Transcription downloaded from https://yetanothersermon.host/_/fbc_lewisburg/sermons/84296/covenental-blessing/.

Disclaimer: this is an automatically generated machine transcription - there may be small errors or mistranscriptions.
Please refer to the original audio if you are in any doubt.


[0:00] Good job, guys. Thank you all so much. And Jason, thank you for leading the singing the worship time this morning.! Jim and Sandra are out. Jason was willing to step up and do that. And so we're thankful for your willingness to serve there, Jason.

[0:14] Yes, Clint pointed out we're going to be in Joshua chapter 5, verses 2 through 12. And real quick before I jump into the text, I want to say, boy, am I glad to be here this Sunday. If you've ever had a canceled flight, then you just know how stressful it is.

[0:28] And last Saturday into Sunday was a very stressful time. But we are thankful to be here on the ground in Tennessee, unconcerned about how we're going to make it today.

[0:42] So praise God for that. I'm going to read for us the passage. And if you would, just stand with me to honor the reading of God's Word. At that time, the Lord said to Joshua, Make flint knives and circumcise the Israelite men again.

[1:03] So Joshua made flint knives and circumcised the Israelite men at Gibeath-heraloth. This is the reason Joshua circumcised them. All the people who came out of Egypt, who were males, all the men of war, had died in the wilderness along the way after they had come out of Egypt.

[1:22] Though all the people who came out of Egypt were circumcised, none of the people who were born in the wilderness along the way were circumcised after they had come out of Egypt.

[1:33] For the Israelites wandered in the wilderness forty years until all the nation's men of war who came out of Egypt had died off because they did not obey the Lord.

[1:44] So the Lord vowed never to let them see the land He had sworn to their ancestors to give us, a land flowing with milk and honey. He raised up their sons in their place.

[1:55] It was these Joshua circumcised. They were still uncircumcised since they had not been circumcised along the way. After the entire nation had been circumcised, they stayed where they were in the camp until they recovered.

[2:12] The Lord then said to Joshua, Today I have rolled away the disgrace of Egypt from you. Therefore that place is still called Gilgal today. When the Israelites camped at Gilgal, while the Israelites camped at Gilgal on the plains of Jericho, they observed the Passover on the evening of the fourteenth day of the month.

[2:30] The day after Passover, they ate unleavened bread and roasted grain from the produce of the land. And the day after they ate from the produce of the land, the manna ceased. Since there was no more manna for the Israelites, they ate from the crops of the land of Canaan that year.

[2:46] This is the word of the Lord. Let's pray together. Father, oh God, as we gather together in your name, we ask now that you would meet with us. God, give us understanding. Open our hearts to receive your truth.

[2:58] Transform us, oh God, to look more like your son after this time of study. We love you, Jesus. It's in your name that we pray. Amen. You can be seated. Jason, I don't know where you're at right now.

[3:12] Hey, you learned a lesson a few minutes ago, which is one I have to learn like every fourth week. You have to say sit down. Yeah, yeah. We like to listen, you know.

[3:23] We like to know when we're, you know, we like to be told when to do things. So it's okay. It's okay. Learning curve, you know. So here it is. The people have made it into the land.

[3:35] The blessing, the fulfillment, the rest that God has promised them stands before them. They are actually standing in it. They're standing in the land. They can feel it. And now they're invited to live in the blessing of the Lord, the land that God had promised, a beautiful, bountiful land, a land flowing with milk and honey.

[3:56] God had promised this land to his people since Abraham. And he had affirmed and confirmed his covenant with his people time and again throughout their history. And after 400 years in captivity and 40 years of wandering through the wilderness, finally they're in the land.

[4:14] And they have the opportunity now not only to stand in the land, but to take possession of it. God has gone before them. He's promised them the land. So they have a sure hope, a sure confidence that they will be able to take and conquer what God has given them.

[4:31] But I want you to notice, before they went and took the land, God called them to pause and to worship. Pause and worship.

[4:41] He called them to do that through two specific acts. Worship through the covenant sign of circumcision and worship by celebrating the Passover meal together to remember the work of the Lord.

[4:55] And before I go any further, I want to ask a question. How often do we pause to worship? How often do we pause to thank God for what he's done?

[5:07] Now we're pretty good, usually, to pause when things are hard, right? When we are discouraged, when we're scared. And to spend time in prayer, asking God to relieve us of this pain and thank him for what he's done.

[5:22] But what about when you're right there? And the blessing is right in front of you. Times are good. You've made it where God has shown you where to go.

[5:33] And there's this beautiful place, this beautiful land for the people of Israel. They could have, in excitement, gone and taken the land. But before they did that, they had to pause and worship.

[5:46] There's an old hymn, Count Your Blessings. You guys familiar with that one? I'll spare you. I won't sing, okay? But, you know, it says, Count your blessings, name them one by one. Count your blessings.

[5:56] See what God has done. I'm not going to do it. I almost sang, but, okay. It's a simple song. It's a good reminder. But if you read the rest of the song, you know, the verses before that, the simple chorus there.

[6:09] The verses are referring to people who are specifically discouraged and overwhelmed and worried and fearful. And the encouragement from the song is, when you have those hard times, count your blessings.

[6:21] You'll be encouraged by remembering what the Lord has done in your life and in history. Count your blessings. Now, the message of that song is not wrong.

[6:32] We should do that, right? We should count our blessings in the hard times. But I would say that sometimes we miss the opportunity to count blessings and worship God when He's actively blessing us and providing for us in ways that deserve His praise and His glory to be shouted.

[6:50] So we need to take a lesson here from the people of God in the book of Joshua. And when God is blessing us, before we experience the full joy of that blessing, pause.

[7:04] Worship God. Thank Him for who He is and what He's done. So as we look at this time of worship here with the Israelites, we're going to notice, like I said, the two acts of worship are circumcision and the celebration of Passover.

[7:20] These are two of the most, if not the most, significant acts of remembrance and worship throughout the entirety of the Old Testament. Right? The covenant is sealed, is marked by the rite of circumcision.

[7:36] And the deliverance from Egypt is celebrated, it's honored, God's name is lifted high at the celebration of Passover. And as we look at these two, these two acts of worship, these two aspects really of worship, God, celebration, and obedience, I want you to understand there's a principle that we just can't escape, which is we can't fully understand the blessing of the Lord until we obey His commands entirely.

[8:00] I'm going to say that again, we cannot fully experience the blessing of the Lord until we obey His commands entirely. And I want to draw your attention not only to these two acts here in the book of Joshua of worship, but the New Testament significance for us as new covenant believers.

[8:21] So as we look through these, I want to point you ahead forward to the New Testament as well. So first we have the command to obey, the command to obey, the sign of circumcision.

[8:34] So Joshua 5, 2, and 3 says, At that time, the Lord said to Joshua, Make flint knives and circumcise the Israelite men again. So Joshua made flint knives and circumcised the Israelite men at Gibeath-Heraloth.

[8:48] You'll notice something here in the book of Joshua. There's this thing that happens where a command is given and then obedience immediately follows. So that's what happened here at the beginning of Joshua 5. God gave a command and Joshua obeyed it.

[9:02] So why circumcision? I know that this is a, you know, it seems like a sensitive topic, but you can't escape this word in the Bible. It's throughout the Old Testament and it's really important in the New Testament as well.

[9:14] But there's three main reasons that the image of circumcision is so significant for the people of Israel. The first is the aspect of cutting. The aspect of cutting.

[9:26] So that reflects the Hebrew word that God used when he established his covenant with Abraham in Genesis chapter 15 when he said that he is going to cut his covenant with Abraham.

[9:40] So the physical act of cutting is sort of a symbol of God's spiritual act of cutting a covenant. So Genesis 15, 18 says, on that day, the Lord made a covenant with Abraham saying, I give this land to your offspring from the brook of Egypt to the great river, the Euphrates River.

[9:57] That word made is in Hebrew, it's katah. It means cut. Today, on that day, the Lord cut a covenant with Abraham. And then if you go ahead to Genesis chapter 17, you find the covenant of circumcision, the covenant sign of circumcision as firmly established.

[10:15] Okay, so the Lord says, this is my covenant between me and you and your offspring, which you are to keep. Every one of your males must be circumcised. You must circumcise the flesh of your foreskin to serve as a sign of the covenant between me and you.

[10:31] Throughout your generations, every male among you is to be circumcised at eight days old. Every male born in your household or purchased from any foreigner and not your offspring. Whether born in your household or purchased, he must be circumcised.

[10:44] My covenant will be marked in your flesh as a permanent covenant. So there's the establishment of this sign of the covenant, which is here to Abraham in Genesis chapter 17.

[10:56] But it's not just the cutting that points to the covenant nature itself, but it's also the blood. Throughout Scripture, what you find is that blood is significant. Blood is actually necessary for the forgiveness or the pardon of sins.

[11:09] And so when a male is circumcised, blood happens. You know, he bleeds. And God made it very clear that blood is necessary for the removal of sin. So from the time of Abraham until the time of Christ and in Judaism still today, the cutting is significant and the bleeding is significant because it points to the removal of sin that God is going to bring about for his people.

[11:32] And then there is the removal itself, which the physical removal of a part of a body is a tangible reminder that God will remove sin from his people. And it's also a reminder that God's people have been set apart from this world.

[11:48] So God established this as a tangible physical sign and it shows the people, it reminds the people that he is their God and they are his people. And not only was it established, by the way, in the book of Genesis, also in the law, in Leviticus chapter 12, it's written into the law as something that everyone is supposed to do when a child is eight days old.

[12:10] It's something that was expected of God's people. So if you look back at Genesis chapter 17, I'm going to go back to that word cut for a second, because if you go back to Genesis chapter 17 and look at verse 14, what you see is that if a person did not adhere obediently to the command of God through the physical sign of circumcision, he would be cut off from the people of God.

[12:36] Genesis 17, 14 says, if any male is not circumcised in the flesh of his foreskin, that man will be cut off from his people. He has broken my covenant. So as we look here in Joshua chapter 5, and you see that the people who left Egypt had not been practicing this act of obedience, this act of covenant, you know, significance, they were cut off, they had cut themselves off from the Lord.

[13:04] That's what it's explained here in Joshua 5, 4 through 7. It says, the reason that Joshua circumcised them is because everyone who came out of Egypt, they were circumcised, but they didn't circumcise their kids.

[13:15] They weren't practicing in obedience. But they had rejected the word of the Lord in other ways as well. If you remember, I've referenced this, I think, every week since we've been in the book of Joshua. But there is this scene in Numbers chapter 13 and 14 where these 12 spies go into the land of Canaan and they come back.

[13:33] Two of them have a good report. God's with us. He'll fight for us. He'll give us victory. Trust the Lord. And 10 of them terrify the people. These people are giants. They'll slaughter us.

[13:44] We'll be taken out. We'll be annihilated. In fact, they were so scared that they thought that their wives and children were going to become plunder in the land. And they said, God, why didn't you just leave us in Egypt to die?

[13:57] They complained, they complained about the Lord. And so, God heard their complaints. And in fact, actually, God said, I'm going to wipe them out completely. And Moses, I'm going to start afresh with you.

[14:08] It's going to be a better, a greater people. It's going to be great. And Moses interceded for the people. Right? He stood to the Lord and he said, Lord God, you are merciful. You are slow to anger.

[14:19] You are compassionate. You are faithful. You are faithful in your love. Don't annihilate these people because if you do, Egypt and the other nations will mock you, they'll say, the Lord brought them out of Egypt but he couldn't get them into the land.

[14:32] And so, the Lord said, okay, I've pardoned their sin, I've forgiven them, but there is still punishment. So, Numbers 14, 21 through 23 says, yet, as I live and as the whole earth is filled with the Lord's glory, none of the men who have seen my glory and the signs I performed in Egypt and in the wilderness and have tested me these ten times and did not obey me will ever see the land I swore to give their ancestors.

[14:57] None of those who have despised me will see it. So, these people entering the land were the product of a generation that had been cut off from the Lord's promise.

[15:09] This does not nullify the Lord's promise. God is still going to give the land to his people but those people missed out on the blessing. Numbers 14, 28 through 30 says, tell them, as I live, this is the Lord's declaration, I will do to you exactly as I heard you say.

[15:27] Your corpses will fall in this wilderness. All of you who were registered in the census, the entire number of you, 20 years old or more because you have complained about me, I swear that none of you will enter the land I promised to settle you in except for Caleb and Joshua.

[15:44] So, instead of being destroyed and replaced, God sentenced them. He punished them by 40 years of wandering through the wilderness. Everyone, 28, 20 years old or older would die. And there's this, there's this picture here that we see that their disobedience and their defiance wasn't just in rejecting the promises of the Lord, rejecting the trust of the Lord, but it was also that they were not circumcising their kids.

[16:08] There's a clear act of defiance throughout this period. But there's a lesson that we have to learn from the wilderness generation and Paul actually explains it really clearly in 1 Corinthians chapter 10.

[16:20] 1 Corinthians 10 verses 1 through 5 says, Now I do not want you to be unaware, brothers and sisters, that our ancestors were all under the cloud, all passed through the sea, and all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and the sea.

[16:33] They all ate the same spiritual food and all drank the same spiritual drink, for they drank from the spiritual rock that followed them, and that rock was Christ. Nevertheless, God was not pleased with most of them since they were struck down in the wilderness.

[16:49] Their example serves as a warning against rebellion and disobedience. They were disobedient to the Lord and so they were cut off from being able to live in and welcome His blessing, His promise of blessing.

[17:06] So why did they go into the land and why did God say before you do anything else, circumcise these men? Why was that so important to God? It's because before the new generation of people who was raised up took that land, they had to experience this covenant renewal ceremony where they aligned themselves as God's people.

[17:31] They were God's people without a sign, and now, as they take the land, they're God's people with a clear sign. But there's blessing that came also from their obedience, and it's kind of a two-fold blessing.

[17:45] The first is found here in verse 7. It says, He raised up their sons in their place and it was these Joshua circumcised. They were still uncircumcised since they had not been circumcised along the way.

[17:56] In Numbers 14, 31, one of the things that God says is to the people, you said that if you went into this land your children and wives would become plunder. Well, God said, those people that you thought would be plunder, He said, I will bring your children whom you said would become plunder into the land you rejected and they will enjoy it.

[18:16] So there's blessing in this fulfillment of God's promise, right? That these kids of a disobedient and a corrupt generation would be able to experience the blessing of the Lord.

[18:27] And then in verse 9, the Lord said to Joshua, Today I have rolled away the disgrace of Egypt from you. Therefore, that place is still called Gilgal today. So there's this other aspect of blessing here, which is the Lord, remember, well, let's go back a second.

[18:41] Remember when Moses was talking to the Lord on the people's behalf? God, don't destroy them. Egypt will mock. The nations will mock. You remember that? I just mentioned it. Okay. So, that word, mock, is the same idea here as disgrace or shame.

[18:55] It's actually the same word in the original language. And so when God says, I've rolled away the disgrace of Egypt from you today, what He's saying is, I am the one who brought you out of Egypt, I brought you through the wilderness, and now I've brought you into the land, and you are clearly my people with this covenant sign, therefore, no one can say a thing.

[19:16] Egypt can't mock. I've completed. I've fulfilled what I said I would do. No other nation can stand against you because I am the Lord, and I've done this beautiful, amazing, wonderful work on your behalf.

[19:27] So they entered the land as God's covenant people ready now to represent Him as a set-apart people here on earth. But there's this New Testament, New Covenant takeaway that we have to learn here, see here as well.

[19:43] First of all, you see in that passage in 1 Corinthians, the warning from Israel's past. It's really, it's really built into this passage that the wilderness generation, they experience the curse of the covenant.

[19:58] So God's covenant, Leviticus 26 explains this, God's covenant has a promise of blessing if the people are obedient and a promise of curse if the people are disobedient. So the people experience the curse of the covenant, and now, as they enter the land, this new generation gets to experience the blessing of the covenant.

[20:17] But just as circumcision was the Old Testament sign of the covenant relationship between God and man, today what we have is the covenant sign of believer's baptism.

[20:28] So when you profess faith in Jesus Christ, when you are saved by grace, you believe in Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, when that happens, Jesus commands that you then go be baptized.

[20:43] Right? Like there's this, there's this, it's this immediate sign, right? God has worked inside your heart. We call baptism the outward sign of the inward transformation. But it is, it's the public physical sign.

[20:54] So the same way that the people of God in the Old Testament had circumcision to clearly mark them as God's chosen people, we today, as new covenant believers, have baptism to mark us as God's covenant people.

[21:07] But the encouragement for us is that we don't forego our responsibility to experience the sign of the covenant. So don't be like the nation who wandered in the wilderness for 40 years.

[21:17] believers. They rejected the command of the Lord. They were disobedient. They weren't practicing the covenant sign. If you have put faith in Jesus and you have not yet been baptized, you have something you have to do.

[21:33] You need to be baptized because Jesus himself commands it. So don't forego the covenant sign. Don't skip out. There's this thing that happens where people will be baptized or people will say that they're saved.

[21:45] They believe in Jesus and then they refuse to be baptized for 15 years. That's not really like a biblical concept. Once you're saved, the next step, the first step of obedience is believer's baptism.

[21:59] So Paul goes on in 1 Corinthians chapter 10 to talk about why that example of ignoring God's command is so dangerous. He goes on basically, they were people who desired evil things.

[22:12] They became idolaters, they committed sexual immorality, they tested Christ, and they complained about the Lord. All of those things happened so that we have an example of what not to do.

[22:25] Ultimately, they rejected the word of the Lord. So don't do those things. Instead, submit to the authority of God's word and as a covenant sign, an act of obedience, be baptized if you haven't already.

[22:40] So we have an image of people who rightly heard and obeyed the word of the Lord in the new generation that's taken the land, and we have an image of people who heard and rejected the word of the Lord in the wilderness generation that died off.

[22:54] But we always need to recall and obey God's word. As we obey his word, like the people of Israel, we'll know divine blessing. And I want to be really clear, when I say blessing, I don't mean like total safety in life.

[23:08] You won't ever hurt your knee, Miss Amy. You won't ever have sickness. You won't ever have financial trouble. That's not the type of blessing that I'm referring to. What I'm specifically referring to is the hand of the Lord, that his divine, eternal blessing is resting upon you, and because of the finished work of Jesus Christ, you have a hope of eternal life with him.

[23:29] If we obey the word of the Lord, if we hear the word of the Lord, believe in Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of our sins, then we will experience divine blessing. And I think within that realm of divine blessing, that eternal hope that we have in Christ, there's also physical blessing that will take place here on earth.

[23:47] Now, this isn't a health and wealth sermon. I'm not saying, you know, be really good and give a lot to the church and then God's going to bless you tenfold. That's not what I'm saying at all. What I am saying is, by our faithful adherence to God's word, generally speaking, you will see and experience a life of blessing.

[24:04] And sometimes that life of blessing isn't always fun. It isn't always easy. And still, you can see that the Lord has blessed throughout. Last week, you heard from my dad, thankfully, by the way, that he was here.

[24:18] But part of his testimony is, throughout his life, a ton of things have happened to him. He lost his parents at a young age. He had this head injury back in 2012. He also lost his daughter in a car accident back in 2023.

[24:32] And it's just like one thing after another. But hearing his testimony and his perspective on what God has done is amazing because he doesn't see all of those negative things. He sees that God has blessed him throughout.

[24:43] He's been faithful to the Lord and he feels as though God has blessed him. And he can show you how God has blessed him too. So there's this sign, this command to obey. So obey the word of the Lord and experience divine blessing.

[24:57] And I just realized that I spent a lot of time on that. So I'm going to try to get through the celebration real quick. Bear with me and buckle up. Okay? So they celebrated the covenant when they got in the land.

[25:09] Joshua 5, 10 through 12 says, While the Israelites camped at Gilgal on the plains of Jericho, they observed the Passover on the evening of the 14th day of the month. The day after Passover, they ate unleavened bread and roasted grain from the produce of the land.

[25:24] So why Passover? Well, you guys know what Passover is. in Exodus chapter 12, before God brought upon the nation of Egypt the tenth plague, which was to kill the firstborn of every human and animal, God established with his people this celebratory meal, which was really illustrative as well.

[25:42] But I don't have time to get into all of that. But you have the unblemished lamb. They had to slaughter an unblemished lamb. You also have the bitter herbs in the meal. So it's not like you season this lamb for a beautiful lamb, wonderful, savory dinner.

[25:56] You put these bitter herbs with it. And then you have the unleavened bread. And what you see in that is this image of one, the unblemished lamb sacrificing on behalf of the people, and its blood covering the sins of the people.

[26:09] Okay, so that's fulfilled in Jesus. You have the bitter herbs, and the bitter herbs are to signify the bitterness of bondage, the bitterness of captivity. Their captivity in Egypt was a bitter experience.

[26:21] And then you have the unleavened bread. Leavened throughout scripture is used to symbolize sin and how it permeates the body. And so taking the leaven out of the bread is a sign to show that God will remove the sin from his people.

[26:34] So you have the necessity of blood, the necessity of sacrifice, and you have divine protection when you listen to his word. So when God went through the nation of Israel and killed the firstborn of the people and the animals, the people who had put the blood of the lamb on their door were safe.

[26:53] God passed over them. Hence the name Passover. And in Exodus 12, 25, Moses told the people, when you go into the land that God has promised you, the land flowing with milk and honey, celebrate this feast.

[27:06] So there's a couple other things that you have to know about Passover. No uncircumcised person was able to celebrate Passover. So there's a clear order of operations here. God tells the people, worship me by obeying my command, and then worship me by remembering my work.

[27:21] So that's what God had told his people to do. There's also this really beautiful timing. In Joshua chapter 4, we see that they, or I think it's Joshua chapter 3, we see that they entered the promised land on the tenth day of the month of Eve, which is the first month of the year.

[27:37] The tenth day of that month is the day that the people picked their sacrificial lamb. And then the fourteenth day was the day that they celebrated Passover. So they were able to enter the land on this tenth day, identify the land that they would sacrifice, practice obedience and circumcision, and then celebrate the Passover meal.

[27:59] And there's this divine blessing that followed their obedient celebration. You see here in verse 11, the day after Passover, they ate unleavened bread and roasted grain from the produce of the land.

[28:09] In verse 12, and the day after they ate from the produce of the land, the manna ceased. Since there was no more manna for the Israelites, they ate from the crops of the land of Canaan that year. God had amazingly, specially provided for his people by sending manna, bread, from heaven.

[28:27] And now that they're experiencing his blessing, he's providing for them in a whole new way. It's not supernatural, it's very natural. By getting into the land of promise, they get to experience the blessing of having security in their food, in their crops.

[28:42] So they were obedient to the Lord, they were marked as his covenant people, they celebrated the salvation of the Lord, and now they get to rest knowing the blessing of the Lord in the land.

[28:55] So again, like the act of circumcision with the work of Passover, we have to think, how does this apply to us today? Well, you know, we celebrate Easter, which is around the time of Passover, you know, because on the day after Passover, Jesus went to the cross and died for our sins.

[29:12] But as he ate his final meal with his disciples, his final Passover meal, he gave the meal itself a whole new meaning. And so we have two ordinances as a church. We have believer's baptism, and we have what's called the Lord's Supper or communion.

[29:27] And at the Lord's table, we experience the reminder, the tangible reminder of eating the bread and drinking the juice, the tangible reminder of the broken body of Jesus and the shed blood for our sins.

[29:39] So as we take communion together, we should do so with the mind of remembrance and praise for the work of salvation that God has done. Passover was a celebration of God's great deliverance.

[29:53] In fact, his greatest deliverance at that point in time. And for us, when we celebrate the Lord's Supper, when we take communion together at the Lord's table, we celebrate God's greatest worldwide eternal act of deliverance that he did through the perfect work of Jesus Christ.

[30:13] Receiving the blessing of the Lord's table through communion is sustaining for us in our faith. It produces endurance within us. So there's a reason that we take communion so regularly here at the church.

[30:25] We do it at the beginning of every month. It's because it's a constant reminder of the broken body and the shed blood of Jesus. And it's also a beautiful picture of the reminder of the covenant blessing that comes to those who are obedient to the word of the Lord.

[30:39] When we share the Lord's table, when we share communion, we look ahead. We don't just look back to the work of Christ. We look ahead to this beautiful hope of a celebration feast in his presence in eternity.

[30:53] We have in the Lord's Supper a physical reminder of the past and a beautiful picture of our future. And so when the people got into the land and they celebrated the Passover, it was a very similar thing.

[31:07] This is clearly meant to refer back to the Exodus event. You have God's beginning work of redemption when he brought his people out and now the work of redemption is complete because he's taken his people to their land.

[31:19] And one day, the work of redemption that God has done in our hearts will be completed as well. When we enter his presence and we experience the blessing that we have before us, there will be a joy that we can't even speak in words.

[31:34] But I want you to understand, we cannot, I'm going to say this, I said this in the beginning, we cannot understand the blessing of the Lord until we obey his commands entirely. The most important command that God has ever given is to believe in Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins.

[31:50] If you have not put faith in Jesus Christ, then the promise of blessing is not for you. There's a promise of curse for those who reject Christ the same way that there's a promise of curse for those who reject the covenant that God had given his people.

[32:06] And I want you to understand, baptism doesn't save you, the Lord's supper doesn't save you. These are acts of remembrance, observance, and they're special, they are very special, but they aren't salvific.

[32:20] They remind us of the completed work of Jesus Christ on the cross. So, if you're a believer and you haven't been baptized, I'm going to ask you to schedule a time to do that. Schedule a time to be baptized today.

[32:32] This is the first act of obedience for the believer of Jesus Christ. And when we have the Lord's supper, the first of every month, I'm going to encourage you to take the Lord's supper with us regularly and really use this as a time to remember the work of Christ and to look ahead to what he has promised us.

[32:53] But again, most importantly, humbly recognize your need for a Savior if you have not already believed in Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins. So we're going to sing a final song.

[33:04] We're going to stand together. I know I'm late today, but hey, I don't care. So if the people downstairs with the kids can hear me, I'm sorry. But I'm not actually.

[33:16] Okay, all right. So we're going to stand and we're going to sing. And I'm just going to ask that you reflect on the idea of covenant. Reflect on really the idea of adherence or obedience to God's word because that's what the people in the wilderness lacked.

[33:30] They did not obey the word of the Lord. And if you have not obeyed the word of the Lord in its most basic call to believe in Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, then let today be the day that you do that.

[33:42] Let's pray together. God, thank you for your word and your truth. Thank you, God, for the opportunity to gather in your name. Lord Jesus, I pray that you would bless as we sing and reflect and consider your truth as it applies to our lives.

[33:55]  And it's in Jesus' name that we pray. Amen. Amen.