Face to Face with God

7 Sept 25 Sermon Duncan Whitty

We are in the book of Exodus this morning. A book of the Bible which has as one of its main themes – the presence of God. Throughout Exodus we see God revealing his presence to his people. God reveals himself to Moses in the midst of a bush that was burning, and yet not being burnt up. His glory, his presence came down on the top of Mount Sinai in fire and smoke (check). The pillar of cloud and fire settled in the mist of the people and God’s glory filled the tabernacle. Exodus tells us that God is actively present with his people, in a real way, a felt way, a way the people could not deny.

I want to talk about the presence of God this morning, because I firmly believe that the Lord wants to reveal more of his presence to us, his people. And I want to create in you a hunger for the presence of God. For God to reveal himself to you, for God to speak to you, for God to communicate to you. I think in every Christian there is a desire and a hunger for the presence of God. Probably all of us want to experience God more, we don’t want the Jesus we worship to be distant and far off. We want God to be close and very real and involved, because we love him.

You want to interact with the people you love. Probably we all have friends in different parts of the country or over in Hong Kong and we can spend long periods of time speaking to them over the phone or facetime. You speak to a friend and you look at your watch, and an hour has gone already! Time flies. They are our friends and we value being with them, even if its only over the internet or the phone and we are willing to spend time with. I believe every Christian has a similar desire to interact with God. To have facetime with God. To speak to him and have him speak back. 

But I want to increase your hunger for that. I want to increase your desire for God. Like Stephen Selby was saying to us a few weeks ago, if God offers us a meal, do we take a nibble and push the rest away uneaten? Do we have a small appetite to be with God, or do we have a deep and urgent hunger for the things of God. 

My job this morning is to encourage you to have a greater spiritual hunger for God and the things of God. As I say we all probably have some kind of desire to seek God, that’s why we are here today, but I’d really like to help you get more hungry for God.

I remember back in 2007 going to a conference in the city of Spokane Washington State in the USA. The name of the conference was ‘The Spiritual Hunger Conference’ and it did what the title suggests. It gave me such a hunger to know and experience God more. It gave me a new love for Jesus. It was partly the preaching from the front, but mostly it was the presence of Jesus in that conference which did something in me that gave me a hunger for more. 

You know we have got to keep the main thing the main thing in our Christianity. And the main thing is to Love God above all things. Love the one who is most worthy of our love. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.

God wants us to love him. Above everything else. Above your family, above your friends, above your hobbies, above your job, love him. That’s his priority for us. If we love anything, any good thing even more than him, then that thing is an idol. 

How are we doing? What is the first thing you wake up and think about in the morning? Is it God? Or is it someone else or something else? Who is on your mind when you wake up? Surely it is likely to be the person or thing you value most? The thing that is on your mind first thing in the day and most often through the day is likely to be the person or thing you love the most. Is it Jesus? Or is it someone or something else? Is Jesus your greatest love?  

It’s a good thing to take a look at yourself and reflect on what’s going on in your mind and in your desires and see where Jesus is. 

Do we love other things rather a lot? Jesus talked about a man who went out and sowed seed in a field (Mark Chapter 4). And some of the seed fell on the path and was stolen by the birds of the air. Some seed fell on shallow soil, so it couldn’t take root. Some seed fell on good soil so it sprouted and bore a good harvest. But he also said some seed fell among thorns and these thorns, or weeds stopped the grain growing and bearing fruit, he said the thorns represent the worries of this life, the deceitfulness of wealth and the desire for other things came in and choked the word, making it unfruitful. 

You know your love or desire for other things can choke out your love for the Lord God. Our heart has only so much room in it. We can only love so many things. So often our love, our desire for pleasure, for success, for fun, for security, for success in ministry, our love for friends and family can push out our desire, our love for God. 

God deserves our love. He deserves not to be second place, but first place in our affections. For he is our maker, he is our saviour, he has given us every good thing we enjoy. He deserves to be first place in our affections. 

Moses loved God and because he loved God, he loved being with God. He had a great appetite for being in God’s presence. And we read in Exodus 33 that he set up a tent outside the main camp, and he called it the ‘tent of meeting’ and he used to go out to that tent and when he went the presence of God would come down. Isn’t that great, when Moses decided to go out to meet with God, God responded and came down to meet with him The pillar of cloud would come down and stand at the entrance to the tent. And everyone in the camp would stand and watch as Moses went out to that little tent and they all stood and worshiped God from a distance when they saw the cloud coming down. But Moses was not at a distance from God, he was right up close. 

And the text says verse 11 ‘The Lord would speak to Moses face to face, as a man speaks with his friend.’

That’s a wonderful verse. 

It’s a picture of intimacy. Moses and Almighty God were close. 

The Israelites worshipped God at a distance. But Moses came close and the Lord drew close to him.

The context of this passage is that the Israelites had sinned by making a statue - a golden calf to worship and God was angry with their idolatry and punished them for it. But then the Lord said to Moses, leave this place and go to the land I have promised and I will drive out ahead of you all the enemy nations- the Canaanites, the Amorites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Hivites and Jebusites. I’ll clear the enemies away and give you a land flowing with milk and honey, a really good land, but I will not go up with you. I’ll send an angel instead with you to give you the land, but I myself will not go.

God was offering the people his blessing without his presence. Now many people would love that. Many people just want to be blessed, they want to go to heaven, they want to have a happy life on earth. But they don’t care too much about being close to God, they don’t care too much about his presence. They want blessing from God but not intimacy with God. 

You know in Islam, Muslims believe that when faithful Muslims die, they will go to a paradise with all sorts of good things in it, but they don’t believe that Allah, their God will be there. They call their paradise ‘Jannah’ and they believe it will be filled with gardens, beautiful companions and divine pleasures. Sounds great, but there is one thing missing- the experiential presence of God. They believe that Allah is too great to come close to human beings. To put it simply, God isn’t in their heaven.

But the Bible tells us something very different- A Christian who dies goes into the presence of the Lord. You see Jesus offers relationship with God His Father. Yes He offers blessings from God, but the greatest thing on offer is relationship with God, to know God, to be close to him, to experience his presence.

How could heaven be heaven if God, the One we are called to love and the One who is most worthy of love most isn’t there?  

But holiness is needed to experience the felt presence of God. God asks his people to be holy. Psalm 24 says:

Who may climb the mountain of the Lord?
    Who may stand in his holy place?
Only those whose hands and hearts are pure,
    who do not worship idols
    and never tell lies.
They will receive the Lord’s blessing
    and have a right relationship with God their saviour.
Such people may seek you
    and worship in your presence, O God of Jacob.^.

To the credit of the Israelites, they didn’t want God’s blessings without relationship with him. They wanted him. 

And so when God spoke to them through Moses saying ‘You are a stiff necked people, If I were to go with you even for a moment, I might destroy you. Now take off your ornaments and I will decide what to do with you.

They were willing to repent, they turned back to God. They stripped off their jewellery and humbled themselves before the Lord at Mount Horeb. 

Without holiness it would have been dangerous for the people to go on into the Promised Land with God’s presence. Because God is a holy God and when he draws near to people they must be holy. That’s why God had said ‘I’ll keep my promise to you and give you the Promised Land, but I won’t go with you.’ 

If we want God’s presence, we need to be humble and be willing to repent of our sin. We cannot be stiff necked.

Before Jesus could come to Israel, God had to get the people prepared and he sent John the Baptist to prepare a highway for the Lord. To get a people who were repentant of their sin. Jesus the very presence of God in human form, needed to have a people prepared to receive him. 

Isaiah calls John the Baptist a voice calling in the wilderness. 

Isaiah wrote ‘A voice calling in the wilderness, In the desert prepare the way for the Lord, make straight in the wilderness a highway for our God. Every valley shall be raised up, every mountain and hill made low. The rough ground shall become level and the rugged places a plain. And the glory of the Lord will be revealed and all mankind will see it.

If we are going to experience a greater measure of God’s presence we got to be clean. Our hearts must be right. The rough ground of our hearts must be levelled and the rugged places in our lives must be made smooth. There can’t be sin in the camp, if the glory of the Lord is going to come. But if we get rid of our sin, then the glory of the Lord can be revealed. The presence of God can be revealed. 

Every year in August I go to my tent of meeting. I go down to the Davids Tent Christian festival in Wiltshire. 

IMAGE OF DAVID’S TENT

Its 72 hours of non stop praise and worship. It starts at 2pm on the Friday and ends at 2pm on Monday. Day and night, day and night, day and night the praise goes up. 3500 people gather over the weekend. You can imagine with that much devotion to the Lord, the Lord comes close. 

I go every year because every year I experience the presence of the Lord in a special way and every year He speaks to me. In a sense you could say, every year I see his face. Its worth the time, its worth the train journey, it’s worth the discomfort of camping. I took my own tent and couldn’t sleep because of the snoring coming from neighbouring tents!! But its worth all that, to meet with God.

God is worthy of it all. He is worthy. He deserves our adoration and our praise and our worship and our service. 

This church is a tent of meeting. It’s a place where we can come and meet with the Lord. And hopefully we experience sometime of the Lord’s presence here on a Sunday. I want to experience more of it, there is more, much more that the Lord wants to give us.

And though the week, every day its good to spend time with the Lord, to go to your private tent of meeting. And I know many of you do. 

Normally right after breakfast, but sometimes last thing in the evening, I spend time praising the Lord, or praying or reading the Bible. It’s a time set apart from the rest of life, to be alone with God. Often that time is called a quiet time in Christian circles. 

I know many of you have a daily quiet time. Time with the Lord. But life gets busy and time pressure can mean that we start to reduce the amount of time we spend reading the bible, praying. We all like to be efficient. I was speaking to a Hong Konger this week, who said that Hong Kongers really value efficiency. Doing something quickly and well. Things in Hong Kong work efficiently and well so I understand, jobs get done quickly. And that is a good thing. 

But you can bring that into your relationship with God and you can start to think- this is really not an efficient use of my time. I spent half an hour, praying and listening to Christian worship music and reading my Bible, but I didn’t achieve anything. Nothing seems to have changed in my life. It isn’t efficient.

These days we live in a microwave society. We can shove a meal in the microwave and zap it and its ready in five minutes. But God is into marinating, not microwaving. Marinating is soaking your chicken or beef in a marinade sauce, and it takes time. 

Just soak in God’s presence. Take time with him and you will find that slowly, you get changed, slowly the Lord reveals himself more to you. Your relationship will develop. Its not an immediate change. 

There is an old hymn, called ‘Take Time to be holy’ which goes;

Take time to be holy, the world rushes on,

Spend much time in secret, with Jesus alone

By looking to Jesus, like Him you shall be

Your friends in your conduct, his likeness shall see

So don’t rush on, like everyone else. Slow down and spend time with Jesus.

IMAGE OF OAK TREE

A tree like this oak tree has a huge system of roots working away taking nutrients out of the soil, feeding the rest of the tree. And all that work is unseen, its underground, but its vital to the life of the tree. Your unseen, secret time with God is vital for your spiritual life. To grow strong in the Lord.

Jesus said ^‘Remain in me, and I will remain in you. For a branch cannot produce fruit if it is severed from the vine, and you cannot be fruitful unless you remain in me.’ – John 15

Just like an oak gets its nutrition from its roots, just like a vine branch gets its life flowing from the vine, so we need to have fellowship with Jesus to be fruitful. And that takes time. 

But you are thinking, where will I get the time? I have children, I have family, I have a job, I don’t have much time. 

We can always make time for things that are important to us.

Susannah Wesley was the mother of 19 children, 9 of whom died young. Two of her sons were John and Charles Wesley who became founders of the Methodist Chruch. 

Early in her life Susannah Wesley vowed that should never spend more time in leisure and entertainment, than she did in prayer and Bible study. Even amid the most complex and busy years of her life as a mother, she still scheduled two hours each day, for fellowship with God and time in his Word, and she kept to that schedule faithfully. But her challenge was finding a place of privacy in a house filled to overflowing with children.

Mother Wesley’s solution to this was to bring her Bible to her favourite chair in the house, and throw her long apron over her head, forming a sort of tent. This became her tent of meeting. Every person in the household, from the smallest toddler, to the oldest domestic servant, knew well to respect this signal. When Susanna was under the apron, she was with God and was not to be disturbed except in the case of the direst emergency. There in the privacy of her little tent, she prayed for her husband and her children and searched out the deep mysteries of God in the scriptures. 

There is always a way to make time. 

In that tent of meeting in Exodus, the Lord spoke to Moses face to face as a man speaks with his friend. That kind of relationship is what the Lord wants to have with every person here.

Jesus after three years with his disciples told them that he thought of them differently that he did at the beginning of their relationship. He said;

‘I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you.’

After 3 years of him teaching them and them learning, they have come to a place of understanding and intimacy with him that he can now call them friends. They are still his servants, but more than just servants, servants who are also friends. 

You can come to know Jesus so well that he calls you his friend. Isn’t that lovely?

Friendship with the Lord is on offer- for those who draw near and yes who are faithful servants, like Moses was. 

Draw near to God and he will draw near to you.

God is a rewarder of those who earnestly seek him. 

Every minute spent in your tent of meeting will be worth it.