12 Moses said to the LORD, “See, you say to me, ‘Bring up this people,’ but you have not let me know whom you will send with me. Yet you have said, ‘I know you by name, and you have also found favor in my sight.’ 13 Now therefore, if I have found favor in your sight, please show me now your ways, that I may know you in order to find favor in your sight. Consider too that this nation is your people.” 14 And he said, “My presence will go with you, and I will give you rest.” 15 And he said to him, “If your presence will not go with me, do not bring us up from here. 16 For how shall it be known that I have found favor in your sight, I and your people? Is it not in your going with us, so that we are distinct, I and your people, from every other people on the face of the earth?”
17 And the LORD said to Moses, “This very thing that you have spoken I will do, for you have found favor in my sight, and I know you by name.” 18 Moses said, “Please show me your glory.” 19 And he said, “I will make all my goodness pass before you and will proclaim before you my name ‘The LORD.’ And I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will show mercy on whom I will show mercy. 20 But,” he said, “you cannot see my face, for man shall not see me and live.” 21 And the LORD said, “Behold, there is a place by me where you shall stand on the rock, 22 and while my glory passes by I will put you in a cleft of the rock, and I will cover you with my hand until I have passed by. 23 Then I will take away my hand, and you shall see my back, but my face shall not be seen.”
12 Moses said to the LORD, “See, you say to me, ‘Bring up this people,’ but you have not let me know whom you will send with me. Yet you have said, ‘I know you by name, and you have also found favor in my sight.’ 13 Now therefore, if I have found favor in your sight, please show me now your ways, that I may know you in order to find favor in your sight. Consider too that this nation is your people.” 14 And he said, “My presence will go with you, and I will give you rest.” 15 And he said to him, “If your presence will not go with me, do not bring us up from here. 16 For how shall it be known that I have found favor in your sight, I and your people? Is it not in your going with us, so that we are distinct, I and your people, from every other people on the face of the earth?”
17 And the LORD said to Moses, “This very thing that you have spoken I will do, for you have found favor in my sight, and I know you by name.” 18 Moses said, “Please show me your glory.” 19 And he said, “I will make all my goodness pass before you and will proclaim before you my name ‘The LORD.’ And I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will show mercy on whom I will show mercy. 20 But,” he said, “you cannot see my face, for man shall not see me and live.” 21 And the LORD said, “Behold, there is a place by me where you shall stand on the rock, 22 and while my glory passes by I will put you in a cleft of the rock, and I will cover you with my hand until I have passed by. 23 Then I will take away my hand, and you shall see my back, but my face shall not be seen.”
Redeemer exists to celebrate and declare the gospel of God as we grow in knowing and following Jesus Christ.
Joel Brooks:
I invite you to turn to Exodus chapter 33. It's also in your worship guide. We get to talk about election tonight. Predestination, election. The fun, the joy that I feel at this moment of doing it.
Joel Brooks:
It is something that we do need to talk about. We need to wrestle through as Christians because you know what? When you go through your Bible, you're gonna find the words election, chose, predestined, all throughout it. And and so you can either spend your lives ignoring it or jumping over it, or you can seek to understand what is God's heart in these things. And, as we're going through Exodus 33, this was a very natural time for us to dig in deep and see what God's purpose in election is.
Joel Brooks:
And so we'll begin reading in chapter 33, verse 12. Moses said to the Lord, see, you say to me, bring up this people, but you have not let me know whom you will send with me. You have said, I know you by name and you have also found favor in my sight. Now therefore, if I have found favor in your sight, please show me your ways that I may know you in order to find favor in your sight. Consider too that this nation is your people.' And he said, my presence will go with you, and I will give you rest.' And he said to him, if your presence will not go with me, do not bring us up from here.
Joel Brooks:
For how shall it be known that I have found favor in your sight? I and your people is not in your going with us, so that we are distinct, I and your people, from every other people on the face of the earth. And the Lord said to Moses, this very thing you have spoken, I will do, for you have found favor in my sight, and I know you by name. Moses said, please show me your glory. And he said, I will make all my goodness pass before you, and I will proclaim before you my name, the Lord.
Joel Brooks:
And I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and I will show mercy on whom I will show mercy. Pray with me. Our father, we ask that in this moment you would indeed be gracious to us. Through your spirit, you would open up your words and you would give us clarity. But, Lord, we need more than clarity.
Joel Brooks:
We need willing hearts and willing minds to embrace what you would have for us. So we ask that through your spirit, we would not only see truth, but that we would delight in it and we would see you as beautiful. I pray that during this time, my words would fall to the ground and blow away and not be remembered anymore, but Lord, may your words remain, and may they change us. We pray this in the strong name of Jesus. Amen.
Joel Brooks:
It's easy to see when you read this text that grace is the theme. You find it in the words found favor, which is the same word as grace. In verse 12, God told Moses that he had found favor in his sight. Verse 13, Moses says, if I have found favor in your sight, please show me your ways. Verse 16, verse 17, show me your favor.
Joel Brooks:
So will the people find favor with God? Will God be gracious to them? That is the theme of this text. It's the theology behind this prayer is all about God's grace, and what does his grace look like, and how does it come to us. The climax of this prayer comes in verse 18, where Moses asked God to see his glory.
Joel Brooks:
If you remember, Moses had been interceding on behalf of the people several times now, and each inter climatic moment, and when he says, show me your glory. Show me your glory, and God responds to Moses's request for glory by saying that he would make all of his goodness pass before him, and we're gonna look at that next week, and that he would proclaim his name, Yahweh. So Moses asked for glory, and God says, I will proclaim my my name, and those are not 2 different things here. All throughout scripture, we see God's glory and God's name as as being tied together. God's glory is bound to his name.
Joel Brooks:
Now back in Exodus 3, God had told Moses his name. He had revealed it for the first time as Yahweh. In your Bibles, we translate this word Yahweh as Lord in all caps. L o r d in all caps. When you see that in your Bible, that is God's name, Yahweh, which literally means, I am who I am.
Joel Brooks:
In other words, the Lord says, I simply am. The Lord is. He has no beginning. He has no end. He is not defined by anything outside of himself.
Joel Brooks:
So he is self defining. If he were to have revealed a name such as, I am the powerful one, we would instantly be comparing him to other things with power. We'd be thinking of, I don't know, dinosaurs or hurricanes or or nuclear power, things of power, and and we would be associating him with that. And God says, no. No.
Joel Brooks:
My power is nothing like that power. There's there's no point of comparison. I simply am. He is self defining. And that's what we learned about God's name when we when we started Exodus and we were back in Exodus chapter 3.
Joel Brooks:
Now in this passage, God gives a further explanation of his name and what his name means. And we read this in verse 19. And he said, I will make all my goodness pass before you and I will proclaim before you my name, Yahweh. And I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious. And I will show mercy on whom I will show mercy.
Joel Brooks:
Do you notice that the the phrase, I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy is very similar to Exodus 3 in God's name. I am who I am. It's the same grammatical construction there. In Exodus 3, what we see is God is is revealing in his name who he is in his being. He is the focus on that passage is on his existence, that he simply is.
Joel Brooks:
But here in this passage, when the Lord once again tells us his name, his focus isn't on his existence. His focus is on what he does, on his action. And he says, I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion. And just as God's existence can't be explained by any outside influences. God alone, free from all influences determines how he will act.
Joel Brooks:
So when God gives us grace, he gives us grace simply because he wants to. And when God ties this into his very name, which he does here, What he is saying is that his absolute sovereign freedom is essential to his being. Without it, he is neither God or he's he's neither glorious. He has to be, he is sovereign in his freedom. So to be God means to be free to do whatever he wants.
Joel Brooks:
And we find this throughout all scriptures. Psalm 115 says, our God is in heaven, and he does whatever he pleases. Not just that he's free to do whatever he pleases, God actually does everything He wants. Psalm 135 says, whatever Yahweh pleases, he does. In heaven and on earth, in the seas, and in their depths.
Joel Brooks:
I just need to point out that when we speak of God's sovereign freedom, we need to make sure that we don't compare it to any notion of freedom that we think we possess, or what we would call free will. Just like God's being is nothing like our being, God's freedom is nothing like what we would call our freedom Because God is truly free and not influenced by anything in the things that he decides to do. For instance, he is not influenced by or constricted by things like power or space or time or knowledge, all those things that influence the way we make decisions and how we decide to do what we want to do. And so, you know, just practically working through this, I would like to think that, I freely chose my wife, Lauren, to be my wife. I would like to say, you know, I chose her.
Joel Brooks:
And I could say, I chose her. And in a way, I could say I freely chose her, but nothing like the way God freely chooses, because I have all of these influences, all of these constraints on my freedom. For 1, Lauren had to actually exist in order for me to choose her to be my wife. Alright? She had to actually be created.
Joel Brooks:
She had to be a being. So I was already completely dependent on God for that. She had to exist in the same time period as me. She couldn't live a 100 years ago, but she needed to be a child of the eighties like I was. And and not just the same time, but the same proximity.
Joel Brooks:
She needed to be in the United States. She needed to be in Georgia. We needed to be able to bump into each other in the halls of Milton High School. That that had to happen in order for me to choose her. And we we had to have things in common, things that resonated with us, shared knowledge and experience.
Joel Brooks:
And so, yes, I I would like to say I I freely chose her, but don't I better never say in the same way that God freely chooses us because I have all of these influences, all of these constraints that go into my decision making. Possibly a better way is to explain what happened is agree with the wisdom writer in Proverbs who says, the mind of man plans his way, but the Lord directs his steps. I freely choose what the Lord has already planned and put before me, But I am bound by all these things, and what I am bound by most, the most constricting thing, the most influential thing in my life is sin. I am a slave to sin and it affects every decision I do until the Lord frees me from that. But God is not affected by that.
Joel Brooks:
So here in Exodus, Moses asked God to reveal to him his glory. God immediately responds by talking about his sovereign freedom. I'll be gracious to whom whom I will be gracious. I will show mercy on whom I will show mercy. In other words, I choose to save whom I will choose to save.
Joel Brooks:
Now, when God was revealing this to Moses, he's not trying to enter into some theological debate. Isn't that like, let me just throw something on the table for the next 3,500 years. I would like you guys to start arguing about this. All right, let me just throw it out there. That's, that's not God's point in this.
Joel Brooks:
You need to see this, as Moses would have seen this, which would have been an extraordinary comfort to Moses when he heard these words. They gave Moses hope. I'll readily admit though, that when I, when I first read through this, it was not comforting words to me when I came across it. This doctrine that we would call, the doctrine of unconditional election, which means God chooses some for eternal life, but he just chooses some for eternal life, and he leaves others in their sin to be justly punished. That doctrine, it more than rubbed me the wrong way.
Joel Brooks:
I I got very, very angry when I came across that. Hated that doctrine. And so it it did not come to be something that I naturally delighted in. I will say now that the Lord has brought me to a point where there is nothing I would rather ascribe to God than his sovereign freedom, something that Augustine called sovereign joy, but it took a lot of time with me. God's choice and things, when he makes a choice, we need to understand he is not influenced by anything other than the mystery of his own will.
Joel Brooks:
Now, for Moses, this was a really good thing because look at Israel's track record up to that point. It's a good thing Moses or God did not act according to what Israel was asking for at the time. And now I realize as we're going through this, maybe some of you have never thought about this or possibly some are resistant to this. So let me just kinda briefly walk through some scripture. There's we we can't come go through all of it, but let me just walk through some scripture that deal with this doctrine of election.
Joel Brooks:
Then let me tell you the hope we have in it and the practical implications of it. So let's just start with Abraham and we started there last week. Genesis 12 out of all the people in the world, all of the people to choose from, God simply chose Abraham. We find out later in the Bible that Abram came from a family of idolaters. He didn't know the Lord.
Joel Brooks:
He wasn't seeking for the Lord. There was nothing in him that made him stand apart. God simply chose Abram and made a covenant with him. He didn't choose anybody else. In Exodus, we see how God chose Israel, and it wasn't because Israel was awesome.
Joel Brooks:
Like, wow, I mean, I've got to pick you guys for my kickball team. You know, like it's, God is, he's not, he's not doing that. Deuteronomy 7 says, The Lord your God has chosen you to be a people for his treasure possession. Out of all the peoples on the face of the earth, he has chosen you. It was not because you were more a number than any of the other people that the Lord set his love on you and chose you.
Joel Brooks:
For you, the fewest of all peoples. That's what God says. It wasn't because you were impressive. You weren't impressive at all. A matter of fact, you weren't even more righteous than any of the other nations.
Joel Brooks:
I mean, as we've gone through Exodus, name one thing that Israel has done that has shown that they were a better people than Egypt. Go through name name one thing that shows they were a better people. They have grumbled, they have complained, they have disbelieved, they have disobeyed. They longed to be back at Egypt at every turn, and they even fashioned for themselves an idol so they could worship like the Egyptians. They were no different.
Joel Brooks:
No. Their their only hope in this in this time when Moses is interceding for them, their only hope is not in what they have done, not in what they have asked for, not the interest they have had in God. Their only hope is that God would not take into account their actions, but that God might just have mercy on them according to his own will. That's their hope. They better hope that their actions do not have an influence on God's decision.
Joel Brooks:
And when we come to the New Testament, there's many texts. Let me just look at a few. Luke 4, Jesus' teaching on election, and he says, in truth, I tell you, there were many widows in Israel in the days of Elijah. When the heavens were shut up 3 years 6 months and a great famine came over the land. And Elijah was sent to none of them, but only to Zarephath and the land of Sidon to a woman who was a widow.
Joel Brooks:
And there were many lepers in Israel in the time of the prophet Elisha, and none of them was cleansed, but only Naaman the Syrian. Jesus, he points out that, in Elijah's day, there were many widows, many that needed help. And God chose 1 and sent Elijah 2, to help her. Later, there were many, many lepers and God went to help 1 when he sent Elisha. He chose to save 1.
Joel Brooks:
In John 15, Jesus told his disciples, you did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit. When you look at the conversion of Paul, I think Paul is just walking down the road. He's literally he's walking down the road going to kill Christians, and God saves him. God completely overwhelms him, knocks him to the ground, saves Paul against his will and draws him to himself. Paul wasn't seeking it.
Joel Brooks:
He wasn't open to it. None of those things. God just saved him. Later in acts, Paul is preaching to the Gentiles and when he finishes, it says, many believe, and we read this in acts 1348, And when the Gentiles heard this, they began rejoicing and glorifying the word of the Lord. And as many as were appointed to eternal life believed.
Joel Brooks:
As many as were appointed or as many as were chosen to eternal life, believed. Not as many as believed were then chosen, but as many as were chosen then believed. Ephesians 1:3-six, Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, even as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before Him. In love, He predestined us for adoption as sons through Jesus Christ. According to the purpose of His will, to the praise of His glorious grace, which He has blessed us in the beloved.
Joel Brooks:
First Corinthians 1, but God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise. God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong. God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are. And those are just just a few. The place where you really want to dig into this doctrine of election in one of the most clearest places is in Romans chapter 9.
Joel Brooks:
And I want us to go there because Romans 9 is actually where Paul expounds on Exodus 33. So Paul is expounding on Exodus 33 when we go through Romans 9. Let me just read you a part of that. I am speaking the truth in Christ. I am not lying.
Joel Brooks:
My conscience bears me witness in the Holy Spirit that I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart. For I could wish that I myself were accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my brothers, my kinsmen according to the flesh. Just stop right there. Does that sound familiar? It sounds like the prayer that Moses prayed last week.
Joel Brooks:
God, if if if you would just blot me out of the book of life rather than them. It's it's the same heart of intercessory prayer is entering into Paul at this moment. And he says, they are Israelites, and to them belong the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship and the promises. To them belong the patriarchs and from their race according to the flesh is the Christ who is God over all, blessed forever. Amen.
Joel Brooks:
But it is not as though the word of God has failed. For not who are all are descended from Israel belong to Israel, and not all are children of Abraham because they are his offspring. But through Isaac shall your offspring be named. That means, this means that it is not the children of the flesh who are the children of God, but it is the children of the promise that are counted as offspring. For this is what the promise said, about this time next year I will return and Sarah shall have a son.
Joel Brooks:
And not only so, but also when Rebekah had conceived children by 1 man, our forefather Isaac, though they were not yet born, and had done nothing either good or bad, in order that God's purpose of election might continue, Not because of works, but because of Him who calls. She was told the older will serve the younger. As it is written, Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated. What shall we say then? Is there injustice on God's part?
Joel Brooks:
By no means, for he says to Moses, I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion. So then it depends not on human will or exertion, but on God who has mercy. Now, Paul quotes here from Exodus 33 because he is explaining a situation that is almost identical to what is happening in Exodus. Exodus begins with Israel and slavery. They are slaves.
Joel Brooks:
They were completely incapable of saving themselves, But God, in his mercy, he reached down and he saved them through their mediator, Moses, by the blood of the lamb. And he brought them out of Egypt. And when they crossed the Red Sea, they crossed over from death to life. Then God makes a covenant with them after he saves them. And at Mount Sinai, he tells them how to live a life that is pleasing to them.
Joel Brooks:
And immediately after he tells them how to live a life that is pleasing to them, they fail. They fall short. And so now the question is after we've God saved us, after he's told us how we're supposed to live and after we have failed, is God's presence going to go with us or not? Then that's when Paul says, well, yes. God says yes, and here's why.
Joel Brooks:
And he says election. And when Paul wrote Romans, he follows the same outline as Exodus. He begins in chapters 1, really through 3, you have that there is a God, you've sinned, and now you are a slave to sin. All of us are slaves to sin. Then we go through chapters 3 through 5.
Joel Brooks:
It says, But God in his mercy has saved us by the blood of the lamb. Through Jesus Christ, our mediator, we are now saved, brought in a relationship with him. Then we get through Romans 6 and 7. It now tells us how we are supposed to live this new life in the spirit and how we are to live a life that is glorifying to Him, but then we fail. And so Paul says in Romans 7, the good I wish I do not do, but I practice the very evil that I do not wish.
Joel Brooks:
Though God has brought me out of slavery, though God has saved me, though God has given me new life and told me how I'm to live, I still fail. So the question is, is God gonna leave me? Is he gonna keep keeping his promises? Is his Spirit going to remain with me? And we get Romans 8 in which God says, yes, you are not in danger of losing the presence of God in your life.
Joel Brooks:
We read these glorious words. For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate you from the love of God in Christ Jesus. Nothing can separate you from God. God says, my presence will be with you. Same situation that we have in Exodus as we have in Romans, and it leads to a discussion on election.
Joel Brooks:
Why? Why does why does God bring up election here? And the reason he does is it's because it's the answer to this question. God, I know that you promised me your presence in my life, but I keep sinning and I keep failing. So how do I know that I will be saved and how do I know that you will always be with me?
Joel Brooks:
That's the question that's put before us. God, I'm sending here, so what assurance do I have that you will still be with me and save me? God responds this way. He says, Listen, listen. You didn't have anything to do with your salvation.
Joel Brooks:
You had nothing to do with your salvation. It was a free gift to you. It was completely unmerited by you. I save whom I want to save. Alright?
Joel Brooks:
Your salvation doesn't depend on your will. Your salvation depends on my will, and I choose to save you. That's the comfort, the comfort we have as Christians. And I realize that even as as some of us hear that, we think, oh, okay. But isn't there like some some little ray of sunshine in me, some little spark in me that kind of sets me apart from other people, and that's why, you know, that's why God chose me as somehow, at least there's some little good, maybe just even my little mustard seed of faith.
Joel Brooks:
Maybe that's the good I have that another person doesn't. And absolutely not. Absolutely not. And Paul unpacks it this way by giving this example of Jacob and Esau. It's a very vivid concrete example.
Joel Brooks:
It says, listen, there was Jacob and there was Esau. They had the same mother. They had the same father. They even had the same womb. And before they ever did a single thing, God chose 1, but not the other.
Joel Brooks:
Their will, their exertion, their it had nothing to do with it. They were both gonna be born into into sin, but God chose Jacob to save. Now, I realize I realize that this can rub at times a wrong way. And I wanna be sensitive to that. Romans 9, I've shared this in the past.
Joel Brooks:
Boy, did I hate Romans 9. Gosh, it's just they're staring at you. And it wasn't that I didn't I didn't understand it. I just was resistant to it. At one point, one of my friends, he kept trying to convince me and he kept pulling up Romans 9, and this is how angry I would get.
Joel Brooks:
I actually had ripped out every chapter of the Bible except for Romans 9 and I gave it to him. I know I ripped the Bible, and I gave it to him. I said, here's your Bible because that's all you ever point to. I I was I was very, very resistant to this and it over time though, it I realized it wasn't that I didn't understand it. It was just that I was resistant.
Joel Brooks:
And Paul anticipates this when he raises a question. Is there any injustice with God then when you look at this situation? Is there any injustice with God? And he says, no. And the answer to his question is, go read Exodus 33.
Joel Brooks:
Read Exodus 33. This is who God is, and it's your only hope. We can only hope in a God who can have mercy. And once again, this is not theology for theology's sake. He's not throwing it out there and say, I like you to just kind of argue, debate this for the next 35 100 years.
Joel Brooks:
That's that's not why God puts this in here, this in here. This should have a profound effect on us as believers, and it should be great hope for those who, who are unbelievers. Let me just give you very 6 very brief things. Practical implications of this theology. 1, humility before God.
Joel Brooks:
Humility before God God. I'll be blunt here. In regards to your own salvation, the only thing you brought to the table was your sin, your stubbornness, and your stiff nakedness, just like the Israelites. All you brought to the table was your sin and need for God to forgive it. And that should humble you before Him.
Joel Brooks:
2, humility before others, patience with others. Paul, right after he unpacks election in chapters 9 through 11 in Romans, one of his first words he says is this, for by the grace given to me, I say to everyone among you not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think. We are who we are by the grace of God. Don't go pointing fingers at somebody thinking you were superior. You're not at all.
Joel Brooks:
God changed you, and so that gives us extraordinary patience with people who don't believe the things that we believe, people who who willingly sin. We have great patience with them. 3rd, worship. This lays a proper posture for worship and that we realize that we are the creatures and he is the creator and that we are humble before the God to whom we owe our entire lives in salvation. 4, prayer.
Joel Brooks:
We saw this last week how the doctrines of God actually lead you to prayer. How remarkably as it was last week, it was the doctrine that God doesn't ever change was the very doctrine that led Moses to intercede on behalf of the people that God wouldn't do the thing he just said he was going to do. These things lead us into prayer. Don't ever think for a moment. Okay.
Joel Brooks:
If I believe in election, that means it's all set and I'm not supposed to pray for people. No, prayer still has an effect on God. It is God's appointed means to bring this about, and you know what, I have never ever in my years heard anybody pray in a way that doesn't support this. I've never heard anybody pray, for instance, Lord, will you grant my lost friend, will you grant them their free will? I've never heard anybody pray that.
Joel Brooks:
What I've heard is, God, my friend is doing this and doesn't believe in you. Change his or her heart. Change their will. Change the circumstance in their life. Though they're running away, turn them around, drag them to yourself.
Joel Brooks:
We use all of this language when we pray, recognizing these people are slaves or they are dead and God needs to wake them up and pull them to himself. That's how we're supposed to pray is hope for our prayers. 5th, it is fuel for mission. My evangelism actually exploded when I came to grips with this doctrine. We see this in doctrine of election was Paul's confidence as well.
Joel Brooks:
I mean, the same guy who wrote wrote Romans 9 and a lot of verses on election throughout the New Testament is the one who was imprisoned, beaten, whipped, shipwrecked, all for the sake of sharing his faith with those who didn't know Jesus. It was his fuel. It was his encouragement to where, you know, Jesus says, my sheep will hear my voice and they'll follow me. Okay. They don't people who hear the voice don't become His sheep and then follow.
Joel Brooks:
It says, my sheep. They're already there and they will hear my voice and then they will follow. That's a great confidence in mission in which we go and we declare and God's sheep respond. Paul, he's, you know, in Acts 18, he's just arrived in Corinth. He's had a horrible time.
Joel Brooks:
There's a handful of converts. There's like 3. He's extremely discouraged. He wants to give up and the Lord appears to him in a vision and says, hey, Paul. Don't be discouraged.
Joel Brooks:
Don't be afraid, for I have many people in this city. Like, many people. You got like 4, 3, 4. I was like, uh-uh, I've got many here. So go in confidence because when you declare the word of God, it will have an effect and these people will come into the fold.
Joel Brooks:
It was this confidence submission. And finally, it is hope for sinners. Hope for sinners. Listen, if you don't know God, and right now, you're pressed in with with your sin, and you're just like, there is no way I could ever turn over a new leaf. There's no way I could even believe the things that that y'all believe.
Joel Brooks:
You know what? You're right. You're right. You can't. But God does that work.
Joel Brooks:
God does that work. It doesn't matter how far you've gone. It doesn't matter how much you have sinned. God is the one who changes people's hearts, and he draws people to himself. It doesn't matter if you finally realize you were dead.
Joel Brooks:
And actually, if you realize you're spiritually dead, that means God's grace is already at work in you, already drawing you in. But God raises the dead. This is your hope, and this brings us to this table here. The fact that we do have hope for sinners. We're gonna take communion together, and as we take, I want us to remember that in regards to our salvation, yes, the bid to come is still there, the bid to come.
Joel Brooks:
We come to take the table, but you know what we celebrate? Not our work, but Jesus's, Jesus who has purchased our salvation for us. Pray with me. Our father, we thank you for your sovereign grace. We thank you that you are not influenced by our actions, but you freely give us grace that we don't deserve and not the judgment that our actions cry for.
Joel Brooks:
So we do celebrate your name and your glory that you will have mercy, great be gracious to whom you'll be gracious and you'll have mercy on whom you'll have mercy. We thank you how we see your grace and your mercy provided for us in Jesus Christ. And we come now to celebrate His work on our behalf. Thank you, Jesus, and we pray this in your name. Amen.