The Pentateuch- Holy God, Holy People, Holy Calling Pentateuch Sermon Series Kenwood Baptist Church Pastor David Palmer November 1, 2020

TEXT: Exodus 15:1-11

Praise the Lord. I am so aware of God's presence here with us this morning. I am humbled to be here and grateful for what God is doing among us. This morning we continue with the Pentateuch, the five scrolls, the base story line of the Bible. We are now in the book of Exodus. I love Exodus for several reasons. Let me give you just three:

Number one: Exodus reveals to us the identity, the character, and the saving will of the Lord. We learn the very name of God in Exodus 3, Yahweh, the Lord. We discover He is faithful to all of His promises, that He is a Redeemer, that He responds to the cry of the oppressed. He sees injustice and responds. He humbles the proud and exalts the humble. He preserves the names of two Hebrew midwives – Shiphrah and Puah – but does not record the name of Pharaoh. He is the God revealed in covenant, remembering His promises to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. He acts with a mighty outstretched arm. He is the God who triumphs over enemies, who redeems us, and who covers our sins by the blood of the Lamb and will lead us to the place of His presence to worship Him. This is the God we meet in Exodus. The God we meet in Exodus shows us, not only His identity and character, but also His saving will, because Exodus is the template of redemption. It's the God who raises up a Child as a deliverer, who performs signs and wonders, who writes into the story that forgiveness is made possible by the blood of the Passover Lamb. God marks out this time to be remembered forever. He is a God who is sovereign, who writes this script into the story, so we are ready for the arrival of Jesus Christ, our Passover Lamb.

Number two: Exodus is the literary center of gravity in the Old Testament. God also prepares

Page 1 of 12 us with this template of redemption, the Exodus. We reach Mount Sinai in Exodus 19, and we stay there all the way for 21 chapters of Exodus, 27 chapters of Leviticus, and 9 chapters of Numbers. It’s where we meet God and stay. The Exodus events are referred to more than 120 times in the rest of the Old Testament. It's the center of gravity. It's this act that God wants us to see and know. It's the pivotal event.

Number three: Exodus defines our identity. We find out who we are. We know who we are in Genesis. We’re made in the image and likeness of God. But we find out in Exodus that we are rescued people. I'm just so thankful for the worship song set this morning that told the story of our redemption, and that's my story. If you have not entrusted Christ yet for salvation, I want you to know that this story has an open end, and when you trust Him for salvation, you become a rescued person. We sing about the blood of Jesus, because it has cleansed us. It has rescued us, and you know there's no power of the enemy, no accusation can stick, and no slander can stick to you if you have been cleansed in the blood of Jesus Christ. This identity as a people rescued and then a people told that you are God's treasured possession in all the earth. The Lord says, “All the earth is mine, but you are a treasured possession.” He has redeemed us and brought us into covenant, and then we have a job to do. We have a mission. It's no wonder that the Apostle Paul's teacher Gamaliel said that “in every generation, a person must regard themselves as if they themselves came forth out of Egypt.” Brevard Childs of Yale University writes that “it is incumbent upon every generation to study the meaning of the Exodus afresh, so that the contemporary situation of the church is addressed by its word.” This story is so powerful and so faith-building that I'm delighted to saturate it.

God's people waited 400 years for this, but this story shows us God, shows us who we are, and fills us with faith. I think the biggest thing that’s happened to me this week, just soaking in this portion of God's Word, is that I stood on solid ground and thought the Lord God is powerful and can be trusted. No matter what's happening in our world, whether that be the Coronavirus pandemic or the national election or whatever we’re facing that might knock us off balance and make us feel fearful, we meet a God in Scripture who fills our hearts with faith, who can be trusted, and whose purposes will prevail. Will you enter into this story with me this morning? I want to go through four movements, following the basic lessons in Bible Journey to see God's hand at work:

Movement 1: God prepares a rescuer. Exodus begins with the descendants of Jacob, whose name was changed to Israel. Seventy members of his family go down to Egypt, and the story begins with those 70. Joseph dies, but the people of Israel are fruitful and increase greatly. This is language that makes us think of Genesis 1:28, when God blessed them and said, “Be fruitful and multiply.” When we read Exodus 1, we realize that this is the God we read about in Genesis

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1, and He's working right here. It is astonishing that they are fruitful and multiply, because, as we will see, they have everything going against them from a human point of view. The king of Egypt dies, and a new king (a new pharaoh) arises, who does not know Joseph, and he sees the descendants of Israel, our ancestors of faith, and they are growing and multiplying. He says this is not good; we should deal shrewdly with them, lest they join our enemies and fight against us. Then the Pharaoh turns against the people of God.

Scholars are divided about which Pharaoh this is. The text actually makes great effort not to name him, which is its own point. God's name is the name you discover in Exodus, not Pharaoh’s. But scholars are divided. Some think it was Thutmoses III, son of Seti I, the 19th dynasty. Others think it was Rameses II, the 18th dynasty. Rameses was famous in battle, and his monumental architecture can still be seen throughout Egypt. Rameses II is his Egyptian name. He was also known as Ozymandias in the Greek tradition. The Greek name Ozymandias comes from one of Rameses’ regnal names that the Maat of Ra is powerful in him, in Greek, that becomes Ozymandias. You might think Rameses and Ozymandias certainly can't be the same person, but they are. Percy Bysshe Shelley's famous poem “Ozymandias” is written in inspiration of what's left of Rameses’ great monumental works. In this most famous of romantic poems, Shelley writes: “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!” We sang a song this morning, “King of Kings,” and we’re still singing about the real King of kings.

Rameses’ monumental architecture is impressive. It is intimidating. It is staggering in scale and scope. But he was worried about the increase of these slave people, and so he sought to subjugate them in three ways:

First was state slavery. They set taskmasters over them to afflict them with heavy burdens and built for Pharaoh storage cities, Pithom and Raamses. The remains of these cities are still evident today. You can see clips of it in Bible Journey. You can still see the ruins of the bricks made with straw. They oppressed our ancestors, made their lives bitter, and forced them to be brick makers. We have inscriptions from ancient Egypt that describe foreigners making bricks. We even have the pictures. These images are almost 3000 years old or even more. They show

Page 3 of 12 us the main three scenes of making bricks. How do you do it? You have one group of workers collecting water from the canal or diverting it from the Nile. You have a second group of workers collecting straw or stubble. Then a third group of workers takes this soaked clay mixture, with straw to stabilize it, forms it into molds, and bakes it three days on one side, then flips it over to bake three days on the other side. A week later you have a brick. It would take 24 million bricks to encircle one of Rameses' palace fortification structures. And the required quota for slave labor is 3000 a day. We even have ancient Egyptian inscriptions that describe the misery of the brick maker. Imagine having to make 3000 bricks, line after line, row after row, for someone else's vanity and fame, knowing God had promised great things to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and waiting and suffering.

Despite this slavery, we increased in number because of God's blessing, and so Rameses’ second strategy was private infanticide. The king of Egypt told the Hebrew midwives, Shiphrah and Puah, that when they help Hebrew women in childbirth, that if it's a boy, then kill it. And we have our first recorded civil disobedience in world literature in Exodus 1:17. But these two women said, “No, we’re not killing the children.” They disobeyed the king, they saved lives, and the people grew in number.

Then the Pharaoh moved to a third strategy, that of genocide, and he commanded all the people that every son born to Hebrews should be cast into the Nile. God works sovereignly in this situation in Exodus 2. A man from the house of Levi knew his wife, and she conceived and bore a son. God's answer to 400 years of affliction is the birth of a child. Oh, what profound foreshadowing we have. A child will be born in rescue. God hears the groaning and answers, and God's answer is to raise up a child and to protect the life of this child miraculously from those who sought to destroy him.

Then in Exodus 3, God meets Moses, who was drawn out of the water. He meets him in the wilderness at the burning bush at Mount Sinai and calls his name, “Moses, Moses.” Moses says, “Here I am.” And the Lord says to him in Exodus 3:6-7: “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. . . I have surely seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt and have heard their cry because of their taskmasters. I know their sufferings.” This is the God of the Bible. “I have seen, I have heard, I know what's going on, and so I've come

Page 4 of 12 down. I've come down to save.” God comes down to save and tells Moses, “I'm sending you. You were raised in the courts of Pharaoh. Now go and speak to the Pharaoh and tell Him to let My son go. “Let My people go,” the Lord says. The ESV renders the second part of this in Exodus 3 as: “that they might serve God.” The language of serving is actually the language of worship. I like the NIV translation better here, because the call is to leave Egypt so that we might worship the Lord. The Exodus is not about freedom in the abstract. The Exodus is about the freedom to worship God. It's about changing masters, from the tyranny of a centralized state that would seek to oppress and restrict movement and control things so that we would be drawn away from God systematically, to a God who says, “Let My people go, so they can serve Me and worship Me and delight in the covenant relationship that's exclusive and a bond in love.” This is the refrain of Moses’ speech. “Let my people go, that they might worship Me.” God raises up a deliverer with a point to rescue us, so we can worship our God.

When we sing, it's not a small thing. It's like the point of salvation. It’s the point of missions. Missions go out to all the world, and people are converted, and this is wonderful, and it is an occasion for great joy. But the point of conversion is the freedom to worship God. The Bible ends not just with people being safe. It ends with people worshiping forever and ever. And this is where we experience our highest joys. It's the greatest thing in the world to just praise God for who He is, and it fills you with strength and joy to remember His saving deeds. God raises up a deliverer, and then He acts.

Movement 2: God brings a judgment by plagues and stretches out a powerful arm to save. One of my favorite segments of Bible Journey this week is seeing Tim Laniak standing in front of these monumental Egyptian buildings. They are big, bigger than you think they are. The pyramids of ancient Egypt were the tallest man-made buildings in the ancient world, and they were thousands of years old when Abraham saw them. It’s not just the pyramids; it’s these monumental reliefs, where the Pharaohs stand there, and they look like Marvel action figures. They are larger than life. The Incredible Hulk looks puny next to these Pharaohs, and they have huge outstretched arms. When you read the hieroglyphs, as I've been told by people who can read the hieroglyphs, they say that the Pharaoh has a mighty arm. But then you see what he's doing with his arm, smashing the heads of his enemies.

The God of the Bible reaches out with a mighty arm to save. In Exodus 3:19, the Lord says, “I know the king of Egypt will not let you go unless compelled by a mighty hand.” God has a strong arm. It is not too short to save, and God is able to save with His hand. I was going through one of the most difficult moments of my life after my parents divorced. My dad remarried, and then my dad and stepmom divorced. It was a crushing blow, and I thought, “Where is the Lord?” One of my mentors told me, “You can lose your grip on God, but He will never lose His grip on you.”

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And I experienced that. This image of God's powerful arm to save is written so deeply into the Scriptures. It's mentioned in passage after passage. It's a source of tremendous encouragement. When you are down, when you are overwhelmed, just remind yourself that your God has a mighty outstretched arm. It's not too short, and it's not weak. He's going to reach out and save with this hand, and He can change the situation. He can act in response to your prayers.

In Exodus 13, we read that our children will ask about the Passover: “What does this mean?” And we are to tell them, “With a mighty hand, the Lord brought us out.” The next generation to remember holy days will ask, “Why do we gather to worship on this day?” The answer in Deuteronomy 5 is: “Remember that you were slaves in Egypt, and the Lord brought you out with a mighty arm and outstretched hand.” Jeremiah remembers God's actions in the past as hope for the future and says, “Lord, You brought us out with signs and wonders and a mighty hand, and so do it again.” So, too, in 2 Chronicles 6:32, we read: "As for the foreigner who does not belong to Your people Israel but has come from a distant land because of Your great name and Your mighty hand and Your outstretched arm – when he comes and prays toward this temple.” Even in the New Testament, 1 Peter 5:6, we read: “Humble yourselves, therefore, under God's mighty hand, that He may lift you up in due time.” Our Father has a strong arm, a mighty hand, and He will never lose His grip on you, no matter what you face. The Exodus story, where God brings judgment by a series of plagues and reveals His is mighty arm to save, is a contest that has two very different effects. It's a contest that forces Pharaoh to concede in the end, and it is a contest that forces or draws Israel to confess. Pharaoh concedes that he is not God. Israel confesses that the Lord is God. As the plagues unfold as a series of judgments, they are right judgments in this contest, God's declaration of war. It's a war against a hostile power that is seeking to destroy and kill and oppress. And God acts. God acts and declares war against Pharaoh.

The Pharaohs saw themselves as divine. They were the incarnation of the sun god Ra. That's why the Pharaohs have golden skin in their funerary masks. The pharaohs would go to the Nile in the morning and greet the sun as their father. Pharaohs could maintain their throne as long as they could demonstrate this relationship. Tombs echo these claims. Pharaoh is a god, by whose dealings one lives, the father and mother of all men, alone by himself and without equal. Pharaoh was responsible for maintaining cosmic

Page 6 of 12 order, and that order was seen most predominately in the regular inundation of the Nile River, which was the bread basket of ancient Egypt. The ancients said that Egypt is the gift of the Nile. When you fly over Egypt, you realize that ancient Egypt, and even modern Egypt, is a desert with a river in it. And without this river, there is no Egypt. The Pharaoh was responsible to maintain this order, and yet even ancient Egyptian texts say that if the Pharaoh does not conduct his reign in righteousness, then things will unravel. And we see this unraveling. The first plague turns the Nile into blood.

As the plagues escalate as acts of judgment for Pharaoh to concede and for Israel to confess that Yahweh is Lord, we see this motif of Pharaoh's heart becoming harder and harder. Twenty times in the narrative we have this expression. Ten times Pharaoh hardens his heart, and ten times God hardens it. The language of hardening the heart in Hebrew contains a critical idiom that we must know. The hardening of Pharaoh's heart is translated from the Hebrew word from kavod, which means to make heavy. It's not that Pharaoh's heart was fleshy and soft and now becomes stiff. The idiom in the original text is that Pharaoh's heart becomes weighty and heavy. What's going on? What's going on is in direct conversation with the ancient Egyptian practice of the weighing of the heart. In the Egyptian Book of the Dead, we see this depicted before us. We can look at this scene where the Pharaoh is trying to make it into the afterlife, and he is standing before Osiris, god of the dead, and behind Osiris there is a composite creature ready to devour. When we look more closely, we see the image of Osiris, and we see the Pharaoh standing before him. There is a scale before him. On one side we see the heart of the king, and on the other side we see a feather. That feather represents Ma’at or order, righteousness, justice, and so we’re weighing the heart. Does the heart emerge as heavier? Does that weight of a guilty heart confirm Pharaoh's misdeeds?

Ancient Egyptians were terrified about approaching this ceremony. They believed everyone would face this weighing of the heart, this balance of judgment. You have righteousness that is light as a feather. You know, the book on righteousness is thin; while the book on sin is long.

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The ancient Egyptians prepared for this moment and filled the walls of their tombs with incantations, so that their heart would confess that they done no wrong. They placed heart scarabs on top of their mummies. Several of these are here in Cincinnati at the Art Museum. In the Egyptian mummy that's here in our museum, you can see the incantations to be spoken, so that your heart doesn't actually say the truth of what you've done. Consider Pharaoh’s saying these words: “I have done no wrong. I have not robbed. I have not stolen. I have not slain people.” In the narrative of the Exodus, God says: “Your heart is heavy, Pharaoh, because you have done wrong, and you have slain, and you have committed genocide against My people.” The plagues escalate unto the climactic tenth plague, and this climactic tenth plague is the death of the firstborn. Every firstborn in the land, from the firstborn of Pharaoh to the firstborn of the slave girl, will perish. But the Lord reveals provision for forgiveness. This great battle, this war between the most powerful nation in the world at that time and the God of the Bible, slows down. We enter into the houses of our ancestors, where God tells them to take a lamb, blameless and without defect. Slay that lamb for the household, and take some of the blood from that lamb and put it on the door posts. The blood will be a sign for you, and when I see the blood, I will pass over you, and no plague will befall you.

You may not conceive of the end of time, as the ancient Egyptians saw it, as a cosmic balancing. But let me tell you, if all of us were to be judged in that way, all of our hearts would be heavy. But God writes into the narrative the key of forgiveness. The key of forgiveness is through the atoning blood of the Lamb. That's why we get to sing forever: “Worthy is the Lamb, who was slain, who purchased us – men, women and children from every nation.” The people were told, “This is what you need to do,” and they did it. It is just like when the people asked Jesus what they needed to do to fulfill the works that God requires, and Jesus said, “Believe in the One whom He has sent.” The people took the words they were given, and they acted in accordance with them. They did what God had said. They put the blood on the door posts, and God passed over them.

Movement 3: God says to remember the Passover. We have to remember that our Lord Jesus grew up celebrating the Passover. It is the Passover time that God sovereignly marks out and secures in space and time. It is this moment of all the moments for which God reworks Israel's calendar, so that this event is the first event of the year, in the springtime. It will be for this time and this space that Jesus Christ will say almost 1500 years later, “I eagerly desire to eat this Passover with you.” He is the Passover Lamb. God wants to make sure we know what's really happening. He doesn't leave us to make up the meaning of the cross. Jesus interprets it for us and sovereignly has it happen at this very moment.

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Movement 4: God brings liberation and freedom at the crossing of the sea. After the Passover, God brings triumph, and Pharaoh finally lets us go, and we go together as a group. We read later in the narrative that we went down as 70 people, and we came out as 600,000 families. The engineers among us are already scrambling. However you want to graph that, let’s just say that God blessed us. He didn't bless just us, but we read in the narrative in Exodus 12:38 that “a mixed multitude” came up with us. A number of Egyptians realized the folly of worshiping a man and said, “We’re going with you.” The Exodus is evangelistic. God acts to save.

We read that God did not lead us on the road to the Philistine country, which was the direct route from the Nile Delta straight to Israel, in the upper right corner of this image. It's just a seven day walk; it's not that far. The ancient Egyptians called it the Way of Horus; Israel called it the Way of the Sea. We were there. But then God says in Exodus 13, “Turn around.” As we look at the geography, where God says to turn around by the way of the wilderness, we find that the ESV, like the Septuagint, translates it as the Red Sea. The Hebrew text actually says “by the Yam Suf,” which is an Egyptian loanword for reed – it's the Sea of Reeds. It's not the Red Sea at the bottom of the image; it's the Sea of Reeds – that marshy set of lakes above the Red Sea. It’s a small detail, but some people are troubled when they try to work out the geography. It wasn’t the Red Sea; it was the Sea of Reeds.

But what happened there … oh, what happened there. God turned us around. He pinned us in. In Exodus 14:1, God says: "Tell the people of Israel to turn back and encamp in front of Pi-hahiroth, between Migdol and the sea, in front of Baal-zephon; you shall encamp facing it, by the sea.” God brings us right to this moment where we have no power. Have you ever been in a situation like that? It seems like you're there, and your prayers were answered. And God says, “No. Come right over here. I want you to be really clear about who I am. I want you to know forever about My power to save.” I also want you to know that sometimes, as in the case of Jacob last Sunday, we are tempted to grasp the blessing, because we don't think God is really going to give it to us. And then when He does give it to us, we sometimes think we better take it and run. That’s not the God of the Bible. He is giving it to us as an everlasting possession. We’re not just slipping out of Egypt. He is triumphing and making a way for us to pass through.

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Pharaoh barges in after us, hardening his heart one last time, and races toward us as we stand in between the onslaught of a rushing army and a body of water that we cannot cross. What do you do then? You have a prayer meeting. Then Moses tells the people in Exodus 14:13: “Fear not, stand firm, and see the salvation of the Lord,” and God acts, and the pillar of cloud and fire which led us out moves behind us and is our shield and protection. It's this language that's quoted in Isaiah 52. It's a text that I use whenever there's a transition in life, in my own life or in someone else's. I always pray this prayer from Isaiah 52, which is an Exodus prayer: “The Lord will go before you, and the God of Israel will be your rear guard.” This is what happens. He goes before us, and then He comes back around, and He says, “I'm going to be out in front of you, and I'm going to be behind you. You don’t have to be afraid. You don’t have to be afraid of drowning in the sea. You don’t have to be afraid of the rushing army. I’ll go before you, and I'll be behind you.” Jesus goes out in front of us, and He comes behind us, and He says, “No weapon formed against you will prosper.” The Lord acts, and the God who said, “Let there be light,” caused the wind to blow. The wind is the same word for Spirit in Scripture, and God's Spirit moves and creates a way where there is no way. It wasn't a wading pool – it was a way; it was a highway. The text says that the people could see the water stacked up on either side, and they went through. They came through on the other side, and then God took those same waters and defeated our enemies, bringing a right-measured judgment against Pharaoh and his host. When we step on the dry ground on the other side, what do you do then? You have a prayer meeting before you cross, and when you stand on dry ground, you have a worship service. I don't think you have to have a lot of compulsion to start singing. God does that, and worship happens. We read in Exodus 15:1 that Moses and the people sang this song: “I will sing to the Lord, for He has triumphed gloriously.”

I love accuracy in the details. If you saw “Prince of Egypt,” the Disney version of the Exodus, you would have seen that at this moment of crossing, the people are singing. It's a great Hans Zimmer song. This song of Moses was not originally written by Hans Zimmer, but the people start singing in the movie. They are singing, “Ashira ladonai ki gaoh gaah,” which is a quote from Exodus 15. They took care enough to have the words right. “I will sing to the Lord because has triumphed gloriously.” Exodus 15 celebrates the Lord's victory and climaxes in verse 11: "Who is like You, O Lord, among the gods?” Who is like You?” “Mi chamocha.” “Who is like You, O Lord?”

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The effect of the Exodus even has an effect on the transmission of the Bible. When we look at copies of the Old Testament transmitted, the poetry of Exodus 15 is written in a unique way on the page. No other portion of Scripture is written like this. You can see at the bottom of this image that you have regular text, right to left, telling the narrative, but the poem of Exodus 15 is on the top. If you look at it, you can see that the poem is written to show the division of the sea and the people coming through, like the text is just coming through the middle. This is the Bible that our Lord knew growing up, and this is what He celebrated.

The Exodus has so much to teach us this morning, and it fills our hearts with faith. Let me apply this right now for us in three very brief ways:

Application number one: God rescues us, and I want you to know this. I want to write this on your hearts forever: Whatever you face, the God that we meet in the Bible is a rescuer. He will never ask you to save yourself – ever. But if you call out to Him in trouble, He responds – every time. He will rescue you from an assault on life. He will rescue you from oppression and slavery. He will rescue you from the idolatry of state. He has the mighty arm to save.

Application number two: God carefully sets expectations for us to recognize His salvation. I want to underscore this, because sometimes, as Christians, we think, “Well, the Exodus really isn’t our story.” But it is. God defines the space of a child born to rescue and miraculously preserved from attacks of a hostile king. I know it seems a long way away, but we will be in Advent in just a few weeks, and Matthew takes great care to quote from these early chapters of Exodus to explain the king’s hostile attempt to kill the infant Jesus. A Child born to deliver signs and wonders, designed to confront evil and cultivate faith, forgiveness through the blood of the Lamb, and a miraculous deliverance on our confession through the waters. New Testament writers liken our baptism, confession of faith, to this passing through the waters.

All of these images are so central to our faith and we needed to connect them with the Exodus, more than we did. I want us to have this, because I don't want the Bible to be cut up for you in two parts. I don’t want you to have less of God and less of God's Word. I want you to see the coherence of Scripture, because this coherence then stirs us and keeps us strong. It’s like not standing on one foot, so that whatever comes your way, you are planted in a God who acts and who has perfectly prepared the scene for us to recognize our Lord Jesus. Maybe here today, of

Page 11 of 12 all places, you're seeing Jesus in a new way. Whether you're here in the Sanctuary, outside in the shelter, or watching online, if you've never trusted Jesus to be the source of your forgiveness and new life, invite Him as your Savior today. Join the multitude coming out to the freedom to worship God.

Application number three: God brings us out to complete the work that He's given us. The Exodus doesn't stop with just our rescue. It doesn't stop with just the forgiveness. It continues until we reach the base of the mountain and we’re given God's Word, His will, and we have a job to do as rescued people. What’s the first big job? We worship God, and then we build something. We build a space where God can be worshiped. We take the fruit of our labor, we take the plunder from the Egyptians, and we offer to God in worship. As unrelated as it might have seemed to you when we started, the Exodus is about God taking a people and bringing us out,, and then its about our giving what He has given to us, so that at the center of our life together is a space to worship Him and to remember who He is and what He has done. This morning we have that joy together. Let me pray for us.

Lord Jesus, we praise You. You are our Passover Lamb. We thank You that You have claimed us for Yourself and that You have rescued us. Lord, we’re no longer slaves to fear. We are Your children. Lord, we look to You with confidence. We lift up our lives. We lift up our nation. Lord, we pray that You would do great and mighty things and that Your house would be a house dedicated to worshiping You, where people can discover Your great Name and Your outstretched arm and trust You. We pray, Lord, that this entire church campus and ministry would be built on praising Jesus Christ, making His Name known, and reaching out in love to our community. Use us, Lord, a rescued and redeemed people. We dedicate these our gifts to Your use. We offer them to You out of what You have given to us. We pray that You would enable us by Your grace, by Your power, to magnify Your Name. Who is like You, Lord?

In Jesus’ Name, Amen.

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