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Good morning.
My name is Allie.
I'm a member of the Central Berkeley Community Group.
Today's reading is going to be from Deuteronomy, chapters 9, verses 6 through 7, 11 through
17, 21, 26 through 29, and chapter 10, verses 12 through 22.
Understand then that this is not because of your righteousness that the Lord your God
is giving you this good land to possess.
For you are a stiff-necked people.
Remember this and never forget how you aroused the anger of your Lord, your God, in the wilderness.
From the day you left Egypt until you arrived here, you have been rebellious against the
Lord.
At the end of 40 days and 40 nights, the Lord gave me the two stone tablets, the tablets
of the covenant.
Then the Lord told me,
Go down from here at once, because your people whom you brought out of Egypt have become corrupt.
They have turned away quickly from what I commanded them and have made an idol for themselves.
And the Lord said to me, I have seen this people, and they are a stiff-necked people.
Indeed, let me alone so that I may destroy them and blot out their name from under heaven.
And I will make you into a nation stronger and more numerous than they.
So I turned and went down from the mountains while it was ablaze with fire, and the two
tablets of the covenant were in my hands.
When I looked, I saw that you had sinned against the Lord your God.
You had made for yourselves an idol cast in the shape of a calf.
You had turned aside quickly from the way that the Lord had commanded you.
So I took the two tablets and threw them out of my hands, breaking them into pieces before
your eyes.
Also, I took that sinful thing of yours, the calf you had made, and burned it in the fire.
Then I crushed it and ground it to powder as fine as dust and threw the dust into a stream
that flowed down the mountain.
I prayed to the Lord and said, Sovereign Lord, do not destroy your people, your own inheritance
that you redeemed by your great power and brought out of Egypt with a mighty hand.
Remember your servants Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
Overlook the stubbornness of this people, their wickedness, and their sin.
Otherwise, the country from which you brought us will say, Because the Lord was not able
to take them into the land he had promised them, and because he had hated them, he brought
them out to put them to death in the wilderness.
But they are your people, your inheritance that you brought out by your great power and
your outstretched arm.
And now, Israel, what does the Lord your God ask of you but to fear the Lord your God,
to walk in obedience to him, to love him, to serve the Lord your God with all your heart
and with all your soul, and to observe the Lord's commands and decrees that I am giving
you today for your own good.
To the Lord our God belong the heavens, even the highest heavens, the earth and everything
in it.
Yet the Lord set his affection on your ancestors and loved them.
And he chose you, their descendants, above all the nations as it is today.
Circumcise your hearts, therefore, and do not be stiff-necked any longer.
For the Lord your God is God of gods and Lord of lords.
The great God, mighty and awesome, who shows no partiality and accepts no bribes.
He defends the cause of the fatherless and the widow, and loves the foreigner residing
among you, giving them food and clothing.
And you are to love those who are foreigners.
For you yourselves were foreigners in Egypt.
Fear the Lord your God and serve him.
Hold fast to him and take your oaths in his name.
He is the one you praise.
He is your God, who performed for you those great and awesome wonders you saw with your
own eyes.
Your ancestors who went down into Egypt were seventy in all, and now the Lord your God has
made you as numerous as the stars in the sky.
The grass withers and the flowers fade.
Good morning, friends.
Congratulations on being here today and just making it out of the house.
You know, after I graduated from college, I found myself in a pub in Western Ireland,
and I met a friendly local there.
It was a little town called Doolin, sort of known for its session music, pub music, and
a friendly local started buying me pints of Guinness.
And when he discovered that I was training to be a pastor, he said, oh, you hatch, match,
and dispatch.
And by hatch, match, and dispatch, he meant I was in the business of births, weddings, and
funerals.
And fortunately, over the years, we've done more matching and hatching here at Christ Church
than we have dispatching.
And yesterday, we had another match.
We had a wedding of Ethan Van Andel and Kate Mallison.
It was beautiful.
Some of you were there under the Redwood Grove, and then here at the reception last night.
Really joyous event.
And I was thinking at the reception last night about a wedding I officiated a few years ago
from a couple that met here at Cal.
And at the reception, the mother-in-law stood up to give a toast to her new son-in-law.
And she said, so you're the husband now, and from now on, you make all the major decisions
in the household.
And all the egalitarians in the room started sweating, and the feminists were feeling super
uncomfortable.
She said, yeah, now you make all the major decisions, but your new wife decides what's
a major decision and what's a minor decision.
And I thought, yeah, that's pretty smart.
You know, I love being married.
It's so great to find that one very special person that you can annoy for the rest of your
life.
And when Catherine and I got married for better, for worse, I couldn't have done better.
She couldn't have done worse.
And it's a beautiful thing.
But we also know that Jesus was single.
Jesus charted a path, a high and noble path for all of his disciples that would come after
him and be single.
But as we begin today, I just want to say it fascinates me that one of the primary metaphors
to describe the relationship between God and his people is marriage.
This exclusive, intense covenant bonds between a husband and wife.
That's what God says.
That's what his relationship with us is like.
And I just want us to think about that metaphor.
As we open up Deuteronomy, we come to this fifth and final book in the Torah, which is the
capstone and the summary of everything that's gone before it.
It's Moses' last words to the people of God before he dies.
And what I think this text in Deuteronomy 9 and 10 is telling us today, God's word for
us, is that our broken vows call for a selfless advocate and a new life of gratitude.
Let's think for a minute about our broken vows.
I want you to imagine a newlywed couple and they're on their honeymoon.
They plan this special wedding weekend for all their family and friends.
They've had the rehearsal, the dinner.
They've had the ceremony.
They've made the vows.
They've had a big rocking party and they've made these serious covenant promises to one
another before the eyes of God and each other and their community to love and cherish each
other until death do us part.
Pretty serious stuff.
And then they go on their honeymoon to a tropical island, not just for like a week.
They go for 40 days.
I mean, who goes for 40 days?
But they spare no expense and they're having a great time swimming in the ocean, walking
on the beach, reading books, eating well, seeing the sights, making love, luxuriating in the
rest and the joy of their covenant that they've just made.
And then all of a sudden, just out of the blue, one of them is unfaithful.
On their honeymoon, one of them is found in the arms of another and their covenant is
shattered into pieces.
How would you feel if you were the one to be so betrayed?
You'd be heartbroken.
You'd be outraged.
How could you so quickly stab me in the back after such high promises, after such deep sacrifices
that we just made to commit ourselves exclusively to one another?
It's hard to describe the emotions you would feel.
That's why we have country music.
That's why we have the blues.
You know, like, what does it feel like to be cheated on?
And that's exactly what happens between Yahweh and his people with the golden calf.
And we're told this didn't just happen one time on their honeymoon and they made up and
then they lived happily ever after.
The prophets tell us that this happened over and over and over again.
God's chosen people, his beloved people, the treasured possession for whom God went to
great lengths to save from slavery in Egypt.
They entered into this exclusive relationship with God and they made these covenant promises
in response to his.
And they said, you will be our love supreme.
You will be our one and only everywhere and always.
And yet what happened?
They adulterated the relationship.
They adulterated the relationship by introducing another lover and another allegiance into the
relationship.
And we hear about that in verse 16 where Moses says, when I looked, I saw that you had sinned
against the Lord your God and you had made for yourselves an idol cast in the shape of a calf.
You turned aside quickly from the way that the Lord had commanded you.
The people of God decide, you know, we no longer want to live by faith in this living God that
we cannot see.
We want to live by sight and we want to make God less than he is.
And so they cast him in the shape of a bull.
Now, some of you know this statue on Wall Street, Charging Bull.
Anybody seen this statue?
It's been there since the 80s after a market crash as a symbol of financial optimism.
And this golden calf wasn't that different.
It was a symbol of strength and vitality and energy and prosperity where the people said,
we are going to make God into who we want him to be and to do for us what we want him to do.
God doesn't define us and fashion us.
We define and fashion God.
And the Apostle Paul reflects on this as not just one incident in the life of Israel,
but the consistent theme in the history of humanity where he says in Romans 1,
they, all people, exchanged the truth about God for a lie
and worshiped and served created things rather than their creator.
Another theologian commented, this is John Calvin.
He said, the human heart is a factory of idols.
Every one of us is, from his mother's womb, expert in inventing idols.
Now, I doubt that many of us have statues at home that we pray to and seek good fortune from,
but an idol is anything more important to you than God.
An idol is anything that absorbs your imagination more than God.
An idol is something that you seek to give you what only God can give.
And you know you have a counterfeit God, a false God,
when anything becomes so central and so essential that if it's lost to you,
your life hardly feels worth living.
You can kind of hear the self-talk in your own heart when you say,
you know, my life only has meaning and I only have worth if I have power and influence over other people.
Or if I win the love and respect of this group or that person,
or if I have this quality of life and this standard of living,
or if I'm this productive or this successful,
then my life has meaning and my life has worth and value.
And these become our functional gods.
The gods that we're living for are gods of power,
a god of approval, a god of comfort, a god of control,
and on and on.
We're expert in inventing idols in which we reduce God and redefine God
and replace God with something he's not.
And so why does Moses remind the people of this painful honeymoon affair?
Because we didn't read this verse, but in verse 4 it says,
you might say to yourself,
the Lord has brought us to the promised land because of our righteousness.
And then verse 6 picks up and it says,
understand then that it is not because of your righteousness
that the Lord your God is giving you this good land
for you are a stiff-necked people.
We tend to either think too low of ourselves or too high of ourselves.
And the danger here is thinking about ourselves with moral self-congratulation,
with a self-righteous superiority complex over other people.
And Moses says, actually, you have a history of being stiff-necked.
It's this image of an animal that refuses to listen to its owner,
that has this unbending, stubborn, willfully obstinate,
not readily submissive, not easily led sort of attitude to its master.
And I think Moses brings this up because he's saying,
look, this golden calf was not an exceptional lapse.
It's just the most obvious and most horrendous example
of our human, congenital, ingrained, characteristic tendency
of habitual rebellion that seeks life from other sources than the living God.
And the prophets repeat Moses over and over.
Here's the prophet Jeremiah.
He says, my people have committed two sins.
They have forsaken me, the spring of living water,
and have dug out their own cisterns, broken cisterns that cannot hold water.
And so how does Moses respond to the broken vows of God's people?
It says in verse 17 that,
so I took the two tablets and I threw them out of my hands,
breaking them to pieces before your eyes.
And this isn't so much an impetuous act as it is a prophetic symbol
that the moral law of God and God's covenant bond of love with his people
has been shattered because they've adulterated the relationship
by allowing other lovers to creep in,
rendering the relationship null and void, null and void.
And this is a desperate situation that the people of God find themselves in.
And so that leads me to my next point,
that our broken vows call for a selfless advocate.
Our broken vows call for a selfless advocate.
Anybody ever had somebody plead your case when you royally screwed up
or you just totally didn't deserve it?
Maybe a parent, a teacher, a coach, a colleague, a friend went about for you,
put in a good word for you when you just didn't deserve it.
Well, if any nation in the ancient Near East deserved to be destroyed,
the scriptures tell us over and over again, it was the people of God.
More than any other nation,
their very existence here on the edge of the promised land
is proof of the mercy and the grace of God.
And the question is, how did they get God's mercy?
What changed in this situation?
What changed is that Moses stepped up to advocate for them.
Moses went to become their mediator and their reconciler
who interceded before God on their behalf.
And you can hear him doing it in verse 26.
He says,
I prayed to the Lord and said,
Sovereign Lord, do not destroy your people.
And what follows is this model prayer for all who feel the tension
between what the people of God are called to be
and what we actually are.
Anybody feel that tension?
What the people of God are called to be
and what we actually are.
And this tells us,
don't give up on the people of God.
Learn how to pray like Moses.
And how does Moses stand in the gap between God and his people?
Well, first of all, he's selfless.
He completely empties himself of his ego.
And he says,
You know, this is not about me.
Because God had said in verse 14,
he was so ready to be done.
He said,
Let me alone, Moses,
so that I may destroy them
and blot out their name from under heaven.
And I will make you, Moses,
into a nation stronger and more numerous than they.
God is ready to scrap plan A,
start plan B.
He says,
Moses, you and your family can be the new chosen people.
But Moses ignores that offer completely.
And he just kind of says,
Okay, whatever, God.
But I'm going to redirect your attention
to things that are way more important
than little old Moses.
Namely, God, I want you to pay attention to your love
and to your promises
and to your character
and to your reputation
and to your power.
Walk with me through this prayer in verse 26.
Sovereign Lord, do not destroy your people,
your own inheritance that you redeem.
Redeemed.
God, remember your special love for your people.
Remember that they are your treasured possession,
your inheritance in the world.
And then he says in verse 27,
Remember your servants Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
God, remember the covenant promises that you've made,
that you swore to Abraham.
You'd give him seed and land,
that you'd give him a people and a place,
that you would provide him kids
and a home where they can live.
And God, you cannot go back on your word.
You have to be faithful and follow through
on what you said you're going to do.
And then he goes on in verse 27.
He says,
Overlook the stubbornness of this people,
their wickedness and their sin.
God, be who you are.
Be gracious.
Be patient.
Be forgiving.
Overlook and cover their sin by your mercy.
And then in verse 28, he says,
Otherwise, Egypt, the country from which you brought us,
will say,
Because the Lord was not able to take them,
and because he,
into the land that he promised them,
and because he hated them,
he brought them out to put them to death in the wilderness.
God, consider your reputation.
Do not let yourself become the laughingstock of the nations.
Do not let people misinterpret you as unable or unloving.
Father, hallowed be your name.
Do not let your name be dishonored
because of the stupidity of your people,
Moses says.
And then in verse 29, he says,
But they are your people,
your inheritance that you brought out
by your great power and your outstretched arm.
And Moses comes back to where he started this prayer
in verse 26 with the redeeming power of God.
And he says,
God, do what you do.
You rescued us in the past,
and now I'm asking,
save us from ourselves.
Can you imagine what would happen
if we begun to pray like this?
And if you pour out your hearts
and your longings and your hopes to God
like Moses does,
1 Peter 5 says that we're to cast our anxieties
on the Lord because he cares for us.
And a simple way that the Bible urges us to do this
is to tell God not only what we need
or what we want,
but to tell him why he should grant our requests.
Moses pours out his heart
by supporting his requests for mercy with arguments.
Moses makes a case to God,
and he appeals to God.
He says,
it's on the basis of what you've revealed about yourself,
your special covenant love,
the promises you've made,
your character of compassion,
your glory in the world,
your power to redeem.
And I want to suggest that we adopt Moses' example
of chutzpah in our prayers.
Could we be more bold and direct with God?
Rather than telling God what we need,
tell him why we need it on the basis of his word.
Imagine what God would do
if we prayed with this kind of persuasive urgency.
Now I've been slowly working my way
through the Marvel movies,
the Marvel Cinematic Universe with my kids,
and we're a little behind.
We're on Ant-Man,
and Ant-Man and the Wasp is our latest.
So pray for us as we try to catch up with the rest of you.
But I've learned that action films,
in action films,
the main actor or main actress has stand-ins
because it can take hours to set up a scene.
And so you get an actor
and then somebody who looks and acts like the actor
to stand there
until you're ready to film the actual scene, right?
And that's what's going on here.
Moses is a stand-in.
Moses is a placeholder,
a pointer to the main actor,
one better than Moses,
who will be an even more selfless advocate.
And that main actor comes on the scene,
and what does he pray for us?
He prays,
Father, forgive them,
for they don't know what they're doing.
Moses prays,
overlook their stubbornness and wickedness and sin.
And Jesus, the main actor,
when the final scene comes to be played,
he says,
Father, forgive them.
And when does Jesus pray this prayer for us?
He prays it
when he's slowly suffocating on the cross.
Historians tell us that
crucified revolutionaries died
with curses on their lips.
These were gruesome scenes.
There were screams of rage and pain and despair.
And so of all the words
of recrimination,
of condemnation,
of accusation that could have rung out,
what does Jesus say?
He says,
forgive.
Of all the prayers that I need prayed for me,
this one's the most essential.
Father, forgive him.
Not Father, help me,
but Father, forgive them.
Not Father, relieve me,
but Father, save them.
Jesus doesn't pray for himself.
He prays for us.
Jesus emptied himself
to become one of us
and he humbled himself to death on a cross
to become the selfless advocate
that we desperately need.
And he dares to ask God
for what only God can give.
Why does Jesus have the right
and the authority
to pray,
Father, overlook their stubbornness,
forgive their sin?
Because he's there,
fully God
and fully man
on the cross,
in our place,
as our substitute,
bearing our sin,
our guilt,
our shame,
receiving God's just judgment
judgment of death
that we deserve
in order that we might receive
the infinite mercy
and astonishing grace of God
that we don't deserve.
And the Apostle Paul
summarizes it this way
in 2 Corinthians 5.
He says,
God made him
who had no sin
to be sin for us
so that in him
we might become
the righteousness of God.
And so friends,
my question for us
is have you placed
your confidence
in this one
who's your only
selfless advocate
before God?
And are we ready
to renew our trust
and renew our covenant
with him today
in this one
who has secured
God's mercy for us
when he prayed for us
with us in mind
saying,
Father,
forgive him.
Father,
forgive her.
This is what we most need.
Our broken vows
call for a selfless advocate
but they also call
for a new life
of gratitude.
Our broken vows
call for a selfless advocate
and a new life
of gratitude.
It says in verse 12
of chapter 10,
now Israel,
what does the Lord
your God
ask of you?
Now that you've
experienced
the astonishing
mercy of God
and you've received
the infinite grace
of God
and you've been
powerfully saved,
what does the Lord
require of you?
What is the basic
grateful response
that's fitting
to such a reality?
And Moses says,
we're to fear,
walk,
love,
serve,
and observe.
Listen to verse 12.
This is what
it means to show
that we're grateful
to be the redeemed,
forgiven people
of God.
What does he ask
of you but to fear
the Lord your God,
to walk in obedience
to him,
to love him,
to serve the Lord
your God
with all your heart
and with all your soul
and to observe
the Lord's commands
and decrees
that I am giving you
today for your own good.
What does it mean
to fear the Lord?
It means to have
an attitude of respect
and reverence
for God
in everything that we do
that permeates
all other attitudes.
What does it mean
to walk in obedience?
It means to imitate God
in our ethical life.
What does it mean
that that word
in the center of the list
to love?
It means we're to reflect
the loyal love of God
back to him.
And what does it mean
when it says
we're to serve him?
It means we're to worship him
with our time
and our talents
and our treasures.
And then what does it mean
to observe his commands?
It means that we're to give
constant careful attention
to his revelation
in his written word.
And so I want to close
with two practical applications.
First for the Bible-less
and then for the fatherless.
A word about the Bible-less
and a word about the fatherless.
I've been reflecting on this term
a Bible-less Christian
which is a grotesque anomaly.
I know it's a contradiction
in terms
and I think it's not
a lack of Bibles.
It's not that we don't own them.
We have many of them at home.
We have infinite number
on our phones.
The problem is
that many Christians
just don't open them
or read them.
And why is that a problem?
Because if you claim
the mercy of God,
the mercy that Moses hopes for
and the mercy that Jesus secures,
then the basic thing
the Lord asks of us
is to observe his commands.
And where do we find those?
How can we observe
what we do not know
and what we're not regularly
informing ourselves about?
I want you to imagine
this newlywed couple, right?
And the husband says
to his new bride,
he says, you know,
I'm enjoying this relationship
but from now on
I'm not going to listen
to what you say.
I know words are going
to come out of your mouth.
I know you're going to
communicate things to me
but I've come up
with this brilliant idea
that we can have
a wordless relationship.
And so I don't really need
to hear from you
what you're thinking.
I don't really want
to hear from you
what you want
or what you need.
I'm just going to pop
these AirPods in
and I'm going to kind of
feel my way through
the vibes
of how to please you.
Now how is it going to go
for this new husband?
How do you think
the wife is going to
appreciate being ignored?
Or imagine if you have
a car and you need
to change the oil
and instead of consulting
the manual
from the manufacturer
you just pop the hood
and you start banging
around on the engine
and you go,
you know what,
I have a brilliant idea.
Water is so much cheaper
and cleaner than oil.
I think I'm going to put
water in this engine.
How's that going
to go for you?
Aren't you going
to wish that you
had relied on the maker
of the car
to tell you
how it runs?
Brothers and sisters,
we cannot live
a life of gratitude
to God
without His written
instructions
that He's given
to us
for what He wants
from us
and what will please Him
and how He's built
our lives to work.
And so if you find yourself
as a Bible-less Christian
this morning
and you feel
a little uncomfortable,
good,
I've done my job,
God,
we want you
to become
a self-feeder.
We want you
to go from nothing
to something.
We want you
to wake up tomorrow
and turn to Psalm 1.
Turn to the Gospel
of Matthew chapter 1.
If you don't know
what to do,
don't have a plan
for how to do it,
don't have a method,
come talk to me,
come talk to Andrew.
We want
no one here
to be a Bible-less
Christian
because God's
calling us
to observe
His commands
and to walk
in obedience
to what He said.
And the last thing
I want to say
is not just a word
for the Bible-less
but a word
about the fatherless
because when we open
and when we read
our Bibles,
we find it reveals
to us the heart
of our Creator
for His creation
and for the creatures
that He's made
in His image.
And we read things
like this
in verse 18.
He defends
the cause
of the fatherless
and the widow
and He loves
the foreigners
residing among you
giving them food
and clothing.
This tells us
that the Creator God
fixes His attention
not on the glory
and the power
of the wealthy
and the strong
but on the needs
of the poor
and the weak
and the vulnerable
and this fundamental
moral character
of a just
and merciful God
is to be reflected
in the society
and the culture
of His people.
And so I want
to just encourage
us as we close
to find one way
for every person
here to find one way
in this upcoming
holiday season
to defend one child.
One child
who at no fault
of their own
has become fatherless,
has become motherless.
One child
who's been orphaned
and whose needs
can be met
by your resources
and my resources.
And if you want
to know more
about what we're doing
with Care Portal
or Foster the City
or Compassion International
and other things,
email Andrew
and he will send you
to the right people
and the right opportunities
for how we're trying
to set up our church
to defend the fatherless.
But I want you
to imagine.
Imagine us being
a people
who with one hand
we've opened up
the powerful word
of God
and with the other hand
we're blessing
the vulnerable
image of God.
and I think
if we could do
those two things
open the word of God
and bless the vulnerable
image of God
we will have moved
the needle
pretty significantly
toward this new life
of gratitude
that God is inviting us
into us
whose sins
have been mercifully
forgiven.
Us
whose sins
have been
graciously
overlooked.
I hope and pray
this is so
in the name
of the Father,
the Son,
and the Holy Spirit.
Amen.