You Were Afraid Of The Fire

So this morning we're going to be continuing in our study of the book of Deuteronomy chapter 5. And the verses that we're studying this morning and the ones that preceded it, these are the verses that lead up to the retelling of the Ten Commandments. The Ten Commandments are told twice in Scripture, once in Exodus 20, and then here again in Deuteronomy chapter 5. In our passage, the people of Israel are recounting when they were at the base, at the foot of Mount Sinai. And Moses is declaring the law of God to them. And our focus this morning is going to be on the Israelites' desire to not have God speak to them directly. You might think that's a good desire. You might think that's a bad desire. As we study this morning, we're going to figure out whether it's a good desire or a bad desire, or in what ways it's a good desire and in what ways it's a bad desire. There were good reasons for them to want a mediator, namely, that they were in fear of God's holiness consuming them.

It was an appropriate response we're going to come to see. But there's also danger and sinful reasons to not want God to speak to us directly, and we're going to look at those things too. My hope is that God will grow us in our desire to speak with him directly, to have him speak to us directly, and that we would not be content to either not know him or to only know him at a distance or through what other people tell us about him. As God's people, we actually are supposed to commune with and fellowship with him directly. And this morning I hope that I can show you how and why that's a benefit to us. Would you please stand now as we read the word of the Lord from Deuteronomy chapter 5 verses 4 and 5. This is the word of the Lord and it's eternally true. The Lord spoke to you face to face at the mountain from the midst of the fire while I was standing between the Lord and you at that time to declare to you the word of the Lord for you were afraid because of the fire and did not go up the mountain. This is the word of the Lord.

You may be seated. Now, very briefly, you see Moses gives a context. He says, this is where we were and what was going on. We were at the mountain and the Lord was speaking to you from the fire. They heard the Lord's voice directly. Moses places himself in between the Lord and the people. And while he's there, he's declaring to them the word of the Lord. And he gives the reason why he's doing this. He says, for you were afraid because of the fire and did not go up the mountain. I want to start by focusing on this phrase at the beginning, face to face. It says, the Lord spoke to you face to face at the mountain. The first thing I want you to realize is God wants to speak to us, to his people, face to face. He doesn't want to speak to us at a distance. He doesn't want to speak to us through others. He doesn't want us to have a vague impression of who he is or what he says. He wants to speak to us.

face to face. This is what he did in the garden before the fall with Adam and Eve. He walked with them, communed with them, and spoke to them face to face. It was their sin that ended that communion, that face-to-face interaction with God. But it didn't remove God's desire to commune directly with his people. We see this also in the incarnation. When Jesus comes, what does he do? Maybe it'd be better for me to ask another way. What do rich and famous people how do they tend to relate to the people? Do they tend to go down in among them or do they tend to hold themselves off and aloof? Generally, they tend to hold themselves off and aloof and you make an appointment or maybe you can catch a glimpse or maybe you can go to one of their speeches or one of their events and you might make eye contact. They don't want to be face to face with you. They can't be face to face with you. They're too busy. You're not worthy. Something to that effect. When Jesus came to earth,

the Son of God and the Savior of all mankind, that was not his way with us. He came and dwelt constantly among the people. Always, always, always among the people. Among the people to the extent that he grew tired and tried to withdraw himself and the people just met him on the other side. Always with the people so that when his disciples said, send these people away so they can eat and we can rest. He says, you feed them. Even when he went in the garden, In Gethsemane to pray. He didn't go alone. He called the two of his disciples. Come with me. Let's watch and let's pray. He was with his people. He was speaking to them directly. He was healing their infirmities directly. He was teaching them face to face. And also. When we reach our final destination. When we ascend. To glory. We again.

will be face to face with God. Paul tells us this is something to look forward to. In 1 Corinthians 13, verse 12, he's describing this life. He says, for now we see in a mirror dimly. You know, think of the mirror you've got at home. It's got kids' fingerprints and smudges and smears all over it and dust and all of the rest. And you kind of look at it and it's not quite a clown mirror, but it's, you know. You can't quite see. And you say, we want to clean the mirror. We want to see clearly. Paul says, we see now in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part. You know, I can only see bits and pieces. I can only make out the general picture of it. I only know in part, but then I will know fully, just as I also have been fully known. You have to realize that God could have created a place for his people, for us in eternity, where he wasn't face to face with us.

But he chose from the beginning in the garden and in Jesus' incarnation and in glory to dwell with his people face-to-face, interacting with them directly. Sadly, Adam and Eve's sin and all of our sins since then has made that sort of interaction exceedingly rare. Scripture is not full of God interacting with his people face-to-face. And if you think about it, you might think, well, that's too bad. But I'd tell you that it's merciful that God withdrew from Adam and Eve. The only other option for him was to destroy them, to judge them, to deal with their sin in that moment. Because of his holiness and his righteousness, he couldn't just ignore it. It had to be dealt with. And the way he dealt with it was patient and forbearing. He withdrew himself, his holiness, making a covering for them before he left. Every sin from Adam and Eve on down to this day, and to the final judgment has to be dealt with. And so God's withdrawal is not an indication of his desire no longer to be with his people, but to be merciful to them and to bring them to repentance and to salvation so that they can be restored to that sort of interaction face-to-face in glory. Think in your own lives. When someone offends you, what do you want to do? You want to get away from them, don't you? I don't want to talk to you anymore. Get out of my face. I'm going home.

It's what you want to do and someone offends you. It creates a divide. You want to get away. Now, maybe you want to get away to punish them. Maybe you want to get away to manipulate them. But perhaps you want to get away from them so that you don't sin or say something that you're going to regret. Maybe it's a discipline for yourself to create some space, right? Now, we're sinful and God's not. And so his distance was not so that he could get himself under control. But we have to realize that sin creates a divide and drives a wedge. between us and the people that we've sinned against. It creates space. And what is it that you want when that happens? You want that space removed. You want the wedge taken away. You want the fellowship restored. This is what God wants. This is what God is doing. When Adam sinned, he lost face-to-face fellowship with God. God banished him from the garden and withdrew from them. And they never did see God face-to-face again.

Now, in Scripture, there are a few other places where God reveals himself, we're told, face-to-face with other men. One of them is with Jacob. In Genesis 32, 20, it says, So Jacob named the place Peniel, for he said, I have seen God face-to-face, yet my life has been preserved. One of the things you're going to notice as we study this is this idea of their lives being taken in hand. Seeing God face-to-face and their lives being a question of whether it's going to continue is always going on. Now in the context here of Genesis 32, Jacob is wrestling with the Lord for a blessing. You remember that he's come and they're fighting and they're wrestling and they're having this back and forth. And toward the end of the night, Jacob's still fighting and the Lord touches his hip and causes it to be dislocated and causes him pain. Jacob says, I'm not going to let you go unless you bless me, unless you bless me, bless me. So finally.

We come to this passage where it says, so Jacob named that place Peniel, which literally means wrestling with God. For I have seen God face to face, yet my life has been preserved. Now in that passage, it's interesting because it's often referred to as an angel of the Lord that he's wrestling with at the beginning of the passage. And then later it says he was wrestling with the Lord himself. And we could debate and we could question whether it was an angel of the Lord or whether it was the Lord himself. My contention is that it was the Lord himself. We see the same sort of thing happen with Moses and the burning bush in our second example. Though angels and the Lord are not the same thing. I want to show you again from Moses and the burning bush. It says in Exodus 3, verses 2-6, The angel of the Lord appeared to him in a blazing fire, him being Moses, in the midst of the bush. And he looked, and behold, the bush was burning with fire, yet the bush was not consumed. So you see this theme of the Lord's presence, fire,

lives being in danger, all tied together with his presence, his being around fallen man. So the bush was not yet, was not consumed. So Moses said, I must turn aside now and see this marvelous sight, why the bush is not burned up. When the Lord saw that he turned aside to look, God called to him from the midst of the bush and said, Moses, Moses. And he said to him, here I am. Then he said, do not come near here. Remove your sandals from your feet for the place on which you are standing is holy ground. He also said, I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob. And Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God. So was it an angel or was it God? Or was it an angel? And then after that, after Moses turned aside, then the Lord came. Scripture doesn't tell us definitively. But we see a lot of the same types of things going on. We see holiness, we see fire, which is consuming.

Fire when it's contained is warm, but fire when it's uncontained is just dangerous. It just consumes. It just eats. It's voracious. And so Moses goes over and he says, I've got to see about this bush that's on fire that's not being consumed. That's what fire does. And the Lord spoke to him. And then you see that Moses was fearful. He hid his face. He was afraid to look at God. He perceived the holiness of the Lord. And then again, we're going to skip over our text here in the beginning of Deuteronomy toward the end of Deuteronomy. In chapter 34, verse 10, it says, Since that time, no prophet has risen in Israel like Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face. So there's very few times and very early on in scripture where the Lord revealed himself face to face to a man, to Adam, then to Jacob, and then on more than one occasion to Moses. This passage here in Deuteronomy 34 is at the end of Moses' life as Joshua is taking over the leadership of Israel as they're about to enter the promised land.

After this time, after Moses passes away, there are many men who encounter angels of the Lord face to face, but not God himself. They have a similar response to these angels of the Lord, but not God. God has now withdrawn himself. He is not interacting face to face anymore with his people until Jesus comes. Now, why do we go through all of this and point all of this stuff out? Well, to highlight how extraordinary our text is. That not just one man in one place saw God face to face, but that the whole nation of Israel heard the Lord speak to them face to face. Without a mediator at first. Without someone else. You remember the question that was asked right at the end of chapter 4? Who has seen the Lord? Who has stood before him and not died? Who's lived? That same questioning comes up again at the end of this chapter. Who has experienced this and not died? That's typically what happens.

Those who encounter the face of God face to face and deal with his glory and his holiness and his righteousness, they're consumed. And so God speaking, not just to one man in a one-off time, but speaking to all of his people is incredible. He is not far off. He's not disinterested. He's not impotent. He's omnipresent. He's everywhere. And he's engaged with his people. Now, I want to make a sort of a detour for a second to talk about those who say, God speaks to me today. I don't believe that it's appropriate or accurate to say, God speaks to me today. Okay? Now, the difference in that being said could be as simple as being semantic. Okay? Someone maybe from a more charismatic or Arminian sort of background might say, God told me, fill in the blank. And if you're Reformed and if you're just like all the hair on the back of your neck stood up and you're like, no, he didn't. What they may mean is, how would a Reformed person say it? We'd say.

Well, I got convicted. I was convicted that this was, that God, you know, and you can mean the same thing, okay? But we would want to say that God convicted us. It was the Holy Spirit and the work that he does indwelling our hearts. We want to have a big, long discussion about it because we like having big, long discussions about theology. But we could mean the same thing. Maybe one way is a better way, more accurate way to say it. But the thing that shouldn't be lost is that God does still interact with his people. And he does still speak to us, though I would say through his word and through the preaching of his word and through the work of his Holy Spirit, more so than just an internal spontaneous conviction or inkling. God may use dreams. You may have a dream that's convicting to you.

But what I would contend is that if you have a dream that's convicting to you about your sin or about something you ought to do or something you ought to repent of, that that dream exists in the context of your knowledge of Scripture. That you don't become convicted about something apart from your knowledge of what God requires of you. And that we ought to be very wary if we become convicted about things that Scripture is silent on. So we need to be careful to examine what God spoke to me or God said to me. We need to be careful to examine whatever it was we were told against Scripture.

If we are led by God, spoken to or convicted or however it helps you sleep at night to say it in some sort of extraordinary way, we need to be sure that it agrees with Scripture. If what he tells us isn't addressed by Scripture, then you may act on it. But here's the thing. You may well be wrong. And that's not something that we like to admit. And those who... whose pinnacle of spiritual life is communing and speaking with God, don't often like to admit that the things they were told didn't work out. And that is pride. That's pride. There are many things that you may be convicted to do or convinced to do or persuaded to do that scripture doesn't say, yes, and do this. Those things, though, if they're not sinful, you can do them, ought to be held with an open hand. And you need to be ready and willing to say, I was wrong.

I misunderstood. There'll be things you do in your marriage. There'll be things that you do in your work. There'll be things that you do in the raising of your children that you're convinced right now are the right things to do. And I promise you, you're going to find out later you're wrong. And you'll be like, it was wrong for me to do it. And here was what my motivations were. And they were sinful or they were ignorant or they were foolish. But at the moment, I sure thought that's what God was telling me to do. So we have to hold this with an open hand.

our own subjective impressions of what God's compelling us to do, especially when it's outside of the clear teaching of Scripture. If we don't do that, if we are willing to be led along by our feelings and our premonitions and our sense of things, then really what we're doing is elevating something very subjective above God's revealed revelation, above his direct revelation to us. We're saying, you know, my feelings count for more. than these face-to-face interactions that God has with his people and that he's given to us most completely and finally in his word. It's sin to subjugate the word of God to our sense of things, as if it wouldn't ever offend us or require us to do things that we don't like or agree with or that we're afraid of. In this passage, God is speaking for himself directly to his people, and we have to ask why. I believe it was to impress Israel.

with his power and his majesty. He was making a mark so that they would remember, so that they would fear, so that they would obey. The Israelites had petitioned Moses because of their fear. No, you speak to us, and we'll read the passage here in just a second. I want you to realize that Israel's fear of God, speaking to them directly, and their petitioning of Moses was a good thing for them to do. At the end of the chapter, in verse 28, it says this, The Lord heard the voice of your words when you spoke to me. And the Lord said to me, I have heard the voice of the words of this people which they have spoken to you. They have done well in all that they have spoken. This fear of God, this recognition of his holiness and his righteousness, this sense of taking their own lives in their hands was a good thing for them to do and a good thing for us still today to do. Now, all of you sit there and you're like, uh-huh. But could you imagine if we said that in some other church?

The idea that I would say that we ought to have a fear of God. A fear that extends to us feeling as though we're taking our lives in our hands to deal with this. You ought not to think of God that way. That's sinful. That's wrong. You're going back. You're removing all of the grace that's been given to us in Jesus. And I'm saying, no, I'm not. I'm not trying to do that at all. Can we not both love and fear? Can we not both? have joy and tremble? Why does it always have to be one and not the other? God commends them here as his people. He commends their fear of him because it led to them desiring to obey and to do what he said. God really is concerned about how we live our lives and what we do with ourselves. He really does care about how we live our lives and what we do. How we live actually does bring glory to God or it doesn't bring glory to God.

When we get to heaven, there will still be a judgment for Christians. And we ought not to think about heaven simply as everyone's in and there's no, and that's all that matters. In the grand scheme of things, yes, it matters. Going to heaven versus going to hell, yes, that is the distinction that matters. But in glory, there will be a hierarchy and there will be varying degrees of rewards. And those rewards and those blessings will be based on our conformity to and our obedience to the word of God, the law of God here on earth. So what do you want in that day? So the Israelites said to Moses, you speak to us. You speak to us because if he keeps speaking to us, he's going to consume us. Verses Deuteronomy 5 to 27, it says, now then, why should we die? For this great fire will consume us. Remember, this fire is the Lord speaking to them face to face. If we hear the voice of the Lord, of our God, any longer, then we will die. He is holy and we're not. We can't abide this. This isn't going to work.

For who is there of all flesh who has heard the voice of the living God speaking from the midst of the fire as we have and lived? Go near, they're saying to Moses. Go near and hear all that the Lord our God says. Then speak to us all that the Lord our God speaks to you and we will hear and do it. Now, up to this point in the sermon, I've been talking about God speaking to us directly and it being appropriate for us to desire and to pursue that sort of thing. I don't mean that to be a mysterious thing to you. If it's not clear to you, I just want to say, the way God speaks to you face to face now is through his word. Okay? That's his direct revelation to us. Those words are inspired. They come from the mouth of God. They're God breathed. That is his communication to us. Still to this day, recorded and set down for all time. These are his words to us. He does still communicate to us face to face.

But now I want to come at this another direction because you might say, well, it's just me and my Bible then. It's just me and Scripture and my interpretation of Scripture. And I want to say, no, no. They asked for God not to speak to them anymore directly. But what they then asked, the way that they saw that being accomplished, they said, they didn't say, don't talk to us anymore at all. We don't want to hear from you. What they said was, Moses, you go up there and listen to him. Then you come back down here and tell us. And there's a pattern established here that's still intact today.

And the pattern is that God would raise up men to speak on his behalf to his people. It's happening right now. I remember when I was preaching through the pastoral epistles, we came up against this point in a couple of the sermons. The idea that the preaching of the word of God is that we ought to receive it as the very word of God. That we ought to take the implications and the applications that are drawn out by the pastor. in our day and say, that's God speaking to me. But that's not how we think about preaching. That's not how we think about teaching. We think, that's just a man talking. And if I agree with him, then that's probably a good thing. And if I don't, then I think he's just wrong. And if you think I'm picking on you, I just want you to think for a minute, if your job was to talk for God, you want to sign you up? You want to stand up and say, I'm tasked by God to speak.

on his behalf to you. It's an incredible burden that I feel. I don't know if every pastor feels it. I feel it. It makes me not want to talk. Moses, you go up on the mountain and you listen to him and you come down and tell us what he said. Do you view the preaching and teaching of God's word as coming from God or just from a man? The Israelites wanted to hear from God. And so they asked Moses to speak on his behalf. Are you willing to have an intermediary? Moses was a sinful man. I'm a sinful man. Every pastor that stands behind a pulpit is a sinful man. Do you conceive of their words as coming to you from God or not? What's your demeanor toward it? Do you sit in judgment of it? Do you dismiss the preached word of God as just, ah, it's just what he thinks? Ah, he doesn't understand my situation. Well, he's a fool. Oh, he's too young. Well, he's too old.

It's funny, when I planted the church, I was too young to speak to the issues. And I'm almost to the point now with some of you that I'm too old to speak to the issues. It's like, I don't know what the perfect age is, but I never seem to be it. What should our demeanor be toward the word of God? I think the most incredible verse in all of Deuteronomy chapter 5 is this one. It's verse 29. We'll come to it in a few weeks and spend more time on it. But this is something that the Lord says. He says, oh, that they had such a heart in them that they would fear me and keep all my commandments always, that they may be well with them, that it may be well with them and their sons forever. It's God stepping out of this perpetual need that we have to be instructed and saying, you know what?

I wish they didn't need a mediary. I wish they would remember what they feel today for the rest of their lives and that they would remember it in such a way that they'd never need to be reminded or corrected again. Oh, that they had a heart within them for that. Since they don't, Moses goes speak to them. We, like our children and like the Israelites, are quick to forget all that we've been told and taught. The fear washes and fades away. And so we need to be reminded and exhorted so often. Don't you love it when that happens? Aren't you glad I'm saying this to you right now? Aren't you glad I'm saying you need to listen to me? But I'm not saying you need to listen to me. I'm saying you need to listen to God. And you need to be thankful for men who give their lives to caring for your souls. Even though they're sinful and they're wrong at times.

I'm not saying pastors never make mistakes in their preaching or in their counseling or in their conduct. They do. They're sinners. The question is, how are you inclined toward it? Oh, that they had such a heart within them. Oh, that we would be glad when we're rebuked and we're pushed and we're made uncomfortable and we're told no. Oh man, wouldn't it be good if God would give us soft hearts toward that? I'm so stinking stubborn. There's only a handful of you in here who could even tolerate my pig-headedness enough to keep pushing. Some of you are like me. It takes a firm hand, a persistent, dug-in teacher, father, brother, elder, deacon. Brothers and sisters, you have to soften your hearts to the Word of God and to the people that God's placed over you, not because they're perfect and not even because they're better than you.

In many ways, they're not better than you. I'm not better than you. There are men and women in this room who knew more about Scripture than I do. And I'm thankful for them. Daniel often comes and tells me when I screw something up in my sermons. He says, you told this story, you were wrong. And I'm always like, shut up, Daniel. That's what I think. I don't know if I've ever said it. You know I think it, though. Because he's like, I don't want to go tell Dave. But then he comes and he's like, you know that story, that thing you said that, you know, but the Bible says, and I was like, you know, inside, I'm like, shut up, Daniel. But I'm always like, thank you, Daniel. This is how we are. How kind of God was it to speak to his people directly and then to give them a mediator in Moses and then to establish a pattern for all time. It's exactly what we need. If God can't speak to us face to face because of his holiness and his righteousness, then he gives someone to us who's like us.

who can speak in his stead and for our good. When pastors fail, when they say something wrong, or teach something that's unbiblical, our disposition toward it should be first to overlook it. Now, I know, because you're like me, you're all like, but, but, and we all have the what, but what if? Press pause. Before we get to actually... adjudicating in our own minds or with the church or with the pastor, the error. Ask yourself the question, do I believe that God's called this man to be a pastor and to shepherd my soul? And have I submitted myself to this church and to the governance of this church? There's a mechanism for working out his errors and his failures if he persists in them. The most dangerous thing to you is that you would take the authority that God's placed in the men who keep watch over your soul and say, you know what, they don't have any of that.

Or they do, but I'm not going to submit to it. That's the most dangerous thing you can do for your souls. And I'm not trying to say that I'm perfect or Eric or any of the elders are perfect. We know we're not. I've been corrected. I've fought and gotten arguments and been corrected and been disciplined. I've gone through the things that you're worried you might go through. And I'm sure I'll have to go through those things again in my life. The real question is not whether, you know, how exactly we figure out how to deal with the errors. The question is, will we submit to those whom God has raised up? It's a funny thing here that the Israelites say, Moses, you go talk to God. You go listen to everything he says. You come down here and you tell us. And they say, and we're going to do it. For how long? How long did that work out? I mean, they said, Moses, go up on the mountain and you talk to God. He wasn't even back down off the mountain. And they're down there making a golden calf. And so the point here is not the perfect righteousness of God's

mouthpiece, but the needs of God's people to be instructed and to be cared for and to be led. And so your first pass at someone being wrong is to say, you know, we're going to overlook that. We're going to work with it. We're going to figure out. We're just going to talk to him. Like Daniel comes and talks to me. I suppose if I dug in and said, no, Daniel, it's like this. And he's like, well, okay, this could get serious. Then we'd have to deal with that. Usually when Daniel's coming to me, he's coming to me and telling me, that wasn't the right person. Or you completely missed this point or something like that. You conflated two stories more than once. And it's helpful to me. What you shouldn't do is take the sinfulness of the pastor or the elders and use it as a justification to discredit those whom God has raised up. This is one of the benefits.

of not being an independent Baptist church in terms of church polity is that if I go off the rails, there's a mechanism through our church and through our presbytery to discipline me or Eric and to deal with and to adjudicate our failures. In churches that don't have that sort of superstructure, that sort of authority structure, what ends up happening is the church splits or the church dissolves. And Christ's sheep are scattered. And so you ought to be thankful that while there's authority given to the men here, there's also authority over the men who are here. That you have the ability to appeal to. If you think I'm out of line or I'm off track, talk to me. Talk to our elders. And if it gets bad enough, you absolutely should go to the presbytery and deal with it. They're good men who fear God and honor the word of God.

Don't ever let a pastor's shortcomings become an excuse for you to abandon God's word as he feeds it to you through them. Everything I'm saying at this point applies to a local context. And I feel the need to say this because there's so much teaching and preaching and instruction that goes on that's completely impersonal that's online. Where you can listen and you can hear and you can, it's almost, I feel like it's all a popularity contest. So like if you put teaching out online, the whole point is to get people to listen to you. And the way that you get people to listen to you is by saying things they already agree with. So it becomes this giant echo chamber. And that's really how it works. I mean, do you listen to people you don't appreciate or like? How many of you good reform people listen to Arminians? You just don't. Because you're like, well, they're wrong. And that's that.

Now maybe the Baptists among us will listen to the Presbyterians, and maybe some of us will listen to Spurgeon, or some of you Presbyterians will listen to some of the decent old Baptists. But generally, we just want to tailor our consumption down to people that we already agree with. And we do it biblically, we do it theologically, we do it politically, we do it in our friend circles. We really just want to be around people that we already agree with. And it's a shame. I think it's selfish. I think you ought to listen to other people. You ought to hear other people's perspectives. It doesn't mean you have to agree with them. It doesn't mean you can't fight with them or work the things out. But these things I'm telling you about overlooking someone's error, a pastor's error, or correcting him if he's wrong, apply particularly to those who actually have authority in your life. Okay? I don't want you, I'm not saying, and then therefore you should go listen to all of this whatever.

It's available online. You should give yourself your heart and your gifts to the people who've been tasked to take care of it. We ought to, each one of us, we ought to receive God's word from the mouths of sinful men, examining like the Bereans did, whether it was true or not, whether these things were so for the building up of the kingdom. Okay? I guess one of the ways, one of the things I'm trying to say just in general is, if you have a question, If you have a disagreement, if you're frustrated, don't leave. Talk. Talk. Talk to me. Talk to Eric. Talk to the elders. Talk to your small group leader. If you have concerns, voice them. And voice them to the people who keep watch over your souls. It's such a shame when people silently, I just had a friend.

Well, he's a friend and he went to a friend of mine's church. And I was over at his house this last week. And I said, hey, we need to, just in passing, we were just going over there for a few minutes to pick up some eggs. And I said, hey, we need to, you know, praying for your pastor. He's going to go have surgery. The pastor is. I said, make sure you pray for your pastor. He's having surgery this week. And he says, well, he's not my pastor anymore. And then he went on to describe to me the theological shift that he'd had in his brain over the last like nine to 12 months.

And I said two things to him. I said, you know, you ought to be very careful to discredit all of the confessions and creeds in favor of your own interpretation of them. I'm not saying they're inerrant. I'm not saying you can't disagree with them. But the idea that you'd throw all of them out and then just rewrite your own is pretty proud. And he said, yeah, I know. And I said, okay. I said, the other thing is. I said, I'm curious. And this is a pastor question to him. I said, did you talk to them about your disagreements or did you just declare to them after nine months of private independent study that you thought they were flat out wrong and needed to change their statement of faith so that you could continue to be a member of the church? He says, no, I didn't talk to them. And I said, well, that's the failure then. You should have talked to them. If you thought they were in error, you should have processed with them through the error.

And if you end up leaving because you can't come to terms, then you end up leaving. But you should have communicated with them. It shouldn't have been something that was done behind closed doors and in secret, all to be just revealed once the decisions were made. That is, in effect, you saying, I don't want you to take care of me. Or I don't trust you to take care of me. And the fact is, if you don't trust the pastors and elders to take care of your soul, then you should go find a church where you do. But they should know that you feel that way. And they should know why you feel that way.

We want so much of our lives to be sterile, to be clinical, to be business-like. Do your families work that way? Is that how your marriage works? Do you have business meetings about your disagreements? Do you follow all the rules of engagement in the fights? You're always patient when you instruct your kids. No, you don't play by the rules because you're related to them and you're relating to them. Even if it's sinful, you're bonded to them and you're connected to them and you talk to them. We ought to be that way in the church. I think one of the sweetest things as you read about Israel and all of the mess that they have is that Moses knew exactly what they thought of him. They were always coming to him and telling him how terrible he was. Grumbling and complaining, you're a bad leader and you let us out here to die and aren't you awful? Why do you think you get to lead us? All of this stuff. It was so sweet because it was out in the open. And God could then deal with it. Oh, we would live that way.

Not that I'm saying I think the fights are all great and good and let's have more of them. But honesty. Honesty regarding where we're at and what we believe the word of God teaches. That would be good. That would be good. It didn't go well for the people of Israel and all of their grumbling and their complaining against Moses. Why do you and Aaron think you get to be the leaders? You remember the ground swallowed up? Korah, Dathan, and Abiram. Do you remember that God sent fire into the 250 people that they had? That they had petitioned and gotten on their side, burned them all up like incense. And then another 14,000 later of the people were destroyed because of their rebellion. It was like God dealing with us. Do you believe that God deals with us directly? We should want him to. I think it was sweet and though terrifying, very sweet for God to speak to the people directly at the mountain.

And I think their response was appropriate to fear. And I think their desire to have Moses speak to them was appropriate. I think they were short-sighted about their ability and willingness to actually obey. But they were pointed in the right direction. And so we ought to be pointed in that same direction. And course correct when we get off course. Otherwise, we'll just live insulated private lives. And we'll come here and we'll say nice things to each other. And we'll help with this or that or the other thing. But we won't have... A real connection. And it's surprising how quickly the connections can dissolve when there's a conflict. And so we ought to work to be connected to each other. Telling each other the truth. Telling me or the elders if you've got a question or a concern or a frustration. This is the stuff that should go on. And here's the thing. If you don't tell us, it'll come out sooner or later. You'll leave and we'll be like, what happened? And you'll say, oh, this and that. You did this thing six months ago. And it's like, well, why didn't you come tell me?

Maybe I would have apologized if I'd realized that I defended you. Or maybe I would have said you're wrong. But we don't know. So we should want God to speak to us face to face. In his word and through our shepherds. That's what we should want. That's what we should hunger for. Let's pray.