THE SCENE: Israel had been in slavery in Egypt for years. In answer to the prayers of the Israelite people, God sent Moses to Pharaoh with this command: “Let my people go!”
But of course Pharaoh wouldn’t listen and so God brought 10 terrible plagues upon Egypt and Pharaoh to convince them that it was in their best interests to honor His request.
This passage of Scripture from Exodus 12 we’ll be looking at this morning describes the beginning of the 1st and most important festival in the history of the Jewish people called the Passover.
From the day of Moses, until today - every year Jewish God-fearing families have partaken pf the Passover meal as closely as possible. Their Passover meal celebrates the love of their God who freed their ancestors from slavery and who passed over their homes because they obeyed Him in putting the blood of a sacrificed lamb upon the doorframes of their homes.
But Passover was only the first feast day in a week long festival called “The Feast of Unleavened Bread” And that’s what we’re going to be looking at today.
(At this point we read Exodus 12:1-28 and had our opening Prayer)
OPEN: An EMT was working in the Emergency Room when a father brought in his son. The boy had poked a tire from one of his toy trucks up his nose. The father was embarrassed, but the EMT assured him this was something kids often do.
The technician quickly removed the tire… and the father and son were on their way. But a few minutes later, the father was back in the ER asking to talk to the EMT in private.
The father into an examining room where he began: "While we were on our way home I was looking at that little tire and wondering, how on earth did my son get this thing up his nose…" and then he went on to explain what the problem was
Fortunately, it only took the EMT just a few seconds to get the tire out of Dad’s nose.
APPLY: There are certain things that don’t belong up a person’s nose.
They might fit.
They might NOT even cause much pain.
But they just don’t belong.
There are certain things that don’t belong in our bodies
There are certain things that don’t belong in our minds
And there are certain things that don’t belong in our homes
I. What intrigued me about this morning’s passage was that was precisely what The Feast of Unleavened Bread was designed to teach.
The Passover symbolized the freedom God wanted to give His people… but that feast was followed by 6 more days that focused on the fact that God’s kind of freedom required His people to REMOVE things from their lives and their homes.
During The Feast of Unleavened Bread - God’s people were instructed NOT ONLY not to eat leavened bread during that week. But they were not to allow ANYTHING that had ANY yeast in it in their homes. Anyone who ate anything that contained yeast during that week was to be cut off from their people. (shunned/ ostracized).
Yeast was used by God to symbolize the power of sin
When Israel offered bread to God along with burnt offerings, that bread was to have NO yeast in it.
When Jesus warned his disciples against becoming like the Pharisees, He told them "Be on your guard against the yeast of the Pharisees, which is hypocrisy.” Luke 12:1
And when the Church at Corinth had a man in their congregation who was engaged in sexual immorality, Paul wrote that they should not associate with the man until he repented… they were not even to eat with the man. He said, if they insisted on “looking the other way”, that man’s sin would taint the rest of them: “Don’t you know that a little yeast works through the whole batch of dough?” 1 Corinthians 5:6
So, as you can see, yeast was used by God to portray sin in our lives.
II. But as I was preparing for this sermon, I asked myself the question: why would God use yeast to symbolize sin?
(picture of a loaf of bread and a matzah bread)
The large loaf in this picture has yeast… that’s what makes it rise and puff up.
The large cracker, or Matzah bread, has no yeast and so it is flatter.
Sin acts in our lives, in many of the same ways that Yeast works in a loaf of bread
1st – bread with yeast in it tastes good
I’ve eaten Matzah bread. It’s not all that tasty.
That’s why we make bread with yeast in it. Leavened bread does taste good. That’s why we buy it… that’s why we eat it.
Likewise, sin tastes good… if it didn’t taste good, nobody would be tempted to do it.
2nd – it doesn’t take much yeast to change the shape of the flour. It warps the shape of the dough
Similarly, when sin enters into an area of your life… it doesn’t take much to change who you are. It doesn’t take much to warp your character.
3rd – the yeast make the bread look like it contains more flour than it actually does. The larger loaf may not contain that much more flour than the “cracker” but because of the yeast that is in it – it looks like it has more.
ILLUS: One man told me of working for his dad in their donut shop was rebuked by his father because his donuts were larger than they should have been. The dad accused his son of using more dough (and thus costing him money). The son replied that he hadn’t used any more dough than normal… but had instead let the donuts rise longer than normal… and thus the donuts appeared to have more dough in them, but in reality they didn’t.
Likewise - Sin can make us believe we have more in our lives than we do.
· Sins like bitterness and hatred can make feel that we have more power over others
· Sins like hypocrisy and bigotry can make us feel more important than we actually are
· Sinning by viewing crude movies or sexually explicit materials can make us believe we are more mature and grown up.
· And the sins of getting drunk or getting high can fool us into thinking we’ve gained more control over our lives
Sin can make us believe that we’ve gained MORE of something in our lives… but in reality all we’ve gained is more decay and rot, because…
Lastly, yeast causes bread to mold and decay from the inside out.
ILLUS: If you leave a loaf of bread out for too long, what happens to it? It gets moldy. Crackers will last practically forever, but leavened bread will eventually decay and rot because of the yeast within it.
In the same way, sin has the power to cause our lives and our homes to decay and to rot. That’s why God hates sin… because it destroys us.
III. The past few weeks we’ve been talking about how to create a G-rated home
We’re asking ourselves: how can we create a home where our families will be safe from the destructive influences of the world around us. How can we keep the world’s influences out of our homes?
Well… we keep it out same way we deal with any intruder. We close the door and lock it.
Parents are the “Gatekeepers” of the house. You and I are the ones with the keys to the house. And God relies upon us to make sure the destructiveness of the world doesn’t get thru the front door.
Now, I shouldn’t have to go thru a laundry list of the types of things we need to keep out of our homes.
* We all know that there are certain TV shows/ movies/ books/ magazines/ games and so on… that teach lessons and morality that we don’t want our families to learn.
* We all know that our kids shouldn’t be associating with certain kinds of friends, so we shouldn’t be letting those “friends” into the house.
* We all know that if our kids get a hold of alcohol or drugs, it could destroy them… so why would I want those things in my home?
* We all know the damage gambling could do in their lives, so why would I want anything like that around my family?
We’ve got to make up our minds that ANYTHING would hurt our family shouldn’t be let in the front door, or the back door, or thru an open window.
ILLUS: Now, there is a thought pattern that can undermine every effort you make to keep the world from influencing your family. Recently, there’s been a TV commercial put out by “concerned” TV executives. They “know” how concerned you are with the influence of certain kinds of TV programs and so they’ve put out this commercial to remind you to pay attention to their ratings: Y… PG… MA and so on.
But in the midst of their “public service” announcement they show little squares above everybody’s heads. The kids have a “Y” or a “PG”. BUT above the parents heads - when the kids leave the room - there is this little square that shows an “MA” (mature).
It’s their way of saying… we put on these “mature programs” for your benefit.
You’re a grown up…
You can handle it
What they’re saying is: its ok to watch “mature programs” when the kids leave the room. They’re trying to convince you that what you watch won’t influence your children.
Now that’s about as stupid a thing as I’ve ever heard.
One person noted: "Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them."
By giving the impression that certain kinds of TV programs, or activities, or beverages, or drugs, or behavior – whatever… if we give the impression that ONLY GROWNUPS should do these things we teach our children the LIE that this is what mature people do. And those children will desire that maturity. And they will pursue that maturity as early in their lives as possible… because they all desire to be like grownups.
The moment we buy into the heresy of this dichotomy - that our morality is somehow different than the morality we expect from them - the lock on the door is broken and the world will walk right on in.
That’s why God didn’t teach his people to remove the leaven only from their children’s lives.
He taught them to get those things completely out of the house, out of every room and out of the lives of everyone in the home.
Essentially, that means that: if it’s bad for your kids… it’s bad for you.
Or as Paul said “…a little yeast works through the whole batch of dough” 1 Corinthians 5:6
All it takes is a simple opening of the door for sin to enter your home and it will effect the lives of everyone you love.
That’s what God is teaching us here.
IV. And there’s something else I believe God’s teaching us here
As I thought about this passage in Exodus 12, I noticed something intriguing
The FEAST OF UNLEAVENED BREAD was only done once a year. They removed the leaven from their homes roughly in the month of April.
Does that sound like something we do?
Yes, this was literally a “Spring cleaning”
Practically everybody does an occasional “Spring Cleaning” in their homes. Things have laid around and collected that clutter up the attic, the basement, the garage, and so on.
And so once in while, we realize we have to “clean house” and get rid of all that clutter and trash that have accumulated throughout the year.
It’s not that we planned to have all that clutter in our homes we just began to realize that there it was.
It’s the same way with the worldly influences. In spite of our best efforts some of the world’s R-rated thinking and morality can slip into our homes – either by the influences our children encounter, or by the things our spouses or we ourselves bring into the home.
In Jewish society - to prepare for the Passover - the family spends an entire week scouring the house for any and every small crumb of yeast they can find. They do that because God commanded “For seven days no yeast is to be found in your houses.” Exodus 12:19
In other words, they weren’t just getting rid of the yeast that happened to be laying on the floor. They had to look in every nook and cranny – every hidden corner of their home - to find the leaven and remove it.
That’s what we need to do with our homes. Every once in a while, we need to look our homes over and ask ourselves…
… would that magazine prescription please God
… do those books hinder my walk with God
… do those TV programs I watch undermine my family’s faith
Problems in our homes can often come from thinking “just a little” trash won’t hurt.
ILLUS: There is a story of a girl who approached mother while she is preparing salad. Casually she asked for permission to go to amusement center that had a particularly bad reputation.
When her mom said no, the daughter exclaimed: "All the girls are going to be there... etc."
The mom was silent for a couple of moments and then began to reach into the sink and pulled out some of the wilted lettuce and scrapings from the vegetables and sprinkled them on the salad.
Astonished, the daughter asked her mother what she thinks she is doing.
The mother replied, "I just thought that if you didn’t mind putting garbage into your heart and mind, you wouldn’t mind a little garbage in your salad."
CLOSE: What I want you to remember from this sermon is that there are certain false concepts that can undermine your efforts to protect your family from the influences of an R-rated world.
Two of these we’ve already covered:
1st false concept is that you - as an adult - can have a different morality than your children
2nd is the belief that a little bit of sin won’t make any difference
But there is the false concept. That last false idea is that: simply removing sinful influences from your home will protect your family. This springs from the concept that freedom comes from removing sin from our lives. Actually, Scripture teaches that freedom comes from God and we remove sin from our lives because He has shown us mercy.
The Feast Of Unleavened Bread focused on removing the symbol of sinfulness from the home. But that weeklong festival began with a celebration of their freedom from slavery - The Passover Meal. In other words: It wasn’t the removal of sin from the home that made them free. GOD HAD MADE THEM FREE
Removing sin from their homes was not what made them free. Removing that sinful element was based upon the freedom God had given them. They removed the sin BECAUSE God had freed them.
Now that isn’t simply an Old Testament idea. TURN WITH ME to Romans 6. In the previous chapter of Romans, Paul explained that God loved us so much, it pleased Him to forgive our sins. So, in the opening verse of Romans 6, Paul basically says: If it pleases God so much to forgive our sins… why don’t we really make Him happy and sin a lot?
“What shall we say, then? Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase? By no means! We died to sin; how can we live in it any longer? Or don’t you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?
We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life. If we have been united with him like this in his death, we will certainly also be united with him in his resurrection. For we know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves to sin— because anyone who has died has been freed from sin.
Romans 6 is telling us that our freedom came from belonging to Jesus, and because we were now new creatures in Him, we should no longer engage in sinful activities of our past life.
Too often people will say that they don’t want to become Christians until they clean out their lives (Spring Cleaning). They fail to realize that it isn’t in removing the yeast of their past sins that will make them acceptable to God. We can only be free when we accept Jesus on His terms:
1. Faith in Jesus as our Lord and Savior
2 Repentance of our past sins
3. Confession of Jesus as Lord
4. Baptism into Christ
Then and only then is Spring Cleaning effective and beneficial.
SERMONS IN THIS SERIES
Raising A G-Rated Family In An R-Rated World
1 Peter 1:17-1:19
Committing A G-Rated Marriage
Ephesians 5:21-5:33
Teachable Moments
Deuteronomy 6:1-6:23
Spring Cleaning
Exodus 12:1-12:28
The Bad Dad
1 Samuel 2:12-2:36
The Faithful Father
Luke 15:11-15:32
