The Community of Faith and God's Covenant Promises

To the book of Deuteronomy, chapter 26, the Lord is guiding the people of Israel getting ready to enter the promised land, and He's given them all the rules and instructions by which they should live when they get there. And then He talks about, in chapter 26, what they're to do when they enter the land that He'd promised to them. And this, verses 1 through 11, are sort of a connection together. So I want to read from verse 1 through verse 11. But the first half of that we talked about last week, and I want to start with verse 5 and sort of focus on that this evening. When you've entered the land the Lord your God is giving you, begin reading in verse 1, you're as an inheritance, given you as an inheritance and have taken possession of it and settle in it. Take some of the first fruits of all that you produce from the soil of the land the Lord your God is giving you, and put them in a basket. Then go to the place the Lord your God will choose as a dwelling for His name, and say to the priest in office at the time, I declare today to the Lord your God that I am coming to the land the Lord swore to our forefathers to give to us. The priest shall take the basket from your hands and set it down in front of the altar of the Lord your God. Now, that's the promise, that's the first gift of the first fruits. He's together with the very first things that come and say, OK, I'm bringing these to you as a way of saying you have given us the promise that you made. That you would make a land profitable and fruitful for us, and so we come now to say to you, we give an offering of those things that you've given to us, a first fruits gift. Now, not only is the offering to be given, but now in the next part of this, the focus turns, first he's just bringing the gift and it's given to the priest as a sacrifice. Now, God gives him something he's to say as part of this, and this now focuses in on the person bringing the gift. Then you shall declare before the Lord your God, my father was a wandering Aramean, and he went down into Egypt with a few people and lived there and became a great nation, powerful and numerous. But the Egyptians mistreated us and made us suffer, putting us to hard labor. Then we cried out to the Lord, the God of our fathers, and the Lord heard our voice and saw our misery, toil and oppression. So the Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with great terror and with miraculous signs and wonders. He brought us to the place, to this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey. And now I bring the first fruits of the soil to you, O Lord, the soil that the fruits of the soil that you, O Lord, have given me. Place the basket before the Lord your God, bow down before him, and you and the Levites and the aliens among you shall rejoice in all the good things the Lord your God has given to you and your household. There is in this extended passage a description of what God expects in terms of the people he'd given this land of promise to. Remember, the covenant promise is, I will guide you in all the choices that you make. If you'll depend on me as your Lord, say, I let you rule my life. I'll guide you in all the choices that you make, and I will provide for you. I will protect you, and I will make you a powerful influence or a powerful force or a useful person. Your life will have value and meaning. So what he's focused on here is a fulfillment of one of the four promises. I will provide for you. I'm going to give you this land, and it will be fruitful and productive. So when you have it, when it's fruitful and productive, you bring some of the very first crop. As now the promise has been made, they would have been in there a year. So it's not just when they enter, but when you've been in there and the fruit has actually come that you have, that I promised to you. You bring the fulfillment of that promise, a part of it, and you come to me and you make this gift to me. Now, when you come to me, I want you to do something else. I want you to focus your personal witness that I have kept the promise that I made to you. That's what this is about. Now, I want you to notice in this beginning, verse five, as he begins to talk about as God gives him the instruction about what he's to do. In verse six, he says, but the Egyptians mistreated us. In the first part of this, it's plural. He's talking about what happened to the whole group. Egyptians mistreated us, made us suffer, putting us to hard labor. Then we cried out to the Lord, the God of our fathers, and the Lord heard our voice and saw our misery and oppression. So the Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm and great terror with miraculous signs and wonders. See, that's eight times he's mentioned the plural. Now, remember, he brought this gift personally for himself as a sacrifice, but he's conscious that the gift of the land and all that's come is not his only. It is a corporate thing. God has done this for all the people of Israel. He brought us to this place, again that word us, and gave us this land flowing with milk and honey. And now I bring, first time he's mentioned that, I bring the fruits of the soil to you, O Lord, that you, O Lord, have given me. Place the basket before the Lord your God and bow down before him. So there's eleven times he mentions this corporate response. This is what you have done for the people of Israel. And then two times he mentions the specific concrete gift to him. Now, the reason he does this is to make himself and all the people around him aware that what God has done is not just for him. It's a corporate thing. It's for all the people of God. So the nation of Israel, all were the beneficiaries of this covenant promise. If you will let me be your God, I'll bring you to this land of promise, and I will give you what I said in my contract or covenant that I would. I'll guide your life. I'll provide your needs. I'll protect you, and I'll give you value and meaning to your life. So now whenever the food comes and the first time this fourth, one-fourth of the covenant promise comes, I want you to come and recognize that I have given this gift to my people. And I'd like to use a word that's not found in the Old Testament. I'm giving this to my church. That's what the people of God really are, the church. The Bible has a great emphasis on the corporate nature of the Christian life. And it's not simply in the New Testament. It's all the way through the Old Testament. We're blinded by this because we see them use the word nation. We're blinded because we see this as a national identity in the Old Testament, and oftentimes as an individual experience in the New Testament. But I want you to think differently about that. For whenever you enter the kingdom of heaven, see the kingdom of heaven is a group. When you enter the kingdom of heaven, you're a part of a very large group. And the relationships that you have within this large group are close. So we are ordered to call each other brothers and sisters. Because we're not in this together. It's not a Lone Ranger deal. We're not in it separately. And we don't think very often in the New Testament about the sense of our unity and oneness as they did in the Old Testament. And that's a grave mistake for us. People think of the church like a theater. I'm going to go to that, and if I like the movie, I'll stay, and if I don't, I'll go home. But it's different than that. It's more like when the church gathers like Thanksgiving at your home, when all your family comes together. It's more like that. It's not so much about the food that you eat at Thanksgiving, even though oftentimes that's good, but it's about the fact that you're together with the people who are a part of your life. When Jesus was talking about this, his mother and brothers and sisters came to him and he looked around at the people who were his followers and said, you are my mother and my brothers and my sisters. He was saying that those people who trusted him and came to live by faith and listened to what he had to say and lived that had a connection to him closer than the blood can of his physical body. A connection that's more powerful and strong than a person would have with anybody else in the world. That the spiritual bond of having a common commitment to the Father drew those people together to make them one. The man who came with his offering in the Old Testament was to declare that this wasn't simply him out there farming by himself, but he was a part of a group of people who are beneficiaries of the covenant promise that God had made to his people. He was declaring, I know that I am in this stream of people that you've been working with and all the blessings I bring to you today have come not only on me, but all these people who are part of your family, your community of faith. And that's what the church is supposed to be. It's not simply an organization where you go and watch and sit and go home and separate. We talk about membership in our church because it's a commitment to each other, a commitment that says, I want to be a part of this group. A lot of churches don't have membership or they don't ask you to make that commitment. You just come and watch. You go home, whatever it is. That's not a description of what the Bible describes the community of faith to be. And it's supposed to be that it was that in the Old Testament. It's that in the New Testament. It was so much so that whenever in the book of Acts, whenever the church had people who were in difficulty, people sold their land and gave it to the church to be able to help people who were in need. And our church, we've tried to focus on that. Now, the government does a lot of things that church in those days didn't have that had to do, but we have a family ministry fund. So we take an offering, we take them in the Lord's Supper next week, next Sunday. And if there are people in our church that have financial needs, we want to help them with that. Because we're brothers and sisters in Christ. And if your brother or sister had needs, your physical brother or sister, you would want to help them. And the bond that draws us together is stronger than that, is stronger than that, because a lot of your relatives, even maybe brothers and sisters of yours at the time of death, may not make it to be with God. But if our lives are submitted to the authority of Christ, we're going to be together forever. That's what holds us together. Now, this this issue of the community of faith is very powerful in the Old Testament, and it's supposed to be in the New Testament. It was in the story of the New Testament, but I'm afraid as time's gone on, we're not quite as powerful about that, recognizing that bond. What he asked this man to do was to tell his story. I want you to go and stand before the Lord and tell your story. When all this started, it was my forefathers. The wandering Aramean, Jacob, who was wandering around looking for you, and you came to help him and you brought him to this place. Our families went to Egypt and we are in bondage. And you brought us out of Egypt in a miraculous and powerful way. And you've led us to this place. I want you to remember. That you don't stand here with this offering and the food that it's that has been provided for you on your own. There are a lot of people who went before you that have made it possible for you to stand here. That's a really important thing for us to understand. I'm afraid in our individualistic culture in the United States, we often think of coming to Christ as sort of an isolated thing. I came to Christ and I found Christ and I gave my life to him. We don't think of all the people that there were in this world who had an impact and influence to bring us to the very place where we're now part of the family of God. What God was saying, I don't want you to forget all the people that have made it possible for you to stand here and say, I followed the Lord and his promise has come true. Think about yourself. Does anybody remember how you came to know Christ and would share that with us? There was a lot of people that it was almost like bricks in a wall, so to speak. It was like one of the first folks taught me to pray at night when I was like two years old and three years old. God bless mama and daddy, you know, stuff like that. So I did and let me interrupt you just a moment. Now, I understand what you're saying to me. Think about this. Who taught your mom and dad about that? And who taught the person that taught them about that? Go ahead with the story. Well, then, I mean, lots of different things, but a person finally told me about why Christ went to the cross and asked if I wanted to, you know, confess and make a prayer to God or whatever. And so I did that. I went off into my own ways and then Ron, who I used to work with, said that this church was real good and that you were a teacher, not a preacher, and you're real good with application in life. And so I went with that. And when I got here, Andy Addis and Chick Boulding kind of took me in. And then, I mean, there's a whole bunch of people. Yeah, yeah. And those are the ones you knew. And you see, each one of those people who did this for you had someone in their background that brought them to that place. What the Bible is trying to help us understand is that God's at work in so many different ways in the world. And we can't even really imagine all the things that God has done to bring us to this place. My mother's story was she grew up in a family where there wasn't any spiritual interest at all. Her dad didn't want kids to go to church. He'd run her mother off. She went to church and there was a preacher there that preached about writing on the wall. And she was scared to death and went home and one day just said, God, if you're there, take my life. I don't know that preacher. She had a powerful influence on my life, but I don't know that preacher. And I don't know who led him to the Lord. And I don't know who it was that led the person that led him to the Lord. I don't even know the church and I don't even know the ladies names that came by and invited those girls to go to church, that revival meeting that night when they'd never gone any other time. We are all so indebted to the powerful work of God throughout history. And yet sometimes we think that we are doing it ourselves. What God wanted to establish in the minds of the people of Israel was they were not a dot on a piece of paper. They were a part of a long string of God's work in the world. And that's what the church is intended to do for us. It's intended to help us understand that we are a part of a mighty family of God. It stretches back to our father, Abraham, when the covenant first began. And he started this great movement of faith so that we now are able to express our faith in God and receive Christ as the Lord and ruler of our life and experiences. So what he's teaching us is that the blessings you get, they're real for you. When he gets to the end of it, he says, I bring the first fruits of the soil to you, Lord, that the soil I bring the first fruits of the soil that you, Lord, have given to me. There is a personal blessing that comes from the covenant work of God, but it comes to us surrounded by the powerful influence of the people of God throughout the years and throughout history. And none of us will know. None of us will know the impact that your own life has on people. You don't have any idea what your life means to other people. I don't think, for example, that the ladies that invited my mother to go to church when she was just a little girl have any idea how she turned out. I'm sure that the pastor that preached that revival meeting had no idea the impact he had on one of those little girls that were there at that meeting. We don't know what happens in vacation Bible school. We don't know what happens to the lives of people who just come in contact with us for one single hour. But God knows that. What he's trying to make us aware of is we are a part of a mighty, powerful stream throughout history. Yes, it does have personal impacts on us. It does change our personal lives. There is a personal benefit to us, but God's vision for this is far greater and bigger. The many ways in which we do this, we don't know these people going to South Africa whose lives they're going to touch. When you write your check for an offering on a Sunday morning, we send some of that money to our foreign mission board. They send it to missionaries around. You don't have any idea the good that's going to do. But we're all in this together. And what he wanted these people to understand is I am keeping my covenant, but it's not just a promise to you that I'm going to take care of you. This is a promise I've made to everyone, and you're all in this together. And whenever you come to stand before me, don't feel weak and alone. You're not. There are millions of people who are just like you, who are talking to God, who are making promises to him, who are receiving the fulfillment of his promises. And the world is filled with people that are saying to God, you have kept your promise to me, and you have given me exactly what you said you would. And then they can say, and you've given it to all the other people who belong to you too. Now, God asked the people of Israel when they came to give their offering to express this personal awareness of the great blessing that he'd given to everybody, including them. He wanted them to come and stand before the priest, and to stand before God, and to say out loud the history he knew about how they stood there, and the blessings that he had been given, and to give to God some representation of the blessing that he had, this basket of fruit or produce that he had to give. He wanted them to say out loud, here is my gift to you as a recognition of what you have done, not only for me, but for all the people of the church, or the people of Israel as they would say in those days. All of us have been recipients of the powerful blessing that you've given to us. There is a value in having us say out loud to people around us what we know that God has done to bless us. Now, we try to provide in our morning service a time for people to say, here is my personal experience with God, and we want you to say it out loud. Whenever Butch asks people to do this, people sometimes feel, you know, oh no, here Butch is going to ask me to stand up and say something in front of the church. I want you to realize that he's doing exactly what God asked in the Old Testament. You ought to feel upset with Butch and resistant to do that if you have no covenant relationship with God, and you're sure that he's never guided you, he's never provided for you, he's never protected you, and your life is worthless. If all those things are true about you, when Butch comes, say, I don't have anything to say. If any one of those isn't true, if any one of those things is true about you, you're under divine orders to tell the story. You should be excited to tell. This man didn't come with a basket of fruit and say, I'm so mad about this, I have to give this, I'm so upset about all of it. He was to come and say with great confidence, you made a promise to me, and you have fulfilled it. And when you gave your life to Christ, you said, I give my complete life to you. And God says, okay, you trust me, and I'm going to guide you in your choices. You should look back and see that choices you've made, I've helped you make them right. I'm going to provide your needs. You don't need to look back on your life and say, my needs have been provided. I'll protect you. You ought to look back and see some times in which I have helped you. And you ought to be able to see that because you're living for me, you are making a difference in this world. And you ought to be proud to stand and say, this is what God has done in my life. Because what God wants is He wants us to recognize it, and He wants us to tell it out loud. Not just for our own benefit, but for the benefit of all the people around us. What God asked in the Old Testament, He still asks for us. And I hope every one of you will sit down and look at your own life and see if you can really find a time and place in which God has helped you choose and make choices. Which He has given you provision. Which He has protected you. And you feel your life has benefited others. And if you can see that, you ought to feel excited to stand in front of other people and say, here's what God has done to keep His promise to me. Because I've given myself to Him. God wants us to bear witness to His nature, His character, and His behavior. Out loud, open, and public. It is our witness to the world who God is. It is the witness to the world that He's both helped us and others around us too. Would you bow your head please? I want to ask you to think in your mind, how has God guided me? Has God provided my needs? Can I think of ways in which He's protected me? Do you know that other people have said to you, I appreciate what you mean to me, the church, the community. Father, help us not to be ashamed that you keep your covenant. But to be excited to bear witness to the world that our God, who's made a covenant with us, keeps His part. In the name of Christ we ask it. Amen.