Welcome to the Valley Baptist Church sermon podcast.
We're so glad you're here, and we hope this message inspires you,
builds your faith, and moves you toward a deep relationship with God.
Today, you'll find great insight into the Bible
and learn how you can apply it straight to your life.
So welcome and enjoy the message.
Good morning.
Great to be here with this morning.
I was telling any other two service that really it's like being with family.
You guys are like family to me.
You even have the same name for your county as my name, Kern County.
So you can remember that.
I always tell people, a lot of people will say to me, um, they'll call me Steve
Kerns and I say, no, it's current, like the county, just, just one current.
And so we feel knitted to your church because, like Matt was saying, we have a lot of things that are similar.
The church was started in 1985, I know, in December.
We went to the mission field in September of 85.
And we have two co-senior pastors, like Matt was saying.
And we're going into succession just like you did a few years ago.
And so Julio and I are going to be passing the baton on to someone else.
on July 26th.
But our hearts are knit together on everything
as far as evangelism, discipleship, and starting churches.
And that's the exciting thing for me.
Matt's been telling me a lot about that.
And I am so excited about the vision you guys have
for starting churches.
There is such a need here, not only in California,
but other parts of the world to start new works.
And I'm praying that God will continue to use you guys to do that.
And we've done so much together.
I'm so thankful for you guys.
You guys bring down mission teams all the time.
And I just ask you to pray to come on one of our mission trips.
We have a great time sharing the gospel in schools and different neighborhoods.
And people are wide open in our part of the world.
So pray about coming on a trip.
And thank you for supporting us financially also, for praying for us.
Pam and I were just this week with DBS.
And we love that.
That's one of the highlights every two years.
Pam was on this side with the little ones
up to fifth grade.
And then I was in the junior high, sixth to eighth grade.
And you should be proud of your young people.
Those sixth to eighth graders were paying attention.
like you wouldn't believe.
And we were talking about David and his faith and everything
and had, I think we had over 80 of them
make Professions of Faith.
So it was just a great time this week.
We love being with you.
We feel like, I always tell people,
I lived in the States,
this is where I would go to church for sure.
I love the three pastors and believe in them.
And Pam and I just love coming.
So thank you so much for having us here.
You know, and I was thinking when Matt was talking about the
Our time in El Salvador, number one, it's hard to believe we've been there 41 years in September.
And they're saying 41 VBSs, we're coming up on 41.
And the other thing is, if you knew me before I went, you would say, you know, if they had a yearbook,
you know, the yearbook sometimes I'll have most likely, least likely.
If they had least likely to ever be a preacher, I would have won.
Hands down.
I am the most unlikely person to be a missionary.
But when I was growing up,
first of all, I grew up in an atheist home.
And a lot of times people will ask me,
especially on the mission field,
what about people who have never heard the gospel?
What about them?
And I say, well, if you want to interview one,
I'm one of them.
I never heard the gospel before I was 14 years old.
I didn't even know anything about God, Moses, David.
The only time I'd ever heard of Jesus
is my mom was a hippie and she took me to the play
Jesus Christ Superstar.
That was it.
And that doesn't say a lot about Jesus, you know?
So that's all I knew.
But when I was 14, my dad was in Vietnam,
and my mother died suddenly of a heart attack.
And what it caused to happen in my life
when she passed away was I realized
that she not only left a void of love,
but purpose and direction.
And I remember after she passed away,
this answers the question,
what happens to people that are in the middle of nowhere,
never heard the gospel?
I remember that as I looked at creation,
in nature, I said, somebody must have made this.
That's what Romans 1.20 says.
Romans 1.20 says that the invisible things of God,
his deity and his power, are revealed by the things
that he's made so that we are without excuse.
And so I started looking, seeking after whoever made it all.
I didn't even have a name for it.
And three years later, I was going to high school in the Sacramento area,
and I heard the gospel from a friend of mine, and I asked Christ to save me.
After that, I went off to college where I met my wife, Pam, in University of California.
Many of you have heard of Davis. That's up between San Francisco and Sacramento.
And that's where I met my wife.
She was studying to be a dentist,
and I was studying to be a chemical engineer.
And we met, got right out of college and got married.
And of course, if you're a chemical engineer,
you don't get to work in nice places usually.
You work in places like the Mississippi River.
That's where we moved to Louisiana.
And I remember we moved down there,
we became members of a church that's by the airport.
If you've ever landed in New Orleans,
the airport's actually in Kenner, which is a suburb,
and our church is right by the runway.
And First Baptist Kenner's where we're at.
And I remember one time, the pastor preaching on faith,
and he was going through the book of Hebrews,
chapter 11, and said, if you have faith,
Do you believe that God could use you to share the gospel with everyone in your workplace?
And that just cut to my heart because I was a shy person and I didn't want to share my faith.
I was scared to do it. I was scared people would laugh at me. I was scared I didn't know what to say.
But I wanted to grow in faith. And my favorite verse in the Bible is Hebrews 11, 6, which says,
without faith, it's sort of hard to please God.
It doesn't say that, does it?
Without faith, it's impossible to please God.
And when I think of what God did for me,
I want to please Him.
So the only way I can please Him is with faith.
And so the preacher says, if you have a lot of faith, proving it of course from the Bible,
you'll share with the people around you.
So I started doing that, and nervous as could be.
We would go into the projects that are in downtown New Orleans and share.
And one day this guy who ended up in ministry that now I'm the director of Good News in
Action, he's a Southern Baptist evangelist, invited me to El Salvador.
And we went there in 1983, I went there,
in the middle of a civil war.
And I remember how receptive people were to the gospel.
You couldn't believe it, everybody wanted to hear.
And as a matter of fact, when Pam and I moved to El Salvador,
it was 10% evangelical, which means you were either
a Pentecostal church, a Baptist church, or a Bible church.
Now it's 40%.
So people just wide open.
And when I first went to El Salvador,
I didn't know any Spanish.
I just thought you put an O on the end of a word in English.
That works for about three or four words.
You know, car, carro, that works.
So there's one of them.
But, and it's not even problemo, it's problema.
So anyway, so I moved down there and I mean,
I went down there just go on the trip,
but never was gonna move there.
I'm an engineer. There's no way I'm ever going to be a pastor.
So I went back in March of 1984,
and I'll never forget I was in the eastern part of the country,
in a big city called Santa Ana,
and I was sharing the gospel, and I heard in my mind...
Now, does this ever happen to you?
That when you're praying and you hear someone talking to you in your mind,
you're not sure if it's God or you?
Okay, I'm not the only crazy person. Good.
No, I'm just kidding.
And so I was wrestling with that, but I heard this right in my heart.
My voice, never heard an audible voice.
I want you to move to El Salvador.
So I responded to this voice, and I said,
I know that's not you, God, because you would never call an engineer.
You would never call a shy guy.
I always admired preachers.
I said, man, you know, they probably were insurance salesmen or something.
work with Toastmasters and they're so glib and I'm just,
there's no way I could do that, you know?
So I said, I know you're not calling me.
I know that's me talking to myself.
Then I would hear that voice again,
I want you to move down there.
And I'd say, well, I didn't grow up in church.
I come from an atheist family.
I don't know anything about RAs and a one
and all the mission stuff.
And then I would say, I know you're not calling me
because my wife would never go to El Salvador.
And I just said, this is crazy.
But it just got more and more intense.
And I did this thing after I became a Christian,
is I would read through the Bible.
I thought the Bible was just a really hard book
to understand, like a calculus book.
And I remember the first time I read through it,
I didn't understand anything.
I just said, I must have brain damage for the Bible.
I couldn't understand anything.
And you know where I would get in trouble
is in Exodus and Numbers.
And I just couldn't get through it.
But I says, I've got to learn this thing
because I see all these kids knew the Bible.
And so I just kept reading it and reading it.
And I do this deal, if I got to a passage in the Bible
I couldn't understand,
and I didn't know commentaries existed,
I would just sit there for months trying to figure it out.
And so I was reading through 2 Samuel 24,
where God punished David for numbering his men.
I don't know if you remember the story,
but it was a horrible plague where a lot of people died.
And I thought to myself, why is God punishing David
for taking a census of his men for fighting?
At the same time, remember what's going on in my mind
as I'm praying.
Every time I pray, Steve, I want you to move to El Salvador.
Well, I can't do that because of this.
And then one day I realized,
He punished David because he had told David,
I'll win every victory.
It doesn't matter how many men you have.
And when he numbered his men, what was he doing?
It was a lack of faith.
And what was I doing?
And I'll never forget when I says, I'm going.
I'll do it, God.
I'll do it.
And I went out and I told Pam.
And she wasn't excited about it, as you can imagine.
That's another story.
And then, of course, God worked on her.
I always say I think my wife has more faith than me
because she was willing to follow me
when we were 26 years old to go down to El Salvador.
And she'd married an engineer.
And so we sold everything.
We moved down to El Salvador in 1985,
and God's taken care of us since then.
And, you know, I thought about that.
When I was in college, I remember that there was a big debate between psychology,
two fields of psychology.
Class of psychology was you are the way you are.
You're where you're at because of your upbringing, your nurture.
And you remember that if you're older like me, you remember when we were young,
it was always the nurture.
Well, that kid's messed up because of his parents or whatever.
It was nurture, nurture, nurture.
But they started to discover that some people would grow up in a difficult family and do great.
And some people would grow up in a great family, in a great environment and do bad.
And they said, there's got to be something else.
So you probably remember they started this thing that's called psychobiology.
That was where they started to say, no, the reason you're mad isn't the way you were raised.
It's you're the mad gene.
You've got the genes.
It's nature, right?
So the two camps are battling, nurture and nature.
This is what I believe personally.
I don't think it's either one.
I do believe your nurture and your nature contribute.
Don't misunderstand me.
But I know of a man that didn't have a good dad.
He had a perfect dad.
Right?
And this man not only had a perfect diet,
he had perfect genes.
He didn't have the mad gene,
which they've never discovered, by the way.
But he didn't have any of these genes.
And you know what?
He was placed in a perfect environment, and he messed up.
Did Adam mess up because of his nurture?
Did Adam mess up because of his nature?
No, Adam messed up because he made a bad choice.
And as I study the Bible, that's what I see.
I see that what gets us where we're at
are the choices that we make.
And that's why throughout the Bible,
God encourages us to make a choice.
In Deuteronomy 30, 19, he says,
"'I call heaven and earth as witnesses today against you,
that I've set before you life and death,
blessing and cursing, therefore, what does it say?
Choose life, that both you and your descendants may live.
The Bible's very clear, it's your choice.
You have free will.
And I say this to encourage you
because you might not like where you're at right now.
And now you realize,
if I make the right decisions in the future,
I will come out of this good.
You know, we should choose life, obviously,
that both you and your descendants may live.
Many of you already know this passage
because the last part's on a lot of plaques and houses.
And Joshua says,
and if it seems evil to you to serve the Lord,
choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve,
whether the gods which your father served
that were on the other side of the river
or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you dwell,
but it's for me and my house.
We will serve the Lord.
And so what we see in the Bible and what we see in life
is that our life is a chain of decisions.
And the key to making the right decision, I believe,
is making decisions based on faith.
And I don't think there's a person
that models this better than Moses.
And so I want you to open your Bible to Hebrews 11.
And we're just gonna look at six verses
and see what it says about Moses.
So I'm in Hebrews 11, verse 23.
Hebrews, and you know about this,
this is the hall of faith, right?
And not the hall of fame, but the hall of faith.
All the people had great faith.
And it says in verse 23 in Hebrews 11,
"'By faith Moses, when he was born,
"'was hid three months of his parents,
"'because they saw he was a proper child
"'and they were not afraid of the king's commandment.
By faith, Moses, when he was come to years,
refused to be called the son of Pharaoh's daughter,
choosing, there's that word, rather to suffer affliction
with the people of God than to enjoy the pleasures of sin
for a season, esteeming the reproach of Christ's
greater riches than the treasures in Egypt,
for he had respect under the recompense of the reward.
By faith he forsook Egypt, not fearing the wrath of the king,
for he endured as seeing him who is invisible.
Through faith he kept the Passover and the sprinkling of blood,
lest he that destroyed the firstborn should touch them.
And finally, by faith they passed to the Red Sea as by dry land,
which the Egyptians are saying to do, were drowned."
I believe that when we make choices,
Based on faith, we change our world for something positive,
and we change the world of other people.
And so I want to answer,
this is the question I want to answer today.
What kind of faith changes the world?
And I think that the application of this
is for any kind of a thing that we're facing right now.
I think there's three clear principles.
How do we know what faith looks like?
Sometimes when we talk about faith,
it seems like something very vague and general.
This passage lays out clearly
how you know if you're living according to faith.
So first principle, first principle.
World-changing faith chooses God's plan despite the peril.
I don't know if you saw something interesting in verse 23,
but he is accentuating not the faith of Moses, but of his parents.
And it's interesting because usually when we think about that faith,
we think of the parent of his mom and his sister.
You remember the story where they were hid, but his dad's in there too.
It says in verse 23, one more time.
It says, by faith...
Moses, when he was born, was in three months of his parents
because they saw he was a proper child, and I love this,
and they were not afraid of the king's commandment.
You know what the most common commandment is in the Bible?
In this commandment, you can find with every major character in the Bible,
you can hear God saying it to Abraham, to Isaac, to Jacob, to Moses, to Joshua, to Ruth,
to Mary when she was with child, to Joseph.
What's the most common commandment?
Fear not.
Look at what he said to Joshua.
You know, I counted 85 times.
It says I'm just going to put one.
He says to Joshua before he's going to conquer the promised land,
Have I not commanded you, be strong and of good courage?
Fear not.
Do not be afraid, nor be dismayed, for the Lord your God is with you wherever you go.
You see, what you learn in the Bible is that the opposite of faith is fear.
And the way that the devil manipulates us is through fear.
You see, there's two roads you can go by.
Anytime you're gonna make a choice, you can say,
I'm gonna go that road because people are gonna laugh at me
or I'm gonna be rejected by other people
or I won't be cool with my friends.
That's the fear road.
That's where the devil manipulates you.
Or you take the faith road, which is God's road.
You know, Pam and I were born here in California
and it just amazes me how this state's changed so much.
When we were growing up, it was the faith state.
This was the entrepreneur state.
This was the state that you went to be daring.
And now what I see is a lot of fear, so much fear.
And of course, it's a problem that we have in the whole United States.
The number one mental health things that are growing are anxiety, are fear.
People are just fear and fear will paralyze you.
Fear will make you make bad decisions.
Faith will change your life.
And so if we've made decisions in the past based on fear,
we need to change that up.
Do you realize that part of the reason Jesus died for you
was not just to redeem you and save you,
it was to deliver you from the bondage from fear?
Let me prove it.
Hebrews 2, 14 and 15.
Inasmuch then as the children have partaken of flesh
and blood, he himself likewise shared in the same.
that through death he might destroy him who had the power of death, that is the devil.
And look at this, and release those who through fear of death were all their life subject to bondage.
Do you realize that when we make decisions based on fear, it's a bondage?
And Jesus came to die on the cross for your sins, took your place on the cross,
so you could be free to make decisions based on faith.
It's a sad thing when a person is paralyzed,
but, and I understand that.
I get it, when Pam and I moved to El Salvador,
it was the middle of a civil war.
We took our oldest was two years old,
our second was four months,
took them down to El Salvador
and went through the civil war.
And in 1989, right after the Berlin Wall fell,
the writing was on the wall
and the communist guerrillas knew
they were gonna have to do something radical.
So they had what was called the final offensive.
Well, by coincidence, it was November of 1989,
I was just talking to a lady that was there in San Miguel
during that time where I was at.
During that time of the final offensive,
I was in San Miguel,
which is in the eastern part of El Salvador,
and where the guerrillas had taken the city.
And then my wife was in the capital, San Salvador,
and we were separated.
There was no cell phones.
There was no way to communicate.
And she was outside playing with the kids,
who at that time were six and four and three years old.
And then we had another child afterwards.
And she's outside playing, and somebody comes running and says,
everybody go inside.
And she said, I'm going to play.
Ya viene los muchachos, and muchachos or boys is what they called the guerrillas.
And they went running into the house.
And Pam says they fought all night, and she had to take the kids and go under the stairs
because the stairs are made of cement.
And when you're in fighting, stray bullets will pierce your roof.
You have to find a place where there's cement.
So she just told the kids, hey, kids, we're going to camp out tonight under the stairs and all that.
Of course, I didn't know this was going on.
I was in San Miguel with a youth group.
And so we were trapped there for 10 days.
We were separated from each other.
We couldn't communicate, no phone lines.
And it was an incredible time where you just trusted in God.
And during that whole time, as we were going through that,
I couldn't wait to get back home.
So finally I got back home.
And when I got back home,
I remember Pam and I talking and saying,
well, that's over, isn't that great?
But then that night we were asleep
and we started hearing the fight right outside our house.
And we got up on the second floor where our bed was
and we looked out and it was like a laser light show.
You could see the helicopters shooting
and they have tracers so you can see
where the bullets are going.
They had urban tanks that were shooting.
The guerrillas had placed dynamite on the electrical post
and we could see those flashes coming and blowing up.
And I'm sitting on their bed, and it's a surreal moment because I'm sitting on the bed,
and all of a sudden I see my 6-year-old girl, my 4-year-old girl, my 3-year-old boy, and my wife,
and we're looking out there.
And I know it was the devil just whispered to me,
"'Everybody was right. You're an idiot.
"'You brought your family down here to die.
"'Your whole family was right. You wasted your life.
"'You could have been something. You could have been an engineer,
"'but you're down here just to die.'"
And I felt really guilty.
But then I heard God speak to me in my heart
and say, no, you're never dumb
if you're where I want you to be.
You made the right decision to be here.
And right at that moment, I saw my daughter
who was four crying, she was really crying.
And I hugged her and I said, honey, don't worry,
everything's gonna be all right.
And here's the crazy thing.
They didn't quit fighting, but she quit crying.
You know why?
Because her father said everything's going to be all right.
And it doesn't matter what you're facing when you hear your heavenly father say,
everything's going to be all right.
You can face anything.
That's why it says be anxious for nothing, but let God know all your petitions.
And the peace that passes all understanding will guard your heart.
When you let him know.
And so I understand it's tough when you do that.
But I would encourage you to have faith in what he does.
One little quick thing here before I go, because I think it's important to mention it.
Isn't it interesting that it says,
By faith Moses, when he was born, was hid three months of his parents,
because they saw he was a beautiful child.
That's a weird verse for me.
Because I think one of the unsung heroes of the Bible are the midwives, the Hebrew midwives that saved all those children.
And the most powerful man on the face of the earth said, I'll kill you.
And they said, I don't care.
Now, you might say to yourself, why did he save Moses?
Because he thought that she thought that her baby was beautiful.
How many moms have you heard of in history that when they delivered a baby and the nurse brought the baby, they said, ooh, that's ugly.
Right?
Now someone's gonna say it's happened probably,
but I don't think it happens very often.
Because it doesn't matter what that kid looks like.
All of my kids, because they were a normal birth,
they weren't cesarean, they look like WC Fields
in a UFC fight, and they're just,
All smashed up.
But when I saw those kids, they were the most beautiful thing on the face of the earth.
I don't think that what she said is, because Moses is beautiful, I'll save him and the other ones aren't beautiful.
I think what it means is she was saying that kids are beautiful.
We saw that in VBS.
You see, to me, sometimes the Bible is so clear.
There's just clear principles.
The first thing God said to man was, fructify, bear fruit, and multiply.
And I've thought about that.
The only reason we're here is to reproduce physically.
And if you can't reproduce physically, spiritually.
Or you adopt or whatever.
You don't have to have kids, but you should be reproducing into other people.
So if that's what God wants, what does the devil want?
What?
kill the kids, abort the kids, sterilize the kids.
That's the new thing happening.
We don't want kids.
That's the devil.
He's against it.
So there's daring people that say, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
I'm going to believe God by faith that that's what it's about.
That's why we're on this planet.
Here is my father glorified that you bear much fruit.
John 15, eight.
And so that's what these ladies were doing.
They were risking their lives because they said children are beautiful.
Children are heritage of the Lord.
Okay, second principle, second principle.
World-changing faith chooses God's prize, with a Z, despite the price.
Look at what it says one more time in verse 26.
Esteeming the reproach of Christ, greater riches than the treasures in Egypt,
for he had respect under the recompense of the reward.
You see how Moses went through that?
He was focused on the prize, so he paid the price.
And that's the way life works anyway.
It's not rocket science.
I mean, if you like football like I do, you know that starting in August or late July,
I like the Cowboys, and they practice in Oxnard, California.
And they start going through that process where they're preparing
for going to the Super Bowl.
They hope to go to the Super Bowl.
Not the Cowboys, they haven't gone for 30 years.
But anyway, and so if you root for a college team,
you know that they start doing that.
We know that, this is what it's about.
Because every one of those players are saying,
I want the prize, I have to pay the price.
Do we agree with that?
Or you see it with moms.
It's unbelievable the process of having a baby.
You know, I was there for four births.
And when I was a young guy, the cool thing was,
I can remember some of my friends saying,
Steve, are you gonna be in there for the birth?
That was the cool thing.
Remember, my dad's generation,
you were never in there for the birth.
The men were just outside pacing back and forth.
And so my generation was, if you're anybody, Steve,
you're gonna be in there.
I didn't wanna be in there, but you know, peer pressure.
So they said, you gotta take these Lamaze classes, Lamaze.
And in these Lamaze classes, I'll never forget the first day I was in the class with Pam.
Pam's pregnant like that lady, you know, pregnant right there.
And we're sitting there and everything.
And the lady comes out and says she was a Lamaze coach.
And she said, okay, men, you know, husbands, you're going to be really important, really important in this.
because you're gonna have to keep your wife
focused on breathing.
And I didn't say this,
because I try not to be a smart aleck,
but I thought to myself,
if Pam doesn't know how to breathe by now, tough luck.
I mean, there's no way this is gonna work.
How am I gonna teach her to breathe?
And so they said that when they're going
through these horrible pains, birth pains,
They say that the key is that you focus the mom on the prize.
Think about that.
As they push, the baby's coming.
And a woman can take this huge, you know, women have a higher threshold of pain than men.
They can take this huge amount of pain because the prize is coming.
Can you imagine if you told a pregnant mom,
and said, you're an OBGYN and they're 38 weeks and said,
I got good news and bad news.
I said, the good news is your pregnancy's going really great,
but the bad news is there's a 50% chance
that it's a watermelon, it's not a baby.
You think any woman would go through that?
Why do you go through it?
The prize, the baby.
And so what you learn is that I can go through
a huge amount of pain in the present
if I have a great future.
That's why I like prophecy so much.
You see, the Bible gives us hope,
focuses to a great future
so we can go through the tough present.
And that's what Moses did.
Moses was able to, number one,
he was able to renounce the position of a prince
because he was focused on the future.
It says in verse 24, it says,
"'By faith Moses, when he was come to you,
"'has refused to be called the son of Pharaoh's daughter.'"
Think about that.
Now we know that Moses' uncle died.
Remember, he was a firstborn.
He died, that was Pharaoh's son.
History says there were no other uncles.
Who would have been the next Pharaoh?
Moses, Moses, the king of the world.
And you know what he said?
No thank, no thank you, I'm a child of God.
I'm a child of God.
It says, speaking of Moses,
and Moses was learning all the wisdom of the Egyptians
and was mighty in words and deeds.
He was prepared to be the next Pharaoh.
And he said no.
He reminds me of one of the Moravian missionaries.
The Moravians had these incredible missionaries
And one of them was a baron.
He had the titles of a baron.
He renounced his baronship, that's what it's called,
gave away all of his money, went as a missionary,
and he said these famous words.
What is it to me to bear a title well-born
when I am born again in Christ?
What is it to me to have the title Lord
when I desire to be the servant of Christ?
What is it to be called your grace
when I am in need of God's grace?
All these vanities will I away with,
and all else I will lay at the feet of my dear Lord Jesus.
And he made the decision.
He was smart.
The baron was smart.
Moses was smart because of the focus on the prize.
But he also renounced the pleasures of a prince.
I don't know if you saw that when we read it through the first time.
But verse 25 says, choosing rather to suffer affliction with the people of God than to enjoy the pleasures of sin for a season.
Can you imagine, and I'm humanly speaking here,
the pleasures that he had access to?
He had it all.
And he said no, because he knew that there was joy
in the presence of the Lord.
And I always tell people, you know, sin is fun,
that's why we do it.
You know, you can't tell kids, don't sin, it's not fun,
it's fun, that's why we do it.
But sin has two problems, two horrible problems.
Number one, sin's bad and it offends God.
But number two, and it's good to teach your kids this, sin is temporal.
The pleasures are temporal.
Somebody said sin's like Chinese food.
It doesn't matter how much you eat, you're always hungry afterwards.
And if you engage in any kind of sin, you're never satisfied.
Never, never, never.
The only thing that satisfies you is God.
And so I always think, man, Moses was smart.
You know, he keyed in on this at this time.
He realized, I don't need those temporary pleasures.
And then he rejected the prosperity of a prince.
This is unbelievable.
is steaming the reproach of Christ greater riches than the treasures in Egypt.
And I don't know how many of you have ever seen an exhibit of one of the pharaoh kings.
Remember when King Tut exhibit was being taken around the United States?
I never saw it, but I saw pictures.
Or have you ever seen a movie where they're looking for mummies or whatever with pharaohs?
What's there a whole bunch of whenever they open the tomb?
Gold.
That was all his.
Gold.
You see, nobody could have lived the American dream more than Moses.
And he said, it's all hype.
I'm going to live for Jesus.
I'm going to focus on the real prize.
You know, the way that Paul said, it's incredible.
Paul said, yea doubtless.
And I count all things, but loss for the excellence of the knowledge of Christ.
Jesus, my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things and you count them, but.
Dung.
You know what dung is?
That's manure.
That I may win Christ.
Both of them understood what it was about.
And I always think about this.
This last part says, and I don't know how your version says this,
but it says, for he had respect under the recompense of the Lord.
That word he had respect is apoplepo in Greek.
And what it means is that he had taken his gaze away from something else, and he was actually staring.
He had a gaze. He not only was focused on the prize, he was totally staring at the prize.
I always thought about how was he staring?
The best thing I can think about is sometimes when my wife has to tell me something important, she says,
sometimes I don't hear very good.
Now, I've never confirmed this, but this is what she says that I can't hear very good.
And especially if I'm watching something real important, like a football game.
We all know those are really important.
She always says to me, why are you watching the game?
Just look at the box score tomorrow.
Why?
I said, she doesn't get it, man.
She just doesn't get it.
So, so, you know, she says that if I'm watching something, I really like it.
She says, I could say, Steve, the house is burning down.
I say, OK, OK, later on. OK, OK. No, no sweat.
So so she stands in front of me sometimes to get my attention.
I know this is really important stuff.
So I thought, how how was Moses looking at the prize?
This is the best picture I could find.
I think Moses was like this.
on the prize.
And they say, Moses, Moses, you can be a prince.
I'm too focused on being a child of God and a child of the king.
I don't hear you.
Moses, you can have pleasures, any carnal pleasures.
I don't want that temporal stuff.
I'm focused on the eternal pleasure.
But Moses, Moses, you can be rich.
I'm already rich.
I'm a joint heir with Jesus Christ.
Why are you coming with all this junk that's going to burn up?
I am a joint heir with the firstborn who gets everything.
That's what we have.
I always tell people, hopefully I'm Musk is the first trillionaire
because I get all that during eternity.
Thanks for making all this money, Fortune 500.
It's all ours.
And, of course, it will be useless anyway.
We have eternal riches.
We have eternal glory.
And the devil wants to focus you on the hype.
You know, my daughter, when she used to live at home,
our last daughter, we waited five years
to have the fourth one, she loved to watch reality shows.
And she used to watch this show called Hoarders, H-O-A-R-D-E-R-S.
And I always remember that, you know,
always trying to connect with your kids.
So, you know, I'm watching this show.
And at first, I would laugh.
And then afterwards, I was sad.
Because it's funny when you see a person can't walk through a
house because of the newspapers, but then you realize
there's some serious issues.
People that hoard stuff have issues.
And I think the angels have a show in heaven,
and it's called American Christian Hoarders.
I just read this morning that the average American
has 4.9 pounds of garbage per day.
And last year we had 292 million tons.
One of the biggest problems is we're running out of room
for all the garbage.
Bigger problem, storage space.
You wanna make a lot of money, build storage units.
Because Americans have so much stuff
They got to accumulate and accumulate.
And I can just picture the angels going,
people are dying and going to hell,
and you're accumulating all that junk?
I don't get it.
Excuse me for saying this,
and I don't want anyone to feel bad,
because this is a great church,
and I don't think it's a problem with anybody here.
I don't get it, man.
What does it profit a man to gain the whole world
and lose his soul?
I don't get it.
I don't get a focus if it isn't on souls.
I don't get it.
Honestly, please explain it to me.
Please explain the American dream.
Please explain just getting more and more and more stuff that's going to burn up.
I don't get it.
If you have a lot of money, nothing wrong with that.
If you have a nice house, nothing wrong with that.
This is not a guilt trip.
But there's something going on wrong in our country.
I remember when Larry Burkett said back in the 1980s, he was a mentor for Dave Ramsey, the...
Guru on finances. He says, I fear the day that American Christians are so in debt they can't give to missions. We're there. All missions groups are cutting back. Because most people can't give. Because they have sacrificed their soul for Visa and MasterCard.
And they're so, they gotta pay so much money.
And it's a tragedy,
because how can we do great thing for God
when we're focused on other things?
You know what destroyed the nation of Israel?
Idolatry.
The Bible says that materialism is idolatry.
We need to check our heart.
Probably nobody here, right?
This is a great church.
But we need to check our heart
about where it's important for us.
Moses gives us an example of a person
who did great things for God because he looked at reality.
Not fantasy.
Not stuff that's going to burn up.
We've got to finish.
Last principle.
World-changing faith chooses God's precepts despite the persecution.
Now look at the way this thing ends up.
Do you realize that what God said
must have sounded crazy to a lot of people?
He said, now Moses, here's the deal.
I've done nine miracles and I'm gonna do the 10th one.
And what you gotta do is you gotta sacrifice a lamb,
you gotta put blood over the posts of the door,
and this invisible death angel is gonna come over
and kill every firstborn.
Now, a lot of people that really think they're intelligent
would say, oh, that's ridiculous.
That could never happen.
But I always tell people when we don't believe the Bible,
When we don't have faith, we think we're smarter than God
because God sees the death angel and he sees what's happening.
Then he says another crazy thing.
You're going to cross the Red Sea and I'm going to open it up.
But see, he believed God's word.
He believed God's precepts.
Now the problem when you believe God's word
is you will be persecuted.
A lot of people say, well, he's being persecuted
because he's a Christian or she is.
The Bible never says you're persecuted
just for being a Christian.
That's why most Christians don't let people know
who they are or don't share their faith.
You're only persecuted if you obey the word of God.
Look at this example here.
These likewise are the ones sown on stony ground
who when they hear the word,
immediately receive it with gladness.
and they have no root in themselves.
And so endure only for a time.
After when tribulation or persecution arises
for the world's sake, the word's sake,
why is there persecution?
The word, immediately they stumble.
You see, Moses being Jewish didn't affect him.
But when he says, I'm going to believe God's word,
there comes the persecution.
The same with us.
And that's why I think the devil puts fear in you.
He doesn't want you to believe the word of God
or to follow the word of God.
And that's why there's persecution.
And it's unbelievable what it says here.
And I'll just say this before I read the first verse.
The kind of faith that doesn't risk anything
doesn't accomplish anything.
And you're probably thinking,
oh, he's talking about missions.
No, I'm talking about decisions you need to make in your work,
in your school, at your home.
People that make decisions based on faith
are willing to risk something.
Look at what it says here to finish up.
It says in verse 27,
by faith he forsook Egypt...
not fearing the wrath of the king.
For he endured, and how did he endure?
As seeing him who was invisible.
And I could just hear my family, the atheists, saying,
yeah, those dumb Christians,
they think they see invisible things.
I don't believe in the Easter Bunny, Santa Claus, and Jesus.
I don't believe in fairies and all this silly kind of stuff.
I only believe in what I can see.
You know, I had to hear that for years.
I can only believe in what I see.
And one day I was thinking about it.
Almost everything I believe in, I've never seen.
I mean, we're gonna celebrate July 4th,
the 250th anniversary of independence.
How many here saw them sign the Declaration of Independence?
Thomas Jefferson?
I mean, please don't tell me like everyone says,
I only believe in what I can see.
Almost everything you believe you've never seen.
I could ask you to draw an atom right now, an atom.
No one's ever seen an atom, but I say, draw an atom,
you'll come right up here and draw protons,
neutrons, and electrons.
How do you know that?
It's invisible.
The same scientists that criticize on Discovery Channel,
Christians will say, well, yes, it's a multiverse,
it's dark matter, it's dark energy.
You ever seen dark matter?
No, that's why it's called dark.
I'm not questioning it exists.
What I'm saying is faith is the evidence
of things not seen, and faith comes by
Yeah, so everything you believe isn't because
someone proved it in the lab,
it's because someone told you.
Now a smart person says,
I'm gonna listen to what he says.
I'm not gonna listen to my professor if he contradicts.
I mean, when I got saved,
atheist family, chemical engineering, UC Davis,
I had professors that made fun of God,
made fun of Christians, and I was intimidated.
And then I realized, wait a second,
all the fathers of science believed in God.
Good science is believing that God exists.
And what we believe is based on what we've heard and we make intelligent decisions.
So what does it say about Moses?
He saw the invisible one.
Let me give you one more illustration.
Two people are standing on the deck of a ship.
They're looking to the horizon.
One sees a ship coming.
The other does not see a ship coming.
What's the difference?
They have the same eyesight.
They're looking in the same direction.
One sees the ship, one doesn't.
What's the difference?
You're not gonna like the answer.
One has a telescope.
Ah, nobody likes that.
What's faith?
The telescope, it's a microscope.
You see the invisible world's real.
Atoms are real.
I think quarks are real.
I think dark matter's real.
I think black holes are real, but no one's seen it.
But it's real. I believe God's real. And I believe that when we face something,
you have to see the invisible one by faith. That's why you do great things.
And so they could see the invisible one. And look at what's the last thing it says.
Through faith, he kept the Passover and the sprinkling blood, lest he that
destroyed the firstborn should have touched him. And then look at what it says in verse 29.
By faith, it does not say by faith he passed through the Red Sea.
by faith they passed through the Red Sea,
as by dry land which the Egyptians,
a saying to do, were drowned.
That blows my mind.
That blows my mind, I'll tell you why.
Moses, when he got to the Red Sea,
somebody says it's like being chased
by a busload of terrorists,
and you turn into a dead end road.
That's them.
Do you guys remember what the Israelites were doing
when they got to the Red Sea?
Whining.
I always tell people when I preach the book of Exodus,
I feel so sorry for Moses.
He had to take two to three million whiny Americans.
Oh, God.
Oh, I can't stand whiners.
Because whining is a lack of faith.
Whining is no faith.
That's a carnal Christian.
He's a whiner all the time.
Everything's bad.
And he's taking these whiners everywhere.
And the whiners get to this big Red Sea and they said,
it was better in Egypt.
God brought us here to die.
Yet what does the verse say?
by faith.
They passed.
So can you imagine walking through the Red Sea,
looking on both sides?
How were they able to go through the Red Sea?
How?
Because faith is contagious.
All we need is one dad or one mom
to infect the family with faith.
And you guys are doing it anyway.
I know I'm preaching to the choir.
But we just need people to say, I'm gonna live for God.
And when people see your faith, it's contagious.
That's why two to three million people
can come up to the Red Sea,
and one guy raises the rod and they all go past.
I believe God's looking for revival of holy faith.
I believe it's as simple as this, just believe what God says and do it, and He can change
this world.
And I'm excited.
The faith of one person can be so authentic that it can elevate an entire nation and ensure
its liberation.
What does our country need as we face the future?
What it started with, faith people.
I mean, you've studied the history of the United States.
They all believe they could leave Europe
and have a better world.
That's how California started.
It was the belief.
But if we're paralyzed by fear now,
what's the worst thing that can happen to you?
Die and have eternal vacation,
if you're a believer in Jesus.
I mean, we need to focus on him.
I told the kids this week
when we talked about David and Goliath.
When the troops were there, they were focused on Goliath.
The little shepherd boy, who nobody gave five cents for,
was focused on God.
You remember what he said?
Who's this giant compared to our great God?
And it's the same with you.
We will face things in the coming days,
and you'll have two choices,
fear road, manipulation by the devil,
or faith road, and do great things for God.
God has a plan incredible for your life,
that's why you're still here.
Solomon said it this way, it's better to be a live dog than a dead lion, because you have hope.
God wants to do something great in your life, but believe him for it. Believe him for it.
for your word and like you thank you for examples like Moses who made decisions
based on faith and not based on fear and they think that you used him to take the
nation out of there and what it was a picture of the picture of our Lord Jesus
Christ taking us out from slavery also and I pray for every person here present
Lord that might be enslaved by some kind of fear
Maybe their problem is they need to trust Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior.
Maybe their problem is they've already trusted Christ,
but they need to trust in you for the big decisions they're going to make.
Lord, continue to raise up in this church men and women filled with faith
so that you can change this world.
I pray for this vision of 100 new church plants.
God, that you will do it through us, Lord, and you'll be glorified as you do it.
In Jesus' name I pray, amen.
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