“Are we nearly there yet?”
I’m sure you recognise that as the frustrated cry of a young child on a car journey. I’m pretty certain those words came out of my mouth when I was small.
A frustrated child would have been driven mad by the antics of ancient Israel:
2 (It takes eleven days to go from Horeb to Kadesh Barnea by the Mount Seir road.)
3 In the fortieth year, on the first day of the eleventh month, Moses proclaimed to the Israelites all that the Lord had commanded him concerning them.
Forty years to travel a distance that should have taken them eleven days. And now Moses preaches this recent history back to the Israelites by recognising this trait in them:
6 The Lord our God said to us at Horeb, ‘You have stayed long enough at this mountain. 7 Break camp and advance …
God is calling them into a new future, a future of blessing, in the Promised Land. But they are resistant.
And that makes this a good passage to look at in the second of my sermons on New Beginnings at the start of my ministry here. Last week, I talked about how we must leave the past behind, learning from it yes, but living there no, and seek the new thing God wants to do in our day and age. (You can watch the video or read the blog). This week, I want to talk about moving on, and the spiritual qualities we need.
Here are four important things we need to practise.
Firstly, every member ministry.
In verses 9 to 18 we read of how Moses was overloaded and how he shared the leadership and pastoral care of the people. He knew the whole enterprise would grind to a halt unless he stopped everything funnelling through him.
I once heard about a vicar who would go to the bottom of his garden every morning at 10:30 to watch the Inter-City express train whizz past. Someone asked him why he did so.
He replied, “I want to see the only thing in this parish that moves without me pushing it.”
I think Moses felt like that, and so he drew on the gifts and talents of others. He wasn’t worried about keeping all the glory for himself.
At Monday’s welcome service I said how such occasions made me uncomfortable. The very fact that ministers get public welcome services but others don’t tends to raise people’s expectations of people like me.
But, I said, we are not your saviours, because the job of Saviour of the world is not vacant. It was taken long ago by Jesus. Ministers come alongside to help lead the work of the kingdom, we don’t come to save your church.
So – I won’t be the first preacher to say this to you, but it bears regular repeating – have you considered what your talents and spiritual gifts are? And have you offered them in the service of God’s kingdom? We are all what the Bible calls ‘vessels of honour’ who have the privilege of serving Christ in response to his great salvation.
How does that work out for you?
Secondly, obedience.
After the spies come back with some beautiful fruit from the Promised Land and their message that ‘It is a good land that the Lord our God is giving us’ (verse 25), how does Israel respond? Moses says,
26 But you were unwilling to go up; you rebelled against the command of the Lord your God.
Let us not think that once we have received salvation we can behave as we like. Obedience is not what earns us the love of God, but it is the way we show our gratitude for the salvation we have received. It’s no accident that Israel receives the Ten Commandments after being set free from Egypt, and not before.
And there’s a very specific command here that Israel disobeys: to take the presence of God into the world where he is not yet known, and where people at the time worshipped other gods, false gods. Oh no, they said, we’ll stay among ourselves here where we’re comfortable.
And God gets mad.
I was once asked to conduct the funeral of an elderly church member, and so I arranged a meeting with her family to discuss the service and talk about her life. When her grown-up children, who were no longer churchgoers, were telling me about her, they said one very striking thing.
They told me that the old lady’s whole life had been based on the church and its activities, even her social life.
I think they were trying to impress me, but inside my heart sank. Just as Israel had a command from God to get into the Promised Land, so we have a command from Jesus to get into the whole world with his redeeming love.
It’s so easy just to have a nice quiet life with our Christian friends, but all of us are called to show and tell the Gospel in our words and deeds. There are people around us who need some demonstration of God’s love, and we are the people to do it.
I was so sad when I heard one of the lecturers where I trained for the ministry say, “I don’t have any non-Christian friends.” What a tragedy for the Gospel that was.
There are many ways we could explore this question of obedience, but let’s just concentrate on this for now: how are our lives shining with the Gospel in the world?
Thirdly, gratitude.
It’s more than disobedience to take the presence of God into the world, says Moses. He goes on to say,
27 You grumbled in your tents and said, ‘The Lord hates us; so he brought us out of Egypt to deliver us into the hands of the Amorites to destroy us.
Grumbling, rather than gratitude, characterises Israel here.
Please don’t misunderstand me. There are times to complain. We should not always let lazy or malicious people mistreat us or others. There are issues of justice to take into account.
But there is a grumbling negativity that pervades some Christians and some churches. Nothing is ever good enough for some people.
In one church I had people refuse to take on a role with teenagers. Two of those I approached declined, giving the same reason.
“I’m not taking that on just to be ripped to shreds at Church Council by [Name].”
And when we did get someone else to do the job, guess what happened to them?
When we consider all that God has done for us in Jesus Christ from creation to redemption to the gift of the Spirit and the promise of a New Creation, surely our default attitude in the community of faith needs to be one of gratitude. It will show in our worship. It will come through in our relationships and our sense of community. It will be a shining witness to the world.
When I was a child, I recall my maternal grandmother, who lived with us, singing the old chorus ‘Count your blessings’ around the house. The thought of counting our blessings and being surprised how much the Lord has done is a good principle. Put into practice, it changes the atmosphere in a place. It brings a kingdom atmosphere, I might say.
In saying all this I don’t want to minimise the hardships and struggles that some of you are doubtless facing. But I do want to say that the sort of church which can survive and thrive in the future is a grateful one. There is more than enough of the grumbling spirit in the world. Let’s live – as one Christian leader once put it – ‘in the opposite spirit.’
Fourthly and finally, faith.
Here is the last issue that Moses and God have with Israel:
28 Where can we go? Our brothers have made our hearts melt in fear. They say, “The people are stronger and taller than we are; the cities are large, with walls up to the sky. We even saw the Anakites there.”’
29 Then I said to you, ‘Do not be terrified; do not be afraid of them. 30 The Lord your God, who is going before you, will fight for you, as he did for you in Egypt, before your very eyes, 31 and in the wilderness. There you saw how the Lord your God carried you, as a father carries his son, all the way you went until you reached this place.’
32 In spite of this, you did not trust in the Lord your God, 33 who went ahead of you on your journey, in fire by night and in a cloud by day, to search out places for you to camp and to show you the way you should go.
Fear replaces faith. Israel sees the task ahead purely in terms of what they can or cannot do on their own. They do not see that when God commands something that seems to be humanly impossible, that same God will provide the means to achieve what he has commanded. Israel does not trust its God. Paralysing fear takes over.
This is certainly something we see in churches, and it inhibits their mission. It may even be the beginning of the death of those churches.
Perhaps you have come across churches where they have been offered a great refurbishment and rebuilding project that will reinvigorate their premises for mission. Their existing building is getting old and expensive to run. Although a lively and loving community worships there, the local community looks at the building and thinks it’s closed. What do they do?
They can choose between fear and faith. Fear says, ‘We can’t do this. It’s too much money and too much work for the people we have.’ Faith says, ‘What is God saying to us here? If he is calling us to do this, then we will.’
Fear says we can’t. Faith says God can – provided it’s what he has said.
Hudson Taylor, the famous nineteenth century missionary to China, once said this:
God’s work done in God’s way will never lack God’s supply.
Conclusion
Perhaps, like Israel at the beginning of Deuteronomy, we are on the verge of something new. Will we embrace these qualities and go forward with God?
- Every member ministry, where all our gifts contribute
- Obedience, to take the love of God into the world
- Gratitude for all God has done for us in Christ
- Faith, to run with whatever God calls us to do, even if it stretches us.
Big Circumstance 