Merredin Uniting Church

If Your Presence is not with us …

Turn with me to Matthew 5:13….

This is part of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. He says of those who follow Him – You are ‘the salt of the earth’ and you are ‘the light of the world’.

That means something ……. it is our identity as followers of the Lord Jesus Christ.

In verse 16, Jesus says, ‘let you light shine before men, that they may see your good deeds and praise your Father in heaven.’

Now ‘good deeds’ is not really a good translation here … it makes us think of acts of charity, or acts of kindness only. The words “kala erga” could be better translated as “ideal acts” – “that men may see your ideal acts and praise your Father.”

“Ideal acts” means not only our behaviour but the very ethos, or heart of our being, which identifies us for who we are.

We have an identity as followers of Christ – it is the way in which the world is able to separate us from all others.

How many of you have seen the movie “We are Marshall”?

I haven’t seen it myself but I was listening to a sermon by Louis Giglio recently and he mentioned the movie. I googled it and you can do that too when you get home from church.

It’s a true story about the football team from Marshall University who were all killed in a plane crash in the 1970’s. The campus and the town were devastated by the loss, it felt like their life and purpose had come to an end. The university wants to close down the football program but one young man believes that they can rise from the ashes. He starts training a new team and the town begins to rally around. At the end of the movie there is a hugely emotional moment when all the townspeople gather together and begin to chant, “We are Marshall, we are Marshall”. It’s a new beginning, they have rediscovered their identity.

I often feel that the church of Jesus Christ has lost its identity. We get caught up in the ordinary and the mundane. We begin to do things by rote, we dislike change because somehow we are clinging on to the few little things which seem to identify us as Christ followers.

But we have a much greater identity than that. We are not marked by the way our buildings are designed, the songs we sing, the clothes we wear, or by our charitable acts – though these are part of what we do.

We are actually marked by the fact that God is with us. This has been the mark of God’s people from the beginning and it will be the means by which we will be identified at the end when the Son of Man separates the sheep from the goats. (Matthew 25)

When God is with us we live in another dimension, on another plane – we are running with horses not with men. (see Jeremiah 12, and my comments in the newsletter).

As part of my devotional reading this week, I was meditating on Habakkuk. The prophet is questioning God about why He lets the guilty go unpunished and why He lets the wicked prosper. God answers by saying that they will be punished – the ruthless Babylonians are going to mete out God’s justice. Habakkuk is appalled … but, he says, the Babylonians are even worse culprits, how could God use them?

God responds with a whole chapter which lists the ways of the wicked but states clearly – in just six words the way that God-followers are to live in this world, – “the righteous shall live by faith” (Habakkuk 2:4).

Habukkuk is suddenly overwhelmed by a surge of understanding: God is with His people and “though the fig tree does not blossom and there be no fruit on the vine, though the olive crop fails and the fields produce no food, though there are no sheep in the pen and no cattle in the stalls, yet, he will rejoice in the Lord, the God of his salvation.”

God is with us. We are His. We have an identity in Christ and the Lord knows each of us by name.

If He is not with us, then we are not different to anyone else. It is His Presence which creates our identity, marks us as holy and which guides us on our journey from bondage to the Promised Land. We have not yet arrived – we are still struggling through the desert but our goal is certain and our God knows how to lead us – a pillar of smoke by day and a pillar of fire at night.

Now turn to Exodus 33:12-23

God is fed up with the people He has rescued from bondage in Egypt – he calls them “stiff-necked”. Their offence is that they are proud and haughty. They are self-satisfied. They believe that they don’t need God with them. They have created their own god of gold shaped into a calf – let their golden calf go with them.

He tells Moses that they can go on up to the land of milk and honey but He will not go with them. (Ex 33:3)

I love Moses’ response. (verse 12)

“You keep telling me to ‘lead these people’ but you have not told me who is going with me.

You said that you ‘know me by name and that I have found favour with you’ but you have not taught me your ways.

In other words …. “Lord, here are one million of Your people at the foot of this mountain that you want me to lead. I can’t do it on my own; you need to be with me and you need to be showing me how to do it because they are Your people and this journey is a fulfilment of a promise You made to Abraham. If you are not with us, then nothing will distinguish us from all the other people on the earth.”

Your Presence with us is our identity. Without You we are nothing, we have no name, we are just like all the rest.

Moses realised that God’s Presence is a crucial aspect of our identity as God’s people. Not that we do, or don’t do the things that we are supposed to do but that we are who we are meant to be. We are salt and light – if we lose our saltiness, or hide our light, it might as well be that God is not with us. He is the One who creates our identity. Without Him, we are ordinary; wandering aimlessly through the desert trying to find our way home.

Moses is holding God to His covenant promise – In Genesis 17 God had told Abraham, “I make an everlasting covenant with you, to be your God and the God of your descendants after you.” It was God’s promise to always be with His people and to always be their God. And even if they chose to go their own way, He would still mark them as His people by His Presence with them. The reminder to the Jewish people was to be circumcision and for us who have found our faith and salvation in Christ, it is baptism.

Our identity is marked by God’s Presence with us. It is ritualised in our baptism – I die to self and I rise in Christ. We forget that sometimes.

I am who I am in Christ because God is with me. I can face uncertain tomorrow’s because God is with me. I can face opposition, trouble and death because God is with me. But if God is not with me I cannot face anything – my identity is uncertain, my purpose is unclear and I fear what tomorrow holds.

Moses knew the significance of this and He knew also that it was significant for God because He is the One of certain promises. I suspect that God might not have left Israel in the lurch but He needed to be sure that Moses had crystallised in his own mind the significance of this aspect of the identity of the people of God – that God is with them.

Moses’ challenge proved that and so God says (v 17) “I will do the very thing you have asked, because I am pleased with you and I know you by name.”

I am pleased with you – Good answer, Moses!

I know you by name – I am with you, we are community!

And then look at this (v 18), Moses asks to see God’s glory. That’s a pretty audacious request.

The word “Glory” has changed its meaning over time and we often now take it to mean “honor” or “praise” but you can see that it could possibly mean that in this instance. The Hebrew word “kabod” means heavy, or laden with riches; Moses is asking to see a manifestation, or exhibition, of God’s divine attributes. He wants to see this God who will be with them.

God denies this to Moses, saying that no-one can see the face of God and live. Instead he must hide in a cleft in the rock and God will pass by and Moses will be able to see God’s back. (v 21,22)

The significance here is that Moses can see where God has been but not where He is going. In retrospect, Moses can look and see that God has been with Him – like the “Footprints” poem. In the everyday however, Moses must live by faith in God’s promise.

His identity is not found in the visible Presence of God but in the faith which believes that God is with him even though he does not see Him.

And this is true for us also today. We do not see God with us but by faith we believe that He is with us. The consequence of this is dramatic – it means, as I said last week, that we have peace in our situation and hope in our future. It means that people will seek to have that which we have, and it means, as Moses indicated, that we will be distinguished from all other people on the earth.

We do however have an advantage over Moses, for we live this side of the Cross. We are a people who have witnesses through the ages who can testify to seeing God’s glory. We might not “see” God but we can know God through their testimony.

Turn to John 1:14-18

Do you get it?

The Word who was in the beginning and who was with God and who is God, became flesh. People have seen His glory – face to face. Not just the trail of where He has been, but they were actually with Him when He was with them.

He has been made known.

He is our identity because He is Emmanuel – God with us!

The people of Marshall could shout “We are Marshall! to affirm their identity – but our cry is “God is with us!” “God is with us!” “God is with us!”

Amen

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