Loving God and keeping His Requirements

Moses is just finished in chapter 10, sort of laying the foundation for what will be the guidelines for the people of Israel when they settle in the land of promise that God was guiding them to. He describes the commitment that they are to make to love God, to fear Him, to walk in His ways, to serve Him with all their heart, soul, and to observe His commands. Now he starts talking about in chapter 11 the two key ingredients in this instruction, loving God and keeping His requirements. The loving part of this is the connection that God has with us, the bonding together that comes from when two people make a promise or commitment to each other, they're bonded by this, and the love requirement or the love command or the love instructions is that we are to be bonded to God. And the way we're bonded to God is to listen to His instructions and to do them, working together with someone, listening to what they have to say to us, following their directions is a bonding experience that we have with God. So he starts chapter 11 saying, love the Lord your God and keep His requirements, His decrees, His laws, His commandments always. And then he goes into talking about how they should remember how God has in the past blessed them to take care of them and provide for them. In verse 8 is where I want to pick up in this story, observe therefore all the commands I'm giving you today. Now you'll notice in the beginning of chapter 11 he talks about keep the requirements. In chapter 10 he talked about observing the Lord's commands and decrees. In the idea of observing, if you sit and observe something, you watch it carefully, you see what takes place, you reflect on it, you think about it, it's more than simply reading, it's more than simply looking at. Observing is studying, thinking about, reflecting on something. So he's talking about thinking about the requirements and the commandments and the instructions that God gives us to reflect on them. The Bible talks about this saying you're to think on them day and night. Think on them as you walk along. Think of them as you sit down. Think of them as you eat so that the instructions of God are to be a part of our life and our thoughts about it. Now when we sat down today, Sharon was saying, what was it you had going through your head? This is the day that the Lord has made. This is the day that the Lord has made. Rejoice and be glad in it. When you read the words of scripture, like this song, the words of this song, sometimes those words will come to your mind. And he wants you to think about whatever it is that you read, love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind, and to think, what does that mean? How do I do that? Would God think I'm doing that? What other people around me think I'm doing that? Why would they think that? You see, as you begin to reflect on that one single verse, you begin to expand and explore the dimensions of what that means for your behavior in your life. That's what he's talking about. I want you, he says, to observe all the commands I'm giving you today so that you may have strength to go on and take the land that you're crossing the Jordan to possess. And so you may live long in the land that the Lord swore to your forefathers to give to them and their descendants, a land flowing with milk and honey. Now he uses the phrase milk and honey, if I could kind of jump ahead to that one. Whenever they were out in the desert and they were walking along and they didn't have anything to eat and they were complaining to Moses. They said, Moses, we left the land flowing with milk and honey to be out here in the desert. Now we don't even have anything to eat. He uses this language to describe for them that the place he's sending them is like the place that they came from. I'm sending you to a place that was your dream land, the land flowing with milk and honey. Milk and honey, two qualities that foods, for example, that you don't raise or grow. How do you get honey? The bees make it all by themselves. All you have to do is go out and get it out of the comb. The milk, the cow just makes the milk. You just have to go out and get it yourself or the goat or the camel or whatever you're milking. It's something you don't have to plant and cultivate and work. It's just like a gift to you. There's a place where the things that you're going to receive is a great gift to you. You may not think milk is a gift when you have to get it like that, but it's a lot easier than taking a plow and digging up a furrow and planting seed and waiting for six or eight months for it to grow up and make some food for you. It's their morning and it's their night, ready for you to take. He's talking about two very good, elegant, important ingredients in sort of the luxuries of life that they might experience. A land where there is food that you don't even have to work to get. The bees will make it for you and the cows will make it for you and all you have to do is go get it. What more could you ask for? I know we want more. We want it processed, at the window, delivered to our house. But this was their idea of the ideal life, being fed everything that you need. The end result is you're going to have in this new land what you had before. That's kind of the framework of it. But then he starts his paragraph by just saying, observe therefore all the commands I'm giving you today. Now that instruction and that end result, in between, is the important ingredient. So that you may have the strength to go in and take over the land that you're crossing the Jordan to possess. We don't often think about obedience to the instructions of God as giving us strength. Sometimes we think of following the instructions of God as a duty, as an obligation, as another requirement. Denise, I heard you were going to give your story Sunday. She was telling me about her story. She was saying, God said to me I should do something and so I started doing it. And I thought, okay God, this is all I can do. I don't know if you told this part or not. But then God says, okay here's something else I want you to do. And I thought, oh I can't do that. But I started doing what God told me to do and even though I'm doing more that I didn't think I have the time to do, I have it. You will hear this story over and over and over again from followers of Christ. You hear it in different ways. People say, you know, I never started giving to God because I didn't think I had enough money to do it. Then when I started giving to God, I found out I had enough. I had much money left over for the things I needed as I did before I started giving. Or you'll hear people say, God asked me to do something and I thought, I'm too tired and worn out to go to church. But then when I did, I found out I felt better after I left. You told me this two or three times. I'm so worn out, but I went to church and then when I left, I felt filled with new energy, new excitement, new thrill, new whatever it is that God gives you. And I was talking to a relative of mine. I'd tell you what he is, but he's my niece's son, so I don't know what that makes him. When he gets past brothers and sisters, I'm kind of lost on the family tree. But this kid came up to me and he grew up with my sons and he started talking to me and asked me about church, what I was doing, that sort of thing. And he's a coach, basketball coach. And he said, you know, I moved to this little town and started going to church there. As coach, you know, they ask you to do a lot of things. He said, they came to me one day and said, we'd like you, we're going to have a special youth rally. We'd like you to speak at that youth rally. And he said, I don't do that. And so I went and said, man, I'll tell you, just a wonderful experience, it's just great. And then they started an FCA and said, we want you to come and work at the FCA. And he said, no, I can't do that because I have basketball practice and I can't, it's on Wednesday nights and we have basketball practice, I can't do that. But I'll tell you, whenever I'm not teaching and having basketball in the off season, I'll work with the FCA, that's Fellowship of Christian Athletes. And then he said, I got started doing that and I thought, you know, we could cut our practices short on Wednesday night and go to FCA with the kids. And I said, did you, could you tell that it made your team any worse? Did you miss the basketball practice? He said, no, I couldn't tell it made any difference at all. We had just as good a season as we'd ever had before. One of the things that happens in serving God is you think that the things he's going to ask you to do are going to cost you. So you will have a depreciating experience. I'm going to give God some of my time so I won't have enough left over. I'm going to give him some of my money, but I won't have enough left over. I'm going to give him some of my energy, but it will deplete my energy. The Bible makes the bold claim that serving and obeying God is energizing rather than using up your energy. There is something that God does that energizes you when you do his work for the right motive and reason. In other words, if you're doing it because you want to look important or you're doing it because you have to or if you're doing it for any other reason, but if you know God wants you to do something and you do it, after it's over, you feel better than you did before. And if he wants you to give something and you give it, you find out that you really have a surplus even after you've given that, whether it's your time, your energy, your money or whatever else it is. And what he's talking about here is you go into the fight, this battle to win the land that I'm going to get you. You may think following my instructions, and boy, they were complicated instructions about what to eat and how to live and what to wear and all these things that were complicated. You will find out in the end that you will have more strength than you did if you didn't follow my instructions. What God was trying to teach his people is if you live the way I tell you, I will intervene in your life to empower you, to provide for you, whatever it is that you give in obedience to God, he repays you by replacing it with more than you had. They were going to go into battle. They were going to fight life and death battles. You do what I tell you to do. Live the way I tell you to live, and when you go into battle, you'll have strength that you did not ever know that you had, because I will provide it as a result of what you do. See, what God promises is, you give your life to live in obedience to me, and I will help you make the proper decisions, and I will provide for you. What did the soldier need? Strength to be able to swing the sword, to have the spear, to hold up his shield. What did he need? Strength to do the battle. You obey me, and you will find it in your battle that your strength will be greater. Now see, this is so contrary to our human nature, because you think, if I spend my energy and time doing this, I'll have less for the battle. If I get up on Sunday morning when I'm tired and go to church, I'll be more tired when church is over, because I didn't get enough sleep. What you find is, if you say, God, this is what you've asked me to do, found it in his instructions, and you do it, you will find out you'll come out of that experience more energized and rested than if you hadn't done it. See, what God promises in his promise of provision and protection is that my instructions will assist you in the very things that you wanted to do, but didn't think you had the energy to do, you can do those things and also the things I ask of you. Their strength in battle would be dependent on doing the things that God told them that they ought to do. Now in his instructions, he said, observe therefore all the commands I'm giving you today so that you may have strength to go in and take over the land that you're crossing the Jordan to possess. And so that you may live long in the land the Lord swore to your forefathers to give them to them and their descendants. Now sometimes people think that these claims in the scripture don't come true for them, because they live sort of like they should. But what God said to the people then was, I want you to keep all of my commandments. He didn't mean that you had to look, make a list of them and make sure you did all five or six hundred of them. But he meant that they were to focus on complete obedience to all that they knew, all that they read, and that they would keep learning and keep growing in obedience. So there would be detailed requirements of both learning what his instructions were and making sure that they followed them absolutely. Now when you look back at some of the instructions, he was talking to people, don't steal, don't lie, don't deceive another person, do not swear falsely by my name and so profane the name of God, I am the Lord, do not defraud your neighbor or rob him, don't hold back the wages of the hired man, don't curse the deaf or put a stumbling block in the front of the blind, but fear God, I am the Lord, don't pervert justice. Do not show partiality to the poor or favoritism to the great, but judge your neighbor fairly. Do not go about spreading slander among the people, do not do anything that endangers your neighbor's life, I am the Lord. Do not hate your brother in your heart or rebuke your neighbor frankly so that you will share in his guilt, don't seek revenge or bear grudge. See how the list goes on and on? You'll learn those things and make a pattern when you read one and say, whoops, I'm not doing that one. I'm right up here, behind this thing here. I was reading a list from Leviticus chapter 19 beginning with verse 11, but the book of Leviticus is filled with these. I mean I could start almost any page in the book of Leviticus and you'll see list after list after list. But see what happens to us is we start doing one or two good things to God. I'm going to read the Bible and go to church on Sunday morning, now we expect him to bless us. There's a lot more to it than that. If you start there, you will find something good happens to you. As you begin to learn what he wants you to do and you become more and more devoted to being obedient to him, you will find that his presence and power in your life grows in the same way. And when you stop reading and stop learning and stop growing, you will find that your life gets worse. Say there are 600 of those things and you learn 100 of them and you just quit, well I'm good enough now, I'm better than most people around me. I don't have to read the Bible every day, I don't need to go to church all the time. I'm pretty good. I mean look around me, a lot of people are worse off than I am. The moment you do that, you start finding the power of God in your life diminishes. For what he focuses, I want you to be like me. You are to be holy as I am holy. That's his demand of his people. In the New Testament, Jesus said you are to be perfect as I am perfect. And the word perfect means complete, to be exactly like God. A perfect example of him, that's what we say. We say a perfect example, we don't mean never has any failures, but we mean it's an exact example of him. So the more you learn about Jesus, the more you try to become like him, the more you will find this growing experience in your life. How do you grow in God? You read the Bible. You listen to what it has to say. You sit down with people in your group and discuss what it means and how this affects their lives and you learn how it affects other people and you say, well, yeah, that's what I should be doing. The more you hear the Bible taught, the more you read the Bible, the more you listen to it, the more you apply it to yourself, that is, say, am I doing these things or not? The more you find your life energized by the Spirit of God. And you can have, as a pastor, you can go to all the school and you can study the Bible and preach for 10, 15 years and all of a sudden wake up one day and your spiritual life is dull and dead. You know a lot of the Bible, you're doing a lot of good things, but you quit allowing God to change inside of you. Because nobody ever gets perfect in this world, so there's always room for growth. And when you stop the growth, then you get stagnant and you get empty and you get your life doesn't work like it's supposed to. And what you do is you start looking around at other people and say, well, I know why it's not nice, not like that. Well, it's these people over here in my Sunday school class or people over there at the church or the preacher or the deacons or somebody else's fault, you know, it's always inside of us. It's always there. And what God told them is when you go into battle, you have to obey all of you. So they went into battle. The first had Jericho, great victory. They went to the next city and the army was defeated. One man did not do what God told him he should do. And their army was defeated because one man didn't do what he was supposed to do. We're all in this together. My sin affects you. If I decide that I'm not going to pray and ask God's direction about what to say to you and I get up and talk about what's important to me, you miss what God wanted you to hear. And it affects you. Have you ever been to church on a Sunday morning and the crowd's real small and it just sort of nothing feels like it's going like it should? People that are not there change the whole atmosphere of what happens on Sunday. You see, we all are part of this great job that God has for us. We depend on each other and we depend on God to give us the energy and strength we have. That's why he says, you must learn how to do all the things I tell you to do, because then I will give you the strength to take over the land, that you'll possess this land that I made a promise that I would deliver you. The promises I've made to you will never come to pass unless you do what I tell you to do. The land you're entering to take, the land you're entering to take over is not like the land of Egypt from which you came, where you planted your seed and irrigated it by foot as a vegetable garden. What he means by that was that in Egypt they didn't have very much rain. What God did every year was send a flood to the Nile. They would dig a channel and they had irrigation systems where they had a wheel and a paddle to make the water move down the stream. If you take your hand and push the water, you know how it moves along. Well, they had irrigation systems that were run by hand or by foot, pedaling like a bicycle or cranking it like with your hand. So the water there feels, they had to make the water flow through these irrigation channels by pushing it, handmade. You thought Egypt was great because they grew their vegetables and fruits, but remember how hard that work was? As the slaves you had to do it, you had to stand out there and crank those things and make the water flow. In this new land, but the land you're crossing the Jordan to take possession of is a land of mountains and valleys that drinks rain from heaven. It is a land the Lord your God cares for. The eyes of the Lord your God are continually on it from the beginning of the year to its end. You're going to go into this land where you don't have to crank that irrigation pump. You just get up in the morning and sit on your front porch and watch God drop the rain all over the ground. He runs down the mountains and into the valleys. Everything's watered by God. He keeps His eye on things. If you need water, He sends it. If you need sunshine, He sends that. Everything you need, He's going to be providing for you. They thought if they could go back to Egypt, they would have a land flowing with milk and honey, but the work was hard to make it happen. I'm going to give you a land where everything you saw in Egypt will happen for you, except it'll be a lot less work. One of the great things about God in our service to Him is not only does He promise He's going to provide for us and He's going to protect us and He's going to guide us, but whenever we leave something because He's asked us to, for example, if God says to you, I want you to change something, go from one Sunday school class to another, well, I'll never get over it. These are my best friends back there, but they need me to teach this class. You never leave anything that is valuable to you to do something else God's asked you to do that it won't be better than what you left. Sometimes we're paralyzed with fear. I have found something really, really good, so I better hold on to it with all my might. But if God says, no, I have something else for you to do, turn loose of it freely because He'll not only give you what you had before, but it will be in some way better than even what you turned loose of. God never leads us down or backward. He always leads us up. Now, you know, sometimes that's hard to see, but I remember a lady one time in our church who got cancer and her and her husband had had some marriage difficulties and never been really close. And when she got cancer, he was just right by her side all the time. His 4th of July, went up to see her. She died within a few days. And she said, you know, I don't like this cancer. It's terrible. The pain's bad. But my husband and I have been closer together than we've ever been in our lives. You're going to think I'm crazy, but if I could choose between having the relationship with my husband I have now and having cancer and having the relationship I had with him before with no cancer, I'd choose this. Now, who in their right mind would say, do you want to have cancer? Nobody would say, well, I'll take that. What she discovered was that even in the process of her life, even with something bad happening, God brought into her life something that was more valuable to her than even a healthy life. So that she wouldn't even trade the health with the emptiness of her life with the death that she was facing and the fullness of life that she received. All the way through your life you will discover, if you do what God tells you, no matter how much it looks like it's going to cost you, it will always be worth it. You will discover, if you do what God tells you to do, that whenever he asks you to do something that looks like you're going to lose or be behind or be at a disadvantage, if you do what he tells you and obey him, you will always discover that it's better than what you left. Because the God that we serve, if we're faithful and we live in obedience to him, not halfway, not doing some things we want to and some things he tells us, but say, okay, God, I'm doing everything I know you want me to do as best I can, not perfection, but perfection of effort, then you'll find that God will empower you and give you things that you never thought you could have in your life. And even though he asks you to go through some things that are hard and difficult when it's over, you look back on it, you will discover that it was a step up. Even though everyone in the world around you might say it was a step backwards, you will know and feel it was a step up. For the God that we serve is a God that intends to bless us. And the reason we don't have blessings in our lives is because of our failure to be obedient and our unwillingness to take the step to do what God tells us. Would you bow your heads, please, for a moment? You look at your life right now. If God were to come down and talk to you and put his arm around your shoulder and say, let me tell you what I think about you and your faithfulness to you, would he say, you're doing everything I want you to do? Or would he have to say, wait a minute, there's some spots here that I know you know that you ought to do better, but you're just not doing it. And I know why you're not, because you think it's going to cost you time, effort, money, whatever, and you're afraid to trust me to provide. But I'm not going to bless you until you do. Would you be willing to change that, if you really believed it? You have fear that you're going to lose out? See, that's a fear of believing that God is not going to keep his promise. Would you just say to him, now, I know what you want from me, and I'm going to promise you tonight that I'm going to do the best I can to obey you. And so, Father, help us to keep this promise. Help us to make it, I guess, first, and then keep it, that we might feel what it's like when your strength surges through our lives. In the name of Christ we ask it, Amen.