You Have Stayed Long Enough At This Mountain

So this morning we're going to be continuing our study of Moses' final book, the book of Deuteronomy. Last week we began with the opening verses where Moses called to the Israelites' mind their past sins. He did that for two reasons. One, to humble them. And two, to prepare them as they were about to enter the promised land after their 40 years of wandering in the wilderness. This week, our passage is the beginning of Moses' address to those people, to the Israelites. And the title of our sermon is, You have stayed long enough at this mountain. We're going to focus on what it means for God to be their God, not just God, but their God. Too often we live as though God is distant and that he's not intimately involved in our lives. My hope is that this morning God will help us to see that God's involvement is not based on how we're doing or whether we've earned his good things.

but rather that his involvement in our life is based on his promises that are made to us and belong to us through Jesus Christ. Our text this morning is Deuteronomy 1, verses 3-8. Would you please stand as we read the word of the Lord? This is the word of the Lord, and it is eternally true. In the fortieth year, on the first day of the eleventh month, Moses spoke to the children of Israel according to all that the Lord had commanded him to give to them. After he had defeated Sihon, the king of the Amorites, who lived in Heshbon, and Og, the king of Bashan, who lived at Ashteroth and Edri. Across the Jordan in the land of Moab, Moses undertook to expound this law, saying, The Lord our God spoke to us at Horeb, saying, You have stayed long enough at this mountain. Turn and set your journey and go to the hill country of the Amorites and to all the neighbors in the Arabah, in the hill country and in the lowland and in the Najeeb, and by the seacoast, the land of the Canaanites and Lebanon.

as far as the great river, the river Euphrates. See, I have placed the land before you. Go in and possess the land which the Lord swore to give to your fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, to them and their descendants after them. This is the word of the Lord. You may be seated. By way of reminder, it's important for us to remember that these first chapters of Deuteronomy are Moses rehearsing or remembering the last 40 years. And so as he gets started, he's going back to Mount Horeb or Mount Sinai and their interactions there. At that mountain, that was the place where God gave them the law, where they agreed to be God's people and where he agreed to be their God. This is also the place where they built the golden calf.

This is also the place where Moses broke the tablets, the Ten Commandments. This is also the place where, previous to that, the Lord was angry and wanted to destroy the people. There's a lot that happened at this mountain. So what came before that mountain, before they came to Mount Horeb? Well, they had just come out of Egypt and had been traveling a few months, but the deliverance out of Egypt would have been new in their mind, fresh in their mind. If you had just been delivered out of the house of slavery, out of the house of... of bondage you wouldn't have forgotten it three months later especially when the last deliverance the last judgment was that all the firstborns of the land would die except your own and then you would be sent out of the city or out of the country with all of their wealth and with their army pursuing you only to have a sea open up before you so you could escape and have that same sea swallow up your your pursuers all who stood at that mountain would have known this

would have remembered it and would have still been living on the after effects. It wouldn't have been far out of mind. And so as they come to this mountain, God asks the people by way of Moses, essentially, will you be my people? And he says, you've seen what I did for you in Egypt. Will you consent to being my people, to obeying all that I've commanded you? This is the section in Exodus 19 where you see this interaction between Moses and his... and the era between God and the Israelites. It says, And so while the Israelites were still at this mountain, with their deliverance out of Egypt fresh on their mind, God comes to them and he puts a question to them. Will you be my people? And what it meant to be his people was, will you obey me? That's the question. Will you obey me? You've seen what I've done. You've seen how I've cared for you. Will you obey me? Of course, the people say, all that you recommend, we will do. They're happy to do it. They say, yes and amen. We're going to do it. But even before they left that mountain, Moses was up.

communing with God and receiving the law. And they made for themselves a golden calf, a false god, a god of Egypt. And so as I said already, God was angry with them. And Moses persuaded the Lord to protect his name by not destroying the people. Moses pleaded with him and said, Lord, what will the nation say if you bring them out of Egypt and this news has spread all over only to kill them in the wilderness? What will they say about you? And so the Lord relented and he didn't destroy the people. At least not yet. Then Moses came down the mountain after having just pleaded with the Lord not to destroy them. And then he sees what's going on and he becomes angry. And this is when he broke the tablets, the Ten Commandments. And then the next day or shortly thereafter, he called on the people who were with him and said, all of you who are with the Lord, gather to me. And so it says that all the house of Levi come to him. And what he says is, I want you to gird your sword on your hip and I want you to go walk along the gate and along the camp and kill everybody.

who hasn't come to us. And the scripture records for us that about 3,000 were killed that day or in that time. So Moses was angry, jealous for God's glory and for the people to keep the covenant that they've already broken, having just entered into it. And so if later on in the book of Exodus, as this portion of this account is ending, Moses isn't sure what to do. He's like, we've engaged to be your people and we've immediately, completely deserved to be put to death. And so he pleads with God, and he says this. He says, but now, if you will forgive their sin, and if not, please blot me out from your book which you have written. So he pleads with God, and he says, will you please have mercy on us? From the very beginning, we're pleading for mercy. Moses is pleading on behalf of the people for mercy because they haven't done what they said to do. They haven't said, we're going to follow through and obey. Very quickly, they had turned away. And so Moses pleads, will you forgive them? And if you won't, will you please just take me away and blot me out of...

Now this is a sweet thing that God says here. It'd be easy to focus on the part where it says that he's going to blot out everyone who's gone against him. But the incredible part of what God says there to Moses in Exodus 32 is, go now and lead the people where I told you. Where was it that he was supposed to lead them? It was into the promised land. Now, I've gone through all of this history leading up to this question. Why are they going to get to go into the promised land? After this one thing they've done, even at the mountain, right out of the gate. Isn't it incredible that God said to Moses, I'm not going to kill them. Go.

and lead them to the blessing that I had prepared for them, that I'm sworn to give to them. And he tells them, you're not going to go alone. Behold, my angel shall go before you. Remember that as they wandered through the wilderness, as they traveled, they had fire by night and a cloud by day. An angel, God leading them to their land. Now what's all that have to do with us? Why are we rehearsing all of this history? Well, I want you to see the kindness and the mercy of God to sinners here in the Old Testament. in the law. These people were terrible. They didn't have anything to offer to God and say, look what good things I've done. Don't I deserve the good things, the promised land? Haven't I earned a little bit of blessing yet? And God bears with them. There's another thing we should notice as well, as they're coming out of Egypt, out of the trouble, out of the difficulty, God doesn't just free them from their difficulties, which I'm afraid too often that's actually all we want from God.

is we just want to be freed of the troubles as we see them. And then we want to be set free to do what we want, to return to our own lives. But you'll notice that's not what God does with them. He brings them out of Egypt and then he asks them a question. He says, you've seen what I've done. Will you engage with me going forward based on what I've done for you in the past? And they say, yes, we will. And this is God's way with his people. His job and his prerogative is not simply to bring us out of our troubles. However acutely we feel them, however big of a deal they are to us, His goal is not simply to bring us out of our trouble, but to form a bond between us and himself that lasts the rest of our lives. He could have brought them out of Egypt. They could have worshipped him in the mountain, and then they could have been just set free. Except they couldn't, and we'll come to why not in a little bit. But how often do you want to just be brought out of your troubles and then let go your merry way? I think many times that's what we want. Do we pray for deliverance or do we pray for...

faithfulness in light of God's deliverance? Do we say what the Israelites said, which is all that you say I will do, only to find that a very short time later, we're not doing what we were supposed to do because the trouble's gone. For a period of time, we're intense, we're accountable, we're conscientious, we're attentive, we're on guard, all the things scripture calls us to do. But then something else pops up. We run back to where we fall back into the normal rhythms of life. And in the process, we forsake our commitments to God. This is what the Israelites did at the mountain. And so when God says to Moses, go now and lead the people where I told you. Behold, my angel shall go before you. One of the things that we ought to learn is that when God has joined himself to his people, he is joined to them. He is committed to them.

And when they sin and when they fail, as the Israelites did time and again, he is still their God. Are they disciplined? Yes. Do some of them die? Yes. Do some of them not reach the promised land? Yes. But at any place does God take his people and cast them out and say, I will no longer and never again be your God. The only people that we might be able to find in Scripture that fit that description are the ones at the end of the book of Matthew who come to him and say, Lord, Lord, we've done all these things in your name. And he says, depart from me, for I never knew you. And what he's saying to them is, I never covenanted to be your God. You thought I was your God, and you played a game that looked like you were my people. But I am not your God. I never knew you, and you never knew me. Away with you.

But time and again, Scripture tells us in the Old and the New Testament that when God commits to being with his people, he never breaks that commitment. That bond is never severed. In the Great Commission, Lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age. Just after the book of Deuteronomy, as they go into the land, what does God say to Joshua? Go into the land. Do not be afraid, but be courageous, for I am with you. And so God is always with his people. And so there's this idea or sentiment in modern Christianity that's really beholden to how we feel like we're doing and whether we think God likes us or is pleased with us. And we live as though God deals with us on those terms. And those are our terms. Those are not God's terms. Those are our terms. Am I doing the right thing? Have I earned up enough credit?

to get to ask for this good thing that God has said that he gives to his children. I wonder if I can ask for it. I wonder if it's mine to have or to desire or to claim. And there's a problem in thinking this way. And it's a big problem and it's a dangerous problem because it's always trusting and pointing to your own assessment of your relationship with God. And I don't think that you ought to be spending your lives wondering about whether God loves you. You really don't. I think you'd do better to ask, if you're going to ask a question about love, I think you'd better question to ask is, do you love God? I didn't say perfectly and I didn't say for a long time and I didn't say, I didn't put all these parameters on the love. The question is simply, has God put love for himself in your heart? And the difficulty in asking the question is you're like, well, I don't know because there's all this sin. There's all this stuff I do. There's all these struggles I have. So I'm not sure. And at that point, you have to decide whether you're going to trust

your way of thinking about things, or whether you're going to trust God's way of dealing with things. So maybe a better question to ask is, do you belong to the Lord? Do you belong to him? If you do belong to him, why do you belong to him? Do you belong to him because you're so different than these Israelites? No. None of us would say that's the way to belong to God. Do you belong to him? Is he committed to you? You understand that if we were in God's position, If we could change the whole scenario and you get away from the mountain and the golden calf and everything, and you say, what are our commitments to the people in our lives? And how much sin can they commit before we say, I'm done with you. I don't want anything more to do with you. We realize that it doesn't take much. One of the things I pointed out to my kids this last week.

from last week's sermon that I didn't have time to say is there's an application in there for working and dealing and living under a great burden. 40 years, the last 40 years of Moses' life, he stuck with this miserable people that wanted to kill him, that grumbled and complained, that had nothing good or kind. It was like the worst family reunion that just went on for 40 years. And Moses never quit. Except at the very beginning, he says, either forgive these people's sins or kill me, because I can't deal with his people. And in our text, right after this, starting in verse 9, it says, I can't bear the burden of you people alone. Moses is an interesting man in that he loves his people, and he hates their sins. And he carries them around and suffers under them forever. But he doesn't quit. He doesn't sneak away at night. He doesn't...

cast them off he leads them because god told him go and lead them into the land and at that point when he said that in exodus 32 it was that 11 days journey into the land so that 11 day journey turned into a 40 years of wandering and all that time moses led the people to follow the lord and the reason for all of this is because god is bound to us he is bound to the things he says Do you remember when King Josiah, the boy king, eight years old, they come to him and they show him the law. It was like buried off in some church closet in the corner of the temple, all dusty and unknown. To all of the people, it had been gone. He'd never heard it before. And they come out and they bring this very thing here that Moses is telling the Israelites to him and he reads it. How many years had it been? How many generations had it been since anyone had had any regard for the law?

What was Josiah's response to reading the law, to hearing the law? He thought, this thing, this here is the truth. This here is a record and a testimony of our God. This here is the explanation for who we are, where we've come from, and what's required of us. And then he goes on a campaign through the land, restoring the worship of God. What if he had said, well, it's been so long, I think we've probably just found another way to get along. Just because it had been hidden for a long time, just because it had fallen out of season, didn't make it any less true. He read in that law what God had promised to his people, what he had covenanted with them about, to be their God. And he thought, we have wandered, we have gone so far away, we have forsaken all of...

our obligations, and we have forfeited all of the blessings of God because of all of this wickedness and this worship, and it can't be that way anymore. We're going to return to the Lord. Josiah understood that God had committed to be their God, and that he was, even in the midst of all of their idolatry and sin, he was still committed to being their God, and they were still obligated to be his people. And so this commitment, this bond between God and his people cannot be broken. Cannot be broken. It cannot be broken. You can't break it. We treat our commitments nowadays as though they're all temporary and nothing is ever permanent. Someone was just telling me, I don't know if it was Timothy or somebody, was telling me that marriages are now becoming even more contractual. They just commit to be married for a certain amount of time and then they'll reassess after like five or seven years. Was it Michael? Was it you or Timothy? Somebody was telling me this. But this is becoming a thing that's being talked about or done. They're like, well, we'll just...

We'll just stick together for a while and then it'll expire and we'll reassess. This idea that there's an indefinite term even to marriage is being done away with. And even if we aren't saying, oh, we'll reassess in seven years, our commitments to bearing with a sinner for the rest of our life is deteriorating. And that's just one example of the way in which we view covenants and bonds and commitments to other people. How about serving the Lord? Well, I was a Christian, but I don't want to live that way anymore. As though you can do that. When someone's baptized, they ought to be told, instructed, exhorted, and warned about the commitments that they're making. Because the commitments that are put in place through the waters of baptism are irrevocable. You can't walk away. You might be able to walk away physically, but you can't walk away.

covenantally from the commitments you've made to be the Lord's. You can't do it. You can't say, well, I don't want to play by these rules anymore. I want to go do something else. You can go do something else, but you, like the Israelites, will just be in a breach of contract, if you will. You just won't be doing what's required of you. And you will, at some point, in God's providence, face the consequences for all of your actions. And so the idea of covenants and commitments and the bonds that are formed even between us, we take on very lightly. But the covenants and the bonds between God and his people, they can't ever be broken. God will never, ever, ever refuse to be his children's God. He will never, ever withhold from his children anything that he's promised to give to them, no matter what they do.

And that's the hardest part of the whole thing is that no matter what we do, God will not leave us or forsake us. He doesn't leave or forsake the Israelites. And so when he says to them, you've stayed long enough at this mountain, what he's saying is it's now time for you to go and receive the blessing that I've promised to you, that I covenanted with you. Have you ever had someone give you something good or want to give you something good and you say, I don't deserve it? Is it true that you don't deserve it? A lot of times it is true you don't deserve it. That's sort of the mechanics of a gift, is that you don't deserve it and you haven't earned it, and you didn't get it for yourself. But we have this idea that entitlement, or not entitlement, but deserving something, is how God works. And it's not how God works or deals with us. Remember in Psalm 103 when it says, If you, O Lord, should mark our iniquities, O Lord, who could stand?

Me, maybe, on a good day. No, never. There is forgiveness with you that you may be feared, O Lord. So God didn't lead the Israelites out of Egypt to let them go and to do what they want. He led them out of Egypt to give them a land that was theirs, that belonged to them, because God had promised to give it to them. And so he says to them, it's time for us to leave the mountain. You've stayed long enough at this mountain. Take this route. And then he outlines the land that they're going to and he says, all that is yours. All that is yours. I don't think it would have been too far afield to think that as the Israelites went to that land that they were afraid. And in fact, it's fear that causes them to send spies into the land. It's fear again that causes them to recoil at the report of the spies. It's a land flowing with milk and honey. It's a very fruitful and productive land.

There's giants there, there's armies there, we're weak. And if we go into that land, we're going to die. So did God say to them, well, never mind then, you're free to go. No, that land was theirs. And what he did was he disciplined all of the men at that time and didn't give them the land, but gave it to their children after they had wandered for 40 years in the wilderness. So at what point does God say, I will not give you what I've promised to you as a people? Never. So do you ever get nervous or fearful or angry or impatient on the path that the Lord's leading you on? Do you ever kick and struggle and stiffen your neck against it and say, I don't want all of this. I would throw it away if I could, like Esau, remember? Throwing away his birthright, throwing away what was his by right. Do you ever do that? Every one of us does that. And it's surprising how little it takes to get us to do it.

Esau was hungry. Just hungry. But God is faithful and he gives them the things that are theirs. Why do I keep saying those things are theirs? Well, I say those things are theirs not because of their power or their strength. As they were coming to this place where Moses was going to speak and as they were about to enter the promised land, did you notice what it says had happened? It says that they had just defeated Sihon and Og, these two kings. These bad guys who had given them grief earlier on in their wanderings. They'd gone and they'd destroyed them. What was that supposed to signify to the people? Why would Moses put this little thing in here that he's going to tell them all that the Lord's commanded him to give them after he defeated Sihon, the king of the Amorites who lived at Heshbon and Og, the king of Bashan who lived at Ashtaroth and Edri? What was that supposed to call to mind to the people? It was like a reminder because now at this point we're 40 years away from Egypt.

A lot of these people didn't come out of Egypt. And he says, oh, do you remember those battles we just fought now as a wandering, ragtag bunch of people with no home and no land? How is it that we defeated them in their lands? How is it that we defeated them? Was it not the Lord who went before them and handed those kings and their kingdoms over into their hand? Shouldn't that bolster their faith and their strength as they prepare to go into the land? Shouldn't it remind them of God's kindness and his deliverance and his protection and his provision? I'm afraid it probably fell on deaf ears that they didn't realize it. Those victories were meant to be a foretaste of the work that God would do as they entered into the promised land. It wasn't long after those victories that they went in and went and spied out the land and said, we can't win these battles. And they'd forgotten the battles that the Lord had just won for them. So they weren't being given the land because they were such a...

powerful people. They were a fearful, faltering, sinful people. They didn't go into the land because they had deserved it. They hadn't wandered around long enough to get God's blessings. They hadn't suffered enough so now they could have a good thing. This wasn't God throwing them a bone. These are the people whose fathers had worshipped the golden calf and who died in the wilderness, who'd been afraid to go into the land. So why is it that God gives them this land? Why would he do it? He tells us in the passage, if you go to the next slide. Is that the right slide? Another slide. Yeah. Go in and possess the land which the Lord swore to give to your fathers. He promised to give them that land and to the descendants of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob. And so they were the people that God had covenanted with. They weren't strong enough to...

to take over any of the people in there, and they knew it. They weren't obedient enough or deserving enough to go into the land. They simply were given the land and commanded to go into it because God had sworn that land to them. He had promised to give it to them. Has God promised to give you anything? Daniel said yes, but really quietly. Okay, he said yes a little bit louder. But do we live like he has promised to give us anything? Maybe another question is to ask, what has he promised to give us? Has he promised to give us ease in this life? No. Has he promised to give us wealth in this life? No. But some people have it, and so that means I should get it too, right? No. Has he promised me that I'll have a good marriage and all my children will believe and never commit any terrible sins? He hasn't promised us that either.

But you understand that we have these desires for our lives. What is it that God has promised us? What God has promised us is to sustain us through this life each day, to never leave us and to forsake us, and then at the end of it to welcome us into the eternal promised land. Not a physical land like the land of Canaan that they were going into, but into his land, into his rest. Into his joy. This is what he's promised us. The path there, you'll find will be much like the path through the wilderness. And you'll find that that path is fraught with troubles like the Israelites suffered under from Sihon and from Og. And you'll find that that path is fraught with your own sins. Like the Israelites grumbling and complaining about the food. Being afraid to go into the land. We don't have any water. Did you bring us out here to die? We would rather go back to Egypt.

There will be troubles along the path. In the midst of all of it, though, God's faithfulness never wavers. And what he promises to us, he will give to us. And as a Christian, you have to believe that. You have to believe that. Because if you don't believe that, then you're going to be left trying to figure out, how is it that I get good things out of God? How do I make him into the little genie that gives me the things that I think are important? And that's a path that does not lead to obeying God or to serving him. What you'll find is that every time you go on that path, it leads to bitterness and to anger and to frustration, blasphemy, all kinds of other stuff. And so we need to have our minds changed and conformed to what God's word says. He has promised to give us rest when our work on this earth is done. So will you do the work on this earth that he's given to you to do?

We ought to. What is that work? It's in your homes, with your marriages. It's in your workplaces. It's with your children. It's with your siblings. It's with your spouses. It's with your neighbors. It's with your classmates. Will you talk and tell people about God and what he's like? Will you tell them that we serve a God, and this is the most unique thing about our God. He loves us, and he promises to give us rest even though we sin. And because of that, we're willing. to endure the hardships in this world. We're willing to go through the difficulties that we have, and we face them. But because of what he's promised to give us, we say, I will endure them. I will walk through them. I will endeavor and desire and seek to be faithful. Jesus felt the same temptations that we face to abandon and forsake these things. But in Philippians, it tells us that he had joy set before him, and because of that joy, he endured the cross and despised the shame. The worst

we could imagine. A burden that you and I will never actually have to bear. The sins of the whole world. And he had joy set before him and it made him faithful. Do you have joy set before you? I can't change through my preaching or through my counseling or through my prayer. I can't make your life easy. I can't take your burdens away. I can't make your sin struggles stop. No one can. Me saying those things is not saying, oh, and I'm not capable of doing the things that pastors should be able to do. I'm just saying, I'm just a man, and you're just a man or a woman. What I can do and what I try to do and what we ought to seek to have done is to have our perspectives changed, that we ought to begin to see things the way that God sees them and not the way that we see them. We tend to be transactional. What have you done for me lately? This is how we are in our relationships with one another.

And sadly, it's how we are with God. What have you done for me lately? Well, it seems that you haven't done anything good for me lately. For one, that's not true, that that sentiment is a result of our perspective. But even if it has been a rough season, hard number of years, has God not been faithful? Has God not been faithful to you? Is he not taking you through these difficulties and growing you through them and preparing you to enter into his presence? And I think it's a kindness of God that he takes us through our lives showing us that the things that we love in this world will never satisfy us. And it's hard to have your hands peeled off of the things that you're hoping in. It's hard to have them crumble and fall apart and not come to fruition. It's depressing. It's discouraging. It's frustrating. And yet it's God's kindness to help us to see before it's too late.

that those things can't give us what we need and what we seek. God is faithful to his people. He's faithful in the midst of all of their sins. He's faithful in the midst of all of their wanderings and all of their grumblings and all of their complaining. He gives them what they need. And he gives them what he's promised to give them. I've wondered about Moses, who's angry that he can't go into the promised land. I wonder that if he... After he died, he couldn't go into the physical promised land, but after he died, I wonder if he thought he got the short end of the stick. I wonder if he would have rather gone into the land with the people or if he would have rather been taken away and entered into his rest. I think his perspective changed. Before he was alive, he thought, you people kept me from going into this land that was promised to us. But I don't think he had beholden, seen what that land represented and that he, through death, received something better.

And so I'll end by saying, God will give you the things that he's promised to give to you. And I have 100% confidence in saying that to you. I don't trust your perspective. I don't trust my own. When you're tempted to think that God's not been faithful to you, you're wrong, sinfully wrong. And the fact that you're sinfully wrong in that moment doesn't keep God in any way from giving you the things he's promised to you. And that's the beauty of the gospel. 2 Timothy 2.13 says, If we are faithless, he remains faithful, for he cannot deny himself. And so on the mountain, when the people made the golden calf and God wanted to destroy them, Moses said, But what about your name? What about what you promised to these people? These are Abraham's children. What about what you promised to them? And the Lord relented and didn't destroy them because he can't deny himself. He can't go back on anything he said. That would make him a liar, and he's not a liar.

Our God is a truth teller, and however long he ordains for us to go on, he's not lied to us, and he's not our debtor, and we're not owed the things we want. We're given something much better. So can you have the good things and God's blessing as well? No. That's what the Israelites tried to do once they go into the land. This is skipping way far ahead in the story. They went in and they started out serving him and then they started to not do what he said and they started to allow the people to live and they took them into being slaves and eventually they married them and they started saying, can we have the good thing and God's blessing? And it didn't go well with them. And so you as a Christian have to be committed to saying, I want God's blessings and I know that the way that I will receive those blessings is first because he's promised.

to give them to me. That's how I'll receive them. It doesn't have to do with whether I earn them or merit them, but I am committed to doing what he says because he's promised to give me those things. Otherwise, you're going to chase your tail spiritually for the rest of your life and you're not going to serve him the way you should because you've got this wrong idea about how he interacts with you. If you're a Christian, you will enter into his rest and all of the burdens and trials and sorrows and all the things you think he's done wrong by you, you'll realize at some point you were wrong. If you've lived very long, you've probably realized some of those things even in this life. But as you live longer and finally when you stand before God, you'll realize that your perspective on your own life is not God's perspective on your life and that he's not sitting there going, oh no, I forgot to take care of my kids. I forgot to give them everything I promised. Our God is not a forgetful God. He's not a liar. And if he promised to give these people a land flowing with milk and honey,

He's promised us much more, and he will give it to us. And entering into that land is of more value to us than anything we can find in this world. And so we ought to set aside the things of the world and our desires for them and seek after God. Practically, it will make it a lot easier to live in America as you feel like all of your good things are being taken away. If you say, it's okay if I don't have the good things of the world because I've got the good things of heaven stored up for me. then you'll be okay if you get your worldly things taken away. If you don't, then you're going to be very angry the rest of your life unless God does an about-face in America. You're going to spend the rest of your life just being angry, watching all of your good things taken away from you, worldly good things. So do you want your treasure now, or will you store it up in heaven for the future? And in the meantime, will you seek to be faithful to the obligations that you're under as a Christian to serve your God? He will be faithful.

That's not a question. The question is really, will you be faithful? Will you endeavor and seek to be faithful? If you do, you will see in time that God will grow you in your faithfulness and make his promised blessings sweeter to you and more attractive. Right now, I don't think they're attractive enough to us. I think we're too caught up with the comforts and blessings of the world. That was the Israelites' problem. We should learn from them so that we're not like them in that regard. Let's pray.