Abounding Grace

Pastor Ed Taylor: I wonder today, someone listening right now, maybe online, maybe on the radio, you're listening right now. Maybe this is the word you need. You're like, "Pastor, I don't hear from God. I feel so distant from God." Here's the answer: deal with your sin. God is calling you to a place where you know exactly what to do. Humble yourself and repent with godly sorrow, not worldly sorrow. Don't confuse the two. Worldly sorrow leads to death, but godly sorrow leads to repentance.

Guest (Male): It's good to be with you again, and welcome to Abounding Grace. We're about to return to our study of Exodus, and speaking of Exodus, we've come to the great Exodus. Now God has been preparing the nation of Israel for deliverance and it's finally arrived right here in chapter 12. It's an encouraging passage of Scripture about our great Deliverer. So let's join Pastor Ed Taylor there now.

Pastor Ed Taylor: Exodus chapter 12, as we pick up where we left off last time. Exodus chapter 12, and I've entitled our Bible study "The Great Exodus" because it happens in this chapter as we finish up today. We left off last time with God preparing His children that we know as the nation of Israel.

He's preparing them to be delivered from the slavery that they've endured for many years. He's literally saving them. This is God intervening in human history to bring about salvation. It's a time of great Exodus, or great exit, finally. After generations of pain, after generations of difficulty, after generations of hopelessness—I mean just over and over and over again—God breaks through at just the right time and it ends. It doesn't just end, it ends very quickly with this last or tenth plague. It happens very quickly.

Why? Because again, we're reminded that God can do a quick work. I wonder as I'm sharing today about the generations and the difficulties and the layers of things and the years of waiting and you just get to the place where you think, "I don't think this is ever going to change." The enemy gets in with his lies and he begins to take away your hope. I want you to be reminded that even in your hopelessness, God remains faithful. He loves you, He cares for you, and when the work happens, it's going to happen quickly. It's going to feel that way.

You might even be so discouraged that you're like, "Well, what do you mean quickly? I've been waiting years for this. I've been waiting my lifetime. I remember my grandfather talking to me about this and just this thing that we've struggled with." You have to give God the credit and the glory for the quick work that He does. He is faithful. Waiting, when you wait for something, it can be so discouraging and so hard. I can think of a few things in my own life. I can think of one thing in particular: 11 years.

I have to say, 11 years is a long time to wait when you're used to getting things in 11 seconds or 30 seconds or 11 days. But 11 years, and the way it all looks in the human realm, it doesn't look like 11 years is going to be any shorter than 22 years or whatever that might be. In the discouragement, you have to be careful because there's a lie that takes root from the enemy of our souls that God's timing isn't perfect, or that God has forgotten, or that God doesn't care, or that He's not interested. The Bible actually teaches the exact opposite.

Hold your places in Exodus. Turn over with me to Isaiah so you can mark this and know the address. We talk about it, we reference it, we quote it, but I want you to mark it and memorize it. Take this word and memorize it, whether you're in the midst of something that you're waiting on the Lord for or there's something coming up. I want you to remember the promise that God gives for those of us that are waiting. It says in Isaiah chapter 40 and verse 31, "But those who wait on the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, and they shall walk and not faint."

Think about that. Weakness is replaced with strength, weariness replaced with running, and fainting replaced with walking. God is renewing your strength. What's the strength in waiting? Because you're drawing near to the Lord and depending upon Him. You're desperate perhaps, and your prayer life has come alive. In these places when you leave the presence of God or enter into the presence of God, you're strengthened. You're reminded of His faithfulness.

Now here we are in Exodus. This deliverance has finally come. Exodus is actually a Greek word. We get it from the Septuagint. The Septuagint is a Greek translation of the Old Testament. It's an interesting thing to look at when you see the different words that were used to describe the Hebrew words. Exodus being a Greek word, what's interesting is in the New Testament we find this very same word. It's in Luke's Gospel, chapter 9 and verse 30. In Luke chapter 9, verse 30, you have that glorious time of the Mount of Transfiguration.

In verse 30 it says, "Behold, two men talked with Him, who were Moses and Elijah, who appeared in glory and spoke of His decease which He was about to accomplish at Jerusalem." They were talking about the crucifixion up on the Mount of Transfiguration. They had a discussion, a dialogue about the coming of the cross and the resurrection of Christ. That word "decease" there, translated in the New King James, is the Greek word "exodon," which we get our word Exodus from. Jesus refers to the cross as a great Exodus.

Which reminds me, it's very interesting and you might want to jot it down, there are three great Exoduses in the Bible. There are three of them. We think of one automatically because a whole book of the Bible is named that, but number one is the Exodus of the children of Israel out of Egypt, where they were able to exit out of 400 years of slavery and oppression. The next Exodus is here in Luke's Gospel. Jesus talks about this great Exodus, the cross, the deliverance of Jesus.

The first Exodus, the deliverance of the children of Israel out of slavery. The second Exodus, more important, was the deliverance of anyone who turned to Jesus by faith, the deliverance from sin and death by the cross and resurrection. There's still yet a third Exodus that's still coming at the end of the age: the rapture of the church, the culmination of all human history and the second coming of Messiah. In the final and great Exodus, we will be delivered from this present world and ushered into the kingdom age.

When you think of Exodus, I want you to think more of the deliverance that was just a picture and a type of the coming cross and resurrection, just a reminder of the promise of God that Jesus said. You believe in God, believe also in Me. In My Father's house are many mansions, and if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you, and if I go to prepare a place for you, you know what Jesus promises? The great Exodus. I'll come for you Myself and take you in and be in the presence of eternity for all of eternity. It's so good.

So the children of Israel, like us today, had to prepare for their Exodus. You've got to be prepared. God wants us to be a prepared people for His prepared place, and there's preparation in our lives. As we were talking today in our staff meeting going through our discipleship time, we were talking about counting the cost. We were learning about and being reminded about our character and our integrity, and the importance of the inner man, not the outer man. Not what people see, not something you put up for someone to see, but the cultivation of who you are on the inside.

The depth of your relationship with Jesus, the importance of the weight of who you are open and naked before the Lord. It's not just what people think. The preparation for the children of Israel, well, we learn it's a significant feast known as the Passover. The Passover would point to the coming of Christ. It's the number one picture in all the Bible, the best type of Jesus Christ, the Lamb of God that takes away the sin of the world. And for the Jewish nation, God is doing a new thing.

You always want to be looking for the new thing that God is doing in your life, taking you from glory to glory and strength to strength. God is doing a new thing. If you're not open to the new thing that God's doing, you'll miss it. I think of the testimony that we shared today where Pastor Dan is in a place where he's very fruitful, used in tremendous ways. From all the outward measurements, all that you could see, all that you could even measure as he's sitting across the table with his wife and kids. Look at what God is doing. Look at the faithfulness of God. Look at how we're being used, fulfilling the call of God that took us from California to here.

If he wasn't ready to respond to the stirring that the Lord was doing, if he wasn't ready to go, "Okay, God says alright Dan, I brought you here, now I want to do a new thing." And you're like, "Well, I don't want to do a new thing. I like this thing. I like the thing You're doing right now, Lord. I like it a lot." But God says no, I have something more for you. It's going to be like nothing you've ever experienced. Because even when we're stepping into new things, we want to hold on to familiarity. We want to hold on to something that looks familiar.

The Lord goes, "No, I don't want you looking for something that's familiar. I want you looking to Me. I'm taking you into places you'd never go on your own. I'm taking you into situations you would never choose for yourself. I'm taking you into places where you will utterly depend upon Me." I think today the greatest picture of God doing a new thing sounds a lot like salvation, doesn't it? Where God wants to bring about a new thing. Behold, all things are new. You're a new creation in Christ, the Bible says.

All those things in the past pass away. Behold, I am doing a new thing; all things have become new. I think of Ephesians chapter 2 and verse 10, where the Bible says that we are His workmanship. You know, we have that picture in Jeremiah of God being the potter and we're being the clay. As He's fashioning every single little thing—I want you to think about this, I'm not really an expert in pottery or anything, but I can get the picture. I think we all can. God uses simple enough illustrations that even if you don't do it, you can get it.

So I want you to think of that lump of clay. Oh, by the way, in the illustration, you're the lump, okay? So you're the lump of clay. With every spin and every touch of that clay, it's something new. It may not be exactly what the end's going to be, but on the way to the end, everything is new. Every little thumbprint, every little bend, every little splashing with water. As the wheel speeds up, then that's something new. Everything on the wheel in the potter's hand, it doesn't have to just be some dramatic life-changing thing.

Everything is new. But you can see how the enemy will lie to us there as well. He'll go, "Oh, it's nothing new. Same old, same old." No, it's not. God's always doing something in the eternal now in our lives, growing us into the image of Christ. So here they are, they're prepared. Pick up with me in verse 14 is where we left off last time. It says, "So this day shall be to you a memorial; and you shall keep it as a feast to the Lord throughout your generations. You shall keep it as a feast by everlasting ordinance. Seven days you shall eat unleavened bread. On the first day you shall remove leaven from your houses. For whoever eats leavened bread from this first day until the seventh day, that person shall be cut off from Israel."

"On the first day there shall be a holy convocation, and on the seventh day there shall be a holy convocation for you. No manner of work shall be done on them; but that which everyone must eat, that only may be prepared by you. So you shall observe the feast of unleavened bread, for on this same day I will have brought your armies out of the land of Egypt. Therefore you shall observe this day throughout your generations as an everlasting ordinance."

"In the first month, on the fourteenth day of the month at evening, you shall eat unleavened bread, until the twenty-first day of the month at evening. For seven days no leaven shall be in your houses, since whoever eats what is leavened, that same person will be cut off from the congregation of Israel, whether he's a stranger or a native in the land. You shall eat nothing leavened; in all your habitations you shall eat unleavened bread." Now if you go through the text here and mark, you'll notice eight times God repeats the same word: leaven. It's very important to understand the significance of leaven.

In this feast, the bread, the matzah, was to be baked and made without leaven. There's a few reasons. One is practical. Remember that when they ate this feast for the first time, they needed to be ready, because God was going to act very quickly and they needed to be ready. So without leaven, they don't have the time to let the dough rise and let it ferment. There's an urgency. The leaven speaks of get rid of it, you've got to be ready. Gird up the loins of your mind, Peter would say. Be ready.

But secondly and more importantly, it's not the practical reason, it's the spiritual reason. In the Bible, leaven is often used as a type and a picture of sin. Leaven is so important. When you put leaven in a bread, it puffs it up, it permeates it, it destroys it from the inside. Leaven, you could say, is a lot like pride. The root of every sin is pride, and it destroys everything about us. I was talking again—this seems to be a topic today—I was talking to a few people.

You know, we learned not too long ago that when you have an offense with someone, you're to go with them, share your offense. If they hear you, you've won your brother, right? We learned that. That's important; Jesus taught us in Matthew 18. But when that doesn't happen, when that doesn't take place, we give room to the enemy to make something small so much bigger, so much bigger. And the difficulty and the hard part about that is not only are we disobedient in not settling our things very quickly—letting the sun go down on our wrath, letting our imaginations run wild—but by the time you pick it up again, you've allowed the enemy to puff up your life with pride.

Because you've rehearsed it, you've rehearsed it. I don't know if you noticed this, but when you have something at odds with a brother and you keep rehearsing it, they're always the enemy and you're always the hero. They're always the ones that have done it wrong, but you're always the hero in the story. Because of that, a layer of pride comes up. So that now if you try to reconcile, you're not just dealing with the little offense. It was little before. It was actually something that could have been solved really quickly.

It could have been something like, "Oh, I'm sorry brother, I didn't know you said that. Please forgive me, I didn't mean that. That wasn't my intention. I didn't mean to make that joke," or whatever it might be. It's just like, hey, just take care of it, we can move on, we're brothers and sisters in the Lord. But the longer you let something go and the more you build it up in your mind and the more you deal with it, now you've got a bigger problem, and that's the problem of pride.

Pride becomes this wall that's built brick by brick. So that now when a brother maybe comes to you and wants to solve it, wants to get in there, they're unable to get to the real issue because pride is there. It's like a brick wall that you can't get through. And now it's even worse. This happens all the time in marriage. For the closer the relationships, this happens all the time. This is something that we have to remember: to resolve things quickly, to pray, to get things done, to take care of these things so that the enemy doesn't let us—by the time you get to it, pride is like leaven.

It just takes something and completely destroys it from the inside. Leaven, or what we commonly know as yeast today, is also hidden. Sometimes sins are hidden from others. They're not hidden from God, of course, but it works silently. The wrecking work of sin is hidden and silent because you think you're getting away with it. Also, leaven spreads quickly and putrefies, just like sin does. So for the bread, the bread needed to be without leaven, because your life is best without leaven.

My life is better without sin. I'm sure you know that by now. Your life is better without sin, without choosing to rebel against God. You see, a little sin in your life, just like the Bible says a little leaven leavens the whole lump, which is true, and a little sin will affect your whole life. You can't compartmentalize it. You say, "Well, that's just a little part of my life here." What's tolerated in the mind corrupts the mouth. What's tolerated in the mind corrupts relationships and reputations, and ultimately destroys entire lives.

That little deception, that little white lie—and we emphasize the white but not the lie—I'm not going to handle that, I'm not going to... Listen, there are three things that you need to know about unleavened bread besides the picture of sin. It's what we refer to as matzah bread today, and prior to the COVID days, we used to have them passed out. We would break the bread and pass them out all throughout the sanctuary.

But if you look at the bread itself, you'll see a couple characteristics of matzah bread, even today, that flattened cracker-like bread. First of all, number one, it's striped. You'll see they bake stripes in it. Secondly, you'll notice little holes in it. It's pierced, tiny holes throughout. And then thirdly, of course, it's flat. The flatness of the bread tells you that there's no leaven in it. It's cooked flat. Why is that such a big deal? Why would the bread, not only because it's a type of sin, not only because they needed to be ready, why is it in the Passover, in this feast of unleavened bread, so vital, so important?

Well, Jesus said that He alone is the Bread of Life. This matzah is pointing again, as every component and ingredient in the Passover meal is pointing to Jesus Christ, which reminds us: when you're reading through the Bible, no matter where you are, you want to pray and ask God to show you Jesus. He's on every page. He's there in type and in picture. Sometimes He shows up as the Angel of the Lord. Sometimes in the New Testament, He shows up: God in human flesh.

You want to be looking for Jesus. The bread that's striped and pierced without sin represents Jesus who bore our stripes, Jesus who was pierced, Jesus who was without sin. God builds in memories for us, which is why Jesus would tell us to continually remember Him. "When you do this, do this in remembrance of Me." Don't forget Me. Don't forget what I've done for you. Why? Because you have a tendency to forget, to move on, to break good habits.

Jot it down in 1 Corinthians in chapter 5 in verse 7. It says, "Therefore purge out the old leaven." He tells the church, "Get rid of the leaven." Can't you hear them tell us today, "Hey, Aurora, purge out the leaven. Get rid of it. It's not helping you." So that you might be a new lump. That makes sense with the illustration of the potter, right? Because when you're a fresh new lump, you feel every little move of the potter. And I wonder today, someone listening right now, maybe online, maybe on the radio, you're listening right now.

Maybe this is the word—you're like, "Ed, Pastor, I don't hear from God. I feel so distant from God." Here's the answer: deal with your sin. God is calling you to a place where you know exactly what to do. Humble yourself and repent with godly sorrow, not worldly sorrow. Don't confuse the two. Worldly sorrow leads to death, but godly sorrow leads to repentance.

Guest (Male): You're listening to Abounding Grace with our Bible teacher and Pastor Ed Taylor. To give this a second listen, all you need to do is visit aboundinggraceradio.com or oneplace.com. You can also listen through our app, and that can be found in the App Store or Google Play. Just search for Ed Taylor. Pastor Ed, what do we have to offer our listeners here in the month of February?

Pastor Ed Taylor: Larry, we have a great book picked out for this month for our listeners and for our church. It's our pick of the month. It's called Just Do Something. Kevin DeYoung is the author and he helps you down the path of when you're in that place where "I don't know if I should go left, I don't know if I should go right," and he offers this seeking of the Lord, seeking the kingdom of God, and then just make a decision by faith.

Now I know it sounds simple, and the book actually is smaller, but he unpacks with wisdom the unbiblical ways of understanding God's will and puts you on a path where you can just seek Him, pray through it, and then go for it. Pick it up. I know it'll help. It's a different angle on a very familiar topic. Just Do Something. Great add to your spiritual library.

Guest (Male): That can be yours for a gift of $25 or more today to Abounding Grace. Abounding Grace is made possible through the generosity of our listeners. Each gift that comes in serves to help us present the teaching of God's Word on both the radio and internet. And think of this: you'll be helping thousands all over the world learn about God's amazing grace and how to grow by it. And today when you give a donation of $25 or more, we'd like to say thanks by sending you a useful resource. It's Just Do Something by Kevin DeYoung.

Just call 877-30-GRACE to make your request and donation today. You can also order online at calvaryco.store. And thanks again for joining us today for Abounding Grace with Pastor Ed Taylor. May God richly bless you with His abounding grace. Abounding Grace is brought to you by Calvary Church Colorado, here in Aurora.