Complaining In The Desert

The offer to Chose life

Deuteronomy 30:11-20

Good morning online church- Glad that you are able to be with us and praying that the Lord would continue to minister to you as we dig into the word of God.

Last week in Deuteronomy 29 and you can turn there again this morning we saw that God desires to be in a covenant with us.

He is a covenant God that desires a personal relationship with us.

A covenant defined by Webster is “an agreement, a contract, a seal between two or more people” and a “breach of contract” is to recover damages because the agreement has been broken.

We have all tried to make deals with the Lord.

We have said… Lord if you would just get me out of this mess, I will do such and such and if you just would get me that promotion, I would give more money to the church.

But the covenant God makes with us is that He would be our God and we would be His people.

That we would follow and obey Him.

Because He is a covenant God that we know He takes serious our declaring our lives to Him.

We saw last week the people of Israel are just like today and do not take serious the covenant He desire for us.

He says “Carefully follow the terms of the covenant” so that you may prosper in what you do!

29:14 tells us that “I am making this covenant, with its oath, not only with you standing here with us today in the presence of the Lord our God, but also with those who are not here today.”

Where we left the text last week was talking about a person being agnostic! A person who believes in God but they don’t believe God cares about them. He does not care what you do. He may exist but you cannot talk to Him. That is the biggest lie the Devil is throwing at the world today. There may be a God out there but you cannot know Him and He does not care what you do!

You can get to know Him in fact that is His desire that we know Him and He makes Himself available to us.

You are not just one of His creations that He made. You were made in His likeness and He made the first move to be in a relationship with us and it breaks His heart to have us out of fellowship with Him

It broke His heart enough that He did something about it and went to the cross for us and bridged the impossible gap between God and man by being the mediator or intercessor for us.

Moses was a type of Christ as He was the mediator between a rebellious nation and God and Jesus Christ is our mediator on this side of the cross. “For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus.”

That about where we stopped last week and as we move into the text this morning, we see a nation that is rebellious trying to get into the promised land and build a relationship and new life with God.

Quick moment to pray as we read the text and see what the Lord is telling us today about building a relationship with Him.

Prayer-

Deuteronomy 30:11-20 read from Bible

This morning, we are taking the time to look at living in the presence of God.

We make choices everyday about everything in our lives, but no decision is as important as the choice to have God active or inactive in your life.

The theme of the Old Testament book of Deuteronomy is choice.

Moses, as well as his successor Joshua insisted The Nation of Israel had an obligation to choose who they would follow. Jehovah God, or following other gods that would take them away from the true God.

We have the same mandate for our lives today- We are to choose who we will follow, to be obedient to God or not. Choices!

The constant danger for Israel was to allow something else to become the center of their lives and not God.

The Bible is full of reverences of people who encountered God.

Some were looking for God and some were not even thinking about God but because of His grace and His mercy He shows up and offers a chance for us to respond to Him.

Moses, at the tent of meeting and on the mountaintop of God encountered God and scripture says that the glory of God was all over him. (It was evident that he had spent time with God)

Isaiah encountered God in a vision and was confronted with his sin and the sin of mankind needing a savior. (Time with God will reveal our shortcomings and His greatness)