May The Lord Increase You A Thousand-Fold More

I'm still having a little bit of facial tics about preaching through Deuteronomy. Every week I start and I think, oh man, it's going to be a hard sermon. It's going to be tough. It's going to be miserable. I'm going to tell it's going to see all the stuff we do wrong. And then as I read and as I'm reminded about what the text that we're studying that week actually says, I realize I'm wrong. Time and again, I'm wrong. It really is a kindness of God to give us the history of his people. which is the part of Deuteronomy we're in right now, as well as to remind us of his law and what is expected of us and what he provides us the ability to do through Jesus Christ and his Holy Spirit. And so this morning, our text is a recounting of God's blessings on Israel while they were in captivity. It recounts their increased workload toward the end of their captivity, as well as...

the increased work of having to sort out their conflicts. These things go together. The more people you have, the more problems you have. Okay? That's something that I was listening to Eric in Sunday school, and I thought, did he read my notes? Because he was talking about some of the stuff I was going to talk about. But I know you didn't read my notes, and I didn't read yours, so here we go. The main point of today's sermon is that God doesn't wait to bless his children until they get their act together. If he did, we would never receive his blessings. Now, there's ways you can abuse what I've just said. It could be twisted into being a statement of cheap grace or minimizing of sin, and that's, I trust you know, not the point or the goal of what I'm saying. I think our danger particularly is in the other direction, that we as a church body are not so much inclined toward cheap grace, but...

the sort of servile fear of, well, I have to do the right thing or God's not going to give me what I want. We see him as being holy. We see him as being a judge. We see him as being righteous. And we say, well, if I can never attain to that level, then I'll never get what he's promised to me. And our text this morning dismantles that. And so my hope is that God will use this sermon to grow us in our love for God because of his kindness toward us. While we were yet sinners, before we've gotten ourselves all cleaned up and presentable. I also hope that an expression of that will grow in our hearts and that we will love and bless others who also don't have it all together. That's the point of the sermon, the goal. That's where we're going. Would you please stand now as you read the word of the Lord? From Deuteronomy chapter 1, verses 9 to 15. I spoke to you at that time, saying, I am not able to bear the burden of you alone.

The Lord your God has multiplied you, and behold, you are this day like the stars of heaven in number. May the Lord, the God of your fathers, increase you a thousandfold more than you are, and bless you just as he has promised you. How can I alone bear the load and the burden of you and your strife? Choose wise and discerning and experienced men from your tribes, and I will appoint them as your heads. You answered me and said, The thing which you have said to do is good. So I took the heads of your tribes, wise and experienced men, and appointed them heads over you, leaders of thousands, of hundreds, of fifties and of tens, and officers for your tribes. This is the word of the Lord. You may be seated. As I was preparing, I initially thought I was going to go through this whole text. It was kind of hard to know when to break this text up.

So I thought, well, I think we'll get through this whole chunk. And as I was preparing, I realized I don't think we're going to get through this whole chunk this week. And so we're probably going to get through Moses' statement in the middle, how can I alone bear the load and burden of you and your strife? And that we'll pick up next time there and add to it the verses that follow, which are related to it. So he begins by saying, I spoke to you at that time, saying, I'm not able to bear the burden of you alone. When was this said to them? This was said to the Israelites after they had come out of Egypt.

and before they had received the Ten Commandments, before Moses had gone up on the mountain. This statement here, I'm not able to bear the burden of you alone, and the text that follows that we'll be studying is Moses recounting or retelling of Jethro, his father-in-law's counsel to him. In Exodus 18.15, Jethro, Moses' father-in-law, came to him and blessed him and heard all about what God had done in delivering them out of Egypt and offered sacrifices and they had a meal. How to, like, go to work with your son-in-law day. So he went with Moses to see what he did the next day. And he watched him. And what did Moses do all day long? He dealt with and adjudicated all of the conflicts of the people in Israel. And it says that he was doing that from morning until evening. And Jethro sees that and he immediately says, you know, let me speak to you. Here's my advice. And then you do.

what seems right to you, but this is a really bad thing for you to be doing. He says, you are not going to, like, he's just looking at all the people. You get this impression that Moses is sitting there, and there is just this crowd of people, like, take a number, and they're just coming all day, all day, into the evening, till the end of the day, and that the crowd's not gone. Moses stops, and he just comes back the next day, and it's just going to continue this way perpetually. Now two things are true if that's to continue on. One, Moses isn't going to be able to sustain that. And two, the people aren't going to be able to sustain that. They are not going to get the justice or the care or the decisions that they need because there's not enough people doing the judging. And so Jethro's counsel to Moses was, you need help. You need to appoint men to help you. And you need to set up a system in which the problems are...

basically funneled into these different men to be judges and to rule these things. And you really should only be dealing with the stuff that they are not able to handle. And so Moses ends up doing all of that. All of that is the backdrop to him saying these simple words, I am not able to bear the burden of you alone. When you hear those words, I'm not able to bear the burden of you alone, do you hear a statement of fact? Do you hear a complaint? What do you hear? When I first read it, I thought he was complaining. I can't stand you people and all your problems. But the more I read it, I don't think that's at all what Moses is doing. I'm reminded time and again as I read through these early chapters of Deuteronomy that Moses really did love the people and that he wasn't in his position against his will. He cared for them.

He loved them, and he wanted to see them provided for, and so he did his work with that in mind. Which is not to say Moses didn't ever fail. There was a point at which he struck the rock because he became angry with them. But on the whole, he loved them. And so him saying, I'm not able to bear the burden of you alone, is not a complaint or a gripe, but simply an acknowledgment that he's not able to sufficiently meet the needs of the people. Remember, he was judging between them from morning until evening. And that even then the work was not done. So he was behind and falling further behind. Has anyone come to you in your work and said, you're behind and falling further behind. You need help. You should hire help. You ever had a home project where someone said, you bit off more than you can chew. You need some help. At least the temptation. What's the temptation that wells up inside of you when someone says, I don't think you can. And Nathan's going, uh-uh.

He's saying, no, no, no. We say, I can do it. I can do it. I'll just keep working at it. But many times that thought is very short-sighted because we're only thinking about the project at hand or the very next thing we have to do. We're not thinking about all the things we have to sacrifice or set aside to focus on it or that there's more coming in the future, that this is not the only project we're ever going to have to do. It's just... The one right in front of us. And that they're going to keep coming and keep coming and keep coming. And this is how we get behind in life. I can do it. I can do it. I can do it. And so then someone comes and they say, this thing that you're doing, it's not good. You're not going to be able to sustain this. And it's going to be bad for both you and the people. You need to either scale back, which was not an option for Moses, or you need help. You need to get some help.

I've been on both sides of this, where I have had to tell people, you bit off way more than you can chew. You need help. You need to hire somebody to do this for you or help you, or you need to ask some men in the church or whatever. And I've also been the guy who's been told, you bit off more than you can chew, and you need to not just continue in doing this. You need to solve this problem. You need to get some help. And so we see in Moses' retelling of this that Jethro came to him and said, this is too much what you're doing.

And Moses listened to him. It was very sweet. And this is one of the first things, just sort of a by the way, not really the main point of the text. But one of the things that we can learn is that if someone comes to us and tells us, I think you're doing too much, we ought to listen to what they have to say. Jethro said, I want to give you advice and then do what seems right to you. You're doing too much. Moses listened to it. And so we see one little expression here of the humility that he says he has. You remember Moses who wrote, The first five books of the Bible also wrote that Moses was the most humble man that existed. And here we see some small expression of it. We might laugh and say, how proud to write that sort of thing. But listen, he was humble. It takes humility to do what he did. When you're in over your head and then you won't admit it, that's pride. That's pride. Yeah? Yeah, John said acknowledging your limiting capacity is not a failure. It's just a statement of the truth. We're not able to do...

everything, all the time. Now, it would be easy, and maybe the reason that we might consider this a gripe or a complaint, was you look at the situation, you look at all of the people and Moses, and you think, why do they have to have all these fights? If you ever been in Moses' shoes and think, I've got so much work because of all these other people, or all these other circumstances, I wouldn't be overwhelmed if it wasn't for them. I hear enough chuckles to know I'm not the only one who's ever thought that. it's your fault I have all this work. And now you're telling, you're exposing, now I'm the one who's insufficient, but it's actually your fault. That's why I read it or thought, this might be a gripe or a complaint. But when you look at the reason why Moses says, I'm not able to bear the burden of you alone, you realize that that sort of reasoning that I was just expressing is wicked. Because Moses is not complaining. Am I the only one who's hearing this tinny ring? Can you fix that? Can you fix it?

It's driving me nuts. Okay, I have to keep talking so that you can fix it. I think you fixed it. Thank you. So why did Moses, why was he not able to bear the burden alone? Well, he says, the Lord your God has multiplied you. And behold, you are this day like the stars of heaven in number. So if Moses was to be angry that he had all of this work to do, he had to lay his complaint at the Lord's feet who had multiplied them. It was the Lord who had given him all of this work. Is that often what you think when you have so much to do and you're falling behind? It's the Lord who's filled my hands with all this trouble. Because that's what Moses was dealing with all the time, was trouble. He wasn't dealing with all this good stuff and all this encouraging. He's just dealing with all their fighting. And it was the Lord who had laid all that fighting at his feet. He'd multiplied the people, and so Moses had many, many more people to rule over.

What is Moses referring to when he says that God had multiplied them? Well, he's referring back into their captivity, as I said earlier. In Exodus 1, verse 7, it says, But the sons of Israel were fruitful and increased greatly and multiplied and became exceedingly mighty so that the land was filled with them. And you have to remember the Israelites going into Egypt and what happened. They showed up, and Scripture tells us there were 70. First Joseph went. Then his father and all his siblings and their families came, and it says there were 70. Now, as they're leaving, there's hundreds of thousands of them. Hundreds of thousands of them. Okay? It says that, and later on we will read, it says that there were 600,000 men plus the women and children.

And so there was quite a growth there. And the growth was so astonishing that Pharaoh recognized it. And Pharaoh said, you have to make their lives harder. They're becoming too much. They're becoming a threat to us. And this is the reason they were put into forced labor. This is the reason that they were enslaved. Pharaoh said, they're going to take us over, make their lives very difficult, thinking that they would die and they would not have as many kids. Exodus 1.12 says, But the more they, the Egyptians, afflicted them, the Israelites, the more they afflicted them, the more they multiplied. And the more they spread out so that they were in dread. They, the Egyptians, were in dread of the sons of Israel. This is what precipitated before Moses' birth to the wicked order to kill all the sons. They had multiplied and multiplied and multiplied. And life had gotten harder and they multiplied still more. And we're told that this multiplication...

was God's blessing of them his establishing of them his his his growing of them the Lord your God has multiplied you and behold you are like you are this day like the stars in heaven in number what is that a reference to you remember we looked well babies yes is that what you said babies The promise, yes. Last week I worked to show you that God deals with us through covenants. He promises to give us things. And when he's promised to give us things, he will give them to us. And so when Moses, just a few verses later here, is referring back to this, he's referring back to the promises made to Abraham those hundreds and hundreds of years ago saying, I will multiply you and I will make you like the sand of the sea and like the stars in the skies without number.

And so Moses is saying to them as they come out of Egypt and as they're coming to the mountain, he says, look what God did. He did it. He promised us a bunch of things. He promised us to multiply us. He promised to give us a land. Look, he's multiplied us and he's taking us to the land. So God does what he says he's going to do. So all of the troubles that Moses is dealing with in the people are the result of God's blessing on the people. God's blessing wasn't thwarted by the Egyptians' oppression. If God's going to give a gift to his children or give to them what he said to them that he will give to them, he will give it to them in spite of man trying to stop it from happening. So God doesn't just do what he wants and he doesn't just act erratically. He does what he's promised to do. And man can't stop him from doing it. And this is because he loves his children and he's covenantally bound to them to give to them everything that he's promised. So I said to you already,

I didn't read the scripture, but it said to you that there was 600,000 men plus the children, is what scripture says about the Israelites as they're coming out. And then what does Moses do? We would look at those numbers and be like, that is a lot of people. Not quite as many as, I don't know, how many able-bodied men are there in Indianapolis? Do you imagine being the judge of Indianapolis? Just to give you some sense of proportion. How many people are in Indianapolis? Like a million, isn't it? Am I wrong? I don't keep track of these things. 700,000. Okay, so. Imagine everyone in Indianapolis was a man. And then they all had wives and children as well. And you were Moses. You'd be busy. The Lord's blessed them. He's grown them. And then what does he say to them? It's the strangest thing. May the Lord, the God of your fathers, increase you a thousandfold more than you are and bless you just as he has promised you. I don't often do the math in Scripture, but I did the math this time. Do you know how many people that is?

600 million people, men, plus their wives and their children. And Moses is asking God to bless them this much more. As he's saying, you guys have so many problems, we have to set up a government to deal with it, which is what we'll come to later. Just think for a minute. 70 people to 600,000 people. Now, hundreds of years, right? 400 years. Long time. 70 people, 400,000, you know, 600,000 people. 600 million people. And Moses is saying, won't it be great? Won't it be great? And I can't handle you guys by myself. Won't it be great? May the Lord bless us and may the Lord increase us a thousandfold. Do you have this thing inside of you that says, I don't know that I want that much blessing? I think we all do. I don't know there's anyone here who's actually thought about it who wouldn't have that impulse and be like, I don't know that I'm not able to bear the burden of this alone.

Isn't that the feeling we would all have? I'm not able to bear the burden of this alone. The problem is our answers are then to say, then we will just not have the burden. We won't have the responsibility. We will limit the growth so that we can manage it ourselves. But that's not Moses' desire. That's not what he requests of the Lord. He requests of the Lord that the Lord would increase them incredibly. Some of you have, well... How would you respond if someone came to you, if you were a child of a large family, and someone came to you and said, I'm so sorry for you. You must have had a miserable life. And I hope you don't do. I hope your kids don't have to suffer the injustices and indignities that you had to when you were growing up. Wouldn't that be awful? Andy, you came from a big family. I'm thinking you've probably heard this.

Yeah, they're like, I hope that you, I'm glad you got out of that awful mess, and I hope you do better. Now, don't hear what I'm not saying. I'm not talking about family, okay? I realize I have a lot of kids. It's not the only thing I'm talking about. But you do need to realize it is the place where you're going to, the rubber's going to meet the road with this issue very clearly. And you don't have to have a family my size. I was just with a friend yesterday, and he had had a baby, his wife had had a baby. And I said, how many kids is that? He said, that's four.

And then he said, he says, you know, most people balk at that. But you don't because you've got, you know, way more kids than I do. But he was acknowledging, he's a Christian, he was acknowledging the pressures that you face even with three or four kids. So don't think you have to have half a dozen or more kids to get to the point where people are like, you poor thing. Or they'll say that to your kids. You do not have to have that many kids in our society. But isn't it a shame that we would... That we are tempted to respond to the blessings of God as though they're burdens and that they ought to be avoided. Whether it's children or any other blessing that God gives you, that we would look at them with contempt and say, no, that's more than I can bear. Here's the thing. If you've ever had the thought, that's more than I can bear, memorize this part of Scripture because Moses says it multiple times. And then he sets about getting the help that he needs to be able to bear the burden.

The answer was not limit. Hey, you guys, how are we going to feed everybody? The Israelites had that question. How are you going to feed everybody? Why did you bring us out into the desert just to kill us? How are we all going to eat? And here came the manna from heaven and the water from the rock. The Lord provides. And so we have to be careful in how we think about the blessings of God and whether or not we're actually desirous of receiving them or whether we just want to receive the blessings that... we've outlined as being the good things to have. If the world is going to look at the blessings of God on his people and scoff at it, it ought not to be that we agree with them and do the same thing. I couldn't imagine being Moses standing up in front of these people being as exhausted and worn out as he was and saying, I hope the Lord blesses us so much more. I hope he increases our workload more than we could ever.

Imagine. That takes faith. And many times I don't think the things I'm talking about this morning, I don't think they really get talked about. I think they just, it's kind of like a wink and a nod. You look at people and it's like you have the communication of like, this is a good thing or this is a not good thing or we should do this or we should do that. And we don't really tease it all out and say, we've had enough of this good thing or that bad thing or we've had enough work and we don't want to do any more. We just sort of look at each other and go, this is too much for you. That's too much for me. It's too much for you. It's too much for me. Yeah, let's not do this anymore.

And it all happens in the passing of a glance. May the Lord, the God of your fathers, increase you a thousandfold, more than you are, and bless you just as he's promised you. The other thing Moses is saying is that even as much as he blessed them now, and he said to them, you're as the stars of the heaven, there was still more fulfillment of that promise to come. That it wasn't done yet. Moses is saying, look what God has done. May he continue. Here's the other thing you have to realize about... life is it's either expanding or it's contracting. It's not static. It's just not static. It's either growing or it's shrinking. And so this happens. You can look at China and you can see what's happening in China in terms of their workforce. One of the most populated, most densely populated countries in the world used to be, in 20 years, it's not going to be. It's contracting. We all keep track of like...

What is the birth rate? Which is just to say the replacement rate. Like you need to have 2.1 or 2.3 children to replace yourself. That's like a zero sum. That's like you didn't increase anything. You just replaced yourself. And so things are either growing or they're contracting. And to think that we are going to engineer the blessings of God to where it just continues just the way it is right now is just a farce. You can't do it. You're either intent on life. and growth and multiplication and the blessing of God in every area of your life or your intent on the other things. Contraction, control, less work, less responsibility, less burden. I know it's hard to put it that way, and it's hard for me to say it that way, but we're either going to be oriented one way or the other, and we're going to be figuring out the problems based on our orientations. Are we going to look to God to solve the problems that...

what he requires of us, bring into our lives. Well, if I say this at work, then this is what's going to happen, and then there's going to be this relational thing, and then I might lose, I get written up, and then, okay, are we going to trust God to work good in that situation, or will we say, no, I'm not going to say anything Christian over there? Okay, not about kids, just about life in general. Are we going to trust God to, if you're like, well, if I get in the hot water, what's going to happen? I say, well, maybe what will happen. is what happened with Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. Maybe the Lord will deliver you out of it miraculously. But what did they say to them when they cranked the fires all the way up? He says, I'm paraphrasing, but we trust our God to deliver us. But even if he doesn't, we're going to serve our God. And that ought to be our disposition toward the problems that come up, the conflicts that come up with regard to being faithful to him in any area of our lives.

If we think, well, I don't want to make messes, I can't handle the stress or the frayed ends, and I live my life that way, I just want to be clear to you that somebody at some point in your life said, you are rejecting the blessing of God if you live that way. You're rejecting it. You're saying, I know a better way to live my life. I know how to set my priorities better than you. I know how to negotiate life in this world as a Christian better than what you've said in your word. And that is a rejection. of the blessing of God. But it will be very hard. But it will be costly. What will happen? I don't know. Do you think when Moses said this to them, he knew how it was all going to work out? In fact, it didn't work out very well for a long time for the people. He said this to them not long before they built a golden calf, not long before they went to the promised land and refused to go in, not long before all the men over 20 died.

I'm not saying to you that following God and serving him is going to be this easy thing. What I'm saying to you is you're either pursuing it and trusting that God will provide it because he's promised it to you, or you're not, and you're pursuing something else. It will be one or the other. Practically, what this means is when you live your life, you're going to have plenty of opportunities to say, no, not yet. I need to get this other stuff straightened out first. There's a couple of things that are wrong with that. It presumes that you are capable of getting it straightened out, which is not always true, is it? Some things are not problems to be solved, but burdens to be borne, right? Seasonal allergies. What can you do about it? I suppose you could move to Arizona or somewhere where there's no moisture. But what does everyone who lives in the Midwest have to do with seasonal allergies? What do you guys? I don't have them, but a lot of people do. What do you do with seasonal allergies? Levi? Yeah. Okay, okay, okay. I do this.

So you have a neti pot and you have medicine. Does it fix it? Does it help? It helps a lot though, right? You still look like a Vulcan. So my point is, it's just a burden to be born. What else are you going to do? You can be like, I don't like antihistamines and I don't like the medicines or whatever. And that's fine. You can choose to approach it that way. I'm not saying that's wrong. Or you can be like, give me my histamine blockers and give me this other thing, and I want that. I don't even know what the medicines are because I don't have them. But I have other stuff that I have, the burdens that I have to deal with, right? But you know it's not going away. You know when you take the little pill, it's not going to fix all your problems. And you know if you do it over a long period of time, eventually the pill doesn't even have the same effect it used to have. It's just a burden to be born, and what are you going to do?

Other than blow your nose, wipe your eyes, and cough, and just kind of go, for a few months in the spring and the fall. Not everything is a problem to be solved. So if someone has seasonal allergies, a really godly thing to have to deal with, what are they supposed to do when they're sick? I just can't be doing any of that stuff that God's got to say because I can't sleep and my nose is running, my eyes itch, and I'm sneezing. What are they supposed to do? They're supposed to serve God and seek after his blessings. They're not supposed to wait until they get it all figured out. Because some things can't be all figured out. Some things can't be fixed. Or if they are to be fixed, it's very costly, both financially perhaps and time-wise. It's hard to fix things that are wrong. And in the meantime, while things are messy, you have to continue to serve God and to seek his blessings.

And so let's not use the excuse that I'm busy or I've got these problems. I actually know you have those problems. I have those problems. Maybe different than your problems, but we all have them. And if we use them as an excuse for why we can't serve God or grow or trust him, we are telling ourselves and whoever else we're speaking to a lie. I've been telling you over the last couple of weeks as we've studied this beginning of Deuteronomy that the people of Israel were not particularly good examples to us. You don't look at their life and you say, they're the kind of people I want to be like. In fact, much of what's recorded about them is their sins, where we're supposed to say, I don't want to be like that. Lord, help me not to do what they did. Because we see the consequences of their actions. And so my question to us is, then why did God bless them? Why did he give them good things? Why did he multiply them? Because the same question applies to our lives.

Why does God bless us when we're a mess? Or maybe we should start with the question, do you see God's blessing in the midst of your troubles? Can you see it? Moses could see it. I don't know if the Israelites always saw it. Like when they wanted to kill Moses for dragging them out into the wilderness, not long after Jethro said this, they wanted to kill him because they didn't see the great deliverance from Egypt. It's like they had forgotten the Red Sea. It's like they had forgotten the plagues. It's like they'd forgotten all the gold and wealth that they were carrying that had belonged to the Egyptians. It's like they had forgotten all of God's blessing. And all they could see was their trouble. We have to fight day and night to not live like that. Only seeing the hard and taking for granted all of the good. Does that mean that the hard is not hard?

Does that mean that wandering, that their hunger wasn't real? I believe their hunger was real. I think they really were hungry. I think they were so hungry that they were tempted to kill Moses. And so thirsty. And yet God had blessed them. And was going to continue to bless them. We know the rest of the story. We're not living in it like they were. We look at them going into Israel, or into the promised land. And we look at them starting out really well and marching around cities and yelling and walls falling down and this great conquest. And then... Not so long into it, the complacency starts to set in. They start trimming the edges of what God says to do, and they suffer for it. And that's the long, sad history of the Old Testament, is the suffering of their departure from what God says. When they depart from it, suffering comes, and they repent, and they come back, and then they depart again.

This is what our lives, if we're paying attention to it and thinking biblically, this will be a theme we'll be able to track through our own lives. That there will be times when we're more attentive to the things of God and we're doing better and we can see God's blessings more clearly. And there will be times where the clouds seem to have covered over his blessings in a way and we don't see them. So in that moment, do you believe that the promises are still there and that God will still provide for you? Or has he taken them away? Because... You don't deserve them or you were naughty or you did something. That's not how we ought to think. When we come to the Lord's Supper, do you come examining yourself? What do you think about? Is it just a thing we do? Just a habit? Just a familiar tradition? I hope not. When we're called to examine ourselves, what is it that we see? And when we see our sins, what is it that we think about them? Do you ever wonder, is it enough for me to be...

Sorry and afflicted for the thing I did? Knowing that I did it, knowing I'd feel like this in the future. Is it enough for me to be sorry for my sin? Or does there need to be something more for God to bless me? It is enough for you to be sorry for your sins. Truly sorry for them. Having committed them willfully and repeatedly, it's enough for you to be sorry for them. Don't I have to promise never to do them again? Don't I have to actually not ever do them again? Don't I have to feel... really bad for a certain amount of time don't i have to deny myself some good thing to pay for it or make up for it no and i understand to me to my ears and i presume to your ears what i'm saying is making you somewhat uncomfortable because you're like well you're taking away all of the motivation to not sin and i'm saying has it helped you not sin has that way of thinking actually helped you not fall into sin no it hasn't

Has God's kindness in giving you the things that he's promised to give to you, despite your behavior, has that motivated you to seek after him? Then take hold of that and reject the other. God didn't give you the good things he's given to you because you earned them or because you deserve them or because you're able to pry them out of his hand. He gives them to you as a gift, all of the blessings that you have. And your part is to receive them as an unworthy recipient. That's it. And then to repay to him and to his people and to unbelievers the debt of love that you owe to God. In some ways, I think that if we were poor, it would be easier for us to do this. Now, I don't know. And by poor, I mean as a nation or as if poverty was a more normal way of living that we said, well, this is how life is.

If we would be able to see more clearly the blessings of God. I wonder if our wealth and our abundance doesn't blind us to God's mercies and make his promises seem far off from us. And if it isn't the seedbed to us saying we don't need any more of this. Forgetting how we got it or how it was given to us or in what circumstances we received it. God is faithful. And he's able to do things that we can't conceive of. And he does them regularly. And we need to tune our eyes and our hearts to seeing them and receiving them. And when we see his blessings coming and we go, that's, I don't know if that's a good thing. We need to learn to see with faith and not with sight. How in the world could Moses bear the burden of these people and all of the resultant strife? That wasn't his problem to figure out, actually. It wasn't his job to figure that all out.

all out. Moses wasn't put in a position where he was given work to do and no way to accomplish it. It was God's kindness to Moses particularly and to the people of God to send Jethro and say, you need help. It was a kindness to him. So if you feel like you have nowhere to turn and if things are very difficult for you and you're not sure how it's all going to work out, ask God to send you a Jethro who will show you the way forward, how to handle all the things that God's put in your hands. Many times you'll think that the blessings that God's put into your hand, or maybe you might think of them in terms of responsibilities, that you see your responsibilities as being in conflict with one another. The responsibility to your spouse, the responsibility to your children, your responsibility to your employer or to your friends or to your church. You see these things as being in conflict with one another. How can I be faithful at this and this and this and this? Apparently, my answer is I have to start getting things off of my plate. Some of these things, I need to get rid of them.

But that's not what Moses does. And that wasn't Jethro's counsel. He wasn't like, why don't you send half of them over there and let them start a new people of God. If God's filled your hands with work and your lives with busyness and the resultant mess that comes from it, because that's what happens, right? The busier you get, the more you fight with your spouse, the more trouble you have with your kids or with your parents, the more you got going on, the harder it gets. So what do you do? You say, we got to clear out the schedule, clear out the schedule, get it all gone, make it all go away.

Does it reduce the problem? It doesn't fix the problem. All it does is reduce your commitment to serving the Lord. And that's not the path you want to be on. And so serving God is going to be hard. It's going to come into conflict with your weaknesses and the weaknesses of your family. It's going to come into conflict with your desires and the things that you want out of life. Which will you choose, the blessing of God or your way? I think we ought to do what Moses did, which is seek after the blessing of God for himself and for the people. May the Lord your God of your fathers increase you a thousandfold more and bless you, just as he promised you. This is what it means to be a Christian, to want to receive everything that God promised them. Everything, and as much of it as possible. That's how Christians ought to live. And then they ought to purpose in their lives to seek after those blessings. That will make you strange by the world's standards.

That's okay. When life gets busy, don't set down the pursuit of the blessings of God. Your life will always be messy, okay? It will always be messy. There will always be a little more frayed around the edges than you would like it to be. However much tolerance you have for it, it will always be like just a little more. If God is willing to bless his people in those circumstances, then his people ought to be willing to receive those blessings in those circumstances. And so our part is to receive the blessings of God and to seek after them, not to try to impress God or earn them. Let's pray.