So You Wanna Go Back To Egypt Part 5
It’s a Manna Of Desire
The familiar is always more appealing than the unknown.
We tend to gravitate towards what we are accustomed to.
We go to those places where we know what to expect.
We like being the regular.
Oddly those same tendencies also apply to adverse situations.
We move towards what we know even if what we have known is not good.
Ever hear of someone stuck in the same cycle of mistakes,
Dating the same kind of person,
Working for the same kind of boss,
Hanging out with the same kind of friends.
The names have changed but the story is the same.
Our spiritual Egypt is a familiar place.
Egypt the land of hospitality and refuge became a land of slavery for Joseph’s
family.
The scripture paints a grim picture--
Exodus 1:8-11 (MSG)
A new king came to power in Egypt who didn't know Joseph. He spoke to his people in alarm, "There are way too many of these Israelites for us to handle. We've got to do something: Let's devise a plan to contain them, lest if there's a war they should join our enemies, or just walk off and leave us." So they organized them into work-gangs and put them to hard labor under gang-foremen.
Exodus 1:12-13 (MSG)
The Egyptians got so they couldn't stand the Israelites and treated them worse than ever, crushing them with slave labor.
Exodus 1:20-22 (MSG)
The people continued to increase in number—a very strong people... So Pharaoh issued a general order to all his people: "Every boy that is born, drown him in the Nile. But let the girls live."
God does not forget the promises He made to Joseph’s Great grandfather Abraham, a covenant promise that extends through Joseph’s Grandfather Isaac,
through Joseph’s father Jacob and embraces their descendants.
God liberates His people.
God leads them to the land that He promised to Abraham.
But every time there’s a problem, a difficulty, a challenge, a hardship,
A danger, the familiar life in Egypt exerts its mighty pull to
forsake the unknown land of freedom
for the known land of bondage.
When the going gets tough—they start to wail,
“We wanna go back to Egypt.”
They want to go back to what is familiar.
Today as we continue our series So You Wanna Go Back to Egypt,
We are going to consider hardships and how God uses difficult times
to change us.
We’re going to learn that when adversity happens
believers have a choice,
We can head back to our spiritual Egypt in hopes of finding
happiness or we can press on in the path of holiness to
the Land of Promise.
The destination we ultimately choose is all a manna of desire.
Our conversation will center around the hardships of the journey and the
faith and hope we need to say no to the temptation of going back to
what we know.
Last time I asked you to evaluate yourself.
One a 1 to 10 scale with 1 being the Desire to Be Happy and
A 10 being the Desire to Be Holy—where would you place yourself
on that scale.
Happiness or Holiness.
Before you rate yourself let’s define Happiness
Happiness is based on what’s happening.
I’m happy when things are going my way.
I’m achieving what I want, no heartaches or headaches.
Things are fine and the prospects are that they are going to get
better.
Happiness is what we feel when we have a sense of well-being.
When we feel that everything is right in our world its the environment
for happy to happen.
(Henry Cloud, The Secret Things of God, p. 46)
Delighted, pleased and glad, that’s happy.
Pleasure, contentment, joy, that’s happy.
Cheerful, merry, optimistic, that’s happy.
I like being happy.
I think most people want to be happy,
Though I have run into the occasional poor soul that is only happy
when they are miserable.
The only problem with happy is that it is usually based on what is happening.
What happens always seems to be changing,
So when what is happening is to my liking I’m happy.
When what is happening is not what I want, I’m unhappy.
But even though happy can be fickle and fleeting,
Happy is good.
Do I want to be happy—sure I do, don’t you?
It seems to me that in God’s story the way to happiness is through holiness.
The world offers a fleeting happiness,
God guides us into a holiness that results in a happiness that does not leave.
Holiness can mean many different things.
For our purpose today we can simply understand holiness as being like
Jesus.
You left your spiritual Egypt when you
acknowledged that you were in bondage to sin;
believed that Jesus was the only one who could liberate you;
committed to following Jesus out of bondage and into the
land of Promise.
God accepted your faith and is now leading you to that place where
“He will wipe every tear from their eyes.
There will be no more death or mourning or crying or
pain, for the old order of things has passed away."
Rev 21:3-4 (NIV)
Revelation 22:3-5 (NIV)
No longer will there be any curse. The throne of God and of the Lamb will be in the city, and his servants will serve him. They will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. There will be no more night. They will not need the light of a lamp or the light of the sun, for the Lord God will give them light. And they will reign for ever and ever.
It’s in this city of God where you’re going to know lasting happiness,
The journey from our Spiritual Egypt to the land of promise is on the
pathway of holiness.
There are few scriptures concerning who completes the journey that we tend to
gloss over because they make us nervous.
I think the first one that makes us nervous is the God’s command believers to be
holy.
Leviticus 11:45 (NIV)
I am the LORD who brought you up out of Egypt to be your God; therefore be holy, because I am holy.
Even if we wonder how it is possible to be holy like God,
It makes sense that we who bear His name should also
Bear His resemblance.
We know that Jesus bears that resemblance.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God (John 1:1). The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth (John 1:14). [Jesus] is the image of the invisible God (Col 1:15). For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him (Col 1:19).
So to be holy is to be like Jesus.
The whole purpose of the having to follow God through the desert wilderness is to
make you like Jesus so that you can enter the land of Promise and dwell in
the city of God.
Hebrews 12:14 (NIV)
“…without holiness no one will see the Lord.”
That’s another scripture verse that makes us uncomfortable.
Sometimes we trip up over what we mean by holy,
But if you think of being holy as being like Jesus,
It helps me and gives me hope.
We know that God the Holy Spirit is sanctifying each of His children.
Sanctify is a fancy word for making holy
The Holy Spirit is transforming each of His children into
A unique expression of Jesus.
It has been my experience that the number one way the Father transforms us
into the image of His Son is through training, correction and discipline.
Its in those times of hardship, failure, troubles, trials,
Headaches and heartbreaks that we are most
Trainable and correctable.
Troubles come to everyone.
Jesus told us that in this world we would have trouble.
Jesus told us that no one is exempt.
Both believer and non are going to deal with hardships.
The thing the believer has going for him or her is that God uses those crazy
times to train, correct and discipline,
so that we increasingly become like Jesus.
Hebrews 12:6-8& 10-11 (MSG)
It's the child he loves that he disciplines; the child he embraces, he also corrects. God is educating you; that's why you must never drop out. He's treating you as dear children. This trouble you're in isn't punishment; it's training, the normal experience of children. … God is doing what is best for us, training us to live God's holy best. At the time, discipline isn't much fun. It always feels like it's going against the grain. Later, of course, it pays off handsomely, for it's the well-trained who find themselves mature in their relationship with God.
Transformation isn’t much fun.
Its hard to be happy when the natural reaction to what is happening around
you is to freak out.
Hardship and happy don’t go together all that well.
In Egypt you prized being happy.
Happiness is an important goal, an important value,
something you learned to strive for.
So when hardship comes, there’s this temptation to go
back to Egypt than deal with the difficulty.
To compound the problem and make the temptation even more compelling is our
culture’s craving for instant gratification.
We don’t like to wait for anything and especially if what we are
waiting for is going to satisfy some need that will make us
happy.
We’re a buy now and pay later culture.
We don’t want the preparation we want the pay off.
We want happiness now and
we’ll worry about holiness later.
That’s not the example set forth in scripture.
The writer of Hebrews lifts Moses for our consideration:
Hebrews 11:24-26 (NIV)
By faith Moses, when he had grown up, refused to be known as the son of Pharaoh's daughter. He chose to be mistreated along with the people of God rather than to enjoy the pleasures of sin for a short time. He regarded disgrace for the sake of Christ as of greater value than the treasures of Egypt, because he was looking ahead to his reward.
Moses stuck with God’s plain in the school of adversity
instead of enjoying the pleasures of Egypt,
And note those pleasures are only for a short time.
Why did Moses make that choice,
Because he was looking to something greater in the
future.
Its more of a pay now, and play later attitude.
If you’re waiting for your ship to come in,
It’s a good idea to build a dock to receive it.
Of course scripture also points to the One in whose image we are being
transformed as an example.
Hebrews 12:2 (NIV)
Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.
Jesus had faith that after the execution there was going to be a resurrection.
He endured because He expected joy at the end of the journey.
Jesus is our pattern.
He dealt with the hardship,
and now possesses the joy of the victory.
When you’re up against it,
Don’t bail out and go searching for happiness.
Stick with it and allow your circumstances to train or correct or
discipline you into holiness.
Holiness is where happiness is going to happen.
I want to visit this little side street that I noticed on this message.
Life isn’t always difficulty and full of hardship.
God is a good Father who knows how to give good gifts to His children.
God loves to give us things to enjoy on this path of holiness.
There are plenty of good times.
“It would be wonderful if God could transform us through bounty .
But it just doesn’t seem to work that way.” (Stirratt, p. 89)
If you prefer being happy instead of holy,
There’s this tendency to set up camp.
You’re on this journey from Egypt to the Promised Land
and come to a really great place and decided to stop and
settle down instead of completing the journey.
You get real comfortable in your faith,
No need to learn more,
No sense of urgency,
And here’s what normally happens.
You begin to forget God.
The more familiar and the more comfortable happy valley becomes the more
we tend to rationalize His miracles,
we loose our sense of awe and wonder of Him,
We over emphasize his love and forgiveness and
down play is Righteousness and Holiness.
We settle down into a materialistic lifestyle.
We start to consider His commands as merely guidelines.
Something we get to choose to obey or not.
When times are good its so easy to live superficially.
We become religious Water Skeeters.
A water skeeter is one of those insects that lives on the surface tension
of water, never diving under, never going deep.
Our relationship with God becomes all surface level,
there is no depth, no dependency, no intimacy.
Because of our lackadaisical approach to life we reap the consequences of our
foolishness.
God then uses the headaches and heartaches to train, correct and
discipline us,
once the lesson is learned we’re back on the journey.
Troubles and difficulties are going to visit you on their own accord,
Why invite them?
When times are good enjoy them,
but use those happy times to draw that much more closer to
God.
OK off the side street and now back onto the main drag.
As a believer you have to decide if being happy or being holy is your number one
priority.
If you choose happiness,
you are going to run from hardship.
Your going to head back to the familiar,
Back to Egypt.
Slaves aren’t happy.
If you choose holiness your whole attitude towards adversity changes.
James 1:2-4 (MSG)
Consider it a sheer gift, friends, when tests and challenges come at you from all sides. You know that under pressure, your faith-life is forced into the open and shows its true colors. So don't try to get out of anything prematurely. Let it do its work so you become mature and well-developed, not deficient in any way.
“When the attention of our hearts shifts to a desire for Christ-likeness
and we accept that transformation comes through hardship,
we will see difficulties as a gift from God.” (Stirratt, p. 84)
When you desire to be holy,
When you want to be like Jesus,
You submit yourself to God,
When those times of adversity and hardship come,
You have faith and hope that the circumstances are training you,
correcting you, disciplining you, perfecting you,
making you more like Jesus.
you see hardship as a means that God uses to shape you more into the likeness of Jesus.
I read this prayer in Kevin Stirratt’s book Manna:
“God, teach me whatever You need to teach me.
And teach me quickly, I don’t want to stay here any longer than I need
to.
If You are going to take me through this painful period.
I welcome it. But help me learn fast.” (Stirratt, p. 85)
Training, correction and discipline are never pleasant in the midst of it but
afterwards they produce holiness of heart and life.
Holiness brings with it happiness.
Hebrews 12:11 (MSG)
At the time, discipline isn't much fun. It always feels like it's going against the grain. Later, of course, it pays off handsomely, for it's the well-trained who find themselves mature in their relationship with God.
“When we make up our minds that we would rather look like Jesus than be
comfortable,
we are ready to participate in the transformational miracles of God.”
(Stirratt, p. 89)
So it all comes down to a manna of desire.
What do you want more.
Do you want to be happy?
Or do you want to be holy, knowing that lasting happiness is
the pay off for holiness?
Your desire will greatly affect how you live your life,
And quite possibly how you will spend eternity.
When times get difficult—
Do you really wanna go back to Egypt?
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