you can go and connect in the world as God designed. The result will be living a Christian life with authentic and truthful meaning and purpose, bringing great glory to God.
Let’s pray before we begin our journey into the scriptures, shall we?
Dear God, you are an amazing God of grace and love with promises so concrete yet mysterious and profound that we sometimes cannot comprehend with our human hearts and minds.
We want to see these truths spoken to us spirit to spirit so that we can claim them with a hungry soul and a longing heart. We ban the enemy any access to our minds and hearts as we allow you to awaken our souls to reclaim sleeping promises. We pray that as we are awakened to radically new-old ways of experiencing and doing God in our world, through these truths revealed in the scriptures, that we will recommit ourselves to have, “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done in earth as it is in heaven”(Matthew 6:10). Amen.
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
1. What if the people of _________________________ (insert your church name) weren’t here anymore? Would the community around you notice?
2. Is our church a visible reminder of an invisible God besides the four walls that make up the building?
3. Are you a visible reminder of an invisible God?
4. If you were asked as a Christian what the purpose or meaning of life is, would you be able to give an answer, and what would your answer be at this point?
5. If you were asked what the missions of God’s people were, would you be able to answer the question or know where in the scriptures to find the answers or refer someone to? If you can’t do this yet–don’t worry. Hopefully by the end of the book you will have a clear vision of our works for God and where to find our key missions laid out in the Bible.
3
DEFINING MOMENTS: THE
CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE
REVEALED IN THE PASSOVER
STORY
When someone asks us why we are here, we need to fully know the answer. We need to understand what it is that God directs us to do. We need to understand where in the Bible to refer in order to gain an understanding of our mission. Ultimately, we need to evaluate and focus on seeking, finding, and living a life worthy of glory for God. We need to constantly re-evaluate how we are walking. Are we walking on the path God laid out for us, or have we gone off the path with a small wrong turn in the woods? Until we know what path we are to be walking on, how will we ever know we may have taken a wrong turn?
To help realign God’s people with a fuller and more meaningful walk with God, I start with what I have come to see as two main building blocks that make up the foundation of our Christian experience. Our heritage, relationship and mission with God are established in the Passover and the Red Sea experiences. Every day I have been blessed as I review these two essential building blocks. I love to linger in the stories and their meaning.
These are the truths revealed to me in the soup kitchen that connect us with our basic path for Christian living. Within these two linked stories, God reveals a path for our Christian experience that is so relevant for us today, that it takes my breath away! Let us embark on the journey with one of our ancestors as they experience the Passover and the Red Sea first hand long ago.
THE STORY
My story goes back to my forefathers, the Israelites that came to fill the land of Egypt as foreigners. The sons of Jacob all came to live in Egypt through Joseph their brother. Joseph was a great Israelite who held a high position in Egypt during his day, second only in command to the Pharaoh himself. When Joseph was reunited with his family, they all moved to Egypt. But those days are long ago. Joseph and all of his brothers have passed on since then, but left a legacy of many descendants.
My ancestors may have been respected and worked in harmony with the Egyptians, but that is not so now. It is apparent how different we are today. The Egyptians are a people with deep cultural roots. They worship many gods and are great builders. You should see these pyramids that they built. But we on the other hand have the hearts of wanderers which is why many of my ancestors were shepherds, not builders. And though they worship many gods, we worship only one. We don’t even really live among them as we reside in Goshen and they don’t. This separation of ways and place only lends to more tension and disharmony. We have felt the strain of being foreigners here since we don’t even have the rights of the native Egyptians in recent years, but it has gotten much worse.
This new Pharaoh that rules knows nothing of the days of teamwork between us and them. This king sees us only as a threat because there are so many of us. We heard rumblings that this Pharaoh thinks that since our numbers are so great we might organize against him and try to take over the kingdom. So, to remove that threat from his reign, he forced us into slavery to oppress us and kill our spirit and our growth. He not only stripped us of our freedom, but of our dignity. We are the underclass, the lowly, the hungry, the thirsty and the outcasts.
We feel defeated in so many ways. Our bodies are worn and ache from the long hours building with bricks and from lack of sleep. However, even in the midst of this suffering and torture, we are being blessed as God causes us to multiply and grow even stronger.
We live in times filled with fear, anger, horror, dread, anxiety and downright panic as the Pharaoh even ordered our own midwives to kill all of our baby boys being born. By the grace of God, the midwives stayed true to what was right and spared our Hebrew babies. Just when we thought our God spared us this horror, Pharaoh found out that the midwives disobeyed the orders. “Then Pharaoh gave this order to all his people: ‘Every boy that is born you must throw into the Nile, but let every girl live’” (Exodus 1:22). A state sponsored campaign of genocide for God’s chosen people, who would have thought?
Years have passed, but we are still under the yolk of slavery. We groan under the burden of slavery. Yet we cry out for help with pleas of deliverance to our God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob our forefathers. We have faith in our God, for, “He administers justice for the fatherless and the widow, and loves the stranger, giving him food and clothing…for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Deuteronomy 10:18, 19b).
We know He hears our cries for help. It is later documented in the scriptures that this great God is about to execute a mighty work in saving His people. We are told that, “He looked down on the people of Israel and knew it was time to act, and acknowledged his obligation to help them,” (Exodus 2:25) to deliver us from our oppression, our exploitation, our genocide.
In our need of deliverance, God has been preparing a man to lead us, Moses. Moses has come on our behalf to help us by mediating with Pharaoh, requesting that we be allowed to leave for three days to go and offer sacrifices to our God.
Pharaoh is not impressed with this God that we worship. He figures this God only wants to distract us from doing our work for the Pharaoh, and that we obviously had too much time on our hands to plan such things.
So Pharaoh responds with retaliation as we are now required to continue to build with bricks, but we now have to go and get the straw to make the bricks, and still have to meet the same building quota, which we know is impossible.
Some good Moses has done for us! We are angry at Moses. Perhaps we should have sent someone else to mediate with Pharaoh.
Moses then takes our grumblings and complaints to God, telling Him that this isn’t working. We were hoping for some other plan to be given to Moses. But Moses comes back with the same plan. However, the LORD has sent Moses with more than the plan. He comes back to us with new promises from God, promises of our very own. These promises are our lifeline and we hold fast to them.
God has promised to free us, to redeem us, to make us His own special people. He will be our God. He promises we will know Him (Exodus 6:6-7).
Can you imagine that this great mighty God wants to know us and be in relationship with us? Our