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Sermon Details
- Pastor Name: Jonathan Cornell
- Date & Time: September 21, 2014 | 10:00am
SERMON SERIES: Leap!: Taking Risks for God’s Kingdom
Keep moving forward, or stop and fall backward? This is the question that is placed before everyone who chooses to put his or her faith in God. Forward, active, dynamic, challenging… these are words that are often used to describe faith. But one thing is for certain: the decision to follow God’s leading will always lead to a life characterized by dynamic forward movement. The alternative: stop and go back to where you were.
This fall, we are looking together at the subject of faith. Each week, we are looking at a story of a man or woman from the Old Testament that can teach us something about faith. In each of the last two weeks, I have described faith as a decision to go from safety and predictability to vulnerability and trust. To, as it were, step off a precipice or let go of the trapeze, knowing that when you do, the one who will catch you is none other than the Living God.
Today’s passage is one in which God’s people face a giant obstacle. And many of them—instead of choosing to be bold and trust God—wanted to turn around and head back to the safety of their old life in Egypt. The decision to trust God is to choose the bold path, because it looks fear in the eye and says the one who created me has something to say about fear…don’t have it, you don’t need it, I AM is with me, and therefore I can be bold.
It had been two years since the God’s people left slavery in Egypt. These were tough years walking the hard, dry road of the wilderness, eating manna, a substance that slightly resembled desert dandruff. The memory remained fresh that “at least back in Egypt, we had bread to eat, and we weren’t starving.”
Have you ever had a time in your life when it felt like you were just barely making it? When your family, your job, your finances were hanging in the balance and all you could manage to eek out were just the basics? Or things around you felt so dull and dry and monotonous that it felt like a desert wasteland? First of all, let’s be clear: nobody chooses the desert.
Download the entire transcript here: Numbers 13 Giants and Grasshoppers
