The Song of Moses // Exodus 15:1-21

[Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] all right well there's nothing like baptism sunday there's nothing really like the local church where we get to sing together and see change lives and one of the things that baptism always reminds me of as we were watching it today and thinking about it is uh it's always about commitment right i mean you think about what happens when somebody gets in the water and they we saw this 29 times over the last two weeks somebody gets in the water and then they say i will go they say this is the lord i will go wherever you ask me to go and i will do whatever you ask me to do which is a short way to say you are the lord and it just reminds us that what christianity's about is commitment i mean i don't know how you can read your bible and read things like follow me deny yourself take up your cross lose your life and you will find it in comparison to how much you love me hate your parents put your hand in the plow and don't look back i don't know how you can read things like that and think that christianity is about anything other than serious commitment and i just thank god that in the in the life of our church we're about four years old now in the life of our church we have just had a high commitment culture and i don't know fully how it happened i don't know if it could have if we could do it again if we tried part of it was our launch team of 100 people 30 who moved here they just said we're going to be all in we're going to be all in with our time our talent our treasure we're going to connect our time our money our resources to the people of god and the mission of god in a strategic consistent timely manner and what's been incredible is what we've seen over the last well four years and one of the things that we've that we have seen god use the most is our weekender in helping people get connected and committed so let me just say this we've got one chance left in 2020 we keep saying it we're trying to get out of 2020 as quickly as possible but we've got one weekender left december 4th and 5th so if you've said hey you know what i want 2021 to be different part of the way that we it's different is we connect meaningfully to other people who love god love us love the bible want the best for us and so we think that's going to be an incredible time december 4th and 5th it's really almost at capacity already we're going to open up a few more spots as we look to december if there's any of you you can go online or outside second thing i want to say just real briefly is to talk just for a moment about the election it's like well you know what am i going to say it's like i'm not even sure why i know now because i've done this three times but i'm not i'm not even sure in the sense that what i normally do is on mondays i start to write the sermon for the next sunday and so i sat down monday and i don't know what to say because the election didn't happen then tuesday after seven i don't know what's gonna happen and then i thought well maybe on wednesday and i didn't and then thursday i thought nope and then friday nope and then saturday night and then so i wrote it this morning okay and i changed it before i came out and i'm scared of but but i say all that to say right that's kind of what this year's been like it's like 2020 has been just a crazy year in which it's been a lot of bad news a lot of ups and downs of course coveted everything else like that and then as of yesterday biden says he won trump says it's not over so what is the role of the church and this is interesting we always bifurcate between what is the role of christians which can be different than what is the role of an organized church what is the role of an institutional church and here's what we know at one level we can't be passive right the church can never say politics doesn't matter it's like we all agree on on the other side of politics like politics matters right who's in charge matters who your governor is matters right we all know that at the same time we we don't want to be passive say it doesn't matter ideas do have consequences elections do have consequences but we also don't want to be partisan partisan is where we completely associate with one political party and they they they are god's party and they have it right we can't do it either so what are we doing just so you know and this is what i encourage you to do to continue to be prayerful and prophetic that that is the role of the church prayerful is we are going to pray for all political parties and all politicians and prophetic is we are going to speak the word of god to all issues and all political parties and to call out every type of politician and every type of policy that would go against what the word of god says so we say this again and again but we don't know what the next two months are even gonna look like now in light of just all the crazy that's happened so and we really believe this what a divided nation needs you hear me sales full-time is a unified church and here's what a unified church looks like it's what's called an attractive alternative isn't that beautiful isn't that what you'd want your life to be like if you're really a christian that's what you want your life to be attractive like there's something about you that's different and it's an alternative and it's like it's different than other people because we behave and we believe differently because our hopes aren't ultimately here so let's pray for that and then let's this is what i'm excited about i had a mentor pastor this week say the pastors need to lead their churches to have to tell them this there's a more important conversation to be had than politics we may be the only people on earth to say that there's a more important conversation that we need to be having that's not political it's about the gospel when we're gospel people so let's pray lord i just thank you right now i thank you for the opportunity to see baptisms all day i thank you for a culture of high commitment where i have been challenged whether it's people coming back online or in this room to make weekend worship a priority in their lives what i thank you for those who've come and who've served lord thank you for those who continue to fuel and fund the mission with their generosity well i just thank you for the people who've lifted our church up our staff up our pastors in prayer lord we want to continue to be prayerful and prophetic as we think about our nation our country and our government help us as a church in your name we pray amen all right with our time left we are going to be looking at exodus chapter 15. type 2 turn to exodus 15. i'm gonna catch everyone up because you know if you're new it's a great time to be new right every week every service we have new people in here and we're really excited whether you're watching online new or you're in this room new let me catch everybody up where we've been we've been in the book of exodus for about 10 weeks we've covered a lot let me sum it up you have moses and god's providence and providence just means god's hand and plan in the life of moses and it takes god this may encourage you it takes god 80 years to get moses where he needs to be some of you are like i want to get to medical school i want to get the residency okay it took moses 80 years to get where he needed to be and then and then the second part of the book or the second part that we've talked about so far is moses and pharaoh and with this we love that that's the scenes that you know moses goes he confronts pharaoh there's the plagues we all know that the ten plagues and which leads to the passover in the red sea which is what we spent the last two weeks looking at and it's interesting because the passover is where god says i will accept a substitute instead of you and the red sea is where god says i will show you so you can see that i'm going to judge your enemies well do you know that the cross and the resurrection are very much like the passover in the red sea there are two events that are connected it's like you know a lot of times we'll say jesus died for you the only thing we don't say is and he also rose from dead and that's really important because why is the resurrection important well how do we know that god accepted what jesus did for sinners the answer is the resurrection and so what i want us to see today this is this is where the whole shift in the story starts is in exodus 15 verse 1 if you'll turn to type 2 that what we see is what do christians do now that we are completely free we're free to live for christ we're free from the penalty of sin we're free if we want to be from the power and the pollution of sin in our lives so i want you to see in chapter 15 verse 1 here's what they do we'll just read the first part of verse 1. it says this then moses and the people of israel and they estimate that it's about two to three million people we get that number because later in deuteronomy it says six hundred thousand men went out they estimate with women and children it's somewhere between two and three million so that's a quarter of the population of north carolina that's a lot of people okay it says this then moses and the people of israel sang this song to the lord now we're going to talk a lot about this song and if you're kind of a bible trivia guy you'll you'll find this or a bible trivia girl you'll find this interesting that this is the first song in the bible so exodus 15 is the first song in the bible uh later we're gonna see you know we get a whole book of solves but this is the first of those but here's the principle before we get into all that this is such an important principle and many of you you know this is one of our younger services many of you are young in the service and this is really important to understand um this first principle that arises in exodus 15 and it's this that the first thing that we need to do is worship in the wilderness that's literally the first thing so they're going to worship in the wilderness and what is the wilderness well we know what the word of this is for them it's like it's a really hard place to be and they're going to be there for 40 years right and when they first worship in the wilderness they're like well praise the lord i'm worshiping in the wilderness god just saved me what they don't know is how long they're going to be in the wilderness they're going to be in the wilderness for 40 years and so what a wilderness is it's any time that there's pain or the mundane in your life it's a wilderness right and covet has created for many people wildernesses right i'll tell you common wilderness is that we we see in the life of our church in our city in america um here's one wilderness i hate my job it's so mundane you would not believe particularly how many men hate their jobs right and by the way i mean a job is something you wouldn't do if somebody wasn't paying you right that's the definition of a job right some of us get careers most of us get jobs most people cannot stand how mundane their job is like well what do you do it's like well who knows the answer to that there might be 10 things you do but the first thing you do is i recognize you and lord i worship you i want to be faithful i want to trust you some people their marriages are wildernesses i mean i would say at the size of our church right now we probably get an email every week from somebody whose marriage is in the wilderness can you please help us find counseling i just found this about my wife i just found out this about my husband and i don't know where a lot of this is what it feels like for people i don't know where i am anymore okay because i've told you guys this before but when something happens like that in your life when you look back the past doesn't even make sense anymore because usually there's lying involved you're like i don't even know what's true anymore so then you're in the wilderness well what do you do it's like well who knows what you do there's so many things to do that's part of the problem it's like well here's what you do you start worshiping well how about illness and injury and that's really painful and that's definitely going to happen to you or somebody you love at some point in your life and it will be a wilderness it's actually worse when it happens to somebody else that you love you've all to do until you're walking through that there are so many different types of wilderness and the first thing we do is you say i'm going to worship in the waters and this is why it's so important because most people think and you would think this it makes sense most people would think that the deepest worship happens when they feel it the most you know like if the band's doing really and there's a lot of people singing and it's very emotional and you know and we get the liver quiver shivers you know what i'm talking about that we all get that we love okay when you get then we think and we praise god for that as we love to come together we love to sing loudly we love to worship the lord we love to experience that but here's what you'll find is that the deepest worship often happens when you don't feel like it which is like you know we don't do particularly millennials especially don't do anything they don't feel like doing but it's the worship of the will and i'll tell you i've seen this as i there was a lady back when we were at golder about two years ago after service lady comes up to me she says hey i never really met her before she says hey i'm so-and-so she says my friend is dying at wake baptist wake baptist hospital would you please go talk to her and i said well yeah well and then i went up this afternoon there's two services at night we didn't do four services back then i had some energy and i went went up to wake wake baptist and i sat with this lady and you know i met her two young boys and i realized that she had cancer and was going to die in about two or three weeks and she said i just wanted to pray with somebody she was a strong christian she said would you pray with me and i don't know if you've ever prayed with somebody who's going to die in a few weeks i mean it's different the way they pray she was grieving that she wasn't going to be a grandmother and this stuff's real you know people deal with it and they she was she was she was wrestling she wanted to see the lord but she didn't want to leave her family there was a you know what they're one of the things we'll get into songs one of the things she really she wanted was music and she actually told me this song's really got me through this and this song really expresses this and if we actually were able to and it wasn't me it was the worship team but we were actually able to record a song that she wanted on her on an iphone and give it to her for her to listen to in the hospital and she passed away two weeks later and and i'm just telling you that if you want to be an attractive alternative to the world you worship god when you don't feel like it you worship god when terrible things happen even then right if you know the story of king david we won't go there right now but i think it's first or second corinthians 12 or samuel 12. um david finds out that his son dies he's a baby that dies and it says he got up he washed his face and he went and he worshipped the lord it's like wow what kind of person does that how do you even think about that i knew a guy that was telling the story he said that there um he had gotten this terrible diagnosis for his son in the hospital and he said he said i got the diagnosis and i walked down the hall he said and i the the elevator doors opened up he said and i crawled into the elevator and i crawled into the corner and i just prayed to the lord and i said lord i don't know what you're going to do it was the deepest experience of worship he ever had in his life it wasn't when he felt everything and so this is such a fundamental thing because it's like well if you can worship in the wilderness you can worship anywhere and so we're going to we're going to get to see this i want you to see what happens we're going to see a ton of principles partly what i want to do today is walk you through exodus 15 partly what i want to do today is to show us the importance of song and worship in the life of the church we had a lady after the 11 o'clock service been in church her whole life good godly lady she said thank you i never understood why we sing as a church i never really understood the why and so i want to talk about that for a little bit first i want you to see verse 15 verse 1 again we're going to look at this this verse in great depth then moses and the people of israel it's interesting not just moses it doesn't say moses saying and the people of israel looked bored which is what most worship leaders would say you know is is the experience of people it doesn't say it doesn't you know i've read the whole bible i've read all the verses on worship nowhere does it say look bored say nothing and hold your cup of coffee but that would be a common experience right and so what's interesting is the whole idea is that we are to sing together now this is interesting because the atlantic uh during cove i think it was about april the atlantic came out with an article on you know not a christian magazine um the atlantic came out with an article on the importance of singing because that was one of the first things in kova they said let's you know not do for a season and so they they kind of said okay well what are the effects of singing and guess what they found out that when you sing with other people it's a natural antidepressant it immediately helps your immune system somehow hormones are a relief that help you bond with other people it's like i love it when science catches up with the bible okay that's right because the bible's been saying that for a long time you know and that's actually and that's why it's very deep because you know the definition of deep is works at multiple levels of analysis that's like that's why something's deep it works everywhere and so what's so deep about singing is it's like spiritually it connects us to god relationally connects us to other people biologically it's good for us right and so we love this thing in our culture we love singing right i mean i was thinking the other day it's like you go out to i mean i remember being a kid you go out to the baseball game and it's like what do you do at the beginning baseball game everybody stand and sing it's like this is strange but okay well it's like what is that all about it's like well it's we're singing the song of our nation and then what's what's even more interesting right i remember like seventh inning it's like my dad takes the baseball game okay in the seventh inning we're also gonna sing we're singing again and you get you stand up and you sing and think about what you're saying take me out to the ball game what's that about it's like i'll tell you what it's about the same thing we do together here it's like i love this so much i want to sing about it with everybody else who loves it that's worship i mean think about so so you know you think about the love for broadway the love for musicals the love for hamilton right i mean when hamilton came out on disney plus one lady i knew she said in the first two weeks she watched it 11 times and you know what i said to that i understand i mean it's not good it's three hours long but it is that good you know and then i was reading this article about it and land manuel who who wrote it okay i read that he made 42 million dollars between writing it producing it selling it to disney and you know i thought he deserves every penny because if you actually know what he did he read a book that most of us could not make it through a thousand page book on alexander hamilton and then he took that and decided i'm going to make a story that's for the most part historically rooted and it's going to be full of song and i'm going to bring in multiple genres of hip-hop and we love it it's just like we love song is such a deep part of who we are what do moms do with their kids immediately sing to them what do kids do all day long they just like skip around and sing they sing songs that make no sense my kids will be on the toilet just singing i'm like what could you be singing about in there they just but that's what they do right there's just this singing element to us and so there's there's song and culture and then there's song in the scriptures i want to understand song on the scriptures because song shows up very early in other words a lot of people think if you read genesis 1 in the original hebrew it's poetry so many theologians think maybe god sung the world into existence which is pretty which is a pretty cool thought and then music shows up very no this is the first song exodus 15. music shows up very early music shows up in genesis chapter four so you know adam and eve followed us in genesis 3 genesis chapter four musical instruments are invented so we've been singing and dancing uh for and performing music for a very long time and then what happens is uh is then you go all the way through the scriptures and they're singing massive songs and massive celebrations so much so that you have the book of psalms which is something to think about the largest book in the center of your bible is a bunch of songs that express every human emotion possible which is really incredible because like you don't hear us talk about lament much but but i think it's a third of the psalms are lament which is why in covid you saw a return by a lot of churches and a lot of christians to the psalms it's like we're trying to learn how to lament we don't know how to lament life's been so good for so many of us for so long we don't even have the category of grief and lament built in and so what we have here is is you see the singing now you can you can think about a couple different ways when we get to the new testament we're introduced to mary who she has jesus what what happens in luke chapter two as soon as she finds out she's pregnant she sings a song it's like sometimes that's all you can do you're so happy it's like all you could do is sing or or how about paul it's like well all right paul and silas you're in jail which i mean these jails were terrible these jails you only got fed if your friends were willing to identify with you and bring you food i mean these jails were terrible and they were chained to each other and many also think usually you're trained to a guard and so i think it's act 16 what do paul and silas do when they're in jail they start singing hymns it says so much so that the guard because our we'll get to this our singing is missional our singing is part how we witness to the world the guard says what the heck is going on here they end up leading the guard to christ how about jesus christ himself do you know that it says that in mark 14 when jesus left the lord's supper so judas leaves to betray him it's him and his love and friends he says let's sing a hymn. read it it's in mark 14. it's an interesting thought jesus and his 11 friends singing and acapella him together because he basically needed to sing before he headed to the garden god himself i want you to see this in zephaniah chapter 3 verse 17 it says this the lord your god is in your midst a mighty one who will save you he will rejoice over you with gladness he will quiet you by his love he will exalt over you with loud singing we think because we're made in god's image and god's things but here's the next thing what you see i want you to understand singing in the life of the church so it's interesting that again a lot of people is like how do how does the average christian think about singing is it what we do to warm up for the sermon that's how a lot of people view it i need to sing can we sing two or three or four songs i can kind of warm up the ceramics of some people think of it some people think it's what we do while some of you show up late okay that that's very very common right okay i'm just gonna you know they sing for the first 15 minutes so i'm going to kind of show up and it's interesting because matt chandler who's a pastor in dallas texas of a large church he said that his dirt church was growing um he was an incredible teacher preacher he still is and he said that people it would frustrate him and frustrate his whole staff because in their elders and everybody because what happened is everybody would come just in time for his sermon and they would miss all the singing and so he said one sunday he switched it he started he started the sermon almost immediately and they did a quick thing and then they got a sermon and and they started to do that and they moved three or four songs to their end he said what started to happen is as he would say all right he'd finish his sermon he said let's pray he said as he would pray he would see people started to pack up and leave and he just said i guess what's happened is the the american church we don't know what we have all priorities for but maybe we have a priority for the teaching of the world we don't often have a priority for the singing for the worship by song of the church which is partly how we respond to what god said do you know that there are 50 50 5-0 50 commands in the new or sorry in the whole bible for you to sing which is interesting it's like it's commanded like there's you know normally we think of commands as like don't do this right don't look at that and don't covet and don't lie and don't cheat don't steal and you know we're like this is actually a command for your joy that you would come together that you would sing and so what i want to talk for just a little bit about what we're doing in worship and in singing because because when we talk about worship sometimes we talk about worship like sometimes people think of singing as uh as worship and everything else not as worship right a little bit like i went to church and we worshipped and then heard a sermon and then saw baptism and then we worshiped some more and then there were some announcements it's like actually all of that was supposed to be worship because worship is when your faith expresses itself in obedience or adoration that's the definition of worship so and that's helpful to know it's like so your faith any so you can worship your whole life that's the whole point it's like all of life can be worshipped because any time i'm expressing my faith in obeying god or in adoration that would be singing or praising god that's worship and so what i want us to see is if you go back with me to exodus chapter 15 verse 1 i want to show you one more thing it says this ah this is halfway through i will sing to the lord so this is moses saying this with all the people i will sing to the lord for he has triumphed gloriously the horse and his rider he has thrown into the sea so the first thing we're seeing is that what we ultimately sing is the word of god in the events of god that's what we sing so this is here's how we say it here and this is really how we think about things and i want you to understand how we as a church are intentional and how we think about things uh we would say it's always about substance over style and worship it's always about the content of what we're singing over the form of how we're singing it and this is a super important conversation to have i mean not not i mean i thank god there's no division over this in our church but how many churches split or splants or whatever you're gonna call it okay over over worship wars right and it's interesting because what happens with this is if you if you'll be a historic we always talk about here bible saturated historically rooted globally informed solves like most of your problems because if you realize historically so this is interesting because people say you know oh man the music's too loud well guess who says the music's too loud old people every every time right every generation i mean that's just that that is actually the answer the answer is young people in 40 years will i mean that's kind of the answer but what's interesting about that is do you know the organ is like literally the loudest instrument on earth i mean that thing is i mean that thing is so loud right the same people who say i don't want it loud i want the organ the organ is the scariest loudest instrument i've ever heard and what's there so just think about that and then think about this the organ was taken out of the bar well she didn't know that and when it was taken out of all that's so ungodly do you know that when john newton wrote amazing grace he wrote it to a drinking song so people could easily remember it it's like it would be helpful to know these things right do you know that when they put pews in the church people thought that was ungodly because you're supposed to stand the whole time in worship because that's how you under the word of god somebody like thank god they have views right um when they took um when they when they decided to give us hymn books people thought you don't do that if it's really worship you memorize the songs and you sing them when we got when a lot of churches went from the hymnbook to the screen people thought that's ungodly because if i can't see the entire song and all of it stands us all at once it's not going to affect me the same way and of course now there's you can't put anything behind the songs that moves i mean it's just we're all goofy okay when it comes to worship stuff and that's part of just admitting it right i mean anytime somebody says i didn't like the worship i'm like you know i don't know i say this out loud my thought is good we weren't worshiping you because ultimately it's like it's not ultimate about that we want to make sure the content is correct the other thing so i said historically rooted globally informed so here's another helpful thing if you go around the world you people get this so i was at a church for a while great church but a church that had a very nuanced very sophisticated form of worship i'm talking flute i'm talking saxophone i'm talking i mean just all of it how you had to dress when you're on stage all these different things great church otherwise i mean just but but but tunnel vision on on on a certain type of you know they if 1992 came back they were ready i mean they were i mean they were ready for it and and and uh seriously and um but what was interesting is it was also the most missional church i'd ever been a part of and so uh up until that point and so basically what happened is whenever these people would go on mission to india or africa or china or wherever they would love the worship there which would be completely different in style because they could get it when they made the massive transition there they would get it oh that makes sense that they would have different drums here and they would make those sounds and they would hit the beat like that they would sing the songs twice as long and they repeat the words so much and and so sometimes it's just helpful to go okay if i'm a historically rooted globally informed person and so so just so you guys know that's the heart we are wanting to sing everything we do is do we sing the word yes do we preach the word yes do we see the word yes do we pray the word yes everything we do is informed by the word it's always substance over style now here's the next thing i want you to see if you look at me at verse 2 it says this the lord is my strength and my or i'm sorry um go back to verse 15 chapter 15 verse 1 i will sing to the lord for he has triumphed gloriously the horse and his rider he has thrown into the sea so here's what i want you to see that the object of our worship this is very simple but sometimes right it's sometimes it's going back to the very basics and going this is what this is all about the heart of worship is praising and honoring god above all else right they don't sing to themselves about themselves but it's interesting i mean most worship today right not worship most music day it's just all about the self right all about the self desires all about what we want all about what we've done and so what's interesting is is they god is the obvious of their worship even though it was moses that they saw save them so what they saw if you go back you don't need to go there now if you go back to chapter 14 moses puts the staff out he's kind of the hero the waters come crashing back down and again they may have thanked moses and they should thank moses but they ultimately give honor to god and this is a powerful principle it's like you know if you ever met jk rowlands who you know wrote harry potter it would be really weird if you met her said i love harry potter can i see the laptop you wrote it on she'd be like well i'm the auth i mean i'm the author but we want to think if if i had a you know surgery done afterwards i said to the doctor hey did you use scalpels yeah can i thank them you know it would be i mean now again we should thank each other we should give honor we should thank the instrument that god uses but we should give god the ultimate glory and actually one of the if you want to begin to worship everywhere you need to begin to see god everywhere you need to be so martin luther famous monk become pastor theologian all that he used to say god wears different masks so you know he used to say you know got so we'd say it this way like you know you go to the grocery store and that's how god provides for you and if you were like man it's so incredible that i can i mean the grocery store could you imagine the apostle paul walking to the grocery store he would be completely overwhelmed or someone 300 years ago walk in the grocery store it's like lord thank you for providing for me and it's so it's so meaningful fun is a shallow word but it's so incredible if you begin to say god i see everything in my life that's from you every good gifts from above tell you a story when i first moved here from durham to winston-salem now i gotta be honest durham's a real foodie city okay so i came here i know this is gonna sound kind of snooty when i say this but when i came here i could find no good chinese food and now there's really great chinese food i had it really close to me in durham and so for the first like three years here i was trying they tried this place when i tried it was okay try this place and i tried those okay and and then one day i saw a new szechuan on peter's creek and this little biscuit built place had become you know this is a chinese place and i remember walking in there and i thought wonder what this is going to be like and i walk in there and as soon as i get inside everybody's asian and nobody speaks english and i was like yes this is it you know exactly what i'm talking about this is it i know this and then i looked around and the only people eating there were chinese people i was like i'm home so i so i i immediately ordered the food and they gave it to me and it looked just like the food from durham when it was you know from the china place and i can distinctly remember getting in my car going home and being like lord you did this you knew what i needed i mean i've thought about not moving because of the proximity of my house i mean if i were to do that to that chinese restaurant i just love it but it's just it's just it's just i'm so grateful and it's so fun it's so deep to go i'm not just grateful that that i'm actually you know i'm kind of joking here but i'm being serious i'm actually grateful to something more than that i'm grateful to a god who would even create that type of food so so first it's god centered second it's gospel censored look at look at verse two the lord is in my this is the personal nature of worship it has to go to the personal nature the lord is my strength and my song and he has become my salvation now do you see what he says there he says strength song and salvation some of you say kyle where did you get the idea the idea of alliteration from it's biblical it's right there do you see moses does it strength song and that was a joke didn't go very well um i'm in the line of moses that's what i'm trying to show you um so basically here's the big idea guys that they are singing about their salvation which is incredible i mean this is what christians do christians don't sing about how great we are now this is interesting i had a friend who during 9 11 he was a campus minister and he said that right after 9 11 they got everybody together he said and they said the staff said we're going to sing a new song and the song was called we are who we've been waiting for and it was just it was like the classic american modern spirit we're going to solve our own problems there was no looking up to god there was only looking around to each other that's not what christians do christians say i will sing a salvation now this is important because here's why their salvation was or here's why their worship was so deep they looked at the red sea and they saw what should have happened to them they looked and they saw the judgment of god had fallen on the egyptians and it should have fallen on them now the height of your worship will flow from the depth of your understanding of theology of salvation and of what god's done for you so i'll tell you tell your story there was a pastor and he was walking a young new man who'd just become a christian through uh their membership class this is a different church and he said that the the young man said hey i'm trusting the lord i believe jesus died for my sins i want to follow him i believe the bible is the word of god i want to join the church i just don't believe in hell and he said don't join our church he said what i want you to do is i want you to take about two months and i just want you to read about hell i want you to read about judgment i want you to read about the wrath of god i want you to read about eternal punishment i just want you to and i want you to look what jesus says because no one talked about how more than jesus and i want you to look at church history and i want you and he said about two or three months later that young man came back and said i've read about it i've studied it and i do believe in eternal punishment now and i just want to say thank you so much because my appreciation for the cross and my appreciation for jesus christ is so much deeper because i really realize what he saved me from and so that's what christian's saying about we that this is why it's like how could you not raise your hands how could you not yell out loud how could you not be thankful for what god saved you from now it says three things it says he's our salvation our strength and our song so salvation is is you know that's christianity 101 god saved me right that's that's what we hope our kids get it you know eight years old five years old whatever it is 10 years old that from a young age i understand god saved me but the second thing in the next phase is god is my strength right some christians never really understand this they have to usually have to go through some type of suffering or they have to deal with some type of sin where they have to realize really realize i've come to an end to myself i had a guy this weekend say it wasn't until my parents got divorced that i really realized i needed god he said i was a christian but when i real when my parents got divorced i realized like this is real and i can't he said and he said to me he goes i think every man and every woman needs a breaking point in their life where they realize they can't do this on their own and that's where god says god isn't just my salvation god is my strength and then what the i think what you get to eventually is god is my song in other words he's not just what i need to get through life and he saved me from hell but i actually enjoy him and sin would not be an escape to pleasure it would actually be an escape from pleasure and i wouldn't want to do anything that would break the fellowship that i have with god so he sings these things it's gospel-centered it's god-centered and i want to show you what it says in exodus 15 verse 2. it says this my father's god he continues to sing and very very personal my father's god and i will exalt him so it's it's gospel centered it's god centered it's generational in thinking so he says he says i'm going to worship the same person that my mom worshipped and my mother's mom worshipped and my dad worshipped and my father worshipped it's malta this is by the way i want you to you know this is why we sing old songs and this is why we sing new songs right this is why we sing hymns that are it's really amazing to sing songs like when you sing the doxology i won't sing it for you right now but which is which is that you know that basically where you talk when you sing about the father and the son and the holy spirit that i think is was written in 1674. so when you realize that that was written 100 years before america was founded and that that's so powerful to think christians have been singing this song or certain songs for hundreds and hundreds of years but also every new generation wants to in their own style based on their own experiences based on the word of god write their own songs and so you see that he says my father's god you see the generational nature of it this is also part of what what part of how we make theology memorable and portable is we encapsulated in song right one of the things that we say on our staff team is songs are sermons people remember which is kind of offensive to me just a little bit okay and i understand that i understand that most i mean it's a humbling thing to realize that most of what i tell you you will not remember okay but you will forget but there's something about a song that can say hey let's put music to this let's put a motion to this let's think very creatively let's package it in three to five minutes let's put on your spotify playlist let you take it with you everywhere there you go and so that's the generational part here's what look at look at verse three here this is the first i love things in the bible that are surprising to us in verse three is the first thing that they sing about god after about their salvation this is the first attribute or character of god ever sung about in the bible here it is the lord is a man of war it's like wow wasn't expecting that i thought i was hoping for god is love right i mean that's kind of what people think the lord is a man of war the lord is his name pharaoh's chariot and his host he cast into the sea and his chosen officers were sunk in the red sea the floods covered them they went down into the depths like a stone so he's like the number one thing that he worships god for and one of the main things we should worship god for is he fights our battles for us he fights our enemies for us that we had an enemy satan sin death hell the wrath of god and he took care of those enemies and a lot of people sometimes go well it was the god and kind of a classic misunderstanding of scripture is is the god in the old testament like this angry warrior it was like his teenage years his middle school years and then he matured and you know in the new testament he's like he's like a more mature version of himself and he's not angry anymore and he's not wrathful and he's not judgmental and it's like you can't read the accounts in the gospels of jesus christ and how he dealt with religious people and the demonic and think that there's not still a warrior christ you can't read the end of the book of revelation where it says jesus christ is coming back with a sword on a horse and he's wearing white if you wear white to a fight you're winning okay you don't normally wear white to a fight you're winning okay and so we have this kind of idea and this is really powerful because what will create deep worship in you is to realize god has fought for you and will fight for you like i have seen in 15 years of ministry that women will put up with almost anything in their husbands if they actually believe that they love them and will fight for them and we'll fight for their children they'll put up with the laziness and the goofiness and whatever else it is if they believe at the end of the day i'm fight i'm tender with my family i'm tough for my family i had a guy after this is a neat thing about doing this a couple times i get some response and can talk about a couple things i had a guy after the second service come up to me he said thanks for talking about the idea of the warrior he says i'm just convicted that that's what i need to be for my family that's what my family needs he's got young kids he's like that's what i need to be i need to be tender with my family i need to be tough for my family and i have a warrior god no now i want to talk particularly to the men for a second because i realized one of the reasons that men men are you know don't sing very often okay i would if we if we could probably you know pull i would imagine you know in this room when we stand and sing it's going to be much more natural for the women to sing usually than for the men to sing well why is that well there's multiple reasons for that one of the reasons for that is the misunderstanding of who god is it's like men do not want to sing romantic love songs to jesus and they shouldn't want to that's weird i'm serious i mean that would not that would not there's no precedent in church history for singing romantic love songs of jesus none of the old hymns would be like that at all there is precedent for worshiping jesus christ worshiping god the father as our dad as our warrior king and most men christianity begins to make sense for them when they realize god is my father and he's a good warrior king and he fights my battles for me and what i need to do as i head out in life is ask him to help me fight these battles that i have ahead of me and believe he will i was talking to a guy who said my son's playing uh 10 year old baseball he said he's not not the greatest pitcher right now and he gets really scared up there you know if you've played sports at a young age and it's like and he said you know i've been telling him i said when you get on the mound and you get scared you ask god to be your warrior king and you say god you're you're a fighter would you strengthen me it's like wow what does that do to a 10 year old what kind of vision of god and vision of life does that give them it also reminds us that god's not tolerant that idea of god being tolerant is wrong people that god's tolerant no no god's patient that's a different thing god's patient god will put up with you for a long time god is very slow to anger but don't take patience for tolerance god does not approve of all lifestyles of all sinful decisions or any sinful decisions god does not approve of all perspectives and so we have this beautiful picture of god as a warrior king which leads to what's next look at verse six it says this your right hand that's not to be offensive to you left-handed people out there okay there's but there's only i mean historically ten percent of the population is left-handed so right hand just meant your strong hand your dominant hand uh your right-hander lord glorious in power your right-handed lord shatters the enemies in the greatness of your majesty you overthrow your adversaries you send out your fury it consumes them like stumble stubble at the blast of your nostrils and this is interesting the bible will often use anthropological language anthropomorphic maybe it's the word language to describe god it's it's god doesn't have nostrils it's it's human language to help us understand who god is it's how god condescends by describing himself to us at the blast of your nostrils the waters piled up the flood stood up in a heap the deeps congealed in the heart of the sea the enemy said and by the way part of the reason you want god to be a warrior king is if you really believe you have a real enemy you know like if you really believe that satan is real that means that there is a evil intelligent person who hates the church okay and that is very very true and you'll even meet humans like that evil intelligent don't like you that's a scary place to be in very scary place to be and so that's where you say god will you fight for me will you strengthen my hands right this is why this is the language of the bible with spiritual warfare the enemy said i will pursue i will overtake i will divide the spoil my desire shall have its fill of them i will draw my sword my hand shall destroy them you blew with your wind the sea covered them they sank like lead in the mighty waters who is like you o lord among the gods that's the heart of worship god there's no one like you who is like you majestic and holiness awesome and glorious deeds doing wonders you stretched out your right hand the earth swallowed them you have led in your and this is interesting the first mention of this word in the whole bible which will become a major theme steadfast love this is the first word mention of the word has said which is a love of the will it's a love of decision it's a love that says i'm not going anywhere it's amazing that god will both give us action and affection in the same idea god's a man of action god of war a man of affection you have led in your steadfast love the people whom you have redeemed you have guided them by your strength to your holy abode i won't spend a lot of time on this except to say this what what christians have always done what and we see this in the example of the first song in the bible is that we sing the story of what god's done for us we and now they had they didn't have a lot of stories to sing they had their one experience with the plagues and god salvation we have all of scripture to sing the story you know the story has many parts there's the story of creation so you'll hear us sing about that god creating the world and how glorious he is and how glorious all the creation is and how great his character is other times we'll sing about our sin that's going to be one of the strangest things right if people come for the first time if you're if you're here for the first time uh what we do about when we say so what the world does with sin is either we don't talk about it or we boast in it that's what the world does i don't talk about it i hide it until it blows up my life and destroys my life uh or i boast in it i sing about it really really loudly and i act like there's nothing wrong with it what the church does is say we're going to actually really confess our sins part of what we do in singing is public confession of our sin when you sing come now fountain and you say my heart is so prone to wonder and it's so prone to leave the god that i love that's a confession and every time i sing and i'm like that's true and i needed to sing that and then there's the cross and when so many times you'll hear us we'll try to sing the the epicenter of what we sing about is the cross of christ and the truth is in heaven is also the epicenter of what we say about the lamb who was crucified that's what they sing in revelation 5. in heaven forever we will sing about how jesus christ saved us on the cross which leads to the final thing we sing about look at verse 14. the peoples have heard they tremble pengs have seized the inhabitants of philistia now are the chiefs of edom dismayed trembling seizes the leaders of moab all the inhabitants of canaan have melted away so it's basically saying other people have seen how great god is t terror and dread fall upon them because of the greatness of your arm they are still a stone till your people o lord pass by till the people pass by whom you have purchased and look at verses 17 and 18. so that was kind of more of the story and its implication verse 17 18 you will bring them in and plant them in your own mountain the place o lord which you have made for your abode the sanctuary o lord which your hands have established the lord will reign forever and ever the final thing christians sing about is our future hope what's interesting is if if you look at places where the church is a minority or the church is heavily persecuted guess what the church sings a lot about heaven and the second coming of jesus which is why americans sing almost never about heaven or the second coming of jesus because that's not often where our hope is and what's interesting is we one of our desires along with having substance the word of god is to have a span of emotion when we sing there was a very famous article written multiple years ago called what can miserable christians sing it's an interesting question the whole idea is hey life is really really hard and if you walked into the average church everybody seems like they're just saying these happy songs about how life how great life is and what we try to always say is i really i try to think this in my mind that every week in our church this somebody got engaged and somebody got some really bad news about their parents something like that i mean that would be the truth somebody got into the medical school they wanted to or the residency that they wanted to or he asked her out or who knows and it's really really exciting and then somebody else you know is worried about a lump they discovered on their neck or found out they're being you know demoted when they thought they might get a raise or found out that they still can't get pregnant or stay pregnant and part of what the church does is it creates a language in song this is why the psalms have so many different rhythms to them and so many different elements of emotion to them but we want to sing songs that say we can all of us can grieve together all of us grieve about what it's like to live in a sinful world and we look for heaven in the hope to come and so thus ends mostly the song but there's this one interesting thing i want you to see in verse 19. here's what it says for when the horses of pharaoh with his chariots and his horsemen went into the sea the lord brought back the waters of the sea upon them but the people of israel walked on dry ground in the midst of the sea and here's this is entering verse 20 then miriam and miriam is the sister of aaron and moses moses is actually the youngest of three then miriam the prophetess the sister of aaron took a tambourine and all the charismatic said amen right okay the tambourine here we go in her hand and all the women went out after her with tambourines and dancing now this is interesting because moses leads all the people miriam leads some of the people right moses leads all the people in worship she leads some of the people women are in worship particularly the women this is a great application it's like who do you need to lead worship well the answer is first yourself you know and then maybe the lord will open up different opportunities you know if you're a husband if you're a father lead your family lead your wife if you got roommates lead them say let's get together guys let's sing together let's pray to go let's worship the lord together there's something powerful that happens when we come together to worship i remember my senior year of college a guy said that we were living in a dorm to try to reach the dorm for christ and he said what if we got up at every you know friday morning at 7 a.m and pray together and 7 a.m is really early in college i didn't even know there was a 7 a.m i mean i'm communicating but you know and so so we'd get up and we'd pray and we'd seek the lord together and what we see here with miriam is it says that she was singing and dancing and every once in a while people will ask me can christians dance the answer is some can and some can't okay that's that's the biblical answer to that question and you know but there's there's this there's this there's all of these different what we see is she's both loud and how she sings right i remember you know i i'm a loud singer i have the spiritual gift of being able to some of you seen this before if i'm in here but i have the ability to sing the wrong words to songs that i have sang a hundred times while looking at the words on the screen i don't know how it's possible but but i can remember when i was first dating my now wife margie uh we were i brought her up to church one time and i was singing and i'm just i didn't even really fully part of it i got a really loud voice you know to begin with but i was thinking and afterwards she said to me kyle you sing so loud in worship it's awesome to see you're unashamed i was like that's right unashamed and then what happens this is what happens in marriage though now because the difference between cute and annoying is time okay is the so now in the middle of worship she'll hit me sometimes and she's like you are so loud and off pitch and singing the wrong words i'm like ah i'm sorry so so there's it says make a joyful noise to the lord right um um so but then then there's a whole there's a whole physical element of worship which is really powerful you know it's like you know if you've ever seen tim hawkins he's a christian comedian he picks on you know christians and and how we worship and the different decisions that we make and he said you know if you grew up if you grew up at kind of a presbyterian church or more of an independent fundamentalist church he said this is all you can do the chicken flap if it's if worship's getting really good you kind of do you think about pulling a hand out of the pocket but you're not sure if you're you know if you're going to he says and then and then you know as you kind of get into if you're kind of at a baptist church or you know they'll let you do a couple things and you feel comfortable you may do hold the television where you just kind of and and if it's non-denominational it's hold the big screen tv and you see and then you know i said that you know some people say hold my baby and then if it gets if the song crescendos it's really powerful it's mufasa okay and you'll see this and then you know he says if you get into some of these churches there's some more freedom he says you may do that give god a high five you know one hand up he says but the key is you know you're in a fully expressive church when you can do goal post into heartburn back into goalpost and and i and i tell you this partly because part of what it means and actually it's funny part of what it means to know something is to joke about it you actually don't if you can't joke about something you don't understand it and so and part of it we have to laugh at ourselves and hug before but the truth is that there is something about being physically expressive right some of you you need to be more physically expressive okay you need to based on your own personality based on an understanding that we're in public okay some of those things um but you need to be more expressive because everyone saw people go i'm not expressive and then i watch them watch the carolina panthers game you are very expressive when a 21 year old catches a football you're not very expressive singing the lord but you're very expressive in that in that environment um and so we have to learn how to do it now because there's a couple different things like in the bible says clap the bible says shout out loudly the bible says raise your hands the bible says lay prostrate i mean the bible is but neil and i don't know if you've ever done that before i remember we were going back to college um i was a senior in college we were going back to try to reach our campus for christ there was a group of us and one of the girls said to us she said hey guys when we pray for our campus tonight it's our last night we're about to go home she said why don't we all get on our knees and i had never just done that in public with other people and it's also a cement floor and so but i can remember getting down on my knees and watching all my friends get down on our knees and it's like if you've ever done that it like immediately changes how you feel i don't know how the soul and the body work together sometimes something happens your soul it affects your body right you'll see this somebody has unconfessed and it will affect how they look sometimes because they're dealing with it so much the soul will fit at other times something happens in my body like you know why do you i joke about this but why do you raise your hands it it says two things it's i surrender right that's that's the whole idea i got nothing in my hands the other is basically pick me up it's it's what kids do it's what kids do with their parents it's like it's the it's the response of i want you to pick me up it's like a humility it's like that's what it means it's sometimes that's your only response lord i just i surrender and i'm rejoicing and pick me up i love you i mean that's kind of the feel of it and so what we see here is this expression and emotion because the people of god have always sung and it's very very interesting to think about because the bible like i told you it starts with a song and also ends with a song in revelation chapter 15 you don't need to turn there now but in revelation 15 it says that they sang the song of moses and the song of the lamb the song of moses doesn't show back up until revelation chapter 15 when they sing about the lamb who is flame and what's very very interesting is jesus christ when he goes to the cross he ends up on the cross saying my god my god why are you forsaking me do you know what that is that's psalm 22 which would have been a song in his day what is jesus thinking about while he's dying for us he's thinking about a song he heard when he was a kid probably and he's thinking about the character of god and what he realized is the rest of the song is about god forsaking and what he realized is that jesus christ had been our warrior king on earth right he'd fought the demonic he'd lived the life we couldn't live he goes to the cross as christus victor martin luther said the cross was was jesus's chariot on which he overrode the devil but he also understood that god our warrior king and god who we sang about back in exodus 15 was about to go to war against his own son instead of us the heart of the gospel is that god poured out his wrath on jesus christ instead of us and so the final song in the bible in revelation 19 at the very end of time before everybody heads to the new jerusalem in heaven they sing one final song guess what it's about god's victory over all their enemies forever and what we're going to do as we end this service today is we're going to sing a song that you've never sung before at least never sung it here and this song is a song about how god fights for us it's actually a brand new song that was written recently based on exodus 14 in exodus 15. the two chapters we've studied for the last two weeks and so i'm going to pray for us in a moment and may as you sing the song may it begin a new as you look to 2021 as usual as we sing this one together in a minute it may just be a new season of worship for you whatever that means some of it it means you need to sing in your car more you need to sing in the shower more so some of it is it's about singing some of you it's about a way of life it's i want my faith to express itself what worship is is i want all of me to respond to all that god has done and all that god has said let's pray together and then sing lord you are the god who fights for us and you are so worthy of worship when we get to heaven there won't be any more sacraments like we saw today when we get to heaven there won't be any more preaching it won't be necessary but when we get to heaven we will continue to sing forever and we realize that every time we start singing to you on earth we join a song that's already happening in heaven so lord as we stand and as we sing lord may deep worship come from the deepest parts of us we pray this in christ's name amen you

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Length: 55min 10sec (3310 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 09 2020