Mindset: Sinai

Hi, Southeast family. How are you? Thank you for joining us today, either in person or online, we're super thankful to have you with us. And I want to, just before we jump into our mindset series here, I wanted to remind you that we have relaunched prayer partners. And what that means for us is that at the end of the service, if you have something that you need to pray about, or if you feel like, man, I really need to talk to somebody about what it means for us to have a relationship with Jesus, the prayer partners will be down here in the front at the end of the service for you to come down and talk to. And we'd love to have you do that. We'd love to have you be a part of that. And so, they're there. I'll remind you again at the end of the service, but we hope you take advantage of that. They love to pray with people.

We're going to jump into our Mindset series and we've been talking about the framework and the mindset of the people who wrote the Bible. And the reason why that matters is because we don't have an exhaustive history of everything that went on as God worked and moved amongst his people. What we have is a select group of stories that they chose through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. They chose to write these down as a way to help us understand who God is, what his plan is for the world and where we fit in all of that. And so, we have to kind of wrestle with why those stories and what makes that story particularly relevant for you and me, as we understand our role in this world and our relationship with the Lord, and today, we're going to talk about Sinai. 

Now you have to understand that everything about Jewish identity is tied to the Exodus. That's the delivering of being slaves from Egypt, out into the desert and all that stuff. And, everything that they understand themselves to be is tied to that experience. And so we want to kind of pull it apart. Last week, we talked about them coming out of Egypt as the B’Hor, as the first born. And today we're going to pull on another metaphor that God uses to help them understand the kind of relationship that he wants with them. But before we get there, we're going to understand a really important facet of the ancient world. And so the idea is that the world in the ancient near east metaphysic, that's a really big word, which means this is how they see the universe. Um, is this Epic struggle between two opposing forces. Now you and I would most closely call them good and evil, but in the Hebrew world, they would call him Tohu and Shalom. In the Egyptian world they called them  Ma’At and Isphret and these opposing forces that really are built around two important concepts, order and chaos. So, order  -- the world is functioning as it should be. And I want to show you a picture of what that looks like for them. This is the Egyptian river, the Nile river delta. And this is where the Israelites lived in the time that they were slaves there. It's beautiful. It's some of the most fertile farm ground in the entire world, still to this day. It's gorgeous. It's green, it's lush. This is their depiction of order. Things are as they should be. The crop gets planted and it grows. The rains come in the right season in the right amounts. The, when the, in the spring, when the cows are calving, the calves live, um, there's no sickness, or if you get sick, you get better.These are all signs of order, which means that the gods are happy with you. They're allowing things to function as they should. Conversely, chaos also has a mental picture for them. Here's the picture. It's the desert. And this is where God takes his people. This is where chaos reigns. The rains don't come. The calves don't live. The drought is severe. The locusts come and destroy everything. You get sick, but you don't get better. This is their metaphor for chaos. And the fascinating reality is that when God delivers them out of Egypt, he delivers them out from where they believed that the gods were happy with them because of order, out into the desert so that they could be in this place where it felt like the gods were angry at them. And the question is why?

Well, there's lots of reasons why, right? But most importantly, and tantamount to God's relationship to his people, is that Egypt is a place for the eyes. It's beautiful. There's huge buildings. There's tons to look at. The beauty and aesthetic is this major priority in Egypt. But God doesn’t want his people to be people of the eyes. He wants his people to be people of the ears. Man doesn't live on bread alone, but on every word that proceeds from the mouth of the Lord. If you want to live, you’ve got to become a person of the ears. The eyes distract our ears. And so, God takes them out into the desert to teach them how to become people of the ears. By the way, he still does it with you and me. He still does that with us today. And I think if we're struggling to hear God's voice, maybe we ought to prepare ourselves. Cause there might be a desert coming. Or maybe what we found ourselves in, in the world, is this desert where we wrestle with the opportunity to find God in it. So we've become people of the ears. This is God's heart for us. And so God leads them out as the firstborn – we talked about that last week, the B’Hor. We talked about what that looks like and what that means. And then he leads them through the Red Sea and he takes them to Sinai. And Sinai is so important for God's people. It's so important because something happens there that is actually quite incredible. He couldn't have picked a more unlikely group of people. This is a band of misfit toys. They're so jacked up that when God comes to them through Moses and delivers the promise of his message to make them a great nation, it says that they couldn't hear it. They couldn't receive the message because of their harsh treatment and their cruel bondage. They had been so beat up in the world that they had such a hard time grabbing a hold of the fact that God had anything good for them. I don't know about you, but I think maybe there's a lesson in that for some of us -- that we feel like the world has been so difficult, but like, if there is a God, he may love me, but he sure has a weird way of showing it. Like, we wrestle with that. Like, life has a way of beating face out of us if we're not careful. And yet that chaos is right where God takes them to, to help them to develop their ears, to chisel their ears the scripture says. This is a space where they can learn to understand and live God's word.

And he takes them to Sinai where he takes them through something that's actually quite beautiful and it mirrors a Jewish wedding ceremony. And so, what we're gonna do is we're gonna look at that night. Cause every, anytime that I say that people are going to be like, Oh, um, prove it. Okay. So there's five parts to a Jewish wedding ceremony. And, and I want to walk us through those and see if we don't observe these five pieces in the Exodus story. Okay. Cause at one level, not at the deepest level, but at one level, God is trying to help these people understand what kind of a relationship does he want to have with them.
The first part of a Jewish wedding ceremony is the courtship. And that actually happens long, you know, begins long before the ceremony itself. But the courtship --  the courtship obviously is God leading them out. And when he does, he makes four really profound promises to them. These four promises actually become tied to the four cups of the Passover. And that's really significant because it's this, this opening ceremony, so to speak, of God's courtship with his people in Exodus 6, it says this, say therefore to the people of Israel, ‘I am the Lord, and I will bring you out from under the burden of the Egyptians…’ So that's promise one, I'll bring you out. Promise number two: ‘and I will deliver you from slavery to them.’ Promise number three, I'll redeem you with an outstretched arm and great acts of judgment. Now this is important because the idea of the outstretched arm is really significant in the ancient world, anytime in Egyptian hieroglyphics, hieroglyphics that you have a Pharaoh or a god depicted, they always have the right arm raised with a scepter in it. This is a symbol of power, by the way, the Greeks and the Romans pick up on this. And they all have it in their sculptures. If it's an emperor or a deity, they will have their right arm raised with the scepter in it. And they'll have their left arm like this with scrolls in it. Does this look at all familiar to anything, maybe a statue in a harbor near New York? Here's the deal. I don't want to bash on Liberty at all. I love Liberty, but the truth is, we're making a particular statement about where we believe our power comes from. And I would just offer that some trust in chariots and some trust in horses. That's what the Psalms say. But we trust in the name of the Lord, our God, period. This is our source of security, beginning to end. And by the way, far more secure than soldiers. But he says, I’ll redeem you with an outstretched arm. Remember when Moses questions God? God comes to him and goes, Moses, is my arm too short? Not powerful enough. I mean, God had been like flexing on him, right? Like which way to the beach? He'd been, that way. He'd been doing that. He's like my arm too short, but I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and with great acts of judgment. And I will take you to be my people and I will be your God. So the word take is the word lacak, which if you're a Hebrew scholar, you go, ‘Oh, he said that that word’ -- makes Jewish people blush. But it's about a husband. How a husband takes a wife and that's as far -- it's intimate. It's as far as I'm going to go with that, but he says, I'm gonna take you to be my people and I will be your God. And you shall know that I'm the Lord, your God who brought you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians. I will bring you into the land that I swore to give to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob. And I will give it to you for a possession. I am the Lord. So God seduces them, if you will. He lures them. He courts them out of Egypt, out to Sinai.

Step two. Second part of a Jewish wedding ceremony is the Segula. Let me hear you say Segula. It's the exchange of something valuable and not unlike our wedding ceremony. Let me show you a picture. This is --  bam! All the, all my ladies are like, that would be all right. Yeah, don't worry. This is not my wife's wedding ring. You can actually see the diamond in this one. But, we were broke college students. We were trying to make ends meet, right? So I did the best I could. It cost me a lot, but it wasn't very expensive. Do you know what I'm saying? Like it was a sacrifice for me to make the purchase that ring-- a lot. But, that is something that happens in the course of history when a vow is taken of any kind, there's often tokens exchanged and the worth of the token -- how much does this token cost me to give you, is a direct reflection to how serious I take the vow. So the Segula is something that is actually really significant. Now, do we have a Segula in the Exodus? Well, in Exodus 19:4. Here's what it says, ‘you yourselves have seen what I did to the Egyptians, and how I bore you on eagle's wings…’  And let me, let me say this, the word that's translated Eagles there is the Hebrew word for a bird of prey. Here's the problem. There's no eagles in Israel. So, this is most likely the reference would be a buzzard. That would be their word picture, which changes the metaphor slightly. It's not quite as beautiful, but, the idea still stands because they have condors in Israel that are actually really spectacular. The big long, and now they coast, and they are up high, and they feel -- how I bore you on buzzard's wings and brought you to myself. ‘Now, therefore, if you will indeed obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession…’ Like, what is the best gift that God could give you? If he could give you back the truest sense of you. Like what he fully created you to be. Like, if you have a relationship with me, you're going to become everything I made you to be. Like, what better could he -- a piece of gold with a shiny rock on it? That's, that's nothing compared to the truth of me. ‘Among all the peoples, for all the earth is mine; and you shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. These are the words that you shall speak to the people of Israel.’

Part three is the Mikveh. The mikveh is the ceremonial washing. This is the, it's not about removing dirt from your body. It's not about taking a bath because, and there's actually a rabbinic saying about when you should change the water in the mikveh. You should change the water when you throw a stick in and the stick stands up. That's a rule about when you should change the water in the mikveh. So it's not about removing dirt from your body. In fact, as it gets closer to the end, it's probably about adding dirt to your body, but this is about a ritual purification. This is about a heart cleansing. We go through the process of doing the ceremonial bath for a cleanliness of our heart, not for the cleanliness of our body. Let me show you a couple of examples. This is a modern mikveh, which looks like a poorly constructed hot tub, right? That's about what that looks like, but here's an ancient one. This would be more along the lines of what these people would be familiar with. And if you're careful, if you look at the stairs, what you can see is -- especially on the top few stairs, that looks like there was a ridge in the middle of that. And there actually was, it goes all the way down to the bottom when it's in its heyday and it has a rail on it. And the reason is because there's a clean side and an unclean side. So you go down the unclean side, you do the mikveh, and then you come out on the clean side and you don't want the unclean people to touch the clean side because then the whole thing's unclean. Does that make sense? So that's what you're doing there. So we have this ceremonial washing this, this ritual purification of the heart is what's going on there. The question is, cause in a wedding, we want to present ourselves pure, but wouldn’t you? And wouldn't you want to present yourself pure to your spouse? The one that you say you're going to love the most. Is there a mikveh at Sinai in Exodus 19:9-11 it says this ‘and the Lord said to Moses, “Behold, I'm coming to you in a thick cloud, that the people may hear when I speak with you, and may also believe you forever.” When Moses told the words of the people to the Lord, the Lord said to Moses, “Go to the people and consecrate them today and tomorrow, and let them wash their garments and be ready for the third day. For on the third day the Lord will come down on Mount Sinai in the sight of all the people.’ So now, they have this ceremonial washing. Cause they want to present themselves pure when the groom shows up, okay? This is absolutely appropriate.

Now fourth part of a Jewish wedding ceremony is the Chuppah, which is fun to say, Chuppah, here's an example of a Chuppah. This is more of an artist's rendition of a more traditional one. Let me show you a more modern day one. This is what that looks like, and it's decorated with the flowers and it has the covering -- it's this cloth with the covering. Typically, especially in the first century world, this would have been done with a prayer shawl, because the idea is that we're covered by the prayers of God, right? That the smoke represents the prayers. And this idea of the covering, the smoke or whatever. And the question that I have is, is there a chuppah at Sinai? And the answer is yes, or I wouldn't have been asking the question because that would really blow the whole metaphor. I just didn't want to keep the suspense like to, like, I don't know. Yes, because where I don't, if you know this, but where we're going to land is that God marries his people and that matters. Um, okay. So Exodus 24, it says this, it says ‘then Moses went up on the mountain, and the cloud covered the mountain. The glory of the Lord dwelt on Mount Sinai, and the cloud covered it six days. And on the seventh day he called Moses out of the midst of the cloud.’ This cloud is the chuppah. It’s the covering that covers the people. By the way, on Mount Sinai, there's a cloud that comes and settles on the Mount of Transfiguration. There's a cloud that comes and settles on Mount Sinai. Moses shows up after the presence of the Lord is there on the Mount of Transfiguration. Moses shows up after God's presence is there on Mount Sinai. Moses brings three people up with him on Mount Sinai. Jesus brings three people up with him on the Mount of Transfiguration. Do you see any parallels? By the way, there's seven different parallels between Mount Sinai and Mount of Transfiguration. Why? Because God is reinstituting his marriage covenant with his people through Jesus. It's beautiful. It's this beautiful picture. Like if you don't understand that, then you look at the Mount of Transfiguration story in Luke and go, that's weird. It doesn't like, what, what even was that about? and why Peter, James and John, and no one else? Well because he had to have three people with him. 

Part five is the ketubah. This is the wedding contract. And so the way that this works in the ancient Jewish world is that they would write a contract that the father of the groom and the father of the bride would come to an agreement. A dowery would be exchanged. And then the groom would write a contract, a marriage contract it's called a ketubah. Let me show you some pictures of what it looks like today. Here's one -- it's beautiful, right? This, this is a ketubah with all these pretty things. Here's another one. This one -- on one side is English and then the other side is Hebrew. I know you guys are all reading the Hebrew side because you can see it. Isn't that picture cool? So clear. But the, so this is, this is what it would look like. Now, the way that the ketubah works is that the ketubah is the opportunity for the groom to write down -- like, here's kind of what I believe, at least at a 30,000 foot view. Cause you know, you know, you thought you were ready for marriage and then you got married, right? So this is the pre-marriage attempt for the groom to say, here's what I think marriage should be. Nothing prepares you for the real thing. But at least it's an attempt to be thinking in a direction of, Hey, I want to be as prepared as I can be. And so the ketubah is an opportunity for him to give this to the bride and say, here's my expectations. Is there a kethuba at Sinai? Absolutely. There is. What do you think the 10 commandments are? Why these 10 and why do we single them out from the rest? And why is it in its own little pocket? And then there's a break. And then there's these other laws. Here's why, because this is God coming to his people and saying, Hey, this is what marriage looks like. And I'll give you a cool project to do this week, go home and read the Exodus 20, the 10 commandments, read them as a marriage contract. It's beautiful. Like, I don't want you to take on any lovers and I don't even want you to have any pictures of any lovers. That would be, you shall have no other gods before me. And I don't want you to have any graven images. Make sense? Like it's this beautiful wedding. And the question that I wrestle with in my mind is like, why these, why these 10 what's so special about this and what's God doing and how do people receiving it? And like, there's a million questions that go on with this. Well, here's the thing, a relationship with God isn't about God keeping us under his thumb. It's about God inviting us into a particular kind of relationship that's actually really about us becoming something. Like, God doesn't need us. He's not less God if we're not in the relationship with him. He's not like going, man, if these guys don't say yes, what am I going to do? We're the ones that need the relationship. And still the relationship is all about God inviting us to become something more. So in order to know that we have to, we have to read these tic amendments with that in mind. Here's why, because God says don't kill. Not because he wants to control you, but because God is life. God says don't commit adultery. Not because he's like, I'm going to make you a thing and then not let you do it because that's me. I'm God. And get over it. He says, don't commit adultery because God is love. He says, don't covet because God is generous. He says, don't lie because God is truth. God's rules for us reveal to us his nature. And in following those rules, we begin to understand what it means to be connected to God. But here's the thing, we want so badly to be able to negotiate what connection with God looks like. Like, God, I love these parts, the whole blessing and the prospering, and I know the plans I have for you, plans to prosper, you all that. I love that part God. But then there's these other things that I don't really care for. Like the whole forgive. That's I mean, you weren't really serious when you said that, like I know it's a good idea, blah, blah, blah. But you don't really expect me to do that. Do you? God's like, yeah, actually I do. Not because I want to control you, but because of this, when you hold grudges, you get bitter. And when you get bitter, the person you're mad at doesn't pay the price for it. Your grandchildren do because you pass that generationally. Maybe God's idea of what a good life is actually is rooted in something better for us rather than us trying to negotiate a second-rate life. What if we just said, God, I'm connected to you because the whole point of this isn't about being right. It's about being connected to God, the father. But here's the thing that we've got to understand. God loves that we're saved. Saved is great. It's important to God, but that's not his primary objective. Truth, being right is not his primary objective.  His primary objective for you and I is to be connected to him the way a husband is connected to his wife because in doing so he's allows, it allows him to help us become everything that God wanted us to be. He created you to be a thing and we can never completely fulfill it outside of a connected relationship with him. The way that a marriage is supposed to be a connected, intimate relationship. And I know that for some of us sitting in the room, we're like man, marriage is the furthest thing from an intimate connected relationship. And I would just offer you this truth from God's word that is not the marriage that God wants for you. God wants more and better. And I have good news for you on that front too. You can get it like it. It can be there. It's available to you, but you don't get to negotiate what parts of a relationship with God you want to take and what parts you want to leave. What do we have to negotiate with God? Well, God, I, I, I don't, I mean, I don't want to do that. He's like, Oh man, I didn't think about that. We don't get to pick and choose what parts of a relationship with God look like. What we get to do is to honor, because he knows, he knows and his heart for you isn't to control you, it's actually to set you free. It's for freedom that you've been set free. That's what the scriptures teach. I came that you might have life and have that to its fullest. There's not anything over fullest. When I, when my kids were little, we used to play that little game. You know, I love you. I love you more. I look at most plus, infinity. We just play that game. There is no most plus one with God. Well I want to, I want to make life fullest plus infinity, right? Like you can't, you don't get to do that with God. God's the only one who knows what our fullest life can become. And he desires more than anything for you to have it. He's not trying to skip on you. He's not holding out on you. God's not being elusive. He just isn't going to negotiate with you or me about what the best life looks like. Because I don't know. And he does. It's amazing to me how much we want to have it both ways. We want to have all the blessings. God, but not actually walk in the life that he's called us to live in. It doesn't work. Look at, um, did Jeremiah 2? Like my clicker's not working. It's actually right here. There we go, Jeremiah 2. Can, can you just control it from the back? Is that okay? Thank you. Um, here’s what it says: ‘Go and proclaim in the hearing of Jerusalem, thus says the Lord, “I remember the devotion of your youth, your love as a bride, how you followed me in the wilderness…”  that’s another word for desert – ‘in a land, not sown.’ Like, God's message to them through Jeremiah is like, hey, remember, remember when we first had a relationship, it was so simple. As time goes by, we let stuff bleed into it. And it becomes really complicated. Isaiah 54: he says this, ‘for your Maker is your husband, the Lord of hosts is his name; and the Holy One of Israel is your Redeemer, the God of the whole earth he is called.’ Here's the interesting thing. In the first century, there was a modification to the wedding process. And in this world of insula, which is still the communal dwelling, it's the same thing. The idea of the father's house, the, but it was called insula by then. It's the same idea. They call it kabbutz today for what it's worth. But this idea of the groom to be, and his dad during this offering of the ketubah would bring a glass of wine and he would give it to the young bride to be, and as she read the ketubah, if she agreed to it, she would drink the glass of wine. If she didn't agree to it, she would push the wine back. If she drinks the wine, then the groom would say, in my father's house, my Be’Tov, there are many rooms, but I'm going to go prepare a place for you. And if it weren't so, I wouldn't have told you that. But if I'm going to prepare a place for you, I'm going to come back and get you. Now, nobody knows when only my father knows. And so then he leaves and he goes back and if he is a young red blooded Jewish boy, he's going to build that room in about 10 minutes. Right? And there's going to be like, throw it up, all right, this is good enough. Let's get to the wedding ceremony, right? And his dad being a good red blooded Jewish dad is going to go, ‘this for your bride? How can she sleep in this?” And he's gonna tear it down and then he's going to have to build it again. And then the dad will come and they'll have this little interplay until the dad believes that the groom, the son, understands the amount of hard work that it is going to take to build a successful marriage. And then, the people in the town have been talking and the day comes and the shofar is blown and there's a parade from the groom's house down to the bride's house. And he gets her and brings her back. And then they begin the wedding celebration. This beautiful picture. Jesus is with his guys at the last supper and in the midst of that dinner, he says in John 14, here's what it says: ‘Let not your hearts be troubled. Believe in God; believe also in me. In my father's house are many rooms. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go to prepare a place for you, I will come again and I will take you to myself.’ Does that promise sound familiar? ‘That where I am, you may be also.’ What is Jesus doing? He's re-inviting them into that intimate connectedness with God, through him. Like God's heart for us isn't that we know about him. His heart for us is that we are intimately connected with him so that we can become what he made us to be. Please understand, you, you are God's masterpiece and he longs to set it free. But the only way that that can happen is for us to be intimately connected with him. He looks at you and he's like, you, you are amazing. In fact, God does this. He crosses his arms and goes, Oh my, me -- O M M -- I cannot believe how incredible you are. You are a gift that God gave the world, like know that. I used to teach my kids this, when you were conceived, God looked all over the whole world. And he asked himself this question, what does the world need? And then he went into your mother's womb and he made it. You are a gift that God gave the world. And the only way for that to become what it was meant to be is to be intimately connected with God. And so in our relationship with the Lord, are we pursuing rightness or are we pursuing intimacy? Are we pursuing being correct, or the moral high ground, or a posture of elitist? Is that what we're pursuing? Are we pursuing intimacy with God? Like, that should show up in our worship and show up in our prayer life. And it should show up and how we talk to our friends and neighbors when they wrong us. It ought to show up in how we treat our family, it ought to show up. If we're really pursuing intimacy with God, it ought to show up in our life. 

Like I'm gonna, I'm gonna preach a sermon on this one day. Uh, it's another sermon for another day, but I'll give you the highlights. Jesus is in Nazareth and it says that he's prevented from doing very many miracles there because of their lack of faith. And I always ask this question because of who’s lack of faith, these people weren't atheist, they weren't pagans. These are the forefathers of our faith. These are the God believers. These are the ones who read our scriptures every day. That's who they are. And it's their lack of faith that prevents God from working in the world. And I know that there's a whole lot of us that are screaming at all these entities that we think are the problem. But what Jesus is trying to convey is Rome wasn't the problem for them. Their faith was the problem. If you want to see God move, be a person of faith! Stop screaming at people who aren't listening and be the right kind of person that pursues intimacy in our relationship with the Lord. This is when we begin to see God unleashed on the world. Not when, listen, we gotta act in faith, which is evidence that we're pursuing intimacy with God. If we're not pursuing connectedness with the Lord, then foundationally, none of the rest of it matters. We’re not saved for heaven. We're saved for connection with the creator that happens today. It happens tomorrow as well, but it happens today. We're not waiting for some glad morning. We'll celebrate some glad morning. We certainly will, but we're not waiting for it hanging on here. Eternal life starts today. And if you don't know that, but you want eternal life, we have some people who can  be praying with you down here. They’re happy to pray with you about that.

I have all kinds of implications for this message. But at the end of the day, the number one thing that we gotta be focused on is this: Sinai shows us that the pursuit of a relationship with God in this life this isn't about being right or true or getting out of here well. It's about intimacy and connection right now. And that ought to influence everything about everything.

Implication number one for us today is this: God doesn't need us to be perfect or beautiful. Israel certainly wasn't. He only wants us to be faithful. You don't have to have it all figured out and you don't even have to be faithful correctly. We just gotta be working in that direction.

Implication number two is this: God lovingly leads us. And I love that. I love that.

But implication number three then is that we're called to lovingly obey. God lovingly leads us, but we're called to lovingly obey -- not to negotiate a better deal. 

Implication number four: the relationship isn't legalism. It's a beautiful dance between two loving partners.

I’ve got a friend, my friend Moshay, who lives in Jerusalem. He was telling me this story about when his wife was pregnant. She woke him up in the middle of the night. She said, I hate to do this to you, but I'm craving an orange. I told him, I said, Hey, um, what I would have said is, so the keys are on the counter. He was like, no, no, no. I didn't say that. He goes, I went to the store and, and to show her how much I love her -- I didn‘t buy her one orange, I bought her a whole bag of oranges because I wanted to show her how much I loved her. So, I came home and I said, honey, look at this whole bag of oranges. She said, Oh, thank you so much. It's awesome. She ate one the threw the rest away. He loved her. Like that relationship wasn't legalism. It wasn't his moral obligation to it. He wanted to show her how much he loved her. And that's a thing. Like you can look at the 613 laws of Torah and look at it and go, man, these Jews are so legalistic about the way they keep it. But for them, that's not how they think about it at all. They're saying, God gave us 613 ways to tell him that we love him. So why wouldn't you want to do it to the extreme? Because the degree to which you do those things shows us how much we love him. He says to bring a palm frond to the temple, we don't want to bring any old palm frond to the temple, bring the biggest and the greenest and the straightest and the most beautiful and the fullest and the best, the best palm frond that you can afford. That's what you bring because that's how you show God that you love him. And I just wonder if somewhere along the way, maybe we lost the plot and we got so consumed with getting out of here that we forgot that God doesn't need us to wait for heaven to become intimately connected to us and his desire is that we know him here and now. And when we do, we're the ones who get set free. We're the ones who get set free.

I love leading into communion with that idea because where this leaves us is, how many things have we instituted into our life, have we substituted into our life, that weren't what God wanted? Or how many of the things that God wanted us to do have we just not taken very seriously? How many, how many of us have treated our relationship with God like a husband on the wedding day that goes, Hey wife, I love you. And if something changes, I'll let you know. We all go, man, that’s an equation for disaster. But I wonder if we haven't treated our relationship with the Lord that way. God knows our heart. He knows if we love him or not, but it sure is nice to hear it. We’re gonna take communion together. We take it every week. I just would invite us to consider where are the places that we've substituted less than God's agenda for our life. Let's think about that as we prepare our hearts.

On the night, Jesus was betrayed. He took bread and he broke it. He said, this is my body, which is given for you. So whenever you eat this, do it in remembrance of me. In the same way, after the dinner, he took a cup and he said, this cup, this is a new covenant of my blood, which is shed for you. So whenever you drink this cup, do so in remembrance of me. Let's pray.

God, thank you for refusing to give up on our potential. Thank you that you've knocked all the doors down for us to become everything that you've intended for us. Thank you for the invitation of connection with you that can help unleash it. I'm so grateful for your grace as I struggle sometimes to sell myself short to believe that I have a better idea. Thank you for your grace that lovingly and gently reminds us that your way is better. Thank you, God for how you love us and how you plan to use us in the world if we will be faithful. In Jesus name, amen.

I just want to remind you today. If you have anything that you need prayer for, there'll be folks up here to pray with you. If you want to talk to them about a relationship with Jesus, as well. My hope for us this week is that we can live into the connection with God that he wants us to. Stop making a relationship with God about rules and regulations but that we make it about connectedness with him. Thank you for coming.