Transcription
The whole purpose of The Saga of Exodus is built around the the birth of the Old Testament Church. Birth and death are always synonymous. Anytime something is born, something has to die. It has to die in its original form that it might be reborn in another throne.
And so the whole notion of Exodus is centered around the Old Testament Ecclesia, called out Church. They were called out. Moses's name means drawn out. And so life is a perpetual state of evolutions, of births and deaths, of being reborn, of being redeveloped. Of it in one person's life, there there are at least 10 of you. You're not the seven-year-old you were. Your idealistic perceptions have all been altered. You're not the 20-year-old you were. You're you're optimistic view of how you were going to do this or that or the other has been altered or changed. Every year, every situation, every circumstance, every birth, every death gives you another little grain of wisdom that that becomes a block that builds the framework and the substratum of who you are.
We see God inviting his estranged children to be emancipated, not only to receive the not only to relieve the oppression, but to meet them in the wilderness to worship Him. I want you to understand that they had not had a conversation with God for 400 years. They are the people of God. They are born to be with God, but they have not had a real relationship with God for 400 years, in part because of their association and in some ways a simulation with Egypt.
Their association and assimilation with Egypt started out as a blessing and ended up as a curse. Okay, started out a blessing because there was a famine back in Israel, and and and Jacob moves toward his family, toward where Joseph already was in Egypt, that they might get corn to withstand the famine. Everything that starts out a blessing doesn't end up a blessing. So the first 30 years or so, it was a blessing, and it was a wonderful thing. But when the Pharaoh died, there was a Pharaoh who died that did not know Joseph, nor regard his God. From that point, they became enslaved and they entered into 400 years of slavery.
Watch this closely. But God knew it. Not only did God know it, God arranged it. Not only did God arrange it, God prophesied to Abram that this was going to happen. He said, your seed is going to sojourn in Egypt for 400 years, and afterward they will come out with great substance. There is an expiration date on trouble. If there's a date you go in, there's a date you come out. Are you hearing what I'm saying? They were not there because they were subservient or less qualified or less capable or less brilliant than the Egyptians. They were there by a Divine prophecy whereby God incubated Abram's seed from a family into a nation. And in order to incubate the greatness that was in them, he put pressure upon them. But they were no less than the Egyptians, but they were forced to serve the Egyptians for 400 years.
Now psychologists teach that when somebody is abducted, they have a tendency to fall in love with their abductor. I don't understand that, but somewhere along the way, they have a love-hate relationship with the abuser. It might be involved also in domestic violence, a love-hate relationship with abuse, a love-hate relationship. Moses has come to emancipate them from 400 years of of being contorted into whatever Egypt wanted. And anytime you contort who you are into what other people want, there comes a point where you become unfamiliar with who you really are. Some of you know what I'm talking about. You've shifted everything about yourself to contort around what somebody demanded of you, and then sometimes they left, they changed, they died, and you're standing there trying to figure out, who am I outside of what you needed me to be?
So these are a people who have no sense of real identity. They have no sense of real understanding of their language. Their food is gone, their cuisine is gone, their uniqueness is gone, their religion has been aborted. They have assimilated to the environment that they're in for survival. Survival necessitates sometimes that you adapt and adopt to situations that you didn't prefer because it is necessary in order to survive. And our Creator so endowed us with the ability to adapt that no matter what climate we're in, we physically adapt. No matter what situation we're in, we emotionally adapt. No matter what circumstances we engage in, we we adapt to that environment for survival state because we have a strong survival instinct. We have a strong survival instinct. You wouldn't be sitting here today if you didn't have a strong survival instinct. Your heart has been broken, your life has been altered, you've been disappointed, you didn't get everything that you wanted, everything didn't turn out like you wanted it to turn out. But once you were in the situation, you adapted to the situation, found a way to cope with the situation, survive through the situation, and you ought to give yourself, even if you're not going forward, you ought to give yourself a hand clap that you didn't go back.
Their poverty exceeds income and is an all-encompassing barren blight that has been comprehensively damaging and diversely documented. They've lost everything. They've lost everything. They have left Egypt to rediscover themselves by reconnecting with God. Watch this closely. They have left Egypt to rediscover themselves by reconnecting with God. You will never find you without Him. You will never find yourself, your identity, get your self-esteem back without Him.
This is why they got out in the middle of the wilderness and started asking for the leeks and onions of Egypt because their taste buds had become like the Egyptians. This is why they built an image of God that looked like the Egyptian God because their concept of who God was is influenced by Egypt. This is why you come to church and and start talking about a higher power because you are adopting the language of the people you work with. The man upstairs. I'm not a Christian, I'm spiritual. This kind of language is where you have lost your language that God gave you and adapted the language of the people around you, in part because of your need to fit in. You need to be connected. You need to be fresh or need to be accepted. Your need to be accepted by other people, other employers, uh, other CEOs, other companies, other entrepreneurs, other women, other men have forced you to shape your personality into something that they applaud you for. And they don't applaud you for being who you are. They applaud you from being contorted into an image that reflects the times that we're living in. And so they'll tell you, oh, you're out of style. That's out of date. That's old school. So in other words, you got to contort back because now the style has changed.
I'm sick of style. I'm sick of style. I do me. I wore something the other day, they said that's out of style. No, it's not out of style because it's in my closet. Broke trying to keep up with what's in style. That's why they keep changing the style every week to make you have to buy again so you can fit in again, rather than invest in your money. You are breaking yourself trying to keep up with something that somebody dictated out of Paris that you don't even know, and you ain't gonna never be on a runway, but you're gonna be homeless in a shelter if you don't wake up and recognize.
Too much of our energy is spent trying to reconcile with men. We're trying to reconcile with men. We're trying to be in with people. We're trying to be in vogue. We want to be in shape. We want to develop the right language that gets us ahead, that gets us applauded, that gets people to clap for us. We're ashamed to say things that we used to be proud of, things like, I love my wife. I care about my family. I take care of my husband. I make sure that he's good. Those guys, I dare you to make a post about it right now and watch how many people attack you. It's it's not that they're wrong to be them, it's that they will, they like them, or something is wrong with you if your values are not in the same place their values are. And so the fight goes on. It's a fight with men. It's a fight with women. It's a fight with generations. It's a fight with denominations. It's a fight with ethnicities. We're having war, war, war, war, and I'm tired. Anybody tired? Anybody tired of twisting and turning and reshaping yourself into all kinds of configuration, and by the time you get it all worked out, the style has changed. We don't do that over here. We don't do that over there. We don't do this over here. We don't wear that over here. We wear that over here. We do this and that until you are afraid to be yourself because your need to fit in trumps your need to be who you are. And now you don't know who you are. And so you got to go back and hit reboot and go back to the manufacturer and go back to God and say, who did you create me to be? What did you have in mind for me? How have you designed my life to function? Because I am so tired. I've been what my mama said. I've been what my daddy said. I've been what my friends said. I've been what my gang said. I've been so many different things. I've been what my denomination said. I've been what the board said. I did what the school said. I did what everybody said to promote me to get to the next level, and now I just don't even know who I am.
I speak a little bit of Hebrew. I speak a lot of Egyptian. I got a little bit of Hebrew left in me, but I got a whole lot of the Egyptians left in me. And now here comes this joker trying to move me out from what I have adapted to. And even though I prayed that God would send a deliverer, when the answer came, I rejected what I prayed for. Come on, come on. I want you to see what I'm saying. I asked God to deliver me from this bondage, and now when God sends a deliverer, I'm fighting him tooth and nail and asking him, are there no graves in Egypt? You, we just left Egypt. If you wanted to stay in Egypt, you could have stayed in Egypt. But you got one foot in Egypt, and you got one foot on the promises of God. And the moment you run into trouble, you revert back into what is familiar, even though it's not effective. And you're asking, are there no graves in Egypt? By the way, what difference does it make where you die?