The Land Between: Grumbling in the Wilderness | Menlo Online | September 19

is [Music] foreign [Music] is [Music] is [Music] it cannot take [Music] [Music] is [Music] is [Music] [Music] i hope is [Music] our hope is resurrected [Music] well welcome to menlo online my name is josh it's great to have you with us we're honored you join us for worship today let's lift our hearts and our voices to our god [Music] he has done great things see what our savior has done see how his love overcomes he has done great things he has done great things [Music] [Music] oh jesus [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] you [Music] and i know you will do it again for your promises yes and you will amen great things oh god [Music] you have done great things [Music] [Applause] you have a great day [Music] you [Music] [Applause] [Music] you conquered the graves you free every captain and break every chain oh god [Music] oh jesus [Music] oh god [Music] hey everybody mark and jess here and we are so excited to be with you today we have a special online only sermon coming your way but before we get into that let's go ahead and fill you in on some things that we think you should know yes if you're watching on sunday it is september 19th and that means it is our annual meeting day so go to menlo dot church slash annual meeting to get all the information for that if you like things like church budget or if you want to know a senior pastor search update or if you want to vote in our three new elders this is the meeting for you so if you're a covenant partner which is what we call membership go there and register so you can vote for those elders if not you can still attend and watch live on youtube so again go to that website and get all those details there and just a reminder we have fall labs kicking off this week all 25 plus labs are launching and again these classes are both in person and online so we are very excited that we're putting on the marriage course online if that's interesting to you then go ahead and sign up for that we have a ton of people registering already but if not head over to menlo.church labs for more information on all of our other classes and ways to register yes and as always we want to say thank you so much for your generosity it's because of your giving that we can put things on like these labs as well as our fall retreat coming up and all the other types of opportunities that we have that creates community both on-site and online also 10 of our giving goes to missions and outreach so it's because of your giving that we are able to spread the good news of jesus all over the world and in the bay area so whether you've partnered with us for a long time or this is your first time just follow the instructions on the street screen and we just want to say thank you so much for that um so i'm super excited for you guys today my roommate sam littlefield is going to be preaching for you she is the student's director at our menlo park campus and she's preached for them a bunch as well as our young adult sank ministry and she's so so talented so check out week two of the land between hi online campus it is an honor to be with y'all today my name is samantha littlefield but my friends call me sam and i am the student director at our menlo park campus which means that i get to work with middle school students and high school students on a weekly basis it's really really fun and a lot of energy as you would expect i'm excited to be sharing with you today in our land between series because i think that there's something just oddly unifying about wilderness seasons whether you are in a wilderness season now or you've been in a wilderness season before the reality is we've all experienced them or will experience them at some point in our lives and to start i really just want to be honest with you all i have been in a bit of a wilderness season for the past 18 months and if you're doing the math right now yes that does line up to about march of 2020 but as we all have our unique experiences and stories with kovid mine started with me moving right at the beginning of covid to come and work here at our menlo park campus with students i was so excited for everything that was ahead and uh getting to make new friends and living in the bay area uh honestly there were days and moments where i was really confused why god brought me to menlo at the time that he did now on a very practical level all of my needs have been met in this past season and the wilderness that i have experienced may not have felt like a wilderness to other people as we look at this past year and a half that we've all experienced i know that we all know people who have marriages that have failed family members who have passed away jobs that have been lost there have been some pretty clear things that made sense of why some people have felt like this has been a wilderness season and my situation doesn't necessarily have any of those things and really uh the reality is coming to the bay area when i did a ha it had a few perks one of them being that i didn't experience any traffic for the good first chunk of me living here no traffic on the roads that was pretty nice i got really familiar with uh my house plants and all of their watering schedule which i am still carrying through to today and in a way that only the lord could i got to online date during a global pandemic which somehow i got to share the hope of jesus with a handful of people that i matched with and like many of you i did the thing of making sourdough bread and shortly after learning how to make sourdough bread i i forgot and never really made it again um so the wilderness really wasn't and hasn't been all that bad but honestly as the months wore on and uh as there were days and weeks where everything felt so heavy i began to notice in myself how easy it was for me to complain and to offer up my uh my thoughts to the lord about the situation that i was in and the hardships that i felt like i was facing and in this wilderness season that i feel like i've had i i will say that i felt god's companionship like a way that i i never have experienced before and i i think today that's that's really what i want to talk about i want to talk about how we live in a paradox where we have a god that meets us in our complaining and he uses them to cultivate a deep intimacy with us the interesting thing about this past year is that we all experience the same thing a global pandemic together but each of our individual experiences have been so different and in many ways i think it's similar to the israelites wandering in in the the wilderness they wandered and every day every week that passed by different people were experiencing different pains or emotions in the process of the wilderness uh so i want to look through a little bit at the story of exodus and follow a bit of a thread of the israelites posture of their hearts as they interacted in the wilderness and to do that we're going to continue in the book of exodus uh and i do want to just take a a minute and remind you that we have a chat feature in uh in the online platform where if there's a if if this stirs anything in you as we are talking today and you want to pray with someone uh make sure and click that button and someone would be honored to pray with you because that is a gift that we have even in this online space to be able to hold one another up and pray for each other so for a moment i want us to think about the excitement and anticipation that the israelites would have had for their entrance into the promised land uh you know leaving egypt the promised land as they were told was a land flowing with milk and honey they would be free from slavery and the land that they were heading to seemed so much better than the land that they were in already i think we've all had similar moments like this haven't we looking ahead with anticipation for your next big vacation or the excitement around the start of a new job or maybe it's finally reaching retirement or meeting that someone special it's a time filled with hope and anticipation but you soon realize that it maybe wasn't all that you imagined it would be things begin to crumble around you your family maybe didn't seem uh to get your vision for vacation and they argued a lot more than you were hoping for the new job isn't stacking up to what you felt like it would be retirement finds you yearning for more and maybe the new person that you're dating who you thought just maybe would be the one ends up not thinking that you were the one disappointment and discouragement often follow what is stirred in you in those moments in those moments of of disappointment if you're anything like me coming up with a long list of my frustrations seems relatively easy for me to do and in seasons of disappointment offering my complaints to the lord and maybe telling him how i think things should have played out is relatively easy the israelites knew that feeling of disappointment well because after all the buildup for the anticipation of what was ahead the people wouldn't enter into the promised land for another 40 years the israelites would wander in the desert aimlessly waiting for a generation of people to die out so that they could enter into the land that was promised to them and it's rather discouraging when you think about it a promise given followed by years of wandering and waiting and you know as if the wandering wasn't hard enough there was something in the water of the community that uh made this season even more unbearable for the people of israel than it already was it was something that affected the old and the young the men and the women the leaders and the followers it was a spirit of grumbling and complaining that took root early in the israelites fleeing from egypt and it carried on through their entire time of wandering so to recap the story to make sure that we're all up to speed uh moses had exp had an experience with god at the burning bush where he's told to rescue the people from their bondage and he heads to egypt to free the people but when he arrives things don't really go as planned or maybe as he would have anticipated entering in the egyptians end up making life and the workload incredibly difficult for the israelites they take away uh straw they make them go find the straw and make their own bricks and they expect the same workload and output from them every single day so imagine for a second that you are an israelite a guy shows up and he says that he is going to take you into a land that was promised to your ancestors seems pretty great talks about a land uh flowing with milk and honey and it felt like a pretty good deal to be to be free from the slavery that they were in but after he starts speaking of these plans your your life gets incredibly difficult the workload gets harder and not to miss a beat the israelites in this moment when they recognize the parallel between moses coming and their workload getting harder we see one of the first complaints in the book of exodus it's in exodus 5 21. the israelites look towards moses and they say the lord look on you and judge because you have made a stink in the sight of pharaoh and his servants and have put a sword in their hand to kill us they are one for drama the israelites here with this complaint but what i want you to notice is that the relationship between moses and the israelites begins with the people complaining about the way things were happening despite the complaint moses persists and god shows an incredible amount of power as he brings the twelve plagues on the people of egypt after the plagues run through the israelites are finally given the green light from the egyptians to leave but as you might know pharaoh quickly changed his mind about letting the people leave i would imagine that the reality of his workforce completely abandoning him in this moment would have finally hit him and so he has his people pursue the israelites and we pick up the story in the 14th chapter of exodus and verse 10. when pharaoh drew near the people of israel lifted their eyes and behold the egyptians were marching after them and they feared greatly and the people of israel cried out to the lord they said to moses is it because there are no graves in egypt that you have taken us away to die in the wilderness what have you done to us in bringing us out of egypt is not this what we said to you in egypt leave us alone that we may serve the egyptians for it would have been better for us to serve the egyptians than to die in the wilderness the people had just seen god do wonders in egypt and the moment that they enter into a situation where fear is heightened they immediately turn their eyes back to the familiar and they doubt what god is calling them into at least if they died in egypt they would have been comfortable it was better to be alive in slavery than face death in the wilderness they say and to be honest put in this situation i want to confess that i would have been echoing this complaint fear would have felt cripplied as i heard the word of the egyptians pursuing us but the interesting thing about the complaint that the israelites offered was that uh it was a it was a complaint soaked in fear but it was met with god parting the red sea and the israelites walking through on dry land the egyptians are swallowed up by the water and israel's makes it safely across but what i think is important to note is that the habit that formed in the israelites to complain had taken such a deep root in that beginning stage of their wandering and in a fleeing egypt that they would soon forget about the provision of god through the parting of the red sea and they would forget about the power of the plagues it would all become so distant as they continued on their journey to the promised land and to track with it for a moment because we see this in scripture i want to look at a few of the complaints uh that followed shortly after god parted the red sea and rescued them from the hands of the egyptians first when it appeared that they had no water to drink in exodus 15 24 we see that and the people grumbled against moses saying what shall we drink when they grew hungry in exodus 16 verses 2 through 3 it said and the whole congregation of the people of israel grumbled against moses and aaron in the wilderness and the people of israel said to them would that we have died by the hand of the lord in the land of egypt when we sat by the meat pots and ate bread to the full for you have brought us out into the wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger and then again when they thirsted in exodus 17 3 but the people thirsted there for water and the people grumbled against moses and said why did you bring us out of egypt to kill us and our children and our livestock with thirst you know i i think it's helpful to note that most of these complaints were super valid uh you need food to eat and you need water to drink but the spirit of complaining had taken such a deep root inside the heart of the israelites and i'll admit uh in my own life it's really hard to take out the roots that have gotten deep inside of me or to change habits that have built up now this might not be something that uh you struggle with you know this could be an israelite problem and just a me problem i'm sure you never complain when you don't get what you want and of course i'm joking because the reality of our world is it is so easy to complain we've been conditioned in many ways to look at things with a really critical eye in order for us to have a really really good yelp review highly rated when we give all of our critiques about a restaurant that we went to or social media giving us a little bit of that iron courage behind the keyboard as we offer our opinions freely or it feels like often on the right and the left through media outlets they make their money off of complaining about the other side so like the israelites i think it can be really easy for us to find things to complain about but do you know what strikes me about the complaints the ones i read earlier that the israelites offered to the lord god's response again and again was to meet their needs he satisfied their needs he gave them water to drink he freed them from the bondage that enslaved them and he fed them he provided for their needs for the entire time in the land between and his response wasn't to withhold the very thing that they were asking for did you catch that they asked for water and food and to be freed from slavery and god did not withhold that thing he offered it to them he met them just as he provided the plagues in egypt to show his power he used the groanings in the wilderness as an opportunity to provide for their needs to show their power and to show his care i wonder if there is any part of you that has maybe withheld bits of yourself from the lord because you're unsure of how he will respond if god knew the depth of your fear if he knew the depth of your doubt what would he think i think if what we've already seen in exodus is any sign i think that god even though he already knows it wants to hear from you and that he would respond with care earlier i shared a verse about one of the first complaints that the israelites made that's recorded in the book of exodus remember it was when we started talking about how the israelites were enslaved in egypt and the things were getting difficult with making the bricks but that complaint that we that we saw earlier actually wasn't the first complaint in the book of exodus you see while the people were deeply enslaved in egypt before the partying of the red sea before the plagues before moses met with god at the burning bush we read in exodus 2 23-25 that the people of israel groaned because of their slavery and they cried out for help their cry for rescue from slavery came up to god and god heard their groaning and god remembered his covenant with abraham and with isaac and with jacob god saw the people of israel and god knew god knew he wasn't surprised about the state of their situation and from the very beginning god heard the groaning deep in the hearts of the israelites and so as i think about the land between and i as i think about the complaining i think about how comfortable the israelites felt with complaining in the wilderness because of the deep sense of knowing that god heard them from the very beginning they saw that god heard their cries and that he cared for them and i wonder if there's any part of you that has closed this this idea off or if there's a spot that maybe you've chosen to not bring back up to the lord because you think that maybe god thinks that you should be over whatever it is that's causing you concern but i think the land between offers a message for us all our gracious god wants to hear the depths of our groanings he's not far off he is present with us and he invites us to notice him in the in that reality so that he can help transform us into the people that he wants us to be as we look at this story i just want to take i want to offer two takeaways for us uh they are things that i have needed in this past wilderness season and they're things i've been reminded of and i think they are lessons that i will continue to learn in the years ahead and in different lands between in the future the first is a bit of an add-on to much of what i've been talking about already yes we have a god who wants to hear our complaints and he wants to hear and be invited into everything that's going on but i think that god cares about the posture of our hearts and our complaining because i think that there is a difference between complaining and grumbling complaining is communicating your feelings and emotions you know for the israelites that would have been not having water not having food it was the unbearable workload that they that they communicated out they were all fair complaints and i think that these type of complaints actually create intimacy it's inviting god into your everyday space and letting him know what's going on and how you're feeling but grumbling on the other hand has a bit of a selfish tone to it it's complaining as the israelites do in numbers 11 about their desire for meat because they are tired of the manna that god had been providing for them or maybe uh for me it could be grumbling all day at work about how tired i am without recognizing or acknowledging the fact that it may have played it had something to do with the fact that i was up late binge watching a favorite new show it's what we think of and that this grumbling of a spoiled child complaining on christmas because they didn't get exactly that thing that they wanted [Music] this kind of grumbling it creates distance god cares about the posture of our hearts and he welcomes our complaints because it creates intimacy with him it invites him into the life that we are experiencing now the second takeaway is a bit of a response to a reality that i think we have to name before closing our time together and it's this the israelites who complained they actually didn't enter into the promised land they didn't receive the thing that they thought that they would get when they entered into the wilderness and i think it would be tempting to throw out all that i've said so far because of that reality because in r a plus b equals c society i think it could be easy to look at the story of the israelites and think that maybe it would have actually been better for them to stay in the land of egypt sure they would have been in slavery but at least they would have had beds and they wouldn't have had to walk around so much and i think especially in our american society we want a happy ending where people worked hard and they receive a reward for their hard work honestly i want the generation of israelites who wandered for so long to make it to the land that was promised to them but they didn't and so in some regards i just wonder why does it even matter if god welcomes our complaints when we don't get the thing that we've hoped for it makes me think of the passage in hebrews 11 and 12 when it's talking about these heroes of the faith and it names noah and abraham and moses and at the very end of talking about all of these people it talks about how they did not receive the thing that had been promised to them they didn't receive what had been promised gosh it seems discouraging but as i have sat with this story for the past couple of weeks you know what i realized i realized that for the wanderers in the desert sure they they didn't walk into the promised land but they did walk with god through their entire time in the wilderness the desert wanderers had an opportunity to see god move again and again they were guided by a cloud by day by fire by night they were given prov they were provided food manna in the wilderness to eat every single day he provided for all of their needs and they were dependent upon his care complaint after complaint he provided and gave them an opportunity to experience a life wandering with him the reward wasn't promised land for them in that moment but their reward in the land between was deep provision of everything that they needed from a loving father and friend this is the message i want you to hear today sometimes the reward is not the promised land that we had hoped for but what we are gifted with is walking through life with god he is with us in all of our wanderings and all of our hard moments everything we experience he is going with us god met the complaints of the israelites with radical provision and i think that he meets our complaints with radical provision too just sometimes it doesn't come in the way that we expected he is a kind god who wanders with us and even when we don't see him moving or working we can hold confidently to the promises that he offers us his guidance and presence is talked about in isaiah 58 11 where it says the lord will guide you continually and satisfy your needs in parched places and make your bones strong and you shall be like a watered garden like a spring of water whose waters never fail god loves us too much to let us stay in the place of our complaints he'll guide us just as he guided the wandering israelites through different opportunities and invitations to turn to god so this week my invitation to you is to turn your gaze to god and allow him to come into your heart in some way this week friend it is good news that our god hears our complaints he hears our groanings and we can hold to the hope that no matter what land between we are in he is going with us thanks be to god let me pray gracious god we are grateful for the truths and the reality of your nearness to us in wandering seasons and god i pray as i even just think about my own heart and a tendency to turn my complaints into grumbles god would you meet me in that this week help me with the posture of my own heart help me be honest with you about the things that i'm going to going through but god help me also remember that you are with me help me remember that this week help my friends who are watching along today remember that god would you go before us would you remind us that you're going before us that you are going with us and draw us into deeper waters with you amen [Music] speak to me when the sign steals my voice you understand me you understand me [Music] and come to me in the valley of unknowns you understand me you understand me you understand me god you understand me so i throw all my gifts before you my doubts and fears don't scare you're bigger than i thought you were you're bigger than i thought so i stopped [Music] you're bigger than i thought you were you're bigger than i thought [Music] i believe [Music] [Music] help me reach the faith you understand me you understand [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] with the god of all creations [Music] so much greater [Music] i will rest in the father's hands leave the rest in the father's hands i will rest in the father's hands leave the rest [Music] is [Music] i will rest in the father's hands [Music] [Music] you're bigger [Music] is [Music] so much [Music] no you see i will rest in the father's hands leave the rest [Music] my doubts and fears don't scare you you're bigger than i thought you you're bigger than i thought i stepped on negotiations with the god of all creation you're bigger than i saw you were you're bigger than i thought you were [Music] well we hope that you enjoyed this message and i especially love sam's prayer at the end that's something we'll be thinking about this week and before you head into your week make sure that you stop by our annual meeting that's happening after the 10 30 service and register for fall laps because those kick off super excited about those we will see you there have a wonderful week [Music] you

Channel: Menlo Church

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Length: 46min 3sec (2763 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 19 2021