Matt Chandler - Work and Rest

If you have your Bibles, go ahead and grab those. If you’re here and you don’t have a Bible with you, there should be a hardback black one somewhere around you. As I always say, I want you to see that I’m not making anything up here. Once you have that, we’ll be in Exodus chapter 31. I’m going to go back and cover some things that we didn’t cover last week in chapter 30, but our primary text—the place we’re going to camp out—is in Exodus 31 on page 72. I want to recap where we’ve been the last few weeks because one of the reasons I was really eager to get to this spring, remember, is that we started studying Exodus in August. One of the reasons I got really excited to get here is that I knew we were going on this stretch where the theme is about the presence and power of God in our lives. That’s where we’ve been; in fact, the thrust and theme of the last four weeks has been that we have available to us the presence and power of God in our lives. It started with the Tabernacle, the idea that God is going to dwell among His people, that He’s going to set up a tent and live among His people, and that’s what the Tabernacle is. Then we saw that Jesus is the fulfillment of the picture of the Tabernacle, so that as Christians, the Holy Spirit inside us is the Spirit of Christ dwelling among us and being with us in our primary need. You’ve come in here today, and I don’t know what you’ve identified as your greatest need, but the Bible says that your greatest need is the presence of God. Everything you’re truly after in life that is good, right, and beautiful is found in the presence of God—that is your number one need. The Tabernacle was this evidence that God wanted to dwell among us, which is good news: God will never dispel us again or shut us out, and we will live with our God. Then we moved on last weekend to talk about the high priest and the garments of the high priest and how they represented an ideal high priest that we fall short of. We saw how Jesus is the fulfillment of that and how we now reap the benefits of the coming of Christ. Moses, Aaron, and the people of Israel would look at where we are right now with such jealousy for what we have. How do they get into the presence and power of God, where there’s a sacrificial system, garments, blood, and sacrifice? Even then, there’s great trepidation in the presence and power of God; yet we have the Holy Spirit living inside us, making available the presence and power of God anytime we want it. So I’m telling you, Moses, Aaron, the Levitical priesthood, and the people of Israel would look at us now and go, «Man, that’s amazing!» What’s crazy is we’re looking back at this and going, «That’s incredible!» and they would be looking at us and going, «Oh please!» It’s like a seventh-grade track meet—no offense if you’re a seventh-grade track athlete. I’m just saying that having to sit there for five hours to watch 37 seconds can test our affection and love for you as our child. And yet we stay; we endure the sunburn and beating; we watch everyone. We don’t have time for this—let me dive back into the text. What happens now is we talk about last week how the indwelling of the Holy Spirit inside the Christian allows us to walk in power and in the presence of God. We talk about what it means to be a kingdom of priests because that’s how the Lord addresses us. So what does that look like? We looked at the lampstand and the altar of incense, which are both always going, and we said part of it in that lampstand is that being a kingdom of priests means we embrace ordinary life and the power of God transforming us in ordinary life. We should never despise the ordinary. You and I live in a day and age where if something isn’t extraordinary, big, loud, fast, and famous, it’s discarded. But so much of what God is going to accomplish in your life is going to take place quietly over a long period of time, with you just being faithful where you are. We should never despise that—never despise normalcy. God is at work in normalcy, and the light of Christ burning inside us is one of the ways we live as a kingdom of priests in this world. We’re faithful to our wives today; you know why? Because 60 years of that means we’ve been faithful for a lifetime. We’re faithful to our husbands today because 60 years of that is faithfulness for a lifetime. We’re as good a parent as we know how to be today because that’s all we can do, right? We’re just trusting that God is at work in the ordinary, shaping and doing something over decades that we’ll reap the benefit of in 40 years, in 50 years. But for now, it feels stressful and can be.