How to Have a Big God - Life of Moses Part 31

I want to begin this morning with a question.

Here's the question. As the pastor of McLean Bible Church, what should be my number one objective when it comes to your life? Or to put it another way, what should be the primary thing that I want to see happen in your lives as the people here at McLean Bible Church? Well, that's a great question, isn't it? And I've really thought about it, and let me tell you what I believe the answer is. I believe that my number one mission as your pastor is to enlarge your concept of God, to expand your understanding of who God is, His power, His authority, His majesty, His awesomeness, not, you understand, to try and make God bigger.

You can't do that. But rather, to help each one of us get a grasp on how great and how big God really is. Now friends, this is exactly what God wanted to teach the Israelites and do with them 3,500 years ago. And so what I want us to do this morning is I want us to go back in time 3,500 years and see what God did with them.

And then we want to bring all of that forward and we want to talk about, well, so what difference does that make to us? So if you brought a Bible this morning, I want you to open it with me to Exodus chapter 16. If you did not bring a Bible, reach under the armrest there next to you, you'll find a copy of the Bible. And we're going to be on page 51, page 51 in our copy, Exodus 16 in your copy. And you'll remember that after leaving Elam, I'll show you a map, the Israelites headed out into the Sinai desert towards Mount Sinai.

And this is where the trouble began. They began to complain that they were running out of food. Verse four, then the Lord said to Moses, behold, I will rain down bread from heaven for you. And in the morning, verse 13, there was a layer of dew around the camp. And when the dew evaporated on the surface of the ground, thin flakes like frost covered the desert floor. Verse 31, it was white like coriander seed and tasted like wafers made with honey, and the Israelites called it manna.

Now we'll show you a picture of coriander seed so you get an idea what this stuff looked like. And we said that according to the quartermaster general of the United States Army, it would have taken 1500 tons, tons of manna per day to feed the entire Israelite nation out in the wilderness. And what this means is that this manna is inexplicable in human terms, in naturalistic terms. Instead, this manna was a marvelous miracle directly from God to prove to the people of Israel that he was able to meet their every need all by himself, unaided by his own supernatural power. Verse 35, and the Israelites ate manna for 40 years. They ate manna until they came to the border of the promised land where it stopped. Now you say, well, Lon, we know all this.

You've told us all of this. Well, look what comes next now, something very interesting God does next. Look at verse 32. Then Moses said, this is what the Lord has commanded. Take an omer of manna, an omer is about a half a gallon. Take about a half a gallon of manna and keep it for the generations to come so that they can see the bread I gave you to eat in the desert when I brought you out of Egypt. Verse 34, so as the Lord commanded, Aaron took a jar and put an omer of manna in it and they kept it inside the tent of meeting. Now, just so you know, this jar of manna would later go inside the Ark of the Covenant.

You know, the thing that Indiana Jones was after, you remember. And finally, eventually, it found its final home in the temple in Jerusalem, which was built 500 years after the events of Exodus chapter 16. But the question is, why? Why did God tell Moses and Aaron to take a jar of manna and save it like this? Well, God gives us the answer right here in Exodus 16. Look at verse 32. God says, I want you to keep it for the generations to come so they can see the bread that I gave you to eat in the desert. I mean, can you imagine being an Israelite father 100 years later, 100 years after you've gone into the promised land and you're sitting around and telling your children that out in the desert when our forefathers were out in the desert, 1500 tons of this stuff fell from the sky every single night and fed us for 40 years and your children looking back at you and going, right, right. And you see, my friends, this is why God told Moses and Aaron to save some of this manna so that Israelite fathers 100 years, 200 years, 300 years from now could go, OK, you don't believe me? You sit there and go, right. You come with me and I'll show you this stuff. I'll take you to the temple and I'll show it to you. Friends, God wanted manna saved so that generation of Israelites to come would have tangible, visible proof of what great things God did for them in the desert of Sinai.

And so my point to summarize is this. God could have fed the Israelites out there in the desert in a hundred less dramatic ways than using manna. But he did it this way, that is with manna from heaven in order to show these Israelites his immensity, in order to show them his omnipotence, in order to expand their understanding of the size and the majesty and the power of God. And God told them to always carry some manna with them so that they would not forget in the Promised Land what God taught them about himself in the desert.

Could I repeat that? God did not want the Israelites to forget in the Promised Land what they had learned about him in the desert. And what did they learn about him in the desert?

They had learned that he was a huge and an awesome God. Now, that's as far as we want to go in our passage because we want to stop now and ask our most important question. And could you give me a Christmas present and really do this loud? This will be my Christmas present. Don't send me a card, don't send me anything, just make this really worthwhile. Here we go, ready, one, two, three. So what? Now, why don't you do that every week?

That was really good, thank you. I appreciate it, I feel affirmed. Now, you say, Lon, so what? What difference does any of that make to us? There's no man around anymore, so what difference does this make? Well, friends, here's my question for the morning. Why, as followers of Jesus Christ, why is it important for us to have a big view of God?

And let me answer that question. The answer is because how much we can believe God for is directly proportional to the size of our God. Therefore, let me put it another way, the bigger our concept of God is, the more that we can trust Him for. Now, let me show you how this works out practically in our lives as followers of Christ. You know, God has made us wonderful promises in the Bible, in the written Word of God, and when we're going through tough times, my friends, when we're struggling with doubt and with anger and with unbelief, when we're struggling to maintain hope and maintain strength and maintain resiliency, what do our Christian friends normally do?

Well, they normally come alongside of us and they normally remind us of some promise God made us in the Bible. They normally keep giving us God's promises out of the Bible. But you know, I've learned after 26 years of being a pastor and observing Christians that so often this doesn't really help.

And let me tell you why it doesn't help. You see, the problem with giving Christians to the promises of God, promise after promise from the Word of God, is that for so many of us, listen carefully, our concept of God is too small for us to really believe those promises. Our concept of God is too small to really allow us to step out by faith on those promises. I mean, you can tell me, Romans 8.28, that God will turn all things together for good.

You can tell me that all day. But if I don't really believe in my heart that God is big enough, awesome enough, powerful enough, omnipotent enough, and sovereign enough to do it, that promise isn't worth the piece of paper it's written on to me. Folks, giving people the promises of God when they got a little view of God is like trying to build a skyscraper on a foundation of marshmallows.

You understand? And I have learned that for so many followers of Christ, the size of our God is simply too small to bear the weight of the promises of God. And this is what I want to see fixed in your life.

This is what God wants to see fixed in your life. You see, it was because Abraham had a big view of God that when God promised him, Abraham, leave your home, leave your country, leave your friends, and come follow me to a place that you don't even know where you're going, and I'll take care of you, that Abraham, because he had a big view of God, was able to step out on that promise and go. When God promised him a supernatural son, even though his body was dried up, the Bible says, and it had ceased to be with Sarah after the manner of women, as the Bible says, Abraham's view of God was big enough that he was able to rise up and step out on faith and believe God for that son. Folks, it was because Moses had a big view of God that he was able, when God promised him that he would take care of him and give him victory, that he was able to come back and face the most powerful ruler of the most powerful nation on the face of the earth and bring that nation and its ruler to their knees.

It was because Daniel and his three friends had a big view of God that they could face the king Nebuchadnezzar and say, Throw us in the lion's den. We don't care. Throw us in the fiery furnace.

We don't care. We got a big God. You do whatever you want to to us, and our God is still able to deliver us. It was because David had a big view of God that he was able to go out there and face Goliath.

You better have a big view of God. You better have a big God if you're going out there to face that guy, nine and a half feet tall. His spear weighed as much as David weighed.

And I love what David said to him. David said, 1 Samuel 17, he said, You, Goliath, come against me with a sword and a spear and a javelin. But I come against you in the name of the Lord Almighty, the God of Israel, whom you have defied this day.

The Lord will hand you over to me and I will strike you down and I will cut your head off and I'll feed you to the birds, he goes on to say. So that all the world will know that there is a God in Israel. Friends, these people were all able, don't miss this now, to rise up and act on God's promises and step out by faith on God's promises.

Why? Because they had a big enough view of God to support God's promises and allow them to do it. In fact, the number one lesson that the Lord Jesus was always trying to teach the disciples was the size and the power that was at his command.

Why? Because he knew that the size of the mission, the size of the task, the size of the assignment that he could give these men could never rise higher than the size of their God. And you know what?

The same thing is true of you and me. Friends, the size of the mission, the task and the assignment that God can give you and me to do for him can never rise higher than the size of the concept that we have of God. Now that leads us to the million dollar question, doesn't it? And that is, Lon, okay, I accept that, so how can we enlarge our concept of God? How can we enlarge our understanding and our view of God?

Well, that's the question we want to answer and we're done. And let me say first of all, friends, that God is the only one who can do this for you and me. The Holy Spirit himself is the one who has to open our hearts and reveal the living God to us. We can't do that in the energy of the flesh. However, there are some things you and I as followers of Christ can do to accelerate this process. There are some things we can do to facilitate this process.

And I want to tell you what four of them are and then we're done. Number one, want to facilitate God increasing your understanding of his awesome size? Then number one, saturate your life with God's written word, the Bible. Now you might say, but Lon, you know, I already read my Bible regularly, but my Bible reading is not expanding my view of God the way you're talking about here today. Well, friends, maybe you're reading your Bible the wrong way. You say, what? You're reading the Bible the wrong way?

Oh, yeah. See, lots of people read the Bible with their focus on the wrong place. They read it with their focus on theology. They read it with their focus on doctrine.

They read it with their focus on church policy or Christian living or prophecy. But listen to what Jesus said, Luke 24, to the disciples. He said, in beginning with Moses and all the prophets, that means from Genesis one through the end of the Old Testament, Jesus explained to his disciples what was said in all the scriptures about theology. In what he said about prophecy in what he said about doctrine. No, he explained what was written in all the scriptures about what?

Himself. You see, friends, every piece of history in the Bible, every doctrine in the Bible, every Old Testament story, every New Testament parable, every word Jesus spoke, every action Jesus took, every miracle Jesus performed, they were all meant to teach us something about who God is, about his nature, his person, his power, his majesty, his holiness, his mercy about the way he ticks. And the correct way to read the Bible is to be constantly asking ourselves the question after we read anything in this book, now what is that telling me about who God is? You read your Bible like that and I promise you on every page, God will reveal himself to you, he will enhance your understanding of who he is, and he will expand your concept of his greatness and his power. Number two, second suggestion, how you can accelerate the Spirit of God, increasing the size of God in your understanding, is you can pray for a bigger view of God. Remember I said the Holy Spirit's got to do this. He's got to open our hearts and reveal God to us. Most of us are so caught up in praying about our problems every day that we totally miss the most exalted purpose of prayer and that is to get to know God better, that is to deepen our grasp of who God is. David prayed this, Psalm 25, he prayed, Lord, show me your ways. Moses prayed this, Exodus 33, and Moses said, Lord, show me your glory. Show me your person, your character, your majesty, your power.

And you know, folks, frankly, God was honored by requests such as these and he did it for these men. Listen, you want to know God bigger and better than you know God today? Then ask him every day. Make your number one priority in prayer for God to deepen your vision, deepen your concept, deepen your understanding of him and he will do it. You say, how? How can I just get on my knees and pray and God's going to increase my understanding of him? Friends, I don't know how he does it. What difference does it make how he does it?

All I know is he does it. Number three, want to make your God bigger? Then number three, read the biographies of the great men and women of God in the past. You know, it's interesting at the burning bush after Moses took off his shoes.

Think about it now. What was the very first thing that God said to Moses? What's the first thing he said to him?

You say, Lon, I know, I know, I know. He said, Moses, I want you to go back to Egypt and I want you to schwack your Brenner. No, that is not the first thing God said to him. The first thing God said, check it out, was Moses.

I am the God of your fathers. The God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob. Would you notice the very first thing God did is take Moses and point him where? Backwards.

Backwards in time. To Abraham, to Isaac, to Jacob. And why did God do that? Because, friends, he wanted Moses to understand that all the great things that he had heard about God doing for Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, that the very same God was there to do those things for him.

Just the way God preserved Abraham through uncharted territory. The same God that gave Abraham and Sarah that miraculous son. The same God who destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah with fire from heaven. The same God that protected Isaac and provided for Jacob and made Joseph the prime minister of Egypt. God says to Moses at the bush, Moses, I'm that God. And what I did for them, guess what?

I can do for you. Friends, listen, if you want to really increase your size of God, you go back and read what God did for the great men and women of the past. You go back and read the biographies of Hudson Taylor and William Carey and George Whitfield and Fanny Crosby and John Wesley and George Mueller, Mother Teresa, Adoniram Judson, Dwight L. Moody, Jim Elliott, Corey Ten Boom. Because you've got the very same God they have. And friends, if God did it for them in the past, God can do it for you in the present. Go back and learn what God did for them. And if you become a student of what God did in their lives in the past, I promise you, it'll charge you up with what that same God can do in your life in the future. And parents, you owe it to your children, may I say, to make sure they know who every single one of these people are, that they understand the lives of these men and women because you read them the books or you bought the books for them and got them to read them.

Don't you deny your children that incredible heritage because that may be the very foundation upon which they decide to step up and trust God and step out in their lives. And you can get all these things in our bookstore. I send you over there after we're done.

Go get them. Finally, number four. I want the size of your God to get bigger than number four. Give God a chance in everyday life right now to show you His greatness. You know, our vision of God will never fully expand simply by Bible reading and prayer, folks. An army doesn't know how good it is.

You can train all day long, but you never know how good you are as an army until you get out in real battle. And in the same way, you and I will never be able to really grasp the greatness of God until we test it in real life. And every time you and I step out in faith and every time we trust God for something, even if it's little, and every time God shows us His power and does it, you know what?

It will expand our view of God and enable us to trust Him for something bigger in the future. When my son, my oldest son, Jamie, was 13, I took all my boys on father-son trips at certain ages, and 13 was one of them. And it was our turn to take a father-son trip, and Jamie decided he wanted to go out and go horseback riding and fishing in Colorado, so we went. We flew into Denver on a Monday, and I noticed that the Denver Broncos had a Monday night football game, a home Monday night game. That night they were playing the Kansas City Chiefs. And so I decided, hey, how cool would it be for us to go to a Monday night football game? So I called, tried everything I could think of to get tickets.

This game was completely sold out. There was no way to get any tickets, and so when we landed on Monday night, we got our rent-a-car, and I said, hey, Jamie, let's drive over to Mile High Stadium anyway, and let's just see if we can get in. So we drove on over. We parked the car, and before we got out of the car, I said, all right. My 13-year-old son, I said, all right, let's pray. And so I prayed out loud, and I said, Lord, you know how much we really want to go to this game together, and so what I'm asking you to do is to please open up some way for us to get in this game that only you can open up, Lord. You know there are no tickets, but you open up a way for us to get in this game, and by doing that, I prayed out loud, I want you to show my son, Jamie, what a great God you are and how he can trust you for great things.

Amen. So we got out the car. We walked up to the stadium.

There was not one person in sight. But the gate was open. It was halftime, and I said, hot dog, here we go. And we started walking into the gate, and this guard appeared out of nowhere and said, where do you think you're going? I said, well, we're going in the game. He said, oh, no, you're not. Where are your tickets? I said, well, we don't have any tickets, but I figure it's halftime, so we'll just find two empty seats. He said, what?

No, forget it. Out, out, out. You can't come in like that. You've got to have tickets. It wouldn't let us in.

So we're standing about 10 feet outside the gate, not a person in sight. And I start praying silently this time. And I said, Lord Jesus, whether you like it or not, Lord Jesus, I'm afraid I've really gotten us into a mess here. I put your character on the line, Lord. I put your personhood on the line. I put your power on the line with my 13-year-old son. And I said, Lord, whether I should have done that or not, we can talk about later.

In the meantime, you need to do something right now to prove to this boy who you are. Amen. And the guard said to us, you can't loiter there. You've got to move on. You just can't stand there like that. And I said, we're not just standing here.

We're waiting for God to send us two tickets. True story. Well, let me tell you what happened.

Twenty seconds later, I lie not. Out of this gate comes three people, a little two-year-old who had obviously gone south for the evening, his mother and his grandmother. And so they came walking out of the gate and I walked up to the grandmother and I said, ma'am, I said, I know this sounds a little strange. I said, but are you all going home? And she said, yeah, we are. I said, do you have maybe your ticket stubs that we could use to go back in the game and sit in your seat? And she said, I'm so sorry. She said, I threw my ticket stubs away. I said, dog caught it. She said, but I tell you what I do have.

And she reached in her pocket. She said, I do. I do have two tickets we didn't use.

Wait a minute. She said, how much will you give me for them? I said, well, ma'am, my son and I here, we're from Virginia.

And we were kind of hoping to get in free. She looked at me and she started laughing and she said, OK, no problem. And hands me these two seventy five dollar tickets and says, you and your son have a good time in the game. And the guard was standing there watching this whole thing happen. I tell you, it gave me so much pleasure to walk up to that guard and say, here are two tickets, sir. We went into the game. We sat there. The game went into overtime.

The Broncos won in overtime. I mean, it was a fabulous game. You know, my son and I never forgot that experience.

And today, my son's almost 30 today when he has to trust God for things in his life that are challenging. You know what I always say to him? I always say, Jamie, don't you ever forget. Do you remember what happened to us at Mile High Stadium, Jamie? You remember what God did for us there? Now, you got the very same God who gave us those two tickets, son.

And you can trust him today like we trusted in that night at Mile High Stadium. My point, friends, is that developing a big view of God is a process. And maybe right now you can't trust God to open the Red Sea for you. Maybe right now you can't trust God to get you Redskins tickets. Although I don't really think you'd frankly need God's help to get red skin tickets right now.

That is funny, I admit. That is... All right, but maybe you can trust God to do something smaller for you and show you his greatness. Maybe you can trust God to help you find a new job or to knock out your SATs or to find a new house or to share Christ with a friend at work or to give you a parking space at the mall. Maybe you can trust God to help you lead a small group or to raise the funds you need to go overseas as a short-term missionary or to begin teaching a Bible study. Listen, all these great men and women of God we've talked about today, they all learned to trust God in big things by trusting God first in little things. Before Goliath, David had the lions and the bears. Before the Red Sea, Moses had the ten plagues.

Before Daniel was thrown in the lions den, he had ten days of eating vegetables. These men grew in their ability to trust God in big things because they let God show them his power and his greatness in smaller things. And friends, this is what God wants you to do. God wants you to prove him. God wants you to test him. He wants to take you deeper in your grasp of his greatness and he challenges you to do it, to let him do it. Psalm 81 verse 10, I am the Lord. Open your mouth wide, God says, and I'll fill it.

Now, this is not a life verse for dentists. Do you understand what I'm saying? This is God's personal invitation to you to let him show you his power in real life if you'll just step out and give him a chance.

So let's conclude. Friends, God wants you to have a big God, just like David did, just like Moses did, just like Abraham did, just like Daniel did and Ruth and Elijah and the Apostle Paul and all of them. He wants us to be people who see the world through the lens of his omnipotence, his power and his boundless authority.

How are we going to grow to have a bigger God than we've got now in our concept of God? Well, number one, we ask the Holy Spirit to do it. But number one, we saturate our lives with the written Word of God and we read it correctly. What does this tell me about God? Number two, we pray and we ask God to give us a bigger view and understanding of himself. Number three, we read the biographies of the great men and women of God in the past and we remind ourselves that we have the very same God they had. And number four, we give God the chance in everyday life to show us his power. Don't you ever be afraid to step out and give God a chance to demonstrate himself to you?

He loves to do that. Stop running interference for God. Stop protecting God.

He doesn't need you to protect him and he doesn't need you to run interference for him. All he needs is for you and me to step up and give him the opportunity to show how great he is. So give him that chance in your life. And friends, that's my goal. Is that after you come to McLean Bible Church for a year, two years, five years, ten years, you can walk away and say, you know what, my view of God is orders of magnitude bigger than when I started going to that church. That's our goal and that's what we're going to try to achieve in your life. Let's pray together. Father, thank you for reminding us today that you are an awesome God.

Now that fact is true, utterly and empirically true. But Lord Jesus, we need to understand that as people personally, experientially, in order for us to be able to step out and believe your promises and be used by you the way you want to use us. And so Lord, I pray you would use what we've shared today as a catalyst to provoke every one of us here to seeking to know God better and deeper, to seeking to let you increase our understanding of who you are. Lord Jesus, take us to the place where our view of God is so huge that you could give us any assignment, that there's not a promise you could make us that we would not be willing to step out by faith and walk on and believe. Lord Jesus, change our lives because we were here today. And make us men and women of God that you can use in this world. And we pray these things in Jesus' name. And what did God's people say? Amen. Amen.