Out of Egypt Have I Called My Son 1973

I'm going to read today from Hosea, chapter 11, verses 1, 2, 8, 9, 10, and 11. When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son. The more I called them, the more they went from me.

They kept sacrificing to the Baals and burning incense to idols. How can I give you up, O Ephraim? How can I hand you over, O Israel? How can I make you like Admah? How can I treat you like Zeboiah? My heart recoils within me. My compassion grows warm and tender.

I will not execute my fierce anger. I will not again destroy, Ephraim. For I am God and not man, the Holy One in your midst.

And I will not come to destroy you. They shall go after the Lord. He will roar like a lion.

Yea, he will roar. And his sons shall come trembling from the west. They shall come trembling like birds from Egypt.

After the honeymoon of faith is over, one of the biggest problems most of us have is the discovery that we're still very much in bondage to this world. Here we are, we're supposed to be going in to take the promised land. We haven't even come out of Egypt.

And it's important for us to face the facts of this, you know, not to be telling ourselves we're free when we're bound. God, for reasons only he himself understands, permitted his people, Israel, to go through a long season when they were in Egypt, and very soon after they got into Egypt, or it seemed to them, no doubt, they were in slavery. And they didn't get out of Egypt until God called them out.

Our Lord, the incarnate Son of God, was hardly born before he was permitted to be carried as an infant down into Egypt to retrace those steps again. And he didn't come out of Egypt until he was called out. And in a similar way, for reasons only God understands, may no man be presumptuous and think he knows why, God has permitted his people, the Church, to go through a long time of bondage in Egypt when they are enslaved, really, to the spirit of this age.

We look at churches, the Church, in its many manifestations, and we see people who profess Jesus as Lord, nevertheless tied down by all the things that blind the eyes and bind the minds of the children of this world. Anxiety concerning money, lust to become a success, fear of man, jealousy, anger, bitterness, bigotry. There's hardly a fellowship of believers anywhere on this planet where you don't find the marks of Egypt in the way they deal with each other, in the way they conduct their affairs, and in their personal lives, the attitudes and the fears and the cravings and the lusts that control their relationships with other people.

Pick up the magazine of any denomination or any big-name evangelist and you see the imprimatur of Pharaoh on every page. It's slick, so often money-hungry, numbers-happy, influence and prestige, weird. And of course we can see, it's so much easier when we look around at other people and these other evangelists and those other churches, but take our own lives.

Look how much of our own lives is colored and just permeated with the atmosphere of Egypt, the pollution of Egypt. We like to say, since I began following Jesus, I'm in the world but not of it. But can we honestly say that we are living our lives down here in this world as our Lord lived His life down here? Can we say that we are following Jesus carefree of the consequences to us in terms of our money situation or our prestige in the eyes of other people or what our friends think of us? Can we honestly say that we are free from the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eye and the pride of life as we serve God down here in this vineyard of the Lord? What we like to do is, again, see, point to somebody else.

We look at believers of past ages and we say, well, they were no better than we. And yet, if we really look at what happens, we have to admit that there have been thousands of men and women whose lives put ours to shame. Or we look at the Christian celebrities of today and we say, these guys are enjoying all the amenities of Egypt, but God never told us to follow the Christian celebrities of any age.

And there is one thing that we absolutely can't get around no matter what we do. We cannot get around the fact that at this hour God is calling out His people from Egypt in a new way. At this hour God is calling all over the earth for the people who claim to be followers of Jesus to come out of Egypt and live lives that are distinct and separate and apart from that spirit that rules the world.

People who nevertheless hold jobs, buy groceries, drive their cars, love their wives, take care of their children, and yet are aliens and exiles in this world, citizens of another world. Out of Egypt have I called my Son and this time God is calling His Son in the person of His body, the body of Christ on earth, the Church, to come out. If you were of the world, the world would love its own.

But because you are not of the world, for I have called you out of the world, therefore the world hates you. Those words are no longer words that were merely applied or only applied to men around a table 20 centuries ago. Those same words are spoken around that same table by that same Lord to the people in this room.

You're not of this world. I've called you out of this world. You don't belong to it anymore.

Come out of Egypt. And we say, if only I could. If only I could get free of these things.

If only I could shake out of those fears. And then we read like in 1 John. Love not the world.

These are the things that are in the world. If a man loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is of the world, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eye, and the pride of life is not of the Father but is of the world.

And the world passes away and the lust thereof, but he who does the will of God abides forever. We read passages like that and we say, if only we could live that way. If only we could walk around without being hassled to go to the left or to the right by Pharaoh, Satan.

When God calls his people out of Egypt, he not only calls them but he brings them out with a strong hand and an outstretched arm. God does it. We can't bring ourselves out of Egypt.

We can will to do it, we can make resolutions to do it, and we can try to do it but it will never work. God has to bring us out. And he brings us out of Egypt exactly the same way he brought the Israelites out 3,400 years ago.

You remember, Moses performed all kinds of signs yet the people didn't come out by means of those signs. Then came the night of the Passover when the families of Israel killed the Paschal Lamb and then they sprinkled its blood over the door and then they ate its roasted flesh with bitter herbs and unleavened bread and somehow in ways that were beyond their comprehension, God was at work in all these strange things setting his people free from the authority of Pharaoh. That night at midnight there was a cry in all of Egypt as Pharaoh and every house from Pharaoh down found the firstborn son dead.

And that night the people of Israel were set free. Now notice, the people of Israel did not fight their way out. When they got to the Promised Land then they pulled out their swords and they fought their way in.

But you don't fight your way out of Egypt. If you're enslaved to the spirit of this world, the harder you struggle, the harder you squirm to get out, the tighter the chains come around your neck. God brought these people out without any fighting on their part by means of a death, of sprinkled blood, of a feast, three things.

And he uses these same three things to bring us out of Egypt too. God is doing a new thing, but he does the new thing by means of all things that he's already prepared and willed from before the foundation of the world. God brings us out of Egyptian bondage, bondage to this world, first of all by means of a death.

Now we know all this, but let's look at it again because I believe that God will fulfill and confirm his words to us today through a death, the death of the Son of God. Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. Notice Jesus didn't take away the sin of the world that bound the people down to the world by means of his preaching or his teaching or his miracles.

He takes away the sins of the world. He breaks those chains by means of his death. By taking into his innocent flesh the weight of the sins of a race, carrying them down into his grave, bearing the punishment they deserve as the Father turns away his face.

If you want to come out of bondage to the spirit of this age, you have to turn your eyes and put them on the dying Son of God. You look to him on that cross. You consider yourself dead with him.

You determine to know nothing except Jesus Christ and him crucified. There is not a fear or a hang-up or an attitude or a twist in your personality or anything else that can abide the sight of the dying Lamb of God. When you take hold of the death of Jesus with all your heart and soul and strength and mind, every evil thing inside your heart begins to wither.

What are we doing when we come to this altar today, to this table? We are remembering Jesus' death. He instituted this meal to remind us continuously of his death, that we show forth his death until he returns. Secondly, we are brought out of Egypt by means of sprinkled blood.

The children of Israel took the blood from this Lamb and sprinkled it over the posts, top and sides of the door. And then the angel of death, as it passed over the land of Egypt, just jumped over all the houses that had the blood over the doors. Today, we open our hearts.

If we open our hearts, the Son of God comes in and sprinkles his blood on our conscience. How much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without spot to God, purify your conscience from dead works that serve the living God? The angel of death, which is the agent of God's judgment, has control over every conscience that is not sprinkled with that blood. It doesn't matter whether you are an Egyptian or a Jew.

If your conscience doesn't have that blood on it, your conscience is under the authority of the angel of death. It is under condemnation. You can know all the right things.

You can know your Bible upside down and backwards. You can say beautiful prayers. You can do all the right, proper things that are supposed to happen in order to bring the power of Christ in.

But if the blood of Christ is not on your conscience, livingly on your conscience, you are under death. You are on a treadmill of guilt. You work to get that guilt off.

The harder you work, the more exhausted you become and the more condemned you feel. Your mind never stops. Your spirit is always on the go.

Even your body gets strained, but nothing changes. It won't change until your conscience is sprinkled with the blood. When you come to the altar today, don't just open your mouth to receive the wine.

Open your heart. Take and drink. This is the blood of the new covenant, shed for you and for many for the forgiveness of sins.

And finally, we are brought out of bondage to this world by means of a feast. They roasted that lamb and they ate it. Now, they knew that they had a hard night ahead of them, an uncertain future loomed up there in the darkness, yet they ate that feast with joy, praising God, because this was going to be their last night as slaves.

Likewise, when our Lord broke the bread and passed it around, took the cup and passed it around, He knew that He was on His way to indescribable agony, and His disciples understood somehow in their bones that frightful things were waiting for them out there in the darkness. Yet, the joy of that feast of bread and wine was a joy that they never forgot. Jesus was giving Himself to these men in the bread and wine.

He was giving to them a foretaste of heaven, of that banquet when they're going to eat again together. And that's exactly what He's doing with us. He's giving us a foretaste of heaven.

He's not just saying, come out of Egypt, but He's saying, look, here's a taste of heaven for you right now. You don't come out of Egypt just crying. You come out of Egypt with a song in your heart, with rejoicing.

This is a feast. You don't come with a long face to show how pious you are to God as you come to communion, but you come rejoicing because the same God who delivered them is now delivering us. The God who was calling us out of Egypt and calling us now to separate ourselves from the spirit of this age and live by faith only in Him is visiting us this day through the death of His Son, through the blood of the Lamb, through the bread and wine.

And it will open our hearts. He will come in here and He will break the chains that we could never break. Let's pray.

Heavenly Father, we just thank You for the presence of Your Spirit now and we're looking, Father, to You to confirm whatever of Your Word has been spoken in the heart of every person who's crying out for liberty. Grant, O God, that Your sons and daughters may come out by Your power and that we may save our sword for taking and conquering the promised land. Bring deliverance to everyone who's experiencing bondage, Father, in any area as they meet Jesus today.

We ask it in His wonderful name. Amen.