Knowing God and Making Him Known | Exodus 18
Brian Hedges | November 19, 2022
Let me invite you to turn in Scripture to Exodus 18. This morning we are completing this part of our journey through the book of Exodus; we’ll return to this in 2023, but next week, of course, is the first Sunday of Advent, so this morning we are in Exodus 18.
While you’re turning there, let me recount a story I heard a number of years ago. It was about a man who had an unobstructed view to a construction site from his house, and he was watching this building go up. He was really intrigued when one day a large crane came in and placed, right in the center of this concrete slab, a large silver box. He wondered, What in the world is this silver box? Everything else in this building was being built up around the box; the construction was taking place around this box. It was obviously important; it was large, about the size of a large living room; but he couldn’t figure out what in the world this box was.
Finally he walked over and talked to the guys who were building this building, and he discovered that this was a bank that was being built, and the silver box in the center of the bank was the vault. It was, of course, the most important part of the bank; large in size, but also central to everything this bank would stand for. It lay at the heart of the bank, defining its purpose, giving it value, and making it distinct from every other building in the area.
Ever since I heard about or read about that story, I’ve thought that that serves as a helpful metaphor for the defining, organizing principle in one’s life. The one thing that a person builds their life around, that thing in their life that is most central, most important, that everything else is constructed around.
I want to ask you this morning as we begin, what is the organizing center of your life? When you think about your life, you think about the way people live life in the world today, it may be something like achievement or success. Many people, of course, spend most of their adult working years trying to achieve the American dream. It may be maintaining a sense of comfort or security. A lot of times we go through life just trying to minimize pain and maximize pleasure. We want to minimize any kind of inconveniences so that we can live the fullest life possible.
It may be that you’re in a season of life where the essential organizing principle is simply survival. If you’ve gone through a season of grief or of deep trial or tragedy, or you’re facing deep problems in your marriage or your family life, your relationships, or a crisis in your job, you’re just trying to get through. You’re just trying to see the light at the end of the tunnel so that you can get to the point where you kind of resume some kind of normalcy in your life.
I think, whatever the organizing principle of our life is, we all know that it probably should be consistent with both our highest purpose as human beings and also the deepest longings of our hearts.
Obviously, if we really are Christians, and if we are image-bearers of God created by him, accountable to him, and redeemed by him for both his glory and for our good, then that reality should profoundly affect the way we organizing and structure our lives, so that God himself, knowing him and making him known, becomes the center.
But I think, while we often will give lip-service to that and we theoretically believe that the glory of God and knowing God and making him known is the most important thing, we don’t necessarily structure our lives accordingly. A lot of us are living with some degree of chaos in our lives, not really structuring life around that highest priority of all.
I think the passage we’re looking at this morning can help us with that. It is a passage, Exodus 18, that really comes as something of the climax of this first part to the book of Exodus. We’ve been studying this book and have said that it is the story of redemption, and that in the book of Exodus you have the stories, the vocabulary, the images, that help us understand the good news, the gospel of Jesus Christ. If you want to know what it means to be redeemed by the blood of the Lamb and set free from slavery to sin and death, you really get the stories that give meaning to that first of all in the story of the exodus.
We’ve also seen in recent weeks that the book of Exodus gives us practical instruction for living the Christian life. If you think through about the last four weeks or so, we have talked about worship and the importance of worship from Exodus 15. We’ve talked about trials and how to face those trials, as we have examined the children of Israel in their wilderness experience (Exodus 16-17). We’ve talked about what it means to fight the spiritual battles, the battles of faith, and the whole life of sanctification and spiritual warfare from Exodus 17.
Today, Exodus 18 really gives us some instruction about mission, about the mission of God and consequently the mission of the church, and the purpose for which we should be living our lives.
We’re going to begin this morning by reading verses Exodus 18:1-12. Then, by the end of the message I want us to look at a few verses from the second half of this passage. Let’s begin by reading Exodus 18:1-12.
The scenario here is that the children of Israel are now in the wilderness, they have come right to Sinai, the mountain of God, and Moses’ father-in-law, Jethro, first introduced to us in Exodus 2 under the name Reuel, now comes to meet with Moses once again. As he does, Moses is recounting the mighty deliverance that God has brought to his people, and Jethro responds to this recounting of God’s mighty acts with worship and praise. We see it in Exodus 18, beginning in verse 1. It says,
Jethro, the priest of Midian, Moses' father-in-law, heard of all that God had done for Moses and for Israel his people, how the Lord had brought Israel out of Egypt. Now Jethro, Moses' father-in-law, had taken Zipporah, Moses' wife, after he had sent her home, along with her two sons. The name of the one was Gershom (for he said, “I have been a sojourner[a] in a foreign land”), and the name of the other, Eliezer (for he said, “The God of my father was my help, and delivered me from the sword of Pharaoh”). Jethro, Moses' father-in-law, came with his sons and his wife to Moses in the wilderness where he was encamped at the mountain of God. And when he sent word to Moses, “I, your father-in-law Jethro, am coming to you with your wife and her two sons with her,” Moses went out to meet his father-in-law and bowed down and kissed him. And they asked each other of their welfare and went into the tent. Then Moses told his father-in-law all that the Lord had done to Pharaoh and to the Egyptians for Israel's sake, all the hardship that had come upon them in the way, and how the Lord had delivered them. And Jethro rejoiced for all the good that the Lord had done to Israel, in that he had delivered them out of the hand of the Egyptians.
Then notice this, in verses 10-12:
Jethro said, “Blessed be the Lord, who has delivered you out of the hand of the Egyptians and out of the hand of Pharaoh and has delivered the people from under the hand of the Egyptians. Now I know that the Lord is greater than all gods, because in this affair they dealt arrogantly with the people.” And Jethro, Moses' father-in-law, brought a burnt offering and sacrifices to God; and Aaron came with all the elders of Israel to eat bread with Moses' father-in-law before God.
This is God’s word.
Now, this morning I want to essentially make three points, and then, at the end of the sermon, kind of fourth point just to lean into application. There’s going to be a lot on the screen this morning, on the slides, because to understand Exodus 18 we have to see how it fits together with the rest of this book. So there are going to be some charts and some outlines. So don’t feel pressure to get all this down on paper. If you want the PowerPoint, all you have to do is email us at info@redeemer.ch. We’ll send you the PowerPoint. And then there’s a transcript that always goes up at the end of the week. So the information will be there; I would encourage you just to listen and try to take in the message without writing everything down.
I want us to see three basic things to begin with. First, God's purpose. By this I have in mind God's ultimate purpose in the world to be known and worshiped. Second, God's method. And third, God's mission, or how that purpose comes to involve other people in the world. Then at the end we’re going to see application and how this works out in our lives.
1. God’s Purpose: To Be Known and Worshiped
We don’t have to spend a lot of time on this, but I just want you to see in the book of Exodus how this is a central theme in Exodus, that God does everything he does on behalf of the children of Israel in order to make himself known as the one and only true God. I’m just going to read a handful of passages. I could double the number of passages here, but this is what would fit on the screen, okay? I just want you to see these passages that happen at five different points in the book of Exodus, and just notice the common language. Note here the common theme.
In Exodus 6:7, when God is explaining what he’s going to do, he’s making his promises that he’s about to redeem his people, this is what he says: “I will take you to be my people, and I will be your God, and you shall know that I am the Lord your God, who has brought you out from under the burden s of the Egyptians.” In some ways that’s a theme verse for the book of Exodus. The reason that God brings the children of Israel out, the reason they come out (that’s what the word “exodus” means), the reason they get out is so that the Lord will be known to be the true God.
The in Exodus 7:5, in reference to the Egyptians before the whole cycle of plagues that takes place in Egypt, we read in Exodus 7:5, “The Egyptians shall know that I am the Lord when I stretch out my hand against Egypt and bring out the people of Israel from among them.” So, God’s acts of judgment, God stretching out his mighty arm in order to show his power and his righteous judgment in Egypt, is so that the Egyptians will know that the Lord is God.
You see this again in Exodus 9:14. This is the middle now of the cycle of plagues, and these are the words given to Pharaoh himself. It says, “For this time I will send all my plagues on you yourself and your servants and your people, so that you may know that there is none like me in all the earth.”
Then, when you get Exodus 14, before the dividing of the Red Sea, this great event where the people of Israel are actually delivered, what does God say? He says in Exodus 14:4, “And I will harden Pharaoh’s heart, and he will pursue them, and I will get glory over Pharaoh and all his hosts, and the Egyptians shall know that I am the Lord.
Then, when you get into the wilderness section of this passage, where the children of Israel are grumbling and complaining, but God is providing water, he’s providing bread in the wilderness, he’s providing quail from heaven—all these things to meet the needs of the people of God—why is God doing it? Look at Exodus 16:12. He says, “I have heard the grumbling of the people of Israel. Say to them, ‘At twilight you shall eat meat, and in the morning you shall be filled with bread. Then you shall know that I am the Lord your God.’”
Do you see it? This is really clear. The reason why God acts and does what he does in redemption and in judgment and in providence is so that he may be known, so that he might be worshiped.
It reminds me of the book written by that New England Puritan Jonathan Edwards. I read this probably 24 years ago, and I read it three times in the course of a couple of years. It’s such an important book. It was called The End for Which God Created the World. Edwards just marshals out argument after argument and looks at literally dozens and dozens of texts of Scripture, across Old Testament and New Testament, looking at God’s acts in creation and in salvation, redemption, the sending of Christ, judgment, the calls on the church, living the Christian life—all the way to the consummation—everything that God does. He’s looking to ask this question: Why does God act? Why does God do what he does?” He concludes that he does it all for the sake of his name. He does it for his glory. He does it that he might be known.
Here's one of the concluding statements in Edwards’s book. He says, “For it appears that all that is ever spoken of in the Scriptures, the ultimate end of God’s works is included in that one phrase, ‘the glory of God.’” This is why God does what he does.
Brothers and sisters, what this means is that in the solar system of biblical truth the blazing hot sun in the center is God. God’s at the center, and everything else orbits around God. It means that for you and I, in our lives—think about the solar system of your life—it means that the blazing hot sun at the center of our lives should also be God, knowing him, and making him known.
You might ask yourself, what is actually at the center? You think about everything else in your life, everything else as a planet, a compartment, some aspect of life, whether it’s family life, work life, finances, schedule, time management, involvement at church, extracurricular activities. All of those things are categories in your life, but do they orbit around knowing God, revealed in Jesus Christ, and making him known to others? Or is your spirituality, Christian life, and church, is that just one more category among multiple categories that all orbit around some other center? That’s the question.
But God’s purpose is very clear in Exodus and in Scripture. God’s purpose is to be known and worshiped, and that should be our purpose for living as well. So, that’s point number one: God’s purpose.
2. God’s Method: The Deliverance of His People
Secondly, I want you to see God’s method. This is the means by which God accomplishes his purpose, and his means is by delivering his people. God’s method for making himself known is the deliverance of his people.
This is where I think it’s helpful for us to zoom out and look at Exodus 18 in relationship to the rest of this book. I want to show you, first of all, the structure of Exodus as a whole, and then show you how the first 18 chapters fit together and how this 18th chapter fits in. I’m drawing all of this from an Old Testament scholar named Dale Ralph Davis. I owe the wording and the outlining to him. I think this is helpful.
He says that Exodus can be divided into three basic parts.
Part one (chapters 1-18, which has been the focus of this series) is on the God who delivers. The focus here is the power of Yahweh, the saving power of Yahweh, as he delivers the children of Israel from Egypt. Of course, that is the key event: God’s rescue of Israel from Egypt.
The second part of this book (chapters 19-24) shows us the God who demands, and it’s all about the law of God. The focus here is on the will of God, Yahweh’s will. The key event is the giving of the law to Israel at Mount Sinai. We’ll come back and look at that together in the spring.
Then, in Exodus 25-40 the focus is on the God who dwells, and here the focus is on God’s presence with his people. The key event is right at the end of the book in Exodus 40, when the tabernacle has been constructed and the glory of God now fills the tabernacle, and God takes his residence among the people of God.
But in these verse 18 chapters the unifying theme is the God who delivers. You can see this theme of deliverance in these first 18 chapters. Once again, this is Dale Ralph Davis’s outline. This isn’t exactly the outline that I’ve followed in this series, but I think you can see how everything that we’ve covered fits into this framework.
He says that in Exodus 1-2 you have the prelude to deliverance. This is, of course, where we discover that the children of Israel have been in Egypt for 400 years, they have been fruitful and they have multiplied, but now God has heard their cry as they are oppressed and enslaved in Egypt. You have the whole story of the genocide of these Hebrew baby boys under Pharaoh’s edict, and you have the midwives, and then you have Moses, who is rescued as a baby in this ark. All of this is the prelude to deliverance.
Then in chapters 3-11 you have the obstacles to deliverance, and there are really two obstacles. There is, first of all, the servant’s reluctance. This is Moses who is reluctant. It takes two chapters, chapters 3-4, just to get Moses to agree to God’s call to go and to deliver this message to Pharaoh. Then you have the obstacle of the king’s resistance in chapters 5-11, with the cycle of plagues.
Then, in chapters 12-13 you have the sacrament of deliverance, with the Passover, as the Passover becomes the event through which the children of Israel are delivered, and this becomes a memorial for them, something that they are to remember year after year after year with the institution of the Passover meal.
The experience of deliverance is in chapters 14-15, with the deliverance through the Red Sea and then the song of Moses and Israel celebrating that event.
Then you have the wilderness section, the struggles of deliverance, in chapters 15-17.
That’s how these first 17 chapters hold together.
Then Dale Ralph Davis, in talking about the structure of this book, makes some observations about Exodus 18. One observation is that deliverance continues to be a theme, and you might have noticed that when I read the passage. The word “deliverance” shows up five times in those first twelve verses. Moses is recounting God’s deliverance to Jethro, and Jethro then is praising God for his deliverance of Egypt.
In fact, there is a parallel between the worship of the children of Israel in chapter 15 and the worship of Jethro in chapter 18. You can see this parallel. In chapter 15 we read, “The Lord is my strength and my song, and he has become my salvation; this is my God, and I will praise him, my father’s God, and I will exalt him.” That’s verse 2.
Then, down in verse 11, “Who is like you, O Lord, among the gods? Who is like you, majestic in holiness, awesome in glorious deeds, doing wonders?”
It shows us that after experiencing deliverance the children of Israel respond in worship and in praise to this God, because they have seen and they now know that he is the true God.
You have almost exactly the same kind of wording that’s used in chapter 18 when Jethro responds to Moses’ recounting of redemption. Listen to what Jethro says. “Blessed be the Lord, who has delivered you out of the hand of the Egyptians and out of the hand of Pharaoh and has delivered the people from under the hand of the Egyptians. Now I know that the Lord is greater than all gods, because in this affair they dealt arrogantly with the people.”
Jethro here is also praising God for his deliverance, so it means deliverance is still part of the theme in chapter 18. When you read the whole chapter, you get into the second half of the chapter and what you’re seeing is organizational strategies. Jethro is giving Moses advice on how to organize the people of Israel. A lot of times, that’s where people place all their focus. But before you get to that, you have to understand what this chapter is there for to begin with, and Davis concludes that Exodus 18 actually gives us the climax of deliverance, because here you have a non-Jewish person (Jethro) who is coming to praise the God of Israel. In other words, mission is right at the heart of this book.
3. God’s Mission: To Be Known and Worshiped by the Nations
Therefore, we can say that the third point, the third thing we need to see this morning, is God’s mission. God’s mission is to be known and worshiped by the nations. That’s God’s mission, and that’s God’s mission from Genesis to Revelation. It’s certainly true in the book of Exodus.
Let me give you the key quote from Davis, and then back this up with three passages of Scripture, and then we’re just going to move into application for the rest of the message. Here’s what Davis says:
All of this [all of the argument about the place of Exodus 18 and Jethro in the story of Exodus] implies that the writer saw strategic importance in the Jethro story. It suggests that the climax of the deliverance section consists of a Gentile confessing his faith in Yahweh as the supreme and saving God. So Yahweh has not only delivered Israel from bondage but delivered a Gentile from blindness. We needn’t wait for those stories of Rahab and Ruth and Naaman; already in and with Israel’s salvation, Yahweh is at work bringing light to the nations.
Of course, this connects with a profoundly biblical theme. From Genesis to Revelation you can see this, that God’s heart is for the nations. It’s the reason he chooses Abraham and calls him out in the first place.
Look at Genesis 12. This is where you have the first instance of the Abrahamic covenant, the promises that God made to Abraham. The focus is ultimately terminating on the nations. Genesis 12:1-3:
Now the Lord said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. [Here are the promises.] And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”
In other words, “Abraham, this blessing is not just going to be for you. It’s not going to just be for your family and for your descendants. It’s going to be for the nations; in you shall all the families of the earth be blessed.”
Then go to Psalm 67. It was our call to worship this morning, but let’s read it again, Psalm 67:1-5. It’s a prayer. This is a prayer from within the worship of Israel and the Old Testament. Whoever authored this prayer understood God’s purpose. He understood that the reason God was blessing Israel was so that the light of God could go out to the nations.
Psalm 67:1: “May God be gracious to us and bless us and make his face to shine upon us . . .” Why? Look at the purpose statement in verse 2:
. . . that your way may be known on earth,
your saving power among all nations.
Let the peoples praise you, O God;
let all the peoples praise you!
Let the nations be glad and sing for joy,
for you judge the peoples with equity
and guide the nations upon earth.
Let the peoples praise you, O God;
let all the peoples praise you!
Then you go to the New Testament. The apostle Paul in Romans 15, before explaining his own sense of calling as an emissary, an apostle, an ambassador of Christ, his desire to take the name of Christ where it has never been known, he explains to us why God sent Jesus in the first place. Romans 15:8-12:
For I tell you that Christ became a servant to the circumcised to show God's truthfulness, in order to confirm the promises given to the patriarchs, and in order that the Gentiles might glorify God for his mercy. As it is written, “Therefore I will praise you among the Gentiles, and sing to your name.”
And again it is said, “Rejoice, O Gentiles, with his people.”
And again, “Praise the Lord, all you Gentiles, and let all the peoples extol him.”
And again Isaiah says, “The root of Jesse will come, even he who arises to rule the Gentiles; in him will the Gentiles hope.”
We could go on, of course, to talk about the Great Commission, where Jesus tells his disciples to go to the nations and make disciples. “Go and make disciples among all the nations.” Or we could go to Revelation and that great song of worship to the Lamb who was slain. Why are they worshiping him? Because by his blood he has ransomed for God a people from every kindred and tongue and tribe and nation.
You see it from Genesis to Revelation. This is the mission: that God would be known and that he would be worshiped by the nations.
The amazing thing, brothers and sisters, is that this morning every single one of us who is not Jewish ourselves (that would be most of us), if you are worshiping God this morning it is because of the fulfillment of this mission. It’s because the gospel went out; it’s because somebody shared it with you. Because you’re a Gentile. You belong to the Gentiles—and yet here we are; we are worshiping this great God who has made himself known.
We’ve seen God’s purpose (to be known and worshiped), we’ve seen that God’s method of accomplishing this purpose is the deliverance of his people, and that God’s mission is for this to be extended to the nations, to be known and worshiped by the nations.
Conclusion
So here’s the last thing (this is application): this means that knowing God and making him known should be the organizing principle of our lives.
I want to give you three practical and important principles for putting this into practice. How do you go about this? How do you make this the central thing?
I think that there are three things that we can see from Exodus 18. This is rudimentary; this is kind of introductory. There’s a lot more that could be said. But this is to kind of get the juices flowing, to get you thinking, and the homework assignment for you is to take this home and to think about your life, your schedule, your habits, your rhythms. How do you put this into practice? Three important principles. All this we can see in Exodus 18.
(1) The first one is the principle of priorities: Keep the first things first. You find this in all the basic literature, right? Remember back in the ’90s Stephen Covey’s book 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Some of you maybe have read it. It’s a wonderful book. The second habit is to put first things first. Right? You have to have a sense of priorities.
You see it right here. You can extrapolate this, I think, from verses 13 and 16, where you see what Moses’ basic priority is. Now, he’s overwhelmed with his task, and so the rest of chapter 18 is really proposing a solution to help Moses. That’s instructive as well. But just see what the task is, what he’s doing. Verse 13:
The next day Moses sat to judge the people, and the people stood around Moses from morning till evening. When Moses' father-in-law saw all that he was doing for the people, he said, “What is this that you are doing for the people? Why do you sit alone, and all the people stand around you from morning till evening?” And Moses said to his father-in-law, “Because the people come to me to inquire of God; when they have a dispute, they come to me and I decide between one person and another, and I make them know the statutes of God and his laws.”
What is Moses’ priority? He’s helping the people of God rightly relate to God. I mean, that’s what he’s doing. They’re coming to inquire of God, and Moses is making known God’s statutes and his laws. He’s just keeping the most important thing the most important thing. First things first; it’s making God known. It’s rightly relating to God. This is the central task that Moses now has.
Brothers and sisters, if we are Christians, if we are disciples of Jesus, followers of Christ, then the central, most important thing in our lives—the number one priority—should also be knowing him, rightly relating to him, walking with him. That’s number one.
(2) The second principle is the principle of organization. What we see beautifully, wonderfully in Exodus 18 is something very practical that Jethro gives Moses, overwhelmed as he is. Jethro gives him some common sense solutions. He has the right priority, but he’s overwhelmed. So Jethro essentially tells him to organize the children of Israel into groups.
You read it in verses 17-23:
Moses' father-in-law said to him, “What you are doing is not good. You and the people with you will certainly wear yourselves out, for the thing is too heavy for you. You are not able to do it alone. Now obey my voice; I will give you advice, and God be with you! You shall represent the people before God and bring their cases to God, and you shall warn them about the statutes and the laws, and make them know the way in which they must walk and what they must do. Moreover, look for able men from all the people, men who fear God, who are trustworthy and hate a bribe, and place such men over the people as chiefs of thousands, of hundreds, of fifties, and of tens. And let them judge the people at all times. Every great matter they shall bring to you, but any small matter they shall decide themselves. So it will be easier for you, and they will bear the burden with you. If you do this, God will direct you, you will be able to endure, and all this people also will go to their place in peace.”
Listen, of course this is just giving us history, right? It’s giving us history of what happened and how God provided a way for Moses to govern the people. It’s giving us that. It’s making a theological point, as the nation of Israel is now being organized before being constituted as a nation. Here is a way in which they will be governed. But there is a practical principle here for you and I to extrapolate, and it is simply this, that we need to use common sense and bring order into the chaos of our lives.
Some of you are living in chaos in your family life. It’s just absolute chaos. Sometimes organizations get really chaotic. This can happen in a growing organization, a growing church. What’s needed? Some common sense organization.
It means that in our personal lives we have to pay attention to schedule and habits and rhythms and finances and priorities. Priorities always involve saying yes to some things and saying no to other things. That’s what a priority is. It means you put something in front of something else. We have to do that in our family lives, our personal lives, and we have to do that, of course, on the organizational level.
This was the secret of John Wesley. When John Wesley organized the new Christians during the Great Awakening, the Methodist revival, you know what he was doing? He was putting this into practice! He was organizing people into groups with leaders of groups so that they could be discipled and learn to walk with God together. It was common sense, brilliant, strategic organization.
What I’m suggesting is that every individual, every family, every organization needs some level of this kind of organization if we are really to build our lives around the main priority of knowing God and making him known.
What I suggest to you is that you do a little work, take some inventory of your personal life, maybe read a book like Covey’s 7 Habits, or if you want the best Christian book on time management I know of, it’s Matt Perman’s book What Best Next? You could find most of this stuff in short form online in some articles and videos and YouTube. Get some ideas for how to bring some order into the chaos. Get organized.
You don’t do it for the sake of organization, you do it for the sake of maintaining the priority that is uppermost in your heart, which is knowing and walking with the Lord and making him known to others.
(3) Finally, one more principle that takes us back to the gospel. We could call this the central thing, maintaining the centrality of the gospel. It really is what drives Exodus 18. It’s verses 8-12, where Moses essentially shares the gospel with Jethro, and Jethro then responds with worship and with praise. Listen to how Christopher Wright puts this. (I’m almost done.) Christopher Wright says,
The central message of the whole chapter comes in verses 8-12, which are nothing less than the gospel declared, received with joy, confessed, and celebrated. Here in sharp focus we see the essential narrative nature of the biblical gospel. The good news lies in telling the story of the historic act of salvation that God has accomplished. Responding to that good news involves recognizing with faith and joy that it is indeed the work of the living God, coming to know the truth about God, and celebrating that faith and knowledge in feasting communion with the rest of God’s people in God’s presence.
Brothers and sisters, this is what we are also called to. Let me ask you this morning, what are you living for? What is your purpose in life? What is the organizing center of your life? What is the sun around which the planet of your life orbits? What is it? Is it knowing God and making him known? Has your heart been so captured by God’s grace in the gospel of Jesus Christ that the priorities of your life have begun to shift and he is now taking first place? This is what you’re made for. It’s what you’re redeemed for. It’s what we are called together to be a part of the church of Jesus Christ for. It is our mission in the world to know him and make him known. We do it as we have experienced his grace, out of the overflow of the grace we’ve experienced in the gospel, and it becomes our joy to participate in this mission with God.
That’s the calling this morning. It’s a challenge to all of us. Let’s take it to heart, church. Let’s do the work we need to do to make the glories of our God and our King known to the world. Let’s pray together.
Father, we thank you for your word this morning. We thank you, Lord, for how everything fits together to give us this unified, cohesive message, the message of your great redeeming love and of your will to make yourself known to the world. We thank you that you have included us in that, so that you have made yourself known to us in and through your Son, Jesus Christ; through the grace and power of your Holy Spirit; and through the unfolding of your word, the light of the gospel. Lord, we pray that the transforming effect of the gospel would go all the way through our lives to change our worldview and practically to reorient us to this first and central priority. Lord, I pray that you would help us as individuals, as members of families, and as a church—help us, Lord, to do the necessary work to organize our lives around this central thing. Help us, Lord, to discover the joy that comes from making your glories known to others. Give us the right heart, the right motivation. We do this, Lord, not to achieve anything for ourselves and not to earn anything from you; we do it, Lord, because we are so grateful for what you’ve done for us and because the glory of Jesus deserves to be seen and known and loved and cherished by others.
As we come to the Lord’s table, may this gospel feast be for us a reminder of the great grace by which we’ve been saved, of the sacrifice that Jesus has made, the great cost that that required of him, and also the sufficiency of his finished work on our behalf. We ask you, Lord, to draw near to us in these moments. Help us, Lord, to worship you, and draw near to us as we draw near to you. We pray this in Jesus’ name and for his sake, amen.
Brian G. Hedges
