Fire- Moses And The Burning Bush Series

Fire - Part 1, Pastor Rob Ketterling

All right. Well, we are starting our summer series a little bit early even though the weather is not agreeing with us. How many know that? It's like out there it was snowing on me the other day when I was mowing the lawn, and I thought, "This is May." I actually, like it was the first time in my life I actually was wishing it was a bird flying over me and not snow. Yeah, you'll get that.

Man, but it is our series. I love that in our summer we do an elongated sermon series. And this will be a six, seven week series. I might have thrown in a bonus week already. But we are going to look at fire in this series, and then we are going to look at prayer the rest of the summer. We are going to talk about dangerous prayers and prayers that are in the Bible that we can pray.

But as we look at fire now, we are going to look at this and look at the stories like Moses and the burning bush; Elijah at Mount Carmel; Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego -- a classic. We're going to look at the lake of fire; the Bible talks about that. The scripture, the fire shut up in my bones; tongues of fire; and our works being tried by fire. So there is a little variety there, and all the scriptures will have to do with fire. I just love that we can do this.

Today it is Moses and the burning bush. If you have your Bibles, you can turn with me to Exodus 3, and Acts 7. That's where I'm going to read from. Exodus 3 and Acts 7. And I'm going to read from Acts 7 first.

Now, fire is fascinating. If you are a guy, you probably are fascinated with fire. I don't know what it is, but there is something about guys that when they discover matches and fire, there is just something about fire that just attracts us and sucks us into it.

And, incidentally, I do know that some people have bad memories of fire. I do understand that. And most of our teaching will just deal with the scriptures on that. I know that when my wife was growing up, their house caught on fire and they had to move out a little bit. No one was injured. I know some of you might have more tragic stories or been burned. I understand that. This is just an apology on that. And we understand and we won't dwell too much on that. This opening part we'll probably deal more on that than other times. So just wanted to make sure we are aware.

But there is bonfires and candles and fireplaces and big fire pits, and, man, people will chase fire trucks to see what is going on. Fire just fascinates. And especially, again as boys, I can remember going through my fire phase, all right? And I'm going to share this with you so that parents have hope for their children. Because I shared this in an earlier service, and my mom is like, "You are grounded!" Like, "I didn't know you did that. You are grounded now!" You know, so...but I turned out okay, all right? So it's okay. Okay. But you go through that phase.

And I remember finding out about matches and lighters, and we used to just light everything on fire. As a boy, we are like, "Will that burn? Try that." You know. And I can remember once we were in Eagan, and then we had biked to the McDonald's, and afterwards we were just looking for things to light on fire. And, yeah, it's true. And we lit these things on fire, and the fire started to get a little out of control and we didn't know what to do. And there was no water around, and we are thinking like what do we have, and we'd just bought spray paint, which is a whole other story. And so we are like, "Spray spray paint on there." Do not do that! Don't do that! Because all of a sudden the fires were whoosh, and it spread everywhere. And for about the next 15 minutes we were stomping fire, and I threw those shoes away and told my mom and dad I lost those shoes. Okay, that's true.

We lit Christmas trees on fire. Again, don't do that. They burn fast. Our neighbor's house was all burned up the side from that. Yeah.

And then I won't tell you how we did this, but as a kid we used to light our clothes on fire at night and run down the streets when cars were coming so we'd freak them out, and then run and pat it out.