All right. Hey guys, welcome this morning. Hey, before I do anything else, and I know the weather's gotten a little bit better, but days like today, I thank God for our parking team. Can we give it up for those guys standing out there?
Just getting, I mean, that's the second letting out of last service. I mean, they're all campuses, they're just getting totally down poured and man, you guys are you're integral to what we do. So thank you all so much. Hey, before I dive into the actual sermon, I want to give a quick announcement about families count.
Okay. And this is very important. I want everybody to lean into this for a minute. Do you guys remember back in 2020, when COVID and the world got, you know, was on fire in the summer of 2020. And everybody became a philosopher on the internet. Okay, we all Instagram and everything.
Everybody's a philosopher. And I don't know if you remember that time. I feel like the Lord gave me a verse during that time for our church because I was trying to wade through, you know, a lot of this different, you know, there's just crazy stuff going on. Here's what the verse says. I preached on this back then Proverbs 1423 says all hard work brings a prophet but mere talk leads only to poverty. And we use that verse during that time to say, Hey, man, we're not just going to talk about it, we want to be about it. And we want to be about getting on the front lines, particularly around poverty and family breakdown. And you know where you can get on the tip of the iceberg frontline around those two issues is in the foster care system. Okay, so our church was already very much into that, but we continue to read up that and what I want to tell you is out of that has come one of the most dynamic ministries I can think of is called families count families count is an opportunity for us to get on the front line. Like I said, family breakdown poverty with families who are either at risk of losing children to the foster care system or have already have and they're trying to get those children back and we get a chance to enter in with them and to mentor those families in a gospel centered parenting class. It is unique in our state where the only county that offers it where the DSS local DSS has partnered with the local church and allows us to do this gospel centered class that gives these parents an opportunity to jump in.
Listen, the secular left has has said forever Christians care more about children in the womb than they do outside of the womb and that is abjectly false. And a class like families count shows that to the world, man that we want to see breakdown. We don't want to see breakdown. We want to see families stay together and thrive and teach them how to do that. We make our class better than all the other classes to the best we can.
Okay. We try very hard like, hey, man, you come bring your kids will keep your kids. If you don't have a ride will come and get you will have dinner there will send you home with another meal for you and your family. Okay, we do everything we can to make ours shine and say, Hey, come and do this with us. And praise God, we've had dozens of families go through this. Here's the thing. It takes hundreds of volunteers to pull off a families count class.
We're a church right now running 4000 we only have one certified couple that can teach the class. Okay, and that's a problem. All right. And so what we need to I'm casting a vision today.
Okay. Hey, we want to see families count in five other counties in North Carolina in the next three years. We need it to thrive here. The fastest way for it to thrive here is that we move from having one family that's certified to 10. All right, and we can do that the people that do the certification, we've convinced them to come and do the next certification at Mercy Hill Church.
Okay, so people are gonna be coming from all over to get certified. We need people to jump into this. You can go to Mercy Hill Church.org.
com forward slash connect and and that'll be an opportunity for you to dive in. If you feel like the Lord might be calling you into this ministry. Hey, if your heart is burning right now, if you're pulled right now, I would really listen to that. I'm going to tell you I've met a lot of bored Christians in my life. I've talked to the works that he has set out before the foundation of the world that they would walk in. The people who find that are electrified in their Christian faith.
The people who never find it or don't look for it are bored. And so man, if you're if you're like heart is burning, and maybe you're not involved in a real ministry like this, this might be one for you to jump in. All right, we need some awesome families to jump in. So I hope you guys will do that. All right, we're going to be in Exodus 12 today, and we're going to talk about something called the Passover and I'm just going to tell you right off the bat, y'all this sermon is a story that is kind of when you think about Old Testament, this is the big show y'all.
All right. I mean, they don't get bigger than the Passover when you think about legacy down into the New Testament, and how it is radically affected theology for thousands of years. Now, I don't know if the Passover moment is the pinnacle of the book of Exodus. Okay, one day I'll ask Moses if he was writing it that way.
I'm not totally sure. People say well, Mount Sinai is the Exodus or you know, I mean, is the pinnacle or, you know, the Red Sea or something like that. Okay, fine. But certainly when you look back from the New Testament, that this whole concept of the Passover radically affects the rest of theology, and we need to treat it very seriously today.
Okay, and really understand and dig into it. Because in the Passover, we end up with a pattern of salvation that God will use and it will permeate the rest of Scripture. Here's the big idea this morning at our campuses as well, right? Here's a big idea God saves through sacrifice. That is what the Passover is all about.
And it is a form. It is an example that we see that gets set for the rest of the Bible. And we end up in finally going back in and when we finally get to the gospel, we're going to realize man, God saved us through the sacrifice of his son. You know, I think one of the best ways that we can think about sacrificial sacrifice in connection to living. All right, is what we're going to talk about today is spiritually something had to die for us to live an easy way for us to catch the meaning of that is we just think about it physically. Y'all for us to live, something has to die. That's what eating is. Okay, for some for something, you know, it's so funny. Well, you know, people will have you like, I can't believe you could kill something. And then I'm like, do you eat any meat at all?
Do you know how that do you know what happens in that in that whole thing, right? Like, if we're going to live, something else has to die. Now we disassociate it for our kids. Okay, we don't want them to see the ugliness of it. We want them to see the healing and dying from the living that we shouldn't do this, but we do try example as you go to the grocery store and you can buy chicken nuggets that are shaped like a dinosaur. And listen, if that's you, I'm not, I'm not a I'm not belittling it because right now with inflation, everything, we're just all buying whatever is the cheapest.
Okay, I get that I totally get it. But like, if I can go to the store and buy a chicken nugget that shaped like a star, or a dinosaur, okay, I have I am pulling apart something that has to have these, you know, our children are eating something that they don't realize what had to happen for them to be able to eat it. And this is really true. If you're a meat eater, or if you're not, I mean, people don't like to think about it like this.
But it's true for everybody. I mean, you could be the bird, you might be, you might be like a member of our security team. Okay, a burly tattooed boot wearing meat eater.
That's who they are, man. Carnivore never missed a leg day in their life. Okay. They miss a few cardio days. I'm gonna be honest with you. All right.
But they've never missed a leg day. They just drip meat eater, or you may be a vegetarian, you may be a vegan. Okay. I don't know what the thing is, for you to live, something has to die. There's a sacrifice that has to be made. And I think for us thinking about it spiritually, that is true for us as well. Some of us think man, I'm coming to church, I'm doing the thing I'm getting around people. I'm trying to be better. So God will accept me and it always comes down to two things.
I'm going to stop doing some stuff. And I'm going to start doing some stuff and God will accept me. And what you need to hear today is that your sin is so great. My sin is so great.
That doesn't work. What has to happen is somebody has to stand in your place. There has to be a sacrificial lamb. Maybe you're brand new to church, but you've heard that term before, right? The sacrificial lamb. Okay, that comes from this story. The sacrificial lamb.
Let's dive in. All right, something's got to die if we're going to live. Exodus 12, verse 21. Then Moses called the elders of Israel and said to them, go and select lambs for yourselves according to your clan. And kill the Passover lamb.
Take a bunch of hyssop and dip it in the blood that is in the basin and touch the lentil and two doorposts with the blood that is in the basin. None of you shall go out of the doors of your house until the morning for the Lord will pass through to strike the Egyptians. And when he sees the blood on the lentil and the doorposts, the Lord will and this is where we get the name of the story pass over you.
Okay, the Lord will pass over the door and will not allow the destroyed to enter your houses to strike you. What a beautiful picture, man, that we have in the Old Testament. It informs everything we think in the New Testament. This informs, I mean, Jesus was all over this when we talk about what he did for us on the cross. So let's start to break this down. Now I want to talk about a few things along the way, just like we do at Mercy Hill. Big idea is going to be gospel. See Jesus as the Passover lambs, you know, saves through sacrifice.
Got it. But there's some other things that we need to see here. Now in this story, the destroyer, we'll talk about who that is. The destroyer is going to go through all of Egypt. And every house is going to be marked in one of two ways. Either there will be blood pictured in the perfect picture of a cross, lentil and two doorposts from the blood that is slain by you know, the lamb or they will not be there. And in both cases, both houses will be marked. One will be marked with the blood of the lamb unto salvation. I mean, we're going to see the salvation free from slavery enriched in Christ and bound for the promised land. That all comes through the blood. Of course, the other side is judgment. And judgment is going to be hey, the blood wasn't there to cover you. And so the firstborn of all these families are going to die.
It's a premonition of what happens to all of us if we're outside of the blood of Christ, but we're going to get there all that okay, but one of the things that jumps off the page at me initially, is thinking about how God gives the message of salvation to his people and he still does it this way today. Some of you this is brand new. It's the first time.
I love Mercy Hills, this beautiful mix of those two things. Okay, but here's the thing. All right, this story always has something new for us every time we read it. And one of the new things for me, and I knew this, but it didn't pop for me until I began to think about it this week.
But here's something I think is interesting. God did not give the story and modes and instructions of salvation to all the people. He gave it to one person. He didn't tell the people how to be saved. He told Moses how to tell the people how to be saved.
And I think that's very interesting for me today because I think about it and I'm like, wait a minute. In some ways, if you're a Christian, are not all of us in the position of Moses, because God has given us a message of salvation for the world that we are to carry from our neighborhoods all the way to the nations. And if we don't go, they won't hear and if Moses decided not to speak, the destroyer would have come over the entire world. The entire land of Egypt and of Israel and all of the firstborn would have died. Israel wouldn't have been saved if they didn't know what to do with the blood of the lamb.
And there are people in your life and there are people in my life for sure. They don't know what to do with the blood of the lamb. See, you and I, much like Moses are ambassadors. We come with a message from God to the world. We come through us. There's not a big megaphone where God is telling the world. We are that megaphone. We are the ones that are called to take this message in the same way that Moses did. Moses called the elders of Israel to him and said, go select lambs. He is telling them what God has revealed to him. Are we doing the same thing? You could ask a question like this. Write this down. Who will hear the gospel from you?
We think about this with missions, right? Man, we have one of our incredible people. He's a great person.
He's awesome. Sent ones. Comes out of your community groups. Disciples in the same church your kids are being discipled in and you're being discipled in. And they moved to Africa to share the gospel among unreached people. And they go to share among some of the most persecuted people on planet earth.
They're doing a great work. I get a chance to sit with him this week and talk to him. And here's a story he told me. He said, hey man, a few years ago, Mercy Hill, we funded a training for this particular people group. Again, very high persecution. They can't be caught with bibles and thumb drives and all that kind of stuff. So the method is they build the bible in people's minds through stories. Build systematically the storying of the bible. That way they can go into their own culture without the things that will get them caught and they can begin to transmit biblical truth in their culture. And they taught them this method and it was over 30 of them that gathered and he said, Andrew, within the last couple of years, over 20 of them have faced incredible persecution.
Physical persecution. Alright, these are people, our brothers and sisters that are laying it on the line to share the gospel among the unreached in the hardest places. And you and I, maybe we're not there, maybe God is calling you to that. But we at least can be thinking about our neighborhoods. We can be thinking about our families, the people our kids play ball with, their families.
Man, we can think about on the college campus at Clifton and High Point today, be thinking about those dorm rooms. Who will hear the gospel through us? And I want to say this, okay, one of the best ways that we have a chance to be a Moses in terms of standing in the gap and sharing the love of Christ with others and teaching them about what to do with the blood is this time of year. Guys, this weekend we kick off our run up to Easter. And you know if you've been around Mercy Hill, this is a huge deal. We make it a huge deal.
Why? Because we know our culture is very open to a gospel witness during this time of year. I mean, churches will swell in attendance and we want to take advantage of that. And so we're going to invite everybody, hey, be like Moses.
Make the appeal, be an ambassador. We want you to go all in for Easter, okay? If you're part of Mercy Hill, I'm going to ask you to do four things. I want you to think about this with your family. Pray through it.
Man, make a mental decision we're in, okay? Four things. This is what it means to be all in. We're going to pray, we're going to invite, we're going to give, and we're going to serve.
Pray, invite, give, serve. That means that's all in. Of course, you never forget the acronym. The acronym is PIGS. You're wearing a Piggly Wiggly t-shirt, okay?
And now, hopefully, you're never going to forget, okay? You say, well, what do we want you to do? We want you to PIGS.
Very simple. And if you happen to drive by a Piggly Wiggly going to the beach this spring, grab a shirt, okay? And put it on Facebook and tell everybody, man, I'm in. PIGS, okay? Pray, invite, give, serve. Twenty-one days of prayer, also with a true fasting component.
This has become our custom. There'll be hundreds of people in our church that will fast from the very first service of Easter weekend through the last service of Easter weekend, okay? It's become a pretty long week because they keep backing the services up, all right?
So our services will start on Tuesday. There'll be many of us that are fasting from Tuesday all the way through Sunday night. And I'm not talking about a fast like, oh, I'm not going to do social media. I'm talking about, like, a fast. Like, don't eat fast.
Drink a lot of water. That kind of fast, okay? And so maybe we're going to do that. We're going to put before God. We're going to give. We're going to give. We're going to give. We're going to give more than we hunger for your kingdom more than we hunger for food.
That's what fasting is, all right? So we're going to pray and fast. Hey, we're going to invite.
Don't come sit alone. We're going to give. Man, our giving fuels the mission here at Mercy Hill. We have a lot of new people coming. We need people to jump into giving. This year we've had 1,200 families and singles give to Mercy Hill in some capacity, which is really amazing, okay? But we're going to pray to see 200 families or single giving units jump off the sideline and into this vital part of our ministry before the end of April. Maybe that's you.
Maybe you've been coming around. Man, you know it's something you need to do, and you're going to jump into that. I'm not even saying how much you need to jump in, but take a step in that regard. We're praying for that. And the last thing is serve. Guys, when we think about serving, we're going to prepare the jars for what God is going to do, and we need about 1,300 people to serve this Easter, okay? We normally have about 800 on the weekends that serve, and I pray that we'll have 500 people jump in for Easter, all right?
All of this stuff. You can go to MercyHillChurch.com slash Easter for all of these things to be able to say, hey, I'm all in. And if you're not serving now, man, I would tell you to jump in. Jump in to serve in our kids' ministry or jump in to serve first impressions at our campuses this Easter. Let's not be people who teach our kids to receive without giving, okay?
Let's go ahead and jump into all of these things. In that, we have a chance to be like Moses. Hey, I want to do everything I can to shut up a scenario in which people can hear about what they are to do with the blood. But let's get into the gospel itself, okay? Go and select lambs for yourselves according to your clans and kill the Passover.
Lamb. Take a bunch of hyssop and dip it in the blood that is in the basin and touch the lentils and the two doorposts with the blood that is in the basin. It forms a perfect picture of a cross. We're supposed to see something that Jesus will pick up on later. Actually, they paint the blood on the doorposts with hyssop. What did they use to try to give Jesus vinegar when he was on the cross?
They tried to paint him with vinegar when he was on the cross. And I just think about how God is showing us something here. There's an illusion here. You need to see more than what is here.
This Bible is entirely gospel-centered. Don't just see obedience in it. That's important. But don't just see that. See the story of what God is doing. God is revealing his redemptive pattern. If you are going to be saved from the slavery of sin and death, enriched in Christ, and have a future in heaven, it comes this way. It doesn't come another way. It comes this way. It comes through sacrifice.
This is what you've got to understand today, okay? God didn't save the children of Israel because they were better than the Egyptians. They were sinful just like the Egyptians were. Now, I mean, we all have sinned before. The Israelites had sinned before God. Joshua says this at the end of his life when he's looking back and he's trying to urge the Israelites. You remember what he said in Joshua 24, 14? Therefore, fear the Lord. Serve him.
Then he says this. Put away the gods that your father served beyond the river and in Egypt. The Israelites are going to be saved while they are idolaters and forgetters of God's name. Yet, they're going to be saved.
Why? Why would they be saved if the Egyptians not be saved? It's not because they're going to start some things and stop some things and it's not because they're going to get a little bit better and it's not because they're going to clean up their lives morally. It's because something died in their place. They took the lamb. They sacrificed it. They applied his blood. That's the only reason they're going to be saved from this judgment. The destroyer passed over them because something else died in their place. In this story, the firstborn in all of Egypt will be dead and every house will have a dead person in it.
Even the pastures will have dead cattle in them because all of the firstborn are dead but not in Israel. Why? It's not because they're better. It's not because they've got their act together. It's because something died in their place. You gotta understand this today.
In this story, there was something dead in every home. And in others, it was the blood of judgment. See, you gotta understand Passover. Passover is both judgment and it is salvation.
It is both of those things at the same time. And do you know where the greatest picture of this ends up pushing us to? It pushes us to see the cross of Jesus Christ. This is a gospel-centered book and this is a gospel-centered story. On the cross, the sin of the world was rightly judged so that God would be just. On the cross, his grace and mercy flowed. And we are, because his justice was carried out on someone else who voluntarily took it for us, his grace and his mercy flows into our life. Grace, God's righteousness at Christ's expense. Jesus took what we deserve just like the lamb.
Took what the people deserved. And God then sees us marked by the blood of the lamb in Christ and he passes over us. And he gives us a freedom from slavery of sin and death. Enriches us in Christ and gives us a future. And the Bible doesn't say, it doesn't allude to this.
It doesn't, this is not an illusion. Okay, the New Testament specifically makes this connection. Look at 1 Corinthians 5-7. For Christ, our Passover lamb has been sacrificed. Jesus died for us in the same way that the lamb died to preserve the people. Only, and this is from the book of Hebrews, what the lamb did was just a picture.
What the lamb did was a placeholder. It pushes us eventually to see the true lamb that takes away the sin of the world in Jesus Christ. You know, God Almighty is moving the hand of the destroyer.
Now, people want to argue about what this is. I don't really know, angel of the Lord, angel of death. Some people see this very much as the same way they see the burning bush, that it was the angel of the Lord, but then the Lord was the one speaking. A lot of people see Jesus in that and man, I'm not sure here's what I know. God is directing the destroyer to come through every home in Egypt and in every home, something was going to die. Either the sacrifice or the judgment was going to fall upon the firstborn.
And I'm going to tell you something today. This idea of something dying in my place, this is the reason that Christianity has done nothing but grown around the world for the last 2,000 years. It is why people raise their hands when they begin to hear the gospel and we sing about the gospel. And it is why so many of us have put this as the cornerstone of our life.
Listen to me, some of you are here today, some of you are in our campuses. And here's the thing, you're trying to figure this out. You're trying to understand it. You grew up in the South, you grew up around the Bible, you know some stories, but you don't have what other people have and you can't quite square it.
Here's what I mean. Maybe you heard a story about a guy at Mercy Hill in a certain community group that only gets two weeks of vacation a year and yet he takes one of those weeks every single year to go share the gospel among the unreached in India instead of sitting on the beach and you can't square it. There's some of you are here that are like, man, I don't understand how people can give their money away.
And these crazy people seem like they do it joyfully. It seems like they want to invest in the kingdom like I want to invest in the stock market or something like I want to see a return. They want to see a return, but the return they're talking about ain't physical. They want to see people get saved. They want to see marriages get restored. They want to see churches get planted.
They want to see missionaries sent out and they joyfully give their money and you can't understand it. And it doesn't square for you. And it doesn't figure for you. I'm going to tell you the difference. Okay. The difference is you're coming around the faith in a religious fashion.
I want to get a little better. And those people you're talking about that you can't figure that are on fire for Christ. They haven't tried to get better. They trust a God who has made them entirely new. Something had to die and they were reborn. That could happen in your life today. This is why the gospel has gone all the way to the ends of the earth.
This is so funny. Our culture, we don't realize Christianity is the most diverse sociological movement that has ever been in the history of the world. Christians in every corner of the globe, the secular progressive left loves to make fun of Christians. And when they do that, they think they're making, well, who are they making fun of? Usually it's, it's, it's seen as a European white man's religion and it is status. So it shows the ignorance, how far from the truth that is, you know, and this global worldwide movement, the white man is probably the minority.
That's how distinct and how global the Christian faith is. Why is it that way? It ain't because it's got a message that tells you to get better. Try harder. My sin is great. Getting better doesn't erase it. Somebody had to die in my place and Jesus did that for me.
And that's what's different about it. And this is how, maybe you're like, hey, maybe you're thinking today, hey, I don't understand. Why did Jesus have to die? Because Jesus dying absorbs the debt that we owe. God would not be just if he forgave us of our sin, but nobody paid for it. And so Jesus pays for it. He pays for it himself. You can say it like this, forgiveness absorbs debt.
That's what it does, man. When you say I forgive you, that's what you're doing. I told you guys this a couple of weeks ago or a month ago or something, but it was time for Anna to get a different car, got her different car. So now I am driving the van around town. Okay.
So I'm, I'm driving the minivan. I'm not proud of it. All right.
I'm gonna be honest. Um, and it's very important for me that, you know, that I still have my truck. I need you to know that. Okay.
It's sitting at the bar. I drive it when I need it, but I'm zipping around town in the minivan. All right. Um, I tell my boys, it takes a man to drive a van and they don't believe it any more than I do. Okay. So it's just, let's just put the cards on the table. All right. Let's say you needed to borrow my van. No, let's say, let's say you need to borrow the truck because I care. I care about the truck. Okay.
Let's say you need to borrow the truck trucks, older truck, 2005 Chevy, 2,500 with the cat eyes. Okay. There's a few of you that know what that is, but if you know what that is, it matters to you. Okay.
And it matters to me. All right. So, um, you know, I, I got, so let's say I, let's say I let you borrow it.
And you wreck it. Okay. And, uh, and you come back and say, man, I don't have insurance.
I don't have money. And let's just say, I'm like, Hey, I'm not going to, I'm not going to try to ruin your life over this. This is man. Okay. God's blessed us. We have, we can, we can try to take care of this when I say, okay, man, don't worry about it. I forgive you. Did anything about that magically fix my truck?
No. Me saying I forgive you is my commitment to fix it myself. Your forgiveness is bound up. And my willingness to absorb that debt. And that is what God has done in the gospel for him to say, I forgive you.
He has decided to pay for it himself. And he did with the blood of his son who was the sacrificial lamb. And I pray that some of us will get fired up about that today. And I pray that the Lord will give you, as he has promised, you shall keep this service. And when your children say to you, what do you mean by this service?
You shall say it is the sacrifice of the Lord's Passover for he has passed over the houses of the people of Israel and Egypt when he struck the Egyptians, but spared our houses and the people bowed their heads and worship. I bet they did very quickly. I don't have a lot of time for this.
I mentioned it last week. Guys, we've set a goal as a church to see 20% growth in our age-based ministries. I can't think of a better thing to do, right? I mean, man, we want to see fire in our young people. And that's true.
I know you want to see that too, okay? And here's the deal. We know this. I mean, the gospel is only one generation from being lost if we don't pass it down. On the flip side, if we do pass it down, man, the gospel is only one generation from lighting a fire of revival in Gen Z.
That's the other way to look at it, all right? So let us be faithful to pass down to the next generation what God is saying in his gospel message about how we are sheltered by the blood of the lamb and how it lights us on fire inside. I know you want that for the next generation.
I know I do. Guys, man, we're seeing so much growth. I've told you that there's revivals happening all over college campuses, all over the country. One is happening in Greensboro.
I guarantee you that, all right? It's incredible what we're seeing right now. Our student ministry, again, like I said, on fire. We have a dedicated student space that our students have just slapped outgrown.
And it's awesome. We're going to move them over to the ridge. I know there's wheels around that because any time you move, it's like, man, we love the student center.
I understand that. I love the student center. You know what I love more? More kids here in the gospel. And so we have an opportunity to bring them over here.
Guys, I want to push you. Are you serving in these vital ministries? Man, when you jump in to serve, you're going to go to the weekend or think serve in the kids ministry first. Let's make disciples over there on the weekends, okay? Think about serving in college. Think about serving our student ministries.
Why? Because when you come to the land, we can't just assume that the gospel is going to get passed down from generation to generation. And so let us do that very actively. Young men in here, listen. And some of you are leading young families right now. You got kids that are just school age or whatever. Some of you are young pros. Some of you are college students right now. You think a family is a million miles away. It ain't a million miles away.
And you need to make a decision, man. What kind of household am I going to have? Are you going to be like a Joshua? As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord. Your house is going to be marked by something.
It's going to be marked either for the gospel or for destruction. What I look out and I see is, man, we mark our houses. We mark our houses with straight A's. We mark our houses with sports prowess. We mark our houses with being popular. We mark our houses with all these things that we want for our kids. Are we marking our houses with the gospel? Are we marking them with the blood of the lamb? Man, let's push this message down to the next generation. All right, let's finish this passage up. It says, I wish I could just preach a whole nother sermon on that. Pharaoh now asking them, get God to bless me.
That'll have to come a different time. The Egyptians were urgent with the people to send them out of the land in haste, for they said, we shall all be dead. So the people took their dough before it was leavened, their kneading bowls being bound up in their cloaks on their shoulders. Now this is important. They end up, this is an important part of the passage. This is an important part of the Passover ceremony. It's an important part of first Corinthians five.
Man, they don't have that old leaven from that. What's God doing? Hey, where I'm taking you is going to be somewhere completely new.
Man, it's going to be something completely new. The people of Israel had also done as Moses told them for they had asked the Egyptians for silver and gold jewelry and clothing and the Lord had given the people favor and the sight of the Egyptians so that they let them have what they ask and thus they plundered the Egyptians. Put yourself in the Egyptian shoes. I want you to understand.
You go to bed one night or maybe in the middle of the night, you're kind of keep a watch or whatever. This is what would have happened in my life. In my life, I would have lost my older sister. I would have lost my wife who's a firstborn and I would have lost my daughter, Hattie Jo, in one moment. I know people argue, well, was it just firstborn men, sons? That's not what it says.
Okay. I would have lost all those people and I don't know who you would have lost. You're probably thinking about it right now, but here's, you want to, you want to know what the saddest details of this?
This is just give me, 20 seconds of a tangent here. One of the saddest details of this. If you want to read something interesting, the angel of the Lord shows up again in Isaiah chapter 37. If you want to write that down and he passes over the Assyrians, but he don't pass over him kills 185,000 of them in one night. I don't know. Maybe it was the same destroyer.
I don't know how that works. Okay, here's what I would tell you, though. What's funny about that story is it was in the morning that the cries of the Assyrians were heard because all the people died at midnight, which makes sense. I mean, if everybody dies at midnight, you would think the cry and lament would come up in the morning, but it don't happen like that in this story. Do you know why? I want you to imagine how many people in Egypt were holding their children, waiting to see what was going to happen at midnight.
You understand? They were thinking to themselves, this thing is a battle of the gods. We're going to see who wins, Pharaoh or the Lord God Almighty, and they're waiting up with their children.
To see what was going to happen. And the cries begin to come out and people finally say, man, you got to go. They start to, I mean, this goes all the way back to Genesis 15. Okay, this has been prophesied forever that when they come through the 400 years of slavery, they will come out rich.
And that's what happens. One commentator says it like this. It says the Israelites despoiled the Egyptians. The Egyptians are throwing money.
They're throwing clothes at them. And here's what we need to understand today, because this is how gospel rich this is. In one shot, judgment fell on some, and others were freed from slavery, enriched in Christ and given a future in the promised land in one moment. Both of those things were true. And they're going to be true for us today.
Because it all comes down to what you do with the blood. If you do nothing with the blood and trust Pharaoh and trust the gods of this universe and little g non gods of this world, you know what happens? Judgment falls. But if we would trust Christ in the blood of the lamb, y'all freed from the slavery of sin and death, enriched in Christ and given a future in the promised land forever.
So I'm gonna call you with all everything I can today application. Be grateful for God's sacrifice in the gospel. Have a heart of gratitude.
Be pushed. I don't know if you've realized this sermon yet what it is. All this sermon is is a huge introduction to communion. That's what we're gonna do today.
We're gonna have the opportunity to hold the elements in our hands. Of what it took for our salvation, broken body and blood spilled. You know, I was thinking about this from the intro, go back to the intro. We have this disassociation, man. We don't want to see what it takes for us to live physically. We don't want to see the blood. We don't want to see the screams. We don't want to see the knives. We don't want to see what it takes for us to end up eating physically. I mean, hey, but hey, something's got to die. If we're going to live there is sacrifice to be made.
I'll tell you this in my life. You guys know we raised, you know, some of our own food, pretty much all of our own beef. And we raised cows, you know, get one butchered once a year, eat it all year.
And we've raised that cow since they were this big. I mean, that's that's tough. You know, it's like we I mean, I try to kind of put it out of my head with their names. Okay, like the one I got right now is named T-bone. Okay, so I try to remember.
You have a purpose. Okay. But it's still hard. All right. I mean, it's still a tough thing. I'm serious.
We take listen, we take that cow to the butcher. And among my children, I mean, there's feels there could even when they were when their kids were young, there'd even be tears. And people have said, like, man, do you try to shield them from that? No.
Now, they may need therapy at some point. I don't know. Okay, I don't know how this all gonna go.
All right. But I'm gonna tell you, theologically, do you shield them from that? I'm like, no. I want them to feel it. You ever been with a child the first time they shoot a deer or something like that? It's like, hey, it's very exciting. It's also kind of sad for them. They need to feel it.
Why? Because we don't get the luxury of separating what has to happen to live. We could try to do that with chick, you know, chicken nugget dinosaurs or whatever. But but we we don't get that luxury. We got to know something has to be sacrificed.
That is what I'm getting at spiritually. You know, the sacrificial system does I want you to imagine that kill this baby lamb. Man, this this lamb has been in our home. This lamb has a name.
This lamb is cute. You want me to do what? Yep. screams. Knives, blood splatter on the face. Here's what we this.
Do you want to know why many people want to go into works righteousness and just say, Hey, I'm gonna try to get better with my life. Here's why. Because I don't want to believe that it took that to cover myself. It's too ugly. I don't want to look at that.
I don't want to go there. I would rather just try to get better than to have to look at that. And the reality is, our sin created a situation where sacrifice is the only path forward. You didn't need to get better.
You need to get new and to get new something had to die in your place. And Jesus Christ has done that for us. Would you accept him today? Listen, two things.
There's only two applications. Number one, accept him. Accept that he stood in for you. Become a Christian today. Admit your sin.
Believe in what he has done on the cross and confess him as the Lord of your life. The second application is, man, let's come to the communion table with gratitude. So what's the big application?
Sign up for what? No, no, no. This is it today. How grateful are we that we're no longer defined by our greatest failures and the judgment of God has not fallen us.
Why? Because of the ugly, grotesque sacrifice of the cross. But yet something had to die for us to live and he went there for us. That creates gratitude in us, man. Let's thank him as we go to the table. Father, we come before you. And Lord, I pray that your communion table would light a fire in our heart today. It would warm us. God, let us repent of the sin. That so easily entangles us. And God, allow our hearts to be grateful and burst with gratitude over what you have done in our life and allow us to mark our homes with this truth in Christ's name. Amen.
