How's That Working for You?

Nathan Adams · Tidal Church Moncton · October 15, 2023 · Check Your Baggage series

Nathan Adams explores Exodus 3 and 19, Isaiah 6 and Deuteronomy 30 to show that God is holy love. He calls us to receive His holiness with humility, turn from the world's ways, and find the peace and wholeness only He gives.

More from Nathan Adams · The Check Your Baggage series

Topics: Love, Peace, Discipleship

Transcript

[0:01] There are three statements that describe exactly who God is. The first is God is in Exodus chapter 3. God appears to Moses in the burning bush and speaks to him and says, My name is Yahweh, which means being. He says, I am who I am. I, I just am. You wanna know who I am? Existence, the source and sustainer of everything that is. I absolutely exist. I am the brute fact of reality, and all other things rely upon Me. And it was Jesus who then came on earth, and He said to the people, Before Abraham was, I am.

[0:53] And He claimed that divine name. And not only did He say I am, God said to Moses, I will be with you. And Jesus said, even to the end of this world, I am with you always. And that is the God that we worship here this morning. God is holy is the third statement that describes exactly who God is. When He appeared to Moses in the burning bush, He said, take off your sandals. You're on holy ground. And it says that Moses trembled in fear before God. When we come in contact with the living God and not the projection of our own desires, there is actually a trembling fear.

[1:40] He is not altogether safe. As God worked in Moses' life to liberate the children of Israel from slavery in Egypt and brought them out into the wilderness in freedom, He came to them and appeared to them on Mount Sinai. And God said to Moses, get the people ready. They've got three days. And so the people purify themselves in their hearts. They bathe themselves, they put on their cleanest garments. And then God appeared. And I wanna read this to you. It's not on the screen, you must hear it and see it. It says, on the morning of the third day there were thunders and lightnings and a thick cloud on the mountain and a loud trumpet blast. So all the people in the camp trembled.

[2:31] Then Moses brought the people out of the camp to meet God, and they took their stand at the foot of the mountain. Now Mount Sinai was wrapped in smoke because the Lord had descended on it in fire. The smoke went up like the smoke of a kiln, and the whole mountain trembled greatly. And the sound of the trumpet grew louder and louder, and Moses spoke and God answered him in thunder. And the Lord came down on Mount Sinai to the top of the mountain. And the Lord God called to Moses from the top of the mountain. And Moses went up and the Lord said, go down and warn the people lest they break through to the Lord to look, and many of them perish. And let the priests who come near to the Lord consecrate themselves, lest the Lord break out against them. That's a strange phrase, isn't it?

[3:24] Lest the Lord break out against them. And it's repeated just two verses later. And it's this idea that God is as holy as the sun is hot. And when we get close enough, His very presence could consume us, particularly as our presence is mixed and filled with sin. The same experience happened to the prophet Isaiah, who had a vision of the Lord, and he saw God and he said, and he heard the words, holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty. The whole earth is filled with His glory. And in that intense moment, Isaiah says, oh no, I'm a man of unclean lips, and I live in a culture, a generation that's also unclean. Who can help me?

[4:19] And an angel comes down from God and purifies his lips. And to stand in the presence of God, we must be purified. We see this in the New Testament when Jesus appears to Peter and gives him the mighty catch. And Peter suddenly realizes who he's standing in the presence of. And Peter bows down and says, get away from me. God, I'm a sinful man. Get away from me, Jesus. This is holiness. But God is not just holy, God is love. When God appeared to Moses, His purpose was love. He said, I've surely seen the affliction of My enslaved people in Egypt. And I have heard their cry because of their taskmasters.

[5:06] I know their sufferings. Are you suffering today? I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them out of the land of the Egyptians and to bring them up to the land that I have for them, a good land flowing with milk and honey. And the whole story of the Bible is a story of love. One that culminates in Jesus Himself. And without Him, we wouldn't actually know what love is. 1 John 3:16 says, this is how we know what love is. Jesus Christ has laid down His life for us. You see, God doesn't just act lovingly, God is love, says 1 John 4:8. So when we say God is, and when we say God is holy, and when we say God is love, we're not just saying that He's acting in a holy or loving way.

[6:07] We are saying at the core of His essential being is holiness and love. And there is no God apart from those. A theologian named PT Forsyth put these three statements together for us in a very powerful way. He just said, God is holy love. Can we say that together? God is holy love. And that's who God is. Now this morning, I'm not excited to preach to you because I'm no prophet. But, I always feel like God gives me a message, and I didn't like the message He gave me. Honestly, you might get the wrong idea from this message that I don't like you.

[7:04] Well, I love you. I hope you don't get the idea that I'm in any way better than you for you or better than me. And this message has application, not just principle. And once in a while, a preacher can get a bit of the application slightly off. If I do that this morning, can you stick with me on the main point? Can you give me that grace? I might need it. Because what we're going to look at this morning is something we all feel. We feel that there is something very wrong with how the world is working today. We feel it.

[7:50] Whether you're Christian or you're not Christian, you feel it. And what I wanna do is I want to take that sense of something being desperately out of kilter with our world and ourselves as individuals in this world. And I wanna pair that up with the holy love of God. If you'll allow us. Holiness is how we love. Without holiness, love is just a feeling that we often act on incorrectly. If we go on just with a feeling of love, we can end up hurting people that we seek to help. Because love without holiness is only half the picture.

[8:38] It is only half the recipe for beauty in this life and eternity. I'll give a controversial local example: homelessness in Moncton. And before I do say one word about it, I want to say that I really appreciate our mayor and her heart. And this is in no way directed against her. But we have a problem in Moncton. In 2019 we had 113 homeless people, and today we have 473. How do we get there? Homelessness is complex. Increasing number of people are homeless 'cause they can't afford rent.

[9:25] And I don't blame them for that. But the leading cause of homelessness remains drug addiction paired with mental illness. And in the city of Moncton, the firefighters' budget for Narcan kits to revive people that have overdosed has gone up 20 times in the last four years. We used to have people die from a drug overdose a few times a month. Ladies and gentlemen, there are weeks where every day now someone dies in our city. We began an experiment as a city back in 2019. We brought in a thing called harm reduction strategies.

[10:13] We said, we're gonna allow people that are homeless and are actively high to come into a shelter. Before, if you are actively high, you're considered a danger to the others in the shelter. And you had to stay out in the street. It was a consequence of being high. But they said in love, we're gonna let you in. And we don't want you to get sick. So in love, we'll hold the needle for you and give you fresh ones. And we don't want you to die. So we're gonna have Narcan kits everywhere. But you know what it did, guys? It was love without holiness and a neglected accountability, which is fundamental to being a human being. And we have killed people with a misdirected love. People made in the image of God are dying because our love is not paired with holiness, and our hearts should break.

[11:05] And it also indicates to us something, guys, all of us are not as far away from being on the street as we think. One sickness, one abandonment, one misfortune. You could be on the street. And so when we see 473 people on our street in the city, it says our culture is breaking. That is a leading indicator of stress in the entire system. So folks, there is something deadly wrong with the world today, and we need God's holiness to help us correct it. Otherwise, we hurt. You know, we can do it to our kids. If you just love your kids and you don't pair it with holiness, with morality, with standards, you will enable their destruction.

[11:51] Holiness means the house always wins. In the nature of God is holy love, and He is the source of everything. So holiness is written into the very DNA of the universe. It is like the law of gravity in every way, except it's not quite as fast. Have you ever seen someone that said, "Oh, I sinned. Where's the lightning?" God didn't do anything. It's coming. So, how many of you like a little game of chance, and you like to take some calculated guesses and stuff, some calculated risks?

[12:37] I've got 10 coins in here. Heads or tails. Now, we all know the probability on flipping a coin is 50/50, right? What if I said there's a huge reward with you if you're willing to take a gamble with me? If I can flip this and you bet on it, we, if we just get six heads, not five, like probability, but if we get, just get one more, there's a big reward for you. There'll be a little price if we lose, but a big reward if we win. Would you take that bet? I mean, we've only gotta get one extra, right? So I don't wanna, I'm a bad coin flipper, actually. I practice. So I've got them in this container. Let's see what we got here. Okay, I've got 1, 2, 3. Ooh, we lost, we only got four. Okay, let's try again. Okay, we lost.

[13:31] See what we got? Oh, a little better. 1, 2, 3, 4 again, we lost again. Five. Okay, let's try again. Third time's the charm, right? You feeling lucky? And there it is. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. And actually, that's pretty on point. If you flip 10 coins, 37% of the time you're going to get that extra head, you're gonna get six or more. So of course, if we do that 20 times, your chances are still 37%, right? No, your chances go down.

[14:16] There's only 25% chance that you can beat the odds if we're at 20. So instead of trying to get six heads on 10, you're trying to get 12 on 20. Your chances go from 37% down to 25. Let's bump it up again. Let's do 50 tries at this. You taking the bet? Oh, there's a big reward though. Like, there's a bigger reward. Do you want the bet? 10% chance only that you're gonna beat the odds. If we go up to 100 flips of the coin, there is only a 2.8% chance that you will get 60 or more heads. And if we go to 100, sorry, if we go to 1000 tries, your chances are statistically nil. That is the law of averages. That's why there's a buffet at the casino.

[15:05] The longer you play, and they can keep you there. Eventually the law of averages comes in like the law of gravity, and it is gonna be what it's gonna be. And the house always wins. And this is what God's moral law is like in our lives. God says in Galatians 6, "Do not be deceived. God cannot be mocked. A man reaps what he sows. Whoever sows to please their flesh, from the flesh will reap destruction. And whoever sows to please the Spirit, from the Spirit will reap eternal life."

[15:55] So I ask you, what are you doing on a daily basis, on a weekly basis, that's taking your chances with God's law? You might get away with it today, you might get away with it next month. You might be one unlucky lucky person and get away with it for years. But eventually, after the hundreds and thousands of times, God's law always comes, and it will come to bless you if you follow the Lord, and it will destroy you if you don't. Where in your life are you doing this right now?

[16:42] Holiness is wholeness, man. We are awfully afraid to be judged in our culture. We hear, "No one has a right to judge me." How about the One who designed you? How about the One who follows your every breath? How about the Judge who stepped down off heaven's judgment seat and came to earth to dwell among us and took our judgment upon Himself at the cross? Does He have a right to judge you? The One who faced the sins that we have all failed at and triumphed over them, the One who is holy, the One whom our conscience has no peace until we find Him. And when we let that God be our Judge, He makes things right. He puts our life in order.

[17:46] He takes all that baggage that we've been carrying around, and we walk light, and we are made whole. And this wholeness is a peace flowing from a deep awareness that all is well between us and God. This awareness that nothing's been held back, this awareness that if anything bad comes, even that God will use toward our good, to make us more like Jesus and to reveal new areas where we can depend upon the Lord. It says, "You'll keep in perfect peace, all who trust in You, all whose thoughts are fixed on You." Isaiah 26:3. But in Isaiah it also says there is no peace for the wicked.

[18:32] Last week Pastor Buckingham spoke about anxiety, sharing struggles. He had struggled himself with it as a young man, but he pointed out that we are dealing with anxiety in an unprecedented way in our culture now. Now, a fantastic Christian can suffer with anxiety. A fantastic Christian can get sick physically. A fantastic Christian can have troubles of any kind. Amen. But if everybody's sick, then we've got a pandemic, don't we? And if everybody is struggling more and more with crippling levels of anxiety, it is telling us that something is extremely, extremely wrong with our world, and that this experiment in being functionally godless in our society is no longer working for us, and we need peace. And we can only find that in God's holy love.

[19:40] Holiness is being set apart. In fact, that's one of the meanings for the word. You're set apart, you're doing something special, you're for God's purposes now. Now, when I was a kid, Kentucky Fried Chicken, KFC, and some of the other restaurants used to blow fans from their fryers right up in the air, filling whole ends of a town with the smell of KFC. I'd go out to the mall and drive by not hungry in the least, and then do a big U-turn. All of a sudden when that smell hit my nose, and I'd pull into KFC, and we all did, and we were all getting sick and overweight and cardiac problems, and the government stepped in and said, "You can't blow that into the air anymore. You're killing people."

[20:25] What did you smell on the way to church this morning? I smell the drug that promises peace but keeps, gets people so mellow in the moment, they're anxious the rest of the time, and they can't live without it. After a while, that's what I smelled, sanctioned by a government that used to protect us from things like that. And so I say this not, again, for a political point, 'cause they're not listening to us right now. I say that for a spiritual point. We have to stop structuring our morality based on the world's morality and just be one step removed from it. Guys, we need to be 10 steps removed from the world's morality right now.

[21:22] If your sexual morality is, "I don't hook up," that's still not enough. Are you holy? Are we holy? The Lord says in 2 Corinthians 6:17, "Therefore come out from their midst and be separate from them," says the Lord. 1 John says, be in the world but not of the world. Shine like stars in the universe as you hold out the word of life, as you hold out a completely different way of being and doing that's full of the power and love of Jesus Christ, and unashamed. We must be set apart.

[22:08] And holiness is received with humility. Holiness is not arrogance, but rather a deep awareness of our own sinfulness in God's presence. "Woe is me." That's where holiness starts, and it will always be in that place. It will be a deep awareness of our own selfishness, our blindness, our frailty, our vulnerability. And it will just throw, we'll just throw ourselves on God, saying, "Not my will, but Yours be done." You've seen holy people. There is something about them. The peace that they have when you talk to them, they're actually praying for you. You can just feel it, and it's beautiful and it's humble, because holiness is just a gift.

[22:58] It's not something you're going to decide to do. We as sinners grossly underestimate the power sin has on our lives and grossly overestimate our ability to change. The dusty exercise bike at your home testifies against you right now. But change is all but impossible unless God is initiating it, unless He's empowering it, unless He's encouraging it, unless He's working out all things in our life for the purpose of making us more like Jesus. So holiness is not some big move you decide to do with your willpower. It is something that the Holy Spirit draws you to.

[23:45] And I pray He's drawing you right now, and your response is simply to throw yourself on God in desperation and say, "I can't do this. Save me, Jesus." And to surrender your life to Him, despairing of your own power and crying out, "Jesus, share Your holiness with me, flow into my heart by the Holy Spirit," and holiness is here and now. It is obedience to God in the moment. Only this can cut the ties of intergenerational sin and brokenness. And I wanna say that now is the time to turn away from this world and turn to God. No more moment can be wasted if the next generation is to be saved. If we wait until we're in our midlife to get it together, we have successfully raised a broken next generation.

[24:45] These family trees of intergenerational cursing must be broken here and now. I mean it here and now. Don't wait for the end of the sermon. Start breaking these right now. When Moses went up to meet God in that firestorm on the top of Mount Sinai, where God gave His moral laws for all time to him, and He gave phase one laws for Israel as a special, unique people that were later repealed when the gospel went out through Jesus to the whole world, and the moral laws were intensified and internalized even more by Jesus. When that happened, Moses said something to God. He said, "I want to know You more. I want to see Your goodness.

[25:32] I want to see Your glory." And so the Lord descended in the cloud and stood with him there, says Exodus 34, and proclaimed the name of the Lord, and the Lord passed before him and proclaimed, "The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands of generations, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin. But who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children's children to the third and fourth generation."

[26:24] Last week we saw something beautiful with those baptisms, didn't we? I was this time quite especially touched by the eight-year-olds. I've heard testimonies where kids say what they're supposed to say, but those, they weren't saying that. Those kids were saying, "Jesus is there for me, He loves me. Oh, I love Him back." And you see, that's what kids are supposed to be raised in from the moment they appear in our arms. They should be surrounded by the love of Jesus. They should have displayed before them wholly love in their parents, and it's what they need if they're gonna grow up and not be broken.

[27:16] You know, one of our favorite things as a church is when Teen Challenge comes, or guys from Harvest House recovery or something, or women who share stories of God taking their broken life and making it whole. And we absolutely believe in that story. And no matter where you're at today, as far as you could be away from God's holiness, He is here to rescue you. But the best story is the story that never breaks. It's the story of the eight-year-old baptized into God's love and living in it, in harmony with the holy love of God, in harmony with the way the universe is made to run.

[28:02] And that is something that bleeds down into the next generation and the next generation and the next generation. We need that. In Malachi, one of the last prophecies of the Old Testament is that the Messiah will come, and when He does, He will turn the hearts of the fathers to their children. Man, if nothing can break our own selfishness, if our children can't break our own selfishness, what could for them as much as, and even more than, ourselves? We must have holiness here and now. Are you willing to do that today? Number seven and last point: holiness applies to every area of life. When it's applied, then blessing and holiness follow. If it's ignored, then life stops working as it should.

[29:00] The Lord says, "Be holy, because I am holy." Holiness is the very reality of God. And He's saying, "Because of that reality of Me, that needs to be your reality. Be holy." Now let me talk about sexual sin right now. God's ways of sexual reality apply to every one of us, old and young. It applies whether our desires are heterosexual or non-heterosexual. If it's non, I direct you to Romans chapter 1 to prayerfully read. But don't worry, I'm not preaching at you today. We're not fit to speak to you at this moment.

[29:50] I'm also not preaching specifically at the young adults, but I'm gonna say a few words. If certain methods of contraception and protection are 90 or 95% effective, and this is your life, you're just about due. You're gonna have negative consequences. You're going to, perhaps, if you don't follow God's ways, you're going to have a series of divorces in your life. You won't get a paper for it, because you never had a paper when you moved in with them. But the effect and the devastation on your life will be just as bad if you live in a culture that has decided that morality is all about consent.

[30:48] Let me just simply ask you, how's that working for you? Because you or one of your friends has been sexually assaulted against their consent. It's not working. But who I need to talk to this morning is the fathers. Maybe it's the only group I'm qualified to speak of, because it's my group. Exodus 32:7 says that sin is visited, the sin of the fathers. It's visited on the children and the children's children to the fourth generation. And the world that we live in right now, the world in which there is so much brokenness, so much relational instability, where kids have never been more unstable in their lives, where, as a father or grandfather, you don't know if one of your kids might become sterilized down the road because of choices they make to change.

[31:46] That world came from somewhere. There was a man a couple generations ago that said he had a dream. His name was not Martin Luther King Jr. His name was Hugh Hefner. He had a dream of men accessing beautiful women whenever they wanted on the shiny pages of Playboy Magazine photos. He then saw that dream become a reality as men moved from fantasy to action, sleeping with vulnerable women at will. The dream was put on steroids when pictures became digitized, which now messes with the minds of men, women, children, teens. Today in an unprecedented manner, men asked their wives to be the unholy women that they had idolized. They degraded, they cheated. Marriages broke.

[32:40] Women were so hurt by men, and so deeply and so predictably hurt, that many just gave up on men. And so many kids were born without a present dad that they no longer knew what a good man looked like, or if there were any out in that world. And the dream of having any woman at any time has now come to its most unholy distortion of multiple partner relationships, throuple and polyamory. Fathers, I lay the whole mess not at the feet of the young people, not even at the feet of social media, as destructive as it can be. I lay it at your feet and mine. Our sin has dripped down like a black poison to the third and fourth generation, and Hugh Hefner's dream has become a nightmare of sexual darkness that our world lives in now.

[33:36] We must repent with tears and sorrow. We must own the brokenness of the generations. We must seek God's face with desperation and pray for His blessing to be renewed, for all of us, in every area of our lives. God's holiness applies to our talking. Ephesians 4 says, "Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouth." James 3:10 says, "Out of the same mouth come praise and cursing. My brothers and sisters, this should not be." The F word, S, J, C, G, D and W, guys.

[34:23] No way. To our lifestyles, holiness must be applied. James 5:5 says, "You have lived on earth in luxury and self-indulgence." And indeed, that is the dream, the twisted dream. The world tries to sell you that that's what it's all about. But we cannot luxuriate without also giving. We cannot relax without also serving. We cannot advance in wealth or career without also advancing the kingdom of God. Amen. You know, greed is off the charts in our culture. I try to turn off troubling, entertainment and watch a sports game. And there's one of my greatest sports heroes trying to get me to gamble and addict me to something so he can for some reason become more rich.

[35:17] No, friends, there's something deeply wrong here, and we need to come out and be separate, and we need to be different. I invite you now to move into God's holiness, because when God is for us, when we're aligned with His holiness, with the very nature of God and His creation, life is brighter. The whole earth is full of His glory. It's beautiful. And we hear God's words of encouragement to us: be strong and courageous. It says, Deuteronomy 31, do not fear or tremble before them, for the Lord your God is the one who is going with you. He will not fail or abandon you. But when we ignore God's holiness, life stops working.

[36:05] And Moses, as he spoke to Israel, as they're ready to enter the promised land, he said, look, God will be with you if you follow. But if you don't, here's what will happen. If you ignore God's holiness, you will be uprooted from the land you're about to possess. The Lord will scatter you among all nations from one end of the earth to the other. There you will worship other gods that neither you nor your ancestors have known, gods of wood and stone, giving up the living God for silliness among those nations. You will have no rest, nor will there be a place of peaceful rest for the soles of your feet. For there the Lord will give you an anxious heart, failing eyesight, and a spirit of despair. Your life will hang in doubt before you.

[36:50] You will be terrified by night and day, and you will have no certainty of surviving from one day to the next. Is not that our world today? Anxious hearts, a spirit of despair, your life will hang in doubt before you. It is the condition of our hearts when we're not in the center of God's will. So how do we return to the holy love of God? When Moses kept talking, and just listened to his words. And consider when you've experienced all these things, both the blessings and the curses I have set before you, you will reflect upon them in all the nations where the Lord your God has banished you. And I want to just do that for a moment. Now, let's pause and reflect.

[37:45] How is that working for you? If you just close your eyes and consider, now, I'm not asking how it looks from the outside or how prosperous you are. Now I'm asking, how is that working for you? If you're outside of God's will, where's your life heading? Does anything that you're doing have eternal value? And what legacy are you leaving for the next generations? But then Moses says, if you turn and your descendants turn to the Lord your God, and you obey Him with your whole mind and being, just as I'm commanding you today, the Lord God will reverse your captivity and have pity on you.

[38:35] He will turn and gather you from all the peoples among whom you have. He has scattered you, even if you are exiles in the most distant land. From there, the Lord your God will gather you and bring you back. No matter how far you are away from God, my friends, He can bring you back, and He bring you back here. And now in this moment, will you repent and render your heart now before God? It says, then He'll bring you back to the land your ancestors possessed, and you will also possess it. He will do better for you and multiply you more than He did your ancestors. The Lord wants to bless you. The Lord your God will also cleanse your heart and the hearts of your descendants so that you may love Him with all your mind and being, and so that you may live. Who needs that gift of holiness today?

[39:25] Who needs it? Then, the Lord your God will put all these curses on your enemies, on those who hate and persecute you. But you'll return and obey the Lord, keeping all the commands I'm giving you today. How many of the commands? It's not a buy one get one free. We must obey all them. And the Lord your God will make the labor of your hands abundantly successful and multiply your children, the offspring of your cattle, and the produce of your soil, for the Lord will once more rejoice over you and make you prosperous, just as He rejoiced over your ancestors. And we know from Jesus that prosperity is much deeper than physical. It is spiritual.

[40:10] If you obey the Lord your God and keep His commandments and statutes that are written in the scroll, the law, you must turn to Him with your whole mind and your whole being. A lot of times, guys, at the close of a service, we all know that we should, you know, maybe express some appreciation. Don't do that. I don't think there's many people that are feeling appreciative anyway, not today. The response is not clapping, it's crying. It's weeping in your seat. It's weeping at the front here by yourself. Maybe you need someone to pray with you. Come and weep at the front and put your hand up, or come and just pray by yourself.

[40:59] Charlene's gonna sing a song over us now, which is God's blessing on our children and on our generations. It is a powerful vision of what God has for us and what His holy love looks like. But now you have to respond. You have to render your heart. You must give to God a hundred percent yes in every area of your life, in a way that has no bearing on what the rest of the culture is doing anymore. But that says, I have an audience of One. It is Jesus Christ, and I will serve Him and Him alone, Lord God.

[41:44] Now come, we pray, restore Your blessing where the curse of sin has taken away, where the enemy has stolen, enslaved, sullied, and made us feel shame. Come now with a mighty conviction of God, with the Holy Spirit, the conviction that brings joy when we get right with You. And may Your people, Lord, purify their hearts before You today. May they be filled with the holy love of God as we listen and pray.