Lathem Postell: Good morning. Sam Jones, Methodist Church. Is that working yet? Is that my fault? Test, test, one, two.
Anything? Here we go. That sounds better. It's working? Alright.
We tested that this morning. I promise. We really did. We got over here early and we said, hey. We don't want anything to get in the way.
Let's test that. So, it goes to show you, who knows? Maybe maybe God's gotten something important for you to hear, and the devil won't want you to hear it this morning. So, let let's let's dive into it. As we continue our sermon series, the whole story, we're going through, if you don't know, this is your first Sunday here.
First, glad to have you here. Great to have you in worship with you. We are, through 2025, doing a deep dive into the scripture. God laid that on our hearts last year to do that through 2025. And so we're reading through the Bible together.
We've got a reading plan. And then also on Sunday mornings, we are preaching Genesis to Revelation, going through and looking at the whole story, the the grand narrative of scripture. And so, here we're about what? Six weeks in. We're finally to the story of Moses, which started last week there in the first chapter of Exodus.
As we saw God continuing to do what he told Abraham back in Genesis chapter 12, that he would bless the people, that they would be his people, that they would be blessed to go and be a blessing to the nations. And so by the time we got to Exodus chapter one, last week, right, we saw the people of Abraham through Joseph, who were now in Egypt. And here, as we continue in Exodus, we find that God is still blessing them. That they're growing in size, that they're multiplying, and this is fearful to Pharaoh. The Egyptians don't like that the Israelites seem to be doing so well, and because of that, Pharaoh puts them under the yoke of slavery, so that if a war breaks out, they won't be able to fight against them.
And that's where we get to here in in Exodus chapter three. Moses has been selected. He's about to find that out. He's been selected to go and free the people from their slavery in Egypt. He's not a perfect person.
We're not reading chapter two this morning, but hopefully if you're doing the reading plan, you've already read it. You see that Moses in chapter two proves to us, he's not a perfect person, but he's the one that God would use. And we also see there that God is the one who hears the cry of his people, remembers his covenant with them as concerned. And so then we get to chapter three where God begins to show that concern. Where his plan to save the Israelite begins to take shape.
So if you have your bibles with you this morning, that sets our backstory. We're gonna turn here to Exodus chapter three. We're gonna be reading together from Exodus chapter three verses one through 14. Let us hear now this reading from the book of Exodus which tells us this. Now Moses was tending the flock of Jethro, his father-in-law, the priest of Midian.
And he led the flock to the far side of the wilderness and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. In flames of fire from within a bush. Moses saw that though the bush was on fire, it did not burn up. So Moses thought, I will go over and see this strange sight. Why the bush does not burn up.
When the Lord saw that he had gone over to look, God called to him from within the bush. Moses! Moses! And Moses said, Here I am. Do not come any closer, God said.
Take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy ground. Then he said, I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. At this, Moses hid his face because he was afraid to look at God. The Lord said, I have indeed seen the misery of my people in Egypt. I have heard them crying out because of their slave drivers, and I am concerned about their suffering.
So I have come down to rescue them from the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land into a good and spacious land. A land flowing with milk and honey. The home of the Canaanites, Hittites, Amorites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites. And now, the cry of the Israelites has reached me and I've seen the way the Egyptians are oppressing them. So now go.
I am sending you to pharaoh to bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt. But Moses said to God, Who am I that I should go to pharaoh and bring the Israelites out of Egypt? And God said, I will be with you. And this will be the sign to you that it is I who have sent you. When you have brought the people out of Egypt, you will worship God on this mountain.
Moses said to God, suppose I go to the Israelites and say to them, the God of your fathers has sent me to you.' And they ask me, what is his name?' Then what shall I tell them? God said to Moses, I am who I am. This is what you are to say to the Israelites. I am has sent me to you. You pray with me.
Loving and gracious God, we're just so thankful For a moment, Lord, what you're doing in our lives. And Lord, we just ask that in this moment of worship, Lord, as we hear from your scriptures, that you just help us set aside all that binds us. That we cast aside all that distracts us and for a moment, Lord, put you at the heart of who we are and what we do. And in this moment, Lord, we just ask that you mold us, continue to mold us in your image, that we might look more like your son, Jesus. For it's in his name that we pray.
Amen. So names are important in how we communicate with one another. There's a reason that we have the phrase that we're on a first name basis. Right? We understand that knowing someone's name means we know something intimate When you're able to call somebody by their name, when they're able to call you by their name, it shows that there's a relationship that's been built beyond just kind of the surface level.
Now you can know someone's name and not have a deep relationship, but I I would venture to guess that it is impossible to truly have a deep relationship with somebody without knowing their name. And we as humans instinctively know this. I don't think I'm probably telling anybody here something you don't already know. And it's something that that isn't taught to us. We just kind of already know it.
And I know this because of of my daughter, Evie, which I don't she's in the nursery, so I don't know if you can sometimes they like pipe the the service in there. So if you can hear me, Evie, I love you. If not, it just looks really awkward. So I hope you can hear me. But she calls me by a lot of names.
But mostly she calls me dad, daddy, or dada. And I haven't quite figured out I said in the first service, there's probably logic to it, then I realized she's two, so there probably isn't logic to it. But she'll call me one or the other, depending on the situation or circumstance. I really don't know what that is. Sometimes she'll call me dad, sometimes she'll call me daddy, Sometimes she'll call me dad dad.
That is, unless I'm not listening to her. Which which happens from time to time. If if I'm focused on something, or I'm doing something else, and she gets to the point where she realizes I'm not paying attention to her, I'm not listening, or I'm not doing what she wants. Well then, she calls me by my real name. She says, Laphom.
Laphom. You know, I don't know that I ever taught her that or told her what my name was. I guess she picked up on it. By my name. But but it's funny most of the most of the time.
Most of the time, it's funny, right? There's a few times where it's infuriated. But but it's funny when she calls me by my real name. And the reality of it though, while it's also funny, is that it's effective. If she's crying out, daddy, daddy across the house, and I am, and if I'm focused on something, or I'm doing something, I might not hear her.
But the moment that she yells my real name, we could be in a crowded room, we could be at the house and I'm focused on something, and then my ears perk up. Right? Names are important. Particularly, our personal names. The names that we go by.
Well, here in Exodus chapter three, we're fortunate enough that God gives us his name. Not just any name, and I want you to get the breadth and depth of this. He doesn't just tell us his title. He doesn't just tell us his accomplishments. He doesn't give us his credentials for why he is God.
No. Here in Exodus chapter three, talking to Moses through the burning bush, God gives us his name. He gives us his name. He gives Moses his name. And there's a reason for this.
If we go to Exodus chapter three, we see that God has something in store for him. Moses is tending to his father in law's flock when he comes across a burning bush. And that may not be that strange out in the wilderness. Perhaps lightning would have struck and caught a bush on fire. But what's interesting about it is he sees this bush, and it's not being consumed by the fire.
It's burning, but it doesn't have any after effects of the burning. And so he goes to inspect what's going on here. And from that bush, we don't have to go into all of it, we just read the scripture. God speaks to him. Gives him this calling.
I love that, how he says it there. So go now. So now go. Moses is called to go to pharaoh and to free the people from their slavery in Egypt. Right?
All of this. He's got a calling from God. And God even promises his presence with him. How wonderful is that? We could we could do a whole another sermon.
It's a sermon for another day, where he says, I will be with you. Moses asked, who am I to go? And and God says, well, don't worry about that, because I'll be with you. But the part I do want us to focus on is what happens after that. Moses is kind of convinced, I would say.
He's encountered God in the burning bush. He's in the presence of God. We know that. God tells him he's standing on holy ground. God's there with him.
And and in some ways, Moses asked, well, okay. Great. I've seen you here. I know that you've called me to something. But what about the others?
Right? You're sending me to a task. I've gotta convince a group of people that you're gonna free them from slavery to one of the cruelest men that live on earth. How am I supposed to go and do this? I've seen the bush.
They have it. When I go and tell the people this, they're gonna think I'm crazy. What do I tell them? Who do I tell them sent me to do this? And there's, I guess, a lot of things God could have said there, but I love what he chose to say.
Tell them my name. Yahweh. That's God's name. I am who I am in English. Or since there aren't really verbal tenses in Hebrew, we might could translate it as, I will be who I will be.
Tell them Yahweh sent you. God gives us his name. And and again, there's so much in the scripture we could talk about. But, I mean, I was thinking as we were singing that that that song, we could talk about fire and and, how how the fire doesn't consume the bush. And, I mean, there's so much.
We talk about how God will be with us. But I want us to think about the fact that God gives us his name. Don't don't miss that. And in doing that, God's teaching us about who he is. We've said all along in this sermon series, we need to remember that scripture was written for us, it wasn't written about us.
Scripture was written about God, and so here he gives us one of the most, if not the most intimate detail he could provide. His name. He's telling us who he is. And we'll spend a lifetime plumbing the depths of what that means. But I think here this morning, God wants to teach you three things through his name.
He's given you this personal detail about his life and he wants you to know three things about himself. The first thing God wants you to hear this morning is that he is forever. If you've gone to church any amount of time, that may not sound like a revelation to you. But I don't want us to miss that point. Because to those living in the time of the Israelites there in Egypt, this would have been revolutionary.
We can take it for granted. Right? In that day and time, it would not have been that outlandish to believe, well, the Israelites have their God. They have their God, who we now know as Yahweh. And and we as Egyptians, if we were, we have our gods and they have these names, and we have stories about how they came into existence, and what they do, and how they better the world.
No, no, no. It wouldn't have been hard for them to just assume, okay, well, the Israelites have their God. The hard part for the Egyptians would have been that their God was the only There were plenty of Gods out there, but the Israelite claim was that their God was the only God, the one true God. And so God in his name reveals his character, that he is eternal. He is forever.
He is being. We could really get into that. He's telling us by his name. His name reveals his character that he is the one who has no beginning or no end. He's saying, I'm not like those other gods who their stories talk about this or this happening, and then out of the chaos of that, they were birthed or they were created.
No, God's saying, I am. I wasn't created. I didn't come into being one day, and then I might cease to fall out of it another. Character that God is the same yesterday, today, and forever. And what that's ultimately going to mean for us as we read through scripture, is that the same God we read about in Genesis, as we see the stories of creation, the same God we're reading about now, here in Exodus, as we see him sharing a story of salvation for the Israelite people, The same God we're gonna see in the rest of scripture through the Old Testament, then in the New Testament, in the person of of Jesus and and the apostles.
Right? This God is the same God. It's the bold reason why Jesus's claims in John's gospel are so bold. We'll get there eventually. But if you go in John's gospel sometime and you read it, Jesus seven times says, I am We now know God's name.
I am who I am. He says, I am the the bread of life. I am the way, the truth, and the life. I am the true vine. I'm the gate.
He gives us all of these seven different sayings. Not on accident. On purpose. Because he's calling us back to this very moment, Exodus chapter three verse 14. If we understand if we wanna understand what Jesus is gonna do, we gotta understand what God is doing right now.
He's telling you, I am the same God. I am God. God's name tells us that He is forever. The second thing that God wants you to see through His name is because He is forever, His name also teaches us that He should be the foundation of who we are. God's name tells us that he should be the foundation of who we are.
I read a quote recently. I want to read it for you. I don't do that very often, but I couldn't quite put it into better words than this. It was, a quote from John Piper. He was sharing with a group of Christians, I don't know how many years ago, in Northern Ireland.
And so this is almost a direct quote. I had to paraphrase it a little bit because it wouldn't make sense for me to say we're gathered here today in Belfast. I think you would understand that we're not in Belfast this morning. But other than that, these are the words that John Piper shares. This idea that God should be, has to be the foundation of who we are.
Here's what he said. Until God becomes dominant in our thinking and in our feeling, until God becomes the blazing sun at the center of the solar system of our daily lives, until God becomes the Mount Everest and the foothills of all our concerns with this world, until God rests on the souls of the people of God with 10,000 times more weight than any political concern, church growth concern, or any other concern, then all of our talk about the glory of God and the singing and gathering and worship will just be more tinkering and engineering of religion to try to get people to do what we hope they will do. Until God becomes the blazing sun at the center of the solar system of our lives. God calls us to that. If God is not at the heart of who we are as individuals, if God is not at the heart of who we are as a church, well then we're kinda like Paul when he says, we're just loud clanging cymbals.
If the God we worship here on Sunday mornings, which isn't it so great to be able to gather and worship God, If the God we proclaim here and worship, that we sing to, isn't the center of our lives, well then the God we're worshiping is not the God of the Bible. Because the God of the Bible demands to be the center of our lives by his very nature. God is the foundation of all being. He can be nothing less than your all. We need to more often rest in the priority of God.
God isn't something we add to our lives. He is the very foundation of it. In hearing this story, I hope that if you haven't, and we all fall short of that, I hope that you'll choose to put him first, not just because you should, though you should, but because his nature requires it. He is being, I am who I am. I will be who I will be.
If we don't start with God, nothing else can follow. God's name teaches us that he has to be the foundation of who we are. The third thing that God's name teaches us this morning is that if we want to know more about his character, then we need to see and look at what he does. His name reveals part of his character to us, but it goes a step further. He says, look.
If you wanna know more about who I am, well then pay attention to the things I do. I am who I am. I will be who I will be. Look at my actions and you'll see what matters to me. I think when he gives this name to Moses, he's talking just as much to Moses, who was there at the burning bush, as he is to the Israelites, who would hear his name later, as he is to us gathered here today hearing the name Yahweh.
It's a challenge to them and to us. Do you really truly wanna know me? Then look and see what I've done. See what I'm gonna do. Throughout the rest of Exodus, that's why he gives us the name early in the story.
Throughout the rest of Exodus, he's gonna spend time proving who he is. He's going to show us, like he does here in chapter three, that he's a God who hears his people, that sees his people, who calls his people, who ultimately has concern for his people suffering, and because of that concern, will save his people. God's name shows us that we'll get to know him better when we understand the things that he's done. If you wanna know God, you gotta start with his name. I keep thinking about my daughter when she calls out my name.
I love that when she needs something, when she's concerned, when she's worried, when she's fearful, I love that she calls out my name. My real name. I love being dad. She's the only one that can call me that. But I love when she uses my real name because that's that's who I am.
And I love or at least I hope and I think there's some truth to this. I love that she does it because she knows that when she calls out my name, I will come to her rescue. You see, God gave his name to Moses. He gave it to the Israelites. He gave it to God's people.
And he gives it to us so that we can do the same thing. That's the good news of God's name here in Exodus chapter three. God wants you to use it. God wants you to know it. God wants you to call upon Yahweh.
He has given it as a special gift because He wants to know you intimately, and He wants you to know Him intimately. He wants to have that personal relationship with you. He wants to be on a first name basis. Do you know God that deeply? Here's how you can answer that.
What name do you call upon when things go wrong? It's It's easy to praise God when things are going right. It's easy to cry for Jesus, to celebrate God when things are going right. Whose name do you call out when everything goes wrong? When the worries or concerns hit, and when you don't know where to turn?
Who do you lean upon? My prayer for you. My sincerest prayer is that you never have those moments, but I know how life is. And so my prayer is that when those moments come, that you'll do as God's name asks, that you'll place him at the center of your life, that you'll put him at the foundation of who you are, so that when things go wrong, you call upon Yahweh. Whose name will you trust?
Whose name will you lean upon? Hear the good news, God has given you his. I am who I am. I will be who I will be. Yahweh.
Let us pray. Loving and gracious God, Lord, we come today not taking for granted the gift of this story. Lord, the gift that is your name, your personal name, your holy name. Oh, we thank you that you shared it with Moses so many years ago. And through that story, you have shared it with us.
That you are the God of yesterday, today, and forever. You are the God that is the center of it all. And so, Lord, we just ask that as you have revealed yourself to us, that we come to a sincere and true knowledge of that naive lament and and we ask forgiveness and we repent for all of the times that we have placed other names above yours. Sometimes it's our own. It's the name of others.
It's the name of other idols or gods that we have created. Lord, we know that we cannot keep going. We cannot live as you have called us to unless we place you on the throne. The throne of our lives that you might be the center of our adoration and the center of our worship. And so God, help us now to follow you.
Help us to trust as you send us forth with your calling. And when folks ask who we're doing this for, we simply tell them your name. Lord, guide us, oh Lord, as we do our best to follow you and you alone. It's in Christ's name that we pray. Amen.