Be Word of God People!

Deuteronomy 6:1-9

Christ through us. The idea is actually breathtaking when you think about it. Who is God? God is the all-powerful, the Almighty. He’s eternal without beginning, without end. He’s perfect. He’s holy. He knows absolutely everything. Does it sound like God needs any help with anything? No. Who are we? Well, pretty much the absolute opposite of everything we just said about God, right? We’re sinful. We’re mortal. We’re short-lived. We have no idea what is gonna happen tomorrow, and we struggle to remember what happened yesterday. Does it sound like God should be looking for help with anything, much less that he be looking for help from us? It’s breathtaking. That Christ would choose to do his work through sinful human beings like you and me is astounding. It’s humbling. Man, I oh-so – we oh-so do not deserve this. Yet at the same time, it’s invigorating. What an incredible honor God has given to you and to me that we get to do the most important work that there is, the only work that’s eternal, as we share Jesus with our words, our attitudes, our actions. What an incredibly powerful role we play. What incredible impact we have on ourselves, our families, even our society. Of course, there’s an antithesis, isn’t there? If we fail to do it well, who’s going to suffer? We will, as individuals, our families will, our church will, our church body will, and society in general will suffer if we’re not doing the work of Christ aggressively and well as God wants us to be doing. And oh my, do we see it play out in the history of the nation of Israel? We’ll read our text in just a minute. The history of the nation of Israel is oh so incredible and oh so incredibly sad. The nation of Israel had just 40 years before our text seen incredible things. They had seen the ten plagues. They had seen God lead them with a pillar of cloud by day, pillar of fire by night. God had led them to the Red Sea, and then, can you imagine opening that thing wide open and taking the Israelites through on dry ground? He’d appeared to them at Mount Sinai and cut a covenant with them. That’s why the Hebrew literally reads that God cuts a covenant. He made a covenant with his people where he agreed to be their God and they agreed to be his people. God fed them six days every week, week after week after week, for 40 years of wandering in the wilderness. As unfaithful as they were to him, God was faithful, faithful, faithful. And now they’re right on the edge of going into the Promised Land. But Moses isn’t going with them. See, Moses had had a major mess-up and he had severely misrepresented God. He had represented God as a God of judgment and anger when God wanted to be represented as a God of love. And so Moses had angrily struck the rock to bring water out, where God had told him speak to the rock. And God said to Moses, “That great leader, you failed to honor me as holy in the sight of the Israelites, and so you will not be going into the land.” And so what Moses does is he gathers the nation together for one final address. The book of Deuteronomy, 90% of it, or so I didn’t figure out the percentage, but I’m guessing 90% of it, or so is that farewell address to the nation of Israel. Can you imagine the emotions going on in Moses’ heart and perhaps in the hearts of the people, too? This is it. The guy who’s led them for 40 years. This is his last time addressing his people. And the book covers all kinds of stuff from the history of their coming out of Egypt, the history of their 40 years in the desert, the various instructions God had given them regarding their worship life, regarding their political life because they were a theocracy after all, etc, etc. But one of the themes that runs throughout the book are words like the ones that we will now read. These are the commands, decrees, and laws the Lord your God directed me to teach you to observe in the land that you are crossing the Jordan to possess so that you, your children, and their children after them may fear the Lord your God as long as you live by keeping all his decrees and commands that I give you and so that you may enjoy long life. Hear Israel and be careful to obey so it may go well with you and that you may increase greatly in a land flowing with milk and honey, just as the Lord, the God of your ancestors, promised you. Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength. These commandments that I give today are to be on your hearts, impress them on your children, talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up, tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads, write them on the door frames of your houses and on your gates. The word of the Lord. The theme comes through pretty clearly, doesn’t it? What does God want his people to be? He wants his people to be Word of God people. These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts. How do they get on to your hearts? We need to hear them, to read them, to learn them, to think about them, to put them into practice, and as they do, they lodge themselves in our hearts and minds so that what then happens we become oozers of the word of God. I couldn’t think of a better picture. So God wants his word to ooze out of us that we find ourselves talking word of God stuff when we sit at home and when we walk along the road, when we’re going to bed at night, and when we’re getting up in the morning. That is just kind of there, and that as you see the sun rise or, in my case, more likely the sun set, when you see that sunset and its beauty, you think kind of automatically, wow, what a gracious God we have who blesses us with something so beautiful. As the rain falls that you just sort of naturally think what a gracious God we have who is replenishing the earth, and that it just becomes a very natural thing for that to be passed down to your children and your grandchildren and your co-workers and your neighbors and whoever else happens to be around you. That’s what God wants his people to be. He wanted them, and he wants you and me to be Word of God people so that his love might just fill us and come seeping out from us to the people who are around us. Well, how did the Israelites do? The next generation didn’t do too badly under the leadership of Joshua. They went in, they took control of the land sort of, but they ran out of steam. They didn’t fully do what God had told them to do, which was to put to death or drive out completely the Canaanite nations who were living there. Why does God want that? Because he knew that if they didn’t do that, the idolatry of the Canaanites would suck the Israelites in, and more people would end up going to hell. By contrast if they drove out completely or put to death the Canaanites who were there that idolatry would be gone and more people would end up going to heaven and so even though the command sounds at first blush to be cruel the command was actually incredibly gracious because it meant God wanted more people to go to heaven and by not following that command more people went to hell forever. And with that generation failing to fully implement what God had said the slippery slide was off and running and soon will come the time of the judges where cycle after cycle of evil followed by oppression from a foreign nation followed by a very flawed deliverer – a judge – who would rise up to bring deliverance for the Israelites followed by a short time of peace and then the cycle would repeat itself all over again and this went on for 400 years. Time of the Kings. The kingdom splits. The northern kingdom had – count them – zero good kings. The southern kingdom had very few, and so the northern ten tribes end off in exile – gone. Almost the entire ten tribes just disappears. Southern two tribes also exiled to Babylon, and yet what did God do? Even in those bad times when his people weren’t Word of God people overall, and they’re hurting themselves as individuals and hurting their families, and hurting their nation’s society in general. What did God do? Can you imagine? He kept working through them. He kept raising up people like Boaz and Ruth, as unusual as a character that Naomi is in the scripture. Words of God oozed out of her enough that Ruth the Moabite becomes a believer in the true God. It ends up in the line of the Savior himself. What grace. And God raised up faithful prophets like Elijah and Elisha, and there were a remnant in Israel at the time of Elijah, yet I reserve six thousand whose knees have not bowed down to Baal and whose mouths have not kissed him. God continued to work through them, and what does God do today? Can you imagine? He continues to work through sinful human beings like you and me. 175 years ago, three pastors, let me say that differently, 175 years ago, three sinful men who happened to be pastors gathered together and decided they wanted to start a new church body. And can you imagine? It worked. And the words of God oozed out of them and through them, sinful as they were. It spread to others. It passed to the next generation and to the next generation and to the next generation. And here we are with 1200 some congregations, churches all over the United States, Canada, church bodies we’re in fellowship with all over the world. Oh my. What an incredible impact God has had on individuals, families, churches, and, yes, our society, because we are the light of the world, we are the salt of the earth. What grace. And now what does God want? Isn’t the answer pretty obvious? He wants us to be Word of God people. And so the question that’s in front of us, kind of all the time but specifically this morning, is will we be that? Will we be so connected to the word of God that we become oozers of the word of God the way God wants us to be? Will we look at that Israelite nation and learn the lessons from the past? We see how their lack of being Word of God people impacted so many in so many horrible ways. Will we learn? I pray we will. And can you imagine as we ooze Word of God stuff as the Word of God gets more and more on our hearts and we’re empowered and able to ooze it out to others around us, not just with our words but also with our attitudes and our activities. Can you imagine? Christ is going to be doing his work through us. And my brothers and sisters, that’s breathtaking. Amen and amen.