God Is With Us | Exodus

Pastor Cameron continues in Exodus as the enslaved Israelites groan under their suffering and cry out to God, who hears them and remembers His covenant. Through the burning bush, God reveals His name and His promise to be present with His people, then calls Moses to step forward in faith. It's a message about the power of honest prayer and the God who shows up in our deepest need.

Exodus 2:1-3:22 | additional: Exodus 3:14, Romans 8:18-27

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Cameron Lienhart

Cameron is the Senior Pastor of Conduit Ministries

What is Conduit Ministries?

We are all about helping people get closer to Jesus.
Sundays @ 9 AM & 11 AM - 120 Delaware Ave in Jamestown, NY

We're going to take a moment, we're going to pray, and Pastor Cameron's going to come up and he's going to lead us in our sermon for today. Heavenly Father, this morning I asked that you would open your word for us, that we would hear not just words from a page, but words from you, that we would, in the story of Exodus, we would hear part of our own story, that you would be speaking to us and calling us to follow you, to trust you in the midst of our circumstances. Lord, I pray that you would give Pastor Cameron wisdom with his words, that you would give him passion in his spirit, in Jesus' name we pray. Amen. Good morning. How are you? Good. It's good to see you all here this morning and echo Pastor Luke's comments of Happy Mother's Day. We're adding to the list the occasions that Pastor Cameron wears a suit. If you've gone here for any amount of time, you'll know that you get me in a suit Easter, right? Easter Sunday. And then if I marry you, perform your, if I officiate your wedding, you'll probably

Get me in a suit. And I'll get you on the other special occasion of your life. When I bury you, I also wear a suit. But now we're wearing suits on Mother's Day as well. So if it's your first time here and you're like, wow, that pastor, he's like really dread, this is, no, don't, no, no. Come back next week, please. You'll see the, you'll see the normal outfit. Truly, truly our desire to honor, honor the mothers of our congregation here. Should have gotten a flower when you came in. If you didn't get one, make sure you grab one on the way out. And if you got a flower on your way in, please make sure to grab two or three on your way out. Cause there's a ton left. So we, we do love and honor you. Last week we started our summer long sermon series in the book of Exodus. We're not going to be very far into the book of Exodus. We did just about all of chapter one last week and encourage you to go back to the YouTube, our YouTube page and watch

From last week. If you missed it today, we're going to be really, I'm going to try to do all of chapter two and chapter three, which is kind of a big task, but we're going to do our best. So I'm going to ask the Lord, Lord, would you, would you come and just let your presence settle in this place this morning, Lord, that we would know that you are indeed here. Lord, and as the word is proclaimed over the people, Father, I pray that it would find fertile soil, soil that is ready to receive the seed of your word. And that is a healthy place for it to germinate, grow and produce fruit. Lord, till up the hard soil of our hearts that we would hear your word and be transformed by it. In Jesus name. Amen. All right. So we just jump right into Exodus chapter two. You remember from last week where we are in the story or what kind of has happened with the Israelite people and kind of the history of what's unfolded for them. You know, the Israelites were, are the people or the

Nation of God that God promised to bring about and to raise up and to create through Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the patriarchs of the Israelite nature nation. And if you remember from last week that the, these descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the Israelites had grown to such extraordinary lengths in Egypt that a new Pharaoh, who was not really familiar with the reason that the Israelites originally came to Egypt, enslaved them out of fear that they would revolt and made them slaves to the Egyptian nation and to the Egyptian ruler. They then went on to build many cities for the Egyptians. But even though the Israelites were oppressed in this place, God was still with them and God was still actively working to fulfill his promise to make their descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky, as he told Jacob. So even in the midst of their enslavement in Egypt, the first chapter of Exodus tells us that over and over and over again, no matter how much oppression came from the Egyptian slave masters, taskmasters, that the descendants or the nation of Israel

Just continued to grow and grow and grow and grow. It's like they could not be, they could not be stopped. They could not be put down. They could not be hemmed in. And so when enslavement of the Israelites did not work, Pharaoh, the leader of Egypt, turned to a little bit of a different tact. And instead of enslavement, he just went for all out genocide and tried to instruct the midwives of the Israelites as well as the general Egyptian people as well has, hey, if you see an Israelite or a Hebrew baby boy, throw it into the Nile, take its life. We don't want the, we don't want the Hebrews. We don't want the Israelites growing any more. An extraordinary, an extraordinary act by Pharaoh. Now, as you can imagine, this decree to throw Hebrew baby boys into the Nile if you found them or kill them at birth if you were able, as you can imagine, this was quite troubling to many. And so like any loving mother or father would do, many of the Israelite baby boys were hidden or kept secret as long as they possibly could in order to spare their lives. This is where now that's kind of like all background from last week, but this is now where we find ourselves in

The story today. In Exodus chapter 2, we see, and I'm not going to be reading all of these. They're not going to all be on the screen. So if you have a Bible with you, I would encourage you to kind of pull it out and follow along. If you have one of these, if you have one of these journals that we've made available at the Exodus journal that has the scripture on one side and a blank page for notes on the other side, all the scriptures right here. If you didn't pick one up last week, they're $5 each and they're in the back of the sanctuary back there. But in an effort to not read all of this, I'm going to kind of paraphrase much of what's happening in Exodus chapter 2 because Moses, a guy that is going to be central to Moses' story in the book of Exodus comes on the scene in chapter 2. But he comes on the scene as a small Hebrew baby born to a Hebrew or Israelite woman who was unwilling to allow her baby boy to be thrown into the Nile or killed. And so she kept the baby quiet and

Concealed for as long as she possibly could until the scripture says he was getting to the point, getting to the age where he could no longer be kept concealed or shielded from the Egyptian people, the Egyptian powers. And so in an effort in some way, shape or form to spare the life of her son, she created a basket made out of reeds and she covered the outside of it with pitch or tar. And then she placed Moses in the basket and put him in the Nile and sent him down the river, hoping that at some point, someone somewhere would find him and take him in as their own. Now, funny enough, or maybe not funny enough, I don't know what you would call it, coincidentally, uncoincidentally, by the sovereignty of God, Moses washed up to the shore in front of, it seems, Pharaoh's palace. And one of Pharaoh's family members, the leader of Egypt, found him and with a move of God upon her heart, I'm only assuming, had compassion on Moses and this situation and said, "We need to care for this baby." And so they cared for Moses and made Moses a Israelite baby who had been

Sent down the Nile in a tar-coated basket in order to escape the savagery of the Egyptian's people genocide, was now living as a member of the royal household in Egypt himself and was raised there in that family, was raised there in Egyptian culture, likely with Egyptian values. But that is not the end of the story. You see that there's kind of this tension building up in Moses' life, like he's a man that's living kind of with a dual citizenship in his heart, a citizenship of Egypt as a son of Egypt now, but also a citizenship bubbling up in his heart of being a person of Hebrew lineage and genealogy and feeling this sense of strain or tension on the loyalties of his heart. And as the story goes, one day Moses witnessed an Egyptian slave master beating and whipping a Hebrew slave, being very harsh with him. This would be in Exodus chapter 2, verse 11 and 12. "One day when Moses had grown up, he went out to his people and looked on their burdens, and he saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, one of his people. He looked this way and that, " it tells kind of one of these

Things, right? No one's looking, right? "He looked this way and that, " it says, "and seeing no one, he struck down the Egyptian and hid him in the sand." So Moses, seeing one of the Hebrew people being mistreated or beaten by an Egyptian slave master, went and killed the Egyptian thinking that no one would see, no one would know, and then sought to hide his body in the sand. Now, we'll get more into this as the series goes on, but lest we ever believe that all of the people that we talk about in biblical history, all of the biblical story, all of the characters of the Bible are all crystal clean in character and motive and action. Moses is a great example, again. We talked about this last week about like Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, all had things about them, where it's not like the prototypical biblical hero thing that we think about in our heads, like they've done no wrong, they're perfect in every way. That's why God uses them. That's why they're in the story of the Bible, because everything that they have done is absolutely spot-on at every moment, at

Every turn. Well, that's just not the way, one, that the world works, and it's not the way that the Lord works. What we're going to see and what we can believe for our own self is that it is the people, like you and like me, like Moses and Jacob and Isaac and Abraham, it is people just like this who have shady pasts, things they're not proud of, things that they have done, that they shouldn't have done, things that they should have done, that they chose not to. It is those people that God is always willing to use. So Moses may be thinking that he could hide all of the evidence of his crime in the sand, went about his life until he was found out. He was called out on this, and it said that Pharaoh, the leader of Egypt, sought to kill Moses because of what he did. And so out of fear and a preservation of life, Moses became a fugitive. So now he's no longer living with this Hebrew people. He's no longer living with the Egyptian people. Now he is a fugitive

From justice in the land of Egypt and it says that he goes to a place far to the, I think Midian, it'll be far to the east of Egypt where he settles there and marries into a family in Midian and becomes essentially the shepherd of his father-in-law's flock out in Midian or around the base of Mount Sinai. So Moses has a new family here, Exodus chapter 2, verses 15 through 22. We see this. Moses married a woman named Zipporah. They had a son named Amgersham, and he was in a foreign land. And then at the end of chapter 2, the very end of chapter 2, we see this kind of foreshadowing, foreshadowing statement of what is to come in Exodus 3 and really the rest of the book of Exodus. The end of Exodus chapter 2, we read these words in Exodus 2, 23 and 24. During those many days, the king of Egypt died. So the king, the Pharaoh of Egypt, who had sought Moses' life, died while Moses was away living in Midian. And the people of Israel, who were still enslaved, groaned

Because of their slavery and cried out for help. Their cry for rescue from slavery came up to God, and God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob. So at the end of chapter 2 here, we see that Pharaoh has died. Moses is still in Midian, away from his people. And in that moment, it says that God heard the groaning and the cries of the Israelite people because of their slavery. And in the midst of hearing their groaning and in the midst of hearing their crying, it says that he remembered his covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. This would be the covenant to establish them as a great nation, to give them descendants, to bless them so that they could be a blessing, to give them a land that is their own. And this little statement here at the end of chapter 2 kind of sets up for the rest of Exodus, the fulfillment of God's promise, that God hears the groans and the cries of his people, and God remembers the covenant that he made with them and seeks to fulfill it even more.

So this is the first time in Exodus, so far, that we see a response or a, like, how the Israelite people are feeling in the midst of their slavery. Up until this point, we don't have any commentary from the Israelites whatsoever about how they're experiencing their slavery in—all right, have you all seen me with the tie-on now? Okay, it happened. I had a tie-on officially. Oh my gosh, what's better? It was the first time at the end of chapter 2 that we saw how the Israelites were actually experiencing slavery. They were groaning out. They were crying. They were—and that those groans and cries were reaching the throne of God, that God was hearing them. It's interesting—not interesting, but they—the writer here uses the word groans, that they—that they Israel groaned because of their slavery and cried out for help. I don't know if you know ever groaned through something, but groaned is not just kind of like this casual complaint. Groaning is meant to communicate—the act of groaning is meant to communicate an agony of condition. Like, absolute, just undone, unraveled. I am groaning because of what I am in. But listen, what's interesting to me

Here is that the groaning was not necessarily a response to what they were experiencing in slavery. It was more of just a reaction. We're enslaved. There's a lot of pressure on us. We're experiencing a lot of pain. We're experiencing a lot of suffering, and it's kind of like they hit my knee and my reflexes shot my foot out. The reflexive response of what I was experiencing is just this significant, like, agonizing weight that was on their shoulders. Almost as a reflex, they ached and they agonized and they groaned. It became a state of their being and a part of their identity that we'll see later in the story that they were not actually so keen to let go of. They actually began to partner with the agony of their own enslavement. It became comfortable for them in a way.

Sometimes when we're living a really emotionally, mentally, and spiritually dysregulated life, we partner with even in our own lives, the things that bring destruction upon us simply to be tethered to something. And for the Israelites, this was the case. They groaned as a response. But somewhere, listen, somewhere in the midst of their agony, their reaction of groaning turned more from, like, this passive, we're just experiencing this suffering and it hurts and it's painful and this is just the way it is and this is just who we are now. It switched from being something that was just pressed down onto them to something that motivated a different type of response in the midst of their pain and suffering. So they went from reaction of groaning to response, it says, of crying out to God.

Instead of just sitting in their enslavement, instead of just sitting underneath the pain of suffering, instead of just letting that be their identity, surrendering themselves to the situation that they were in, throwing up their hands and saying, well, I guess this is just our lot in life. They instead switched their reaction to a response and said, no, our response in the midst of pain and suffering and enslavement is that we are going to cry out to God.

We are going to let God hear our voice. We are going to let Him hear our cries. We are going to let Him hear exactly where we are in our pain, in agony, it says, and they cried out and their cry for help because of their slavery went where? It went up to God, is what the scripture says.

Listen, when life brings groaning type of pain, groaning type of suffering, groaning type of anguish,

The response of the one whose eyes are fixed on the Father is one of crying out to Him in prayer.

Lord, do you hear me? Do you see me? Do you know what I'm experiencing? Do you know what we're going through? Lord, let my cries reach to you in heaven. Lord, I need you now in this moment when life brings groaning, cry out to God. Now listen, crying out is more than just these like, "Hey God, can you help me?" types of prayers.

It's more than like throwing a spiritual Hail Mary, like no pun intended on that.

My theology friend up here got the joke. It's more than just a spiritual Hail Mary of a prayer.

Throwing something out to heaven on our way up the door. Oh yeah, by the way, God, if you're not too busy today, could you please fix this situation? It's really painful.

That is not crying out. Crying out is more than just these passive help me type of prayers. Listen, crying out is the full bodied, full person expression of desperation for God to show up in the middle of extraordinary circumstances. Crying out to God demands the wholeness of our whole bodies, our whole spirits, our whole emotions, our whole energy. It is a everything else is put to the side. And in this moment, I'm going to leverage the wholeness of who I am to reach to the wholeness of heaven and say, "Are you listening? Where are you?

Is my voice loud enough? Is it reaching to you yet, God? I cry out to you."

Crying out is not the prayer that spills out of your soul. It is the prayer that spills out of your soul when nothing less than a miracle will do. And you need God to hear and hear quickly.

See, there are things that we admittedly and reasonably pray for where we could accept any number of ways in which that prayer gets answered would be relatively acceptable to us. But the prayer of crying out is the type of prayer was like, no, like the circumstances are so dire and the odds stacked so great against us that only a miracle will solve this thing. Only like the manifest presence of God showing up in this moment and bringing healing and bringing redemption and bringing freedom is what we need.

Crying out is a full bodied, nothing but a miracle will solve this, Lord. Where are you? Hear our prayer.

Crying out is the type of prayer we pray when the pain is so great and the pressure and the overwhelm so unbearable that we often can't make the words come out. You ever been in one of those situations? You ever been in a situation so painful and unbearable, so overwhelming, so stressful and heavy and pressurized that you went to pray and open your and you simply had no words. But it's not as if your soul was empty, your soul was full to the brim.

But you couldn't physically make the words come out of your mouth. We end up in moments like this, sometimes when we cry out, we end up feeling the prayer more than saying the prayer, laying ourselves prostrate on the floor in humility and surrender before the Lord, asking him to draw out of us with his Holy Spirit, the song and prayer of our hearts, because our bodies can just not get there.

Now, even in those moments of extraordinary pain, where our bodies can do no more, but just to cry out, God offers his grace and he has offered his grace from the beginning of time to the end of time. But for us here who are New Testament Christians, followers of Jesus Christ, express faith in Jesus, are filled with his Holy Spirit. He says, listen, read my word, Romans chapter eight, I have given to you my Holy Spirit, who dwells and lives in all of you by faith in Jesus Christ. And when you don't have the words to say, when the pain of life is so great, the Spirit of God that's in you will intercede on your behalf. Yes, Romans chapter eight, let's read this, this I will have on the screen for you, Romans chapter eight, verses 18, starting in verse 18.

For I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us.

Go ahead, I'm going to read them from the slides since my version and that version are different. For the creation waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed.

For the creation itself was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God. Verse 22, we know that the whole creation has been, there's that word again, has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth, right up into the present time.

Not only so, but we ourselves who have the first fruits of the Spirit grown inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption to sonship, the redemption of our bodies.

For in this hope we were saved, but hope that is seen as no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have? But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.

In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans.

And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit because the Spirit intercedes for God's people in accordance with the will of God. What Paul says here in Romans chapter 8, he's like, hey, look, the curse and brokenness of sin has brought on pain, suffering, and groaning to the whole of God's creation. He goes so far as to say, it's like, listen, the creation itself, the created world, all of the cosmos is even in its own way, groaning inwardly for the moment that full redemption will come through Jesus Christ to the sons and daughters of God. But in the meantime, he says, God has given us the Spirit of God, his own Spirit, which is a first fruits or a deposit or a guarantee or a seal that says, listen, redemption is coming. I'm giving you the Spirit of God as a deposit and promise that I will not leave you as orphans. I will not leave you alone. I will not leave you to deal with us on your own. Here's a very portion of myself that you may have and be filled with hope.

And in the midst when the pain is too great and in the midst when the pressure and the overwhelm is pressing down upon you and you don't have words to even groan out a prayer, I want you to know that the Spirit is going to intercede for you in that moment and bring up out of his own self groans that words cannot compare.

And so even in moments of great and difficult pain in your own life where you go to God in a posture and a spirit of crying out full bodied surrender and you want to pray and you want to pour out your soul, but you just have nothing left to give, say, "Spirit, I am yours. Please intercede for me."

Let your groans become my own. The second kind of grace that God gives is like, what is really clear in scripture is that God's ears are especially attuned to the desperation of prayer that is crying out.

That there does seem to be this pattern in scripture where when people give of themselves in full bodied, full soul, full mind, full emotion, devotion

To the work of prayer that we would call crying out that the Lord is like, "I am listening.

I am here. I am with you. I am in this moment." That's why we took a couple months ago when we talked about prayer, we talked also about fasting because this is a portion of full bodied devotion to the Lord. I fast in order to discipline and surrender the desires of my flesh so that every part of what I have is focused on the Lord.

And this seems to be the pattern of not how we shake the wind chimes of our spiritual life to get God's attention as if he's unattentive to us when we're not. That's not what I'm saying here. What I'm saying is that there is a desperation that becomes a part of crying out and the Lord responds to the desperate prayers of his people.

Something happens when we take our groaning and we turn it into crying out from our chapter in Exodus today, Exodus 2.24, it says, "God heard their groaning and he remembered his covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob." It's not as if God was somehow absent or that the people in Israel were somehow just loving the suffering of their slavery up until this point. And then one day started to groan and cry out to the Lord. There was a switch and there was a change. And when the people responded in a desperation of heart and soul to the Lord, "Lord, where are you? Come and deliver and save us." It's like God in that moment remembers his covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

Now, it's difficult maybe sometimes for us. Biblical translations from original languages to English are not always the best. This is not the best translation here because you might be fortunate to say, "Well, what do you mean God remembered his covenant with Abraham?"

Did God forget? But here, here, "remembered" is not the opposite of "forgot, " okay? It's not, that's not what the, that's not really what the phrase here really indicates in Scripture. Rather, "remembered" was a way in which to communicate that he was emotionally moved to a rapid fulfillment through the faith and desperation of those who were asking.

That God was, that God was actually moved emotionally by the desperation under which the people cried out to him to deliver them. And the remembering was his stepping forward in move to more rapidly fulfill that which he had already determined he would do, but was now spurred on by the faith and desperation of those who were asking.

Like, I don't know if I like the fact that I can kind of move God's heart and like kind of change his mind, so to speak, from his, what do you mean, man? Like, listen, this, listen, let me hear you, let me tell you this. I want you to hear this very clearly. The fact that God allows himself to be moved by the prayers of his people is a grace and a mercy and an expression of love, not some kind of check mark against his ultimate sovereignty.

You can choose one or the other. You can choose a God that hears your prayers and says, I don't care what you have to say. I will do it when I want to do it, period. Or you can have a God who, as the scripture describes him, as a loving father to us as sons and daughters and says, well, yeah, of course I would be moved by the cries of my children because I love them.

I change my mind or change my timeline, not because I'm fickle, not because I'm not sovereign, but because when my children cry out, I am eager to answer because I love them.

So you can have a God that is a maniacal chess mover of pieces around doing whatever he wants, despite what's going on in your life. Or you can have a God that says, yes, I am actually involved in your life. I see your pain. I see your suffering. And when you cry out in desperation to me, I am moved by your faith to act more rapidly, to do what I had already decided to do.

As we go into Exodus chapter three, then there was a need and a response, which was settled in chapter two, right? The need was, hey, Lord, we need delivered from this slavery.

The response after crying out was that the Lord remembered or was moved to fulfill his covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The end of chapter two, we get this indication, okay, God, I guess God's ready to move now. He remembers the covenant. He is moved to faith. He is moved by desperation. God's going to do it now. And so when we come into chapter three, it's like, okay, here it is. Here's the kickoff. Here's the kickoff of God doing what he said he would do. Now the plan, we see this man, Moses, who had fled to Midian, right? And was being a shepherd for his father-in-law on what some of your Bibles are going to say, Mount Horeb, H-O-R-E-B. Some of your Bibles are going to say Mount Sinai. They're not different places. They are different names for the same place. Most of us know it as Mount Sinai.

But Moses was on the top of Mount Sinai. And it says in verse two of chapter three, that an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush. And he looked and behold, the bush was burning, yet it was not consumed. That there was a bush that was burning, but not like the brush piles that you burned in the spring at your house. That they kind of dissolve into ashes. That this bush was burning, but it was not being consumed. That this was a different kind of fire. And it says that a message came, an angel of the Lord, a messenger came and said,

He looked and behold, the bush was burning, yet it was not consumed. And Moses said, I better go see what this thing is, what this great site, this bush is not being burned. In verse four of Exodus chapter three, when the Lord saw that he had turned aside to see, God called to him out of the bush, Moses, Moses. And he said, here I am. And then he said, do not come near.

Take off your sandals for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.

Now, there doesn't seem to be anything significant about the actual physical place of Mount Sinai, although it does become sort of a central place in the coming years and generations for the Israelite people. So God wasn't saying to Moses, hey, you're in this really holy place on this really holy plateau of this mountain. You need to take off your sandals because this physical place is holy ground. It'd be like saying, hey, when you come in the front doors of the church over here, you better like button up the cursing man and you better hide your vapes. And you better be dressed in suits because this place right here, this room is holy ground. There's nothing holy about Mount Sinai. No more than there is anything holy about the brick and mortar of this building. God tells Moses to take off his sandals because he's entering the holiness, not of Mount Sinai, but he's entering the holiness of his presence. And that when we, when we approach the presence of God, we should recognize or be in recognition of who it is that we are approaching

Or is approaching us and that the act of taking off the shoes was an act of humility, of surrender, of worship. See holiness is not about the where.

Holiness is always about the who. What makes this place holy? It's God's presence. What makes Mount Sinai holy? It's God's presence. What later in the book of Exodus makes the tabernacle holy? It's not, it's not the, it's not the decorations. It's God's presence. Holiness is always about God's presence. God's presence in us through the Holy Spirit of God is what makes you an I holy.

And verse 7 through 9 of chapter 3, Moses begins to, or the Lord begins to talk to Moses to tell him exactly what he intends to do since he had heard the cries of the people. He says, "I have heard the cries of my people. I'm going to do something about it." Lord said, "I have surely seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt." This is verse 7, Exodus 3.

"I have heard their cry because of their taskmasters. I know their sufferings. And I have come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them to a land flowing with milk and honey." And so God says, "Moses, I have heard the cry of the people. I have heard the pain because of the taskmasters that they have in Egypt. And I am coming down and I'm going to lead them into the land that I had promised them. The fulfillment of the promise given to their forefathers, I am about to begin to fulfill.

And most of us, I know at least myself, if I was in this like perpetual state of generational waiting for the Lord to show up and do what I know he had promised me to do, when he actually did show up, I'd be like, "Yes, let's go!"

And I'd be like, "I can't wait to watch you work, Lord. I can't wait to watch you go in there and start wrecking shock."

I'm just going to sit over here and watch. Just going to sit over here and watch.

Because we all still, in some way, shape or form, just expect God to do it and us to watch it and then just to receive the fruit of what he's going to do.

Lord, this is your job. I'm in pain. I'm in suffering. I'm in slavery. All the work is yours, Lord. Just give me the good stuff afterwards.

Just give me the things. Just give me the— Don't take me through the— I'm not— Lord, I'm not interested in the process.

I'm interested in the goal. No process for me. Just the prize, please. And I'm imagining— I don't have to imagine— you know because of Moses' response. The next words that come out of God's mouth to Moses when he says, "I'm coming down." Moses is like, "Yeah!" And I'm going to deliver the people from the Israelites. Moses is like, "Yeah!" And then we're going to go to the land of milk and honey. He's like, "Yeah!" And you're going to go and tell Pharaoh to let the people go.

Well, I thought you were doing it, God. I thought it was your— I thought—

You said nothing about me in this plan. This is you were coming down to deliver. You were coming down to set them free. You were coming down to break the yoke of slavery. You were, God.

Verse 10. God says, "Come, I will send you to Pharaoh, that you may bring my people, the children of Israel, out of Egypt."

Sometimes when we ask God for miracles, God asks us to take a miraculous step of faith.

Not to be passive receivers of what we hope that he will do, but to be active participants in the fulfillment of his promise in the performance of a miracle.

See, lots of miracles and lots of different moves of God start with someone's pre-response of faith to move forward as if the miracle is already done.

I am stepping forward in faith as a pre-response, knowing that even as I step, the miracle's not here, the miracle's not here, the miracle's not here, but I am moving forward in faith, knowing that I just need to keep walking in faith to see the miracle happen.

I just need to keep going. It's coming. Jesus' response is very, anything appropriate, based on, not appropriate, understandable. Who am I? Who am I?

And this is an important, this is an important way that Moses responds, because it really sets up how God responds to him.

You can't really understand how God responds to Moses until you understand how Moses responds to God, because Moses is like, " who am I?"

Now, God ends up kind of juxtaposing this question of Moses. "Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh to bring the Israelites out of Egypt?"

Now, how does God respond to Moses' question? Who am I? He doesn't respond by naming all of Moses accolades or gifts or potential.

Moses, don't worry, you're smart. You'll figure it out. You're witty. You're a great leader. You're charismatic. You are, you are, you are, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, no, no, God flips it. He doesn't focus on the capability of Moses at all.

Now, he gives him an obvious answer first, but Moses doesn't seem to hear it. You see, in verse 12, he says, "Listen, I will be with you."

"Who am I to do this?" Moses says. God's like, "Chill, bro. I will be with you."

And it doesn't seem to hit in Moses' soul because he continues with the same type of questioning in the next few verses. That wasn't enough for Moses, and you're going to find out that Moses loves to try to talk God out of his plans as the story unfolds. But he says in verse 13, Moses says, "Well, suppose, suppose I go to them, if I come to the people of Israel and say to them, 'The God of your fathers has sent me to you, ' and, and, and they asked me, 'Well, well, what is this God's name? What, what shall I say to them?'"

This is an interesting question, even. See, names, especially names of God weren't, weren't exclusive, or there wasn't only one name. People in the Ancient Near East didn't refer to God, especially even in, in the Israelite, in the, in the Jewish faith did not refer to God by just one singular name all of the time. They had, they had names that they used more often. They would say Yahweh for him.

But names weren't exclusive, meaning that God's name was often associated with how God was showing up in that specific situation. And so when Moses asked the question, like, well, what do I do if they ask me what God, if the Israelite people ask me like, well, what's the name of the God that told you that he's going to deliver us? Why should we follow you? It didn't mean that they had different gods, but rather what attributes of God would be brought to bear upon this particular situation or circumstance. How is God going to show up in a different way for us now than he has in the life of our forefathers? That's why we have names. We may have been familiar with names of God like Jehovah Jireh, God the provider, right? Or Jehovah Rapha, the Lord that, who knows that, heals, right? It's about how God shows up in a moment and how his character and his attributes bear, come bearing upon a circumstance or a situation that a name anchors the people in who is fighting for them. And so when we move forward

In verse 13, what is his name? The Hebrew word 'what' or 'ma' always seeks the significance or character or quality and interpretation of that name. What they needed to know asking this question was, what does the name mean or signify in the circumstances such as we are in?

Now, the way that God responds to Moses when he asks, what should I tell the Israelite people is the name of the God who's going to come and deliver them. The way that God responds is a topic of conversation that we cannot even possibly touch in the small amount of time that we have today. Needless to say, oceans of ink have been spilled talking about God's response. But in verse 14, God says, okay, you want a name? The people want to know who it is that's going to come and deliver them and fulfill the promise to give it to their forefathers, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, take him to the land of flowing with milk and honey, release them from enslavement to the Egyptian people, bless them so that they would be a blessing. He says, I am who I am. Verse 14, I am who I am. Some of your translations, I think a better translation given what the context or the thrust of the argument here is, God has said, I will be who I will be.

And in verse 15, he says, this is who I will be. God said to Moses, say this to the people of Israel, the Lord, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob, has sent me to you. This is my name forever. And thus I am to be remembered throughout all generations.

Verse 15 is just as important as verse 14 to understand the meaning of what God means when he says, you want to know my name? I am who I am. I will be who I will be. And then he goes on to say, I want you to remember this thing. This is the name that I will be remembered by for all generations.

So whatever the name actually ends up meaning, we can be confident today that we are still experiencing the same God that the name implies, that God is bringing about his same character and attributes and traits to our circumstance and situation as he brought to the Israelite people.

The name here is connected to the verb haya, H-A-Y-A-H in Hebrew, which is to be in the form of personal presence.

So when God says it very simply in verse 12 and Moses doesn't hear it, he tries to say it in a different way. Because in verse 12 he said, I will be with you. I will be with you. And when he says it in verse 13, I am who I am, he's saying the exact same thing.

I am who I am is a reference to God's personal presence with the people. It would be like him saying, I am truly he who exists and who will be dynamically present then and there in the situation to which I am sending you.

I am truly him who exists and I will be dynamically present then and there in the situation to which I am sending you. Who is this God? What is his name? He is the one that will be with us throughout the whole thing. He is the one who will be dynamically present in the midst of our freedom. He is the one that will be dynamically present in the midst of our circumstances. He will be present. He will be with us. The most significant way we understand God's name revelation to Moses in this moment is that God gives Moses a name that indicates his commitment to covenantal presence with the people in the season of deliverance, but not just in the season of deliverance, but from generation to generation. God promises himself.

God doesn't promise just deliverance. God doesn't promise just gifts. God doesn't promise just blessing. God promises himself. I will be with you. I will go with you. I will make you into a great nation. I will bless you. I, I, I.

Here's the hope from our word this morning. God does see what you are going through and you are not alone. God sees what you're going through and experiencing and you are not alone. He hears the groaning. Number two, God always has his eye towards freedom and redemption, but rarely does he call us to just be a passive bystander. Number three, faith in God's presence and trust in God's plan is what activates the miraculous in our lives

At the end of chapter three, which we'll pick up with next week at the end of chapter three, verses 19 and 20. God gives a further message to Moses, which kind of foreshadows what's coming, but also prepares him as he is moving in faith to do what God called him to do, even though he's like, I can't do this. When God says no, but no, verses 19 and 20 in Exodus three, but know that the king of Egypt will not let you go unless a mighty hand compels him. So I will stretch out my hand and strike the Egyptians with all of the wonders that I will perform among them. And after that, he will let you go. So God goes and does the thing in participation with our faith to go. Moses, you got to go. Let's go talk to Pharaoh. I'm with you, man. I'm with you,

But it's going to be hard. I'm going to read you one quote today as finishing as a conclusion.

Because what I want you to hear, if you walk away with nothing else, hearing nothing else this morning, I want you to hear this.

Rooted in the very name that God gives to Moses. Take that down for a second. I don't want you to hear me.

Rooted in the very name that God gives to Moses. Is the promise that through your suffering, through your pain, and through your difficulty, God is with you. And because God is with you, there is always freedom. There is always hope. There is always redemption. God is with you. This is the greatest gift of all, that God is with us. At the very end of his life, theologian and church planter, starter of the Methodist movement in the United States, John Wesley,

One of his daughters wrote this in her journal entry about the last words that he spoke as he was laying on his deathbed. I want to share them with you as our conclusion tonight, this morning.

Some of those who were most used to hearing our dear father's dying voice would be able to interpret his meaning. But though he strove to speak, we were still unsuccessful. Finding we could not understand what he said, he paused a little. And then with all the remaining strength he had, he cried out.

The best of all is God is with us. And then as if to assert the faithfulness of our promise-keeping Jehovah and comfort the hearts of his weeping friends, lifting up his dying arm in a token of victory and raising his feeble voice with a holy triumph, not to be expressed again, repeated the heart reviving words, the best of all, God is with us.

Brothers and sisters, the best of all, God is with us. Let's pray. Heavenly Father,

We receive your presence this morning. Would you come and be with us? We thank you for being with us in Jesus. We thank you for being with us through your spirit.

Or do we ask that in your presence we would be changed? We thank you, Lord, that though we suffer for but a little while, your mercy is new every morning and you are indeed with us. Amen. Lord, we will be a living sanctuary, Lord, for your presence.

Would you fill us, Father, with your presence? Thank you, Lord, that you are the God who is with us.

Best of all, God is with us. Amen.