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We forget so quickly—and when we forget what God has done, we start to feel alone. That’s exactly why, in Numbers 9, God tells Israel it’s time to keep the Passover: not because the exodus needs to happen again, but because his people need to taste his faithfulness again.
The following study questions are AI generated and may contain errors.
This transcript has been automatically generated and may contain errors.
Have you ever had the experience, I suspect most of us have, of being in the middle of you get a call or an email from a friend you haven’t talked to in a really, really long time, and you think, oh, that happened to me this week. A friend of mine, I actually have been thinking about him quite a bit lately. I like to go through my old photos on my computer. I’m a shutterbug. I have tons of photos. And so I was going through my old photos. I’d run into pictures from when he’d been doing ministry with me years and years ago, and I had changed positions, and he’d changed positions, and we’d just sort of lost track of each other. And he emailed me this week and caught me up a little bit on what God was doing in his life, and we were trying to coordinate a time to actually have a phone call or a video call. He’s in Tennessee now, but to have a call where we can catch up.
What happens in a call like that? When you talk to a friend from years ago that you’ve lost track of, well, usually what we do, I think, is, well, we go over what’s been going on recently, but then somehow inevitably doesn’t it end up that you go back and say, well, remember when, and you talk about something that you did together years ago. This particular friend, he helped me quite a bit when we were both teaching at Lindenwood with prayer ministry there, and I was thinking about that, and if we get to talk before the prayer walk, I thought that’d be something I’d like to share with him, because we’d been doing something that was sort of the seed of what we now do as the semiannual prayer walks. We’d been doing that over at Lindenwood years and years ago, and it was just a little thing. Very few people were involved, and yet that was what blossomed into what we’ve been doing here, where we have different churches around the world gathering and praying together, and I thought he’d just probably really love to hear how God has taken that thing that he was helping with back then, something that, when I’d be discouraged, he would be so enthusiastic about it, I couldn’t help but just regain my enthusiasm for what we were trying to do.
We remember the things that we’ve done in the past, and it reminds us of how God has worked, how he is working. We remind each other of those things, and it draws us together and encourages us, and it helps us as we’re building onward from that, right? Especially if you’ve lost touch with someone, it reminds you, oh, wait, these are the things we share. These are the things we value, and so now as we’re trying to talk about what we’ve been doing more recently, well, what have we been doing more recently with those things that we used to do together? Remembrance brings a friendship back to life, but it also brings our faith back to life, and something that God wants to make sure that the Israelites didn’t forget, and something he wants to make sure that we don’t forget, is the necessity of coming back and reenacting God’s faithfulness, because we have short attention spans. We forget, and then we start to feel alone.
So what we’re going to find ourselves in tonight is Numbers chapter nine, if you want to turn there, or it’ll be up on screen, and Numbers chapter nine is where God says to the Israelites, hey, you know how we did that massive exodus out of Egypt, how I brought you out into this wilderness that we’re in now as we were preparing to go into the promised land, and I promised that all to you, and I’ve been doing everything I’ve said I was going to do for you. Remember all that? And if you remember when we had that first Passover, when my angel of death came and visited the houses of the Egyptians and killed all the firstborns, but those who observed my word and put the blood of the lamb on the doorpost and ate the meal I instructed, they were not visited by the angel of death. Remember that? Remember how I told you that you needed to observe it every year thereafter? Well, now it’s time to do that. God wants them to remember. So that’s our context. You might say, well, I’ve never observed Passover, or maybe I was invited to a Christian Seder dinner that sort of interpreted it, but I don’t actually go and practice it. What does this have to do with me? Well, actually, it has a lot to do with us. And so let’s go ahead and come before our God, ask for his guidance, and think about why does this event need to be remembered? Let’s pray.
Father, thank you for your goodness and your love that has spanned all generations. You truly are faithful to all generations. From the rising sun to the setting sun, Lord, you again and again and again are faithful. And Lord, as we come to your word, would you help us to see that faithfulness in it and to see not just something in the past, but to see how your faithfulness continues even to today. We pray in Jesus’ name, amen.
Let’s go ahead and look at Numbers 9, verse 1. It says, and the Lord spoke to Moses in the wilderness of Sinai in the first month of the second year after they had come out of the land of Egypt, saying, let the people of Israel keep the Passover at its appointed time. On the fourteenth day of the month at twilight, you shall keep it at its appointed time according to all its statutes and its rules, you shall keep it. So Moses told the people of Israel they should keep the Passover.
So God says, okay, you remember what happened. We’re not going to do the whole thing over again, right? We’re not, you don’t have to leave Egypt this time. The sea isn’t going to part. There aren’t going to be any firstborns that are going to die. But here’s what you need to do. You need to have the meal that I had you partake of back in Egypt so that you remember that you’re a part of this promise, that I did that for you and that that’s still true today. And I want you to start doing that and then keep doing that forever because you need to keep remembering. And he wants them to take care in doing so. It says they’re supposed to follow all the statutes and the laws. For example, one of the statutes about the Passover is that you weren’t to partake of it if you were ceremonially unclean. So if you’d, there’s a whole list of things that we’ll say that for another time going through them, but there are different things in the Levitical law that’s given to Moses that he gives out to the Israelites that God says, these things make you unclean. Now God’s not talking about purely something that you can go and get a nice bar of Dial or some hand sanitizer or something and take care of. It’s not that kind of cleanliness that he’s talking about. And it’s also not talking about sin. It’s not necessarily sinful to be unclean. And that’s what we see, for example, in verse six. It says, and there were certain men who were unclean through touching a dead body so that they could not keep the Passover on that day. And they came before Moses and Aaron on that day. So here we have one of the instances of how you become unclean. If you touch a dead body, you are ceremonially unclean. Now that doesn’t mean that you sin by touching the body. If someone dies in your tent or your house, well, you don’t leave them in there. You bury them properly. You do the proper things you’re supposed to do, but you may be unclean for a time. And you can get into a whole discussion of exactly why God instituted these things. Some of them actually seem to be concerned with the health of the Israelites. But what really matters is simply God said this makes you ceremonially unclean, and you have a period of time and a period of participating in ritual in order to become clean again. And what that establishes in the case of these men is that they are not to partake of the Passover while everyone else does, because they’re not clean. So there are rules on how to do it. There are rules on cleanliness. There are rules on how you prepare the meal, what you have for the meal.
It’s not like when you’re planning Easter dinner, maybe you really love to prepare, and so you’re already thinking about that, even though that’s weeks and weeks away. And you’re thinking, okay, I’m going to make this casserole. We’re going to have Aunt Sue bring this dessert. We’re going to do this. We’re going to do that. And of course, we’re going to have to have lots of chocolate because it’s Easter, and you have to have lots of Easter candy, right? So you’re going to have all these things. And we kind of pick and choose what we’re going to want to do and serve. That’s not what we’re talking about here. Passover, you’re going to make what God tells you to make. And no matter how far you look in the New Testament, you’re not going to find the Easter ham listed as one of those things. It’s not there. You’re going to use what God tells you to prepare. So there are rules. There are also rules on how you deal with it. For example, I think many of us love having leftovers after a holiday dinner, right? Ham sandwich after Easter. Maybe enjoy all the casseroles again the next night. If you have casseroles as part of your holiday celebrations, often they’re even better the next day after. They’ve kind of all the juices have marinated, and oh, it’s so good. You’re not to do that with this. What isn’t consumed the night of the Passover is to be burnt. No leftovers. If you hate leftovers, this is a holiday for you. But the key thing is God wants it observed a certain way. He wants to keep the urgency of it. When you’re preparing to flee a country like the Israelites were doing in Egypt, you don’t pack away leftovers. You don’t because there’s no time for that. You’re fleeing an enemy army, and God wants that urgency to remain. So he tells them how to do it in a way that they’re going to re-experience part of what they went through.
Now that can make it sound like, oh, I see where this is going. They’re to do this, but this isn’t going to be anything of joy at all. This is purely going to be going through the motions, suffering as we do exactly what God has told us to do in this, and oh, I can’t wait to be done with it. That’s not the point either. There were rules. There were instructions on how to do it, but the word translated here, observe, perhaps in your Bible, or keep, that word could also be translated celebrate. And commentators have wrestled with the full meaning of that word, but it seems like that word would indicate there’s a bit of, there’s more than a bit of joy in this. This isn’t something where we do it, where if I say, well, keep to the speed limit, I’m not saying rejoice in the speed limit, it is good. It may be good, but does anyone really rejoice in it? I don’t think anyone does. It’s not that kind of keeping. It’s participate in the celebration that speaks to the fact that God has redeemed you, that he is with you.
So that’s what the context is. And the context also is such that it’s going to remind them of something, that God’s going to remind them of over and over again in different contexts, and yet he wants them to actually physically do something, because we’re physical beings. We live in our minds quite a bit, more so perhaps in our present era than ever before, because we don’t need to go anywhere in order to experience a lot of things. We can go online and on demand, we can see almost any place in the world, probably see videos of it, maybe take 3D tours of it. We can write people and communicate with people without going anywhere or doing anything, but we’re still physical beings. So God wants them not only to remember intellectually, remember that I rescued you, and he tells them that over and over again, 24 times after the exodus, God says, remember that I brought you out of Egypt. Hundreds of other times in different wording, God says, remember when I brought you out of Egypt. God knows that they need to be reminded, and he tells them that over and over again. All that’s in the context of observing the Passover, which is going to help them to remember it concretely, because we can remember a lot of things and not really remember them at the same time. Right? You ever have that experience, go someplace and you say, wow, I remembered it was beautiful, but I didn’t remember how beautiful it was. We have those experiences where we need to be in the moment of something again, and when we feel that moment, when we experience that moment, it’s so much better than what we can remember. And God wants the Israelites to remember that about his redemption. His redemption isn’t something that is just known, it’s something that’s felt, something that’s tasted.
Why is it so important that they remember that? They’re out of Egypt. No one, it’s not that they’re going to forget they’re out of Egypt, oh, I thought I was still there. No, they know that they’re out of Egypt. Why do they need to be reminded over and over again? It’s a retelling. It’s like I was talking about my friend at the beginning of the sermon. He and I have known each other for a decade and a half probably now almost. And during that time, we’ve experienced different things, and reliving them helps to remind us of our friendship. Or sometimes we relive things to remember why we’re doing what we’re doing. Here’s an example. Yesterday, thanks to Facebook, it reminded me so I didn’t forget because I feel like the month is just, it’s already March 5th, I can’t believe that. Anyway, Facebook reminded me yesterday it was March 4th. And March 4th is notable in my life because it was the day 11 years ago I was ordained. And so up comes the pictures, and what do I do? I start looking through the pictures. I didn’t forget that I was ordained, it wasn’t like, oh, huh. I wondered what I did on Sunday nights. I know I’m ordained, and yet, what happens when I start to look at those pictures? Well, for example, the one it presented first is a picture in which they just finished laying, the elders had just finished laying hands on me. And I got up and they started giving me hugs. And this pastor who had mentored me from when I was a little kid, this pastor who had shown me so much about what pastoral care looks like, this pastor who had introduced me to some of my favorite theologians for the very first time, I’m in an embrace with him while my mentor from college is looking on. And I look at that picture and it reminds me of the people that God placed in my life to prepare me for what I’m doing, that I didn’t just randomly end up here. No, he was moving things into just the right place so that I could be doing what I’m doing. And he does that for each of us. And when we see things like that, when we relive it, and I can say all that, but when I’m actually looking at the picture, it reminds me all the more, God has been working in this way in my life, and he’s been doing it for years, and he continues to do it. And I look through more of those pictures and I see people, both the ones that are still alive, those who have passed since then, those whom I talked to last week, those whom I haven’t had the chance to talk to in a great deal of time, and I’m reminded of how God put that tapestry together.
Well, the Israelites need that reminder too. They need the Facebook memory to pop up on the one-year anniversary and the 10-year anniversary and the hundredth-year anniversary of the Passover. Eight years ago. And you see the water parting in the photograph, and they say, oh yeah, oh yeah, God rescued us. And what does that do? What happens when we remember the things in our lives where we can see where God has moved us to a certain place? What happens when we see just the people around us that we care about over time? What happens when we start to participate again in the fullness of that? That might sound a little weird, but I think if you stare at a memory, a photo of a memory that’s really near and dear to you, you know exactly what I’m saying. Maybe it’s a picture from a holiday at childhood. Maybe it’s a wedding photo. Maybe it’s a photo from a wonderful family trip. It could be so many different things, but what do we do? We look back at those things and we say, oh yeah, that means something. I am a different person because of experiences like this. It’s not merely an interesting thing, it’s a meaningful thing. It’s not just symbolic, really, at that point. And neither is the Passover. It seems like a lot of symbolism. And today we look at ritual and we say often, it’s a lot of symbolism. And we almost use that as an insult to things, don’t we? It’s just symbolic. It doesn’t really mean anything, it’s just a symbol. But when you go through something like this and you reenact God’s faithfulness, it’s so much more than just a symbol. It’s actually going through and re-experiencing it and being reminded God is with you. God is the God with a mighty hand and outstretched arm can bring you out of one of the most powerful nations in the world against its will and take you to be his own treasured possession. God can do that. It’s a visible word. Because sometimes words just aren’t enough. And it’s a visible word of the experience we have spiritually, too.
I’ve been talking about the Israelites and you may be thinking, well, this is really nice and there’s a nice history on the Passover and it’s maybe nice that I can appreciate if I have some Jewish friends what it means to them as they’re going through the Passover. But what in the world does this have to do with me? What does this have to do with Jesus in my life? Where is this going? Well, remember what day it was that Jesus had the Last Supper. It was a Passover celebration with his disciples. He gathered around like a family would gather around. He gathered his disciples and they were having the Passover meal together. Notice though, when we look at what Jesus has done, what changes? For example, in 1 Corinthians 5, 7, Paul says, cleanse out the old leaven, like you do in a Passover meal, cleanse out the old leaven that you may be a new lump as you really are unleavened. For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed. Jesus makes it even more explicit in John chapter 6 as he’s ministering. He says to them, truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. What are these two passages telling us about the connection between the Passover and the experience that we have as we respond to the gospel? We’re being told about the more perfect Passover sacrifice. Because they would take this lamb each year and they’d roast it and they’d have this meal together and they’d honor God together through that. But that lamb couldn’t save them. The meal that the disciples were having with Jesus couldn’t save them, it wasn’t going to make everything right. But what was Jesus going to do for them? He was going to make everything right. He, as Paul says, was the Passover sacrifice. Jesus says, you don’t have any life in me unless you eat my flesh, you drink my blood.
So that’s kind of a weird, creepy image to us, the idea of eating someone’s flesh, drinking someone’s blood. Maybe you tune through cable TV and you run across one of those real serial killer stories, documentaries, and you start reading about someone who eats flesh and drinks blood, and we lock those sorts of people up. And when Jesus was saying this to the people, we’re told in John chapter 6, a lot of people walked away. Because they said, here’s a nutty guy saying that we need to commit cannibalism upon him. I’m not sure what he’s talking about, but I’m getting out of here. Early Christians were persecuted because as they participated in the Lord’s Supper and said, this is his body and his blood, people thought that maybe the Christians were really committing literal cannibalism. It’s not hard to see why. We get used to it if you’ve been in the church for a while, because this is the way we talk. But it was a shocking image. It was a shocking image pointing to something even more shocking in reality, which is that the very God of the universe, the creator of everyone, the only one who is perfectly sinless and holy, would come into the world to sacrifice himself. And so he gives that meal to the disciples, and they eat the Passover meal together. But he says, now you’re going to understand the full participation in this. Because you can think back to how you were rescued out of Egypt and called away out of slavery and think back to your great, great, great, great, great, great, however many times removed ancestor who walked across dry land where the sea should have been. And that’s really great, but it doesn’t remove the sin in your life. But I’m going to go to the cross, and I’m going to give you a better exodus, an exodus out of sin itself. And we see that woven throughout Jesus’ life, that the scripture says he is reenacting more fully what was experienced by the Israelites, that the true salvation is experienced in him. And he still cares about us today.
So we participate in the Lord’s Supper. Now if you notice when I started, we talked about how God cared about how things were done. And that’s why we come to the Lord’s Supper reverently. We don’t come and just do it willy-nilly because God still cares about how we approach him and how we think about these things. If we’re talking about elements that are the very symbol of what our spiritual reality is that Jesus went to the cross, sacrificed his body and blood for us, there’s nothing to be treated irreverent about it. We’re told the Corinthians were irreverent about it. First Corinthians 11, 27, therefore, whoever therefore eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty concerning the body and blood of the Lord. If you ever wondered why at Little Hills when we have communion, we always introduce it with instruction on how you approach. You need to be a baptized believer in Jesus. If you haven’t been, there’s no shame in that, but you need to become one because we actually care about how we do this. The Corinthians, their problem was that they turned it into a matter of status. Some of the wealthy Corinthians could buy a really nice Lord’s Supper meal. They were going to the church dinner and they were getting first dibs on all the desserts at the dessert table. They certainly weren’t just having a little plastic cup with a little wafer attached to the top of it. They were having a meal, I mean a meal, but then there were those who couldn’t buy the VIP seats and they were outside scraping away at whatever crumbs they could have trying to celebrate the Lord’s Supper as well. And Paul says, do you understand what this is? Do you understand what God’s done for you? Because if you did, you wouldn’t be using it that way. You wouldn’t be using it to elevate yourself. You’d be realizing this is saying I can’t elevate myself, but Jesus has elevated me into his very presence along with these other people, including the ones that I pushed outside. Adopted into the family of God, we need to celebrate together. That’s why we always do communion together. And whether we’re here in person or we’re online, we do it together. We don’t just say, well, you know, sometime during the week you’d like to take some juice and some bread. We don’t say that. We invite each other to do it as one. It’s meant to be a celebration together, just like the Passover. We celebrate that God has redeemed his people, that he’s called us together.
And so as we do that, as we respect it as he’s called us to, and we experience it together as he’s called us to, what is Jesus doing? He’s discipling us. He’s taking us and helping us to understand what does it mean to live the Christian life? Because here’s the root of what God has called us to do. Jesus summarized it for us, to love God and love our neighbor. And we do those things together when we participate. So what do we do? We celebrate together. We’re loving each other. We’re starting here in the church and then taking out into the world, loving each other, and we’re doing it the way that God’s called us to do it. So we’re loving God. And so it’s a little lesson every single time. And it’s one meant to remind us of what God has done for us. Not an empty symbolism. It’s God actually saying, participate, experience again and again, afresh, anew, what I’ve done for you. So when you take this in a few minutes, when you take it, take it as something that God has given to redeem you. Take it as something that says exactly what Jesus has done on the cross again. Take it as a sign that you are part of God’s people. It’s not empty.
We see those unclean folks that we read about in Numbers chapter nine, get the message that this isn’t some empty symbol, that it’s something meaningful because what do they do after they’ve found out that they’re unclean? Well, let’s take a look back again at Numbers chapter nine, verse six. And there were certain men who were unclean through touching a dead body so that they could not keep the Passover on that day. And they came before Moses and Aaron on that day. And those men said to him, we are unclean through touching a dead body. Why are we kept from bringing the Lord’s offering at this point in time among the people of Israel? And Moses said to them, wait, that I may hear from the Lord what the Lord will command concerning you. And the Lord spoke to Moses saying, speak to the people of Israel saying, if any one of you or your descendants is unclean through touching a dead body or is on a long journey, he shall still keep the Passover of the Lord. In the second month on the 14th day at twilight, they shall keep it. They shall eat with the unleavened bread and the bitter herbs. They shall leave none of it until morning, nor break any of its bones according to all the statute for the Passover, they shall keep it. But if anyone who is clean and is not on a journey fails to keep the Passover, that person shall be cut off from the people because he did not bring the Lord’s offering at its appointed time. That man shall bear his sin.
Not going on there, but the first thing, if you’re just kind of whizzing past it, you might say, well, it sounds like God said, okay, the unclean can come. And so God, why was it that you said the unclean couldn’t come? But notice there’s a change there. God commanded them initially, observe it on the first month of the year. Speaking in the Jewish calendar, he’s not talking about January. And so do it on the first month of the year, but he says, if something comes up that keeps you from participating legitimately on the first month of the year, on the 14th day, do it in the second month on the 14th day. Because whatever would have prevented them the first month, they would be ready for the second month. And so God honors their request. And I think we really need to stop for a moment and think about the people who ask this. They don’t brush this off as empty symbolism. They don’t brush it off as, oh, it’s, you know, it would have been nice if we could do this, but it wasn’t in God’s will for us to get to do this. They look at the Passover meal and the fact that they can’t partake of it, and they say, we want to be a part of that experience of God’s redemptive story. We want to taste God’s love. And yet this has happened to us. What can we do? Because we don’t want to be without this. They’re hungering for the experience of God’s love. And so they ask, can we somehow participate? And God honors that request. He says, here’s what you’re going to do. And it reminds us of God’s law in general. God gives his law, but his law is a law of love and of mercy. And he shows mercy here. He doesn’t say, well, too bad, you know, tough luck. That’s how the cookie crumbles. What does he do? He says, okay, I’ll give you another opportunity because I love you and I want you to experience this.
I remember in seminary, I had a professor, and maybe you remember from high school or college or whatever other kind of program you’ve been into educationally, I don’t know if they’re this mean yet in middle school, Leo, hopefully not. You can tell me if they are. But I had a professor who was talking about the bonus you’d get if you had perfect attendance. And there were all these different things about attendance. And he said, now, this is what happens if you’re here every time and you got so many bonus points. And he said, I realize things are going to come up in your life. They’re going to keep you from being here. Maybe you have a family member who’s desperately ill and you have to leave because you know that they’re on their deathbed and you have to miss class. And so you miss class and you go to the funeral and so on. He said, I understand that. You won’t have perfect attendance, you don’t get the bonus, but I understand that. So I’m like, ah, I thought you were about to lay out some mercy here and say, and if you have a legitimate reason for not being there, are middle school teachers this mean? OK, good. Ellie, how about elementary school teachers, are they that mean? OK, good, good, OK. So there’s some mercy at some point, but we lose it, right? And so at some point, you hit this point where, OK, this is the real world now, Buster. And if it doesn’t work, oh, I understand, but too bad. That’s not God. These people couldn’t, for a legitimate reason, participate. He doesn’t say it doesn’t matter, the rules don’t matter, he doesn’t say that, but he says the rules are meant to show my love and my mercy, so I’ll provide a way that you can participate. And that’s a picture of how God works throughout Scripture. Sometimes we read his law and think, how could God be so wittily legalistic, demanding things? And yet, we’re reminded time and time again, God anticipates the times that we’re going to need mercy. For example, when the Pharisees confronted Jesus about the Sabbath, he reminded them that the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. Yes, there was a call to rest, but that call to rest didn’t prevent us, for example, from showing mercy to someone in great need and distress. God provides mercy. And that’s the key difference between respecting God’s law and falling into legalism. When we fall into legalism, we start to think it’s all boxed in, and you’re either in it or out of it, and too bad, so sad if you’re out of it. Just like that instruction I got from that professor. We need mercy in a lot of places in life, and sometimes it’s through no fault of our own.
I was reminded of this a couple months ago. I think I mentioned to some of you, for I think the third time in a year, my bank contacted me and said they turned off my credit card because someone had been trying to use it illegitimately. Now, as I eventually discovered, they were wrong. They just didn’t expect me to make the particular purchase I did. I was renewing our web hosting that we use for the church, and I did it, and it was an annual payment, so it was a little bit larger, and it was from a state I don’t live in, and I can’t remember exactly where it’s billed to, I think Florida, but they thought I must have run off to, someone had run off with my card to Florida, so they shut down my card. This particular credit card company, it takes at least a half hour to an hour, it feels like every time I have to call them up to get the card unlocked. It’s ridiculous. If it weren’t this card I’d had forever, I’d just get rid of the thing. Anyway, so I put it off, it was right around Christmastime, I’d had the flu, it was Christmastime, I put it off, I thought, I don’t really need it right now, that’s fine, I’ll just leave it alone. I did need to pay the bill at the end of the cycle, though, so I tried to pay the bill and I thought it went through, and then a few days later I noticed there was still the balance there, so I tried to pay the bill again. I thought I was set. And then I get a late notice. I thought, wait a second here, I tried to pay that bill, and I go in and sure enough the bill isn’t paid, so I contact support. It turns out they not only shut off the ability to charge anything, they shut off the ability to pay anything, and I wanted to say to them, you know, if someone wants to steal my credit card to pay my bill, please, by all means, I’m happy for you to pay my bill, I will never complain, I will give all of you access to paying my bill if you want, no problem, no problem at all, I’ve never complained about someone doing that. But apparently they were worried about this, so they shut it off, and the simple truth was I am now late. Now it was not through my own fault, it was not my fault the credit card was turned off, and I had tried to pay on time, but I had been prevented, my credit card was spiritually unclean apparently, and so it was late. So what did I do? Well, I rehearsed my faithfulness as a credit card client to them, because I paid off my bill every single month, and I had paid off that bill for over 20 years, every month, I was a faithful client, how could they do this to me, especially when it wasn’t even something that I had done, and eventually, after I think two and a half hours, they refunded the late charge, they refunded the interest, and they didn’t mark me as having paid the account late. What did I do? I turned to my faithfulness and said, hey, I’m faithful to you, credit card company, so have mercy on me.
Now here’s the interesting thing in God’s faithfulness. We need to come to Him and have mercy, whether it’s because we’re spiritually unclean or we’re just an outright sin, we need mercy all the time, I need mercy all the time, but I don’t need to rehearse my faithfulness, because if I did, I’m in trouble. If I go to God and say, God, look at what a great person I am, what’s God going to say? Well, you’re always paying your righteousness bill late, and you never pay it, you’re always going into deeper debt, you’re in hopeless bankruptcy, Tim, there’s no way you can do it. So, and what does the Passover call the people to do? To go and ask for God’s mercy and not recount their faithfulness, but to recount His faithfulness. What does the Lord’s Supper invite us to do? To go and ask for His mercy and recount His faithfulness. That’s why those people that were unclean so hungered for it, they seemed to get it in a way that often we don’t. They were hungering for God’s mercy, to rehearse God’s righteousness, to rehearse God’s grace, and they didn’t want to miss experiencing it. That does both the mercy part and the faithfulness part. That’s what we’re experiencing here. Do we hunger like they hungered? I thought about that. They may say, well, we do it every week, not once a year, so maybe that’s why I don’t hunger for it as much. But then you think about what we’re saying every time we come to the Lord’s table, every time we come in and we proclaim the gospel, every time we experience God’s grace, how awe-inspiring it is, and we should be constantly starving to hear it again, to experience it again, to taste it again. God’s mercy is so profound, so rich, so unending. How can we ever get a fill of it where we can say, I can go a few weeks without that? So every time we have the Lord’s Supper, we’re being reminded of that greater spiritual exodus out of sin and into God’s family. He invites us to that greater promised land of actually being in His presence.
But there’s more. And we may miss this sometimes with the Lord’s Supper, because with the Lord’s Supper, since we do say you need to be a believer to partake, we think, well, this is something that we’re going to close in on, right? This is for us. But may it never be that. And that’s why when we talk about who can participate, I pray that we never forget to say how someone can begin to participate. Maybe someone watching online tonight who’s never had the Lord’s Supper. Maybe someone who walks through these doors any particular week who hasn’t yet trusted in Jesus. We talk every week about what we do, which is that we turn to Him, that we don’t have to do anything special. We just have to say, Jesus, I am a sinner. I need you. I want you to be my Lord. And then receive that good news that He accepts that cry. To experience being a part of His family. And then He invites us to take part. And we see that. We sometimes think about the time of the Israelites as somehow being closed off and separate, and they were just focused on their little holy huddle. But it wasn’t that way. You think about what they did. Well, often it was that way in practice, but it wasn’t that way in how God called them. Because what were they called to do? Verse 14, there is an instruction there that we shouldn’t just sort of pass over. That wasn’t intended, that pun. It says, and if a stranger sojourns among you and would keep the Passover to the Lord. I’m going to stop right there. If a stranger among you, someone who isn’t an Israelite, wants to participate. In other words, like those people who are unclean, says, I am hungry for this. If someone comes into this church and says, I want the Lord’s Supper. I’m hungering to be reminded of a God who actually loves me. Then we need to be as ready as Israel was called to be to communicate that. If someone during the week says, I’m struggling. May we be ready to communicate the Savior’s heart to them. May we never be in a holy huddle. May we never be thinking just in the walls of this church. May we be thinking about God’s kingdom and its expansion and that everybody needs Jesus and that that is what God’s called us to do. May that be what we are thinking constantly. We’re called to gather others.
And right here in this very Israelite moment, what’s God doing? Here’s what you do if someone who isn’t a part of you wants to participate. Go back to Exodus and we find even more instruction on that. How do they get to participate? Well, just like communion, God wasn’t saying, well, you know, they don’t understand who I am, but they think this looks like a nice meal. I’ll participate. He’s not talking about that. Back in Exodus chapter 12, verse 48, as he’s instituting this initially, he gives the instruction. He says, if someone comes and is just passing through, they have no interest in being part of the community, don’t let them participate. But if someone actually wants to sojourn with you, if someone actually wants to be a part of this people that I am forming, if someone says, I want this thing that I see that you have, what do you do? You help them convert. Now in the Old Testament, that meant circumcision. In the New Testament, that means baptism. If someone who hasn’t been baptized, what do we do? I can’t wait till the first baptism that we have here at Little Hills Church. That’s going to be wonderful. It’s going to be a joyful occasion because what are we doing? We’re celebrating. Here is someone who was a part of the kingdom, who’s now a part of the kingdom. Here is someone who is receiving this visible word in the second sacrament that we observe, a moment to be a part of God’s covenant people, just like circumcision was back then. So we call, so it’s a call to conversion every time that we do this, every time we live the Christian life, every time when we’re really showing what it is to be the church and people see that it’s rich and wonderful and beautiful, may they see that in us and when they see it, it’s a call to be a part of it and not just to experience the ritual, but to experience the reality behind it. That is what it comes down to.
Jesus on the night he was betrayed, as he was giving the meal, it says, and when the hour came, he reclined at the table and the apostles with him, he said to them, I have earnestly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer. For I tell you, I will not eat it until it is fulfilled in the kingdom of God. He took a cup and when he had given thanks, he said, take this for yourselves and divide it among yourselves. For I tell you that from now on, I will not drink of the fruit of the vine until the kingdom of God comes. And he took the bread and when he had given thanks, he broke it and he gave it to them saying this is my body, which is given for you do this in remembrance of me. And likewise, the cup after they had eaten saying this cup that is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood. Jesus directly connects it with the Passover and says, this is for you. Trust in me and then experience this visible word. Trust in me and experience that I have given my body and my blood for you. Even though you don’t deserve it, I’m giving you that mercy because I love you. That’s why we partake.
And so tonight, if you haven’t trusted in Jesus, make it the night that you do and then come back and experience this with us next week. You can leave, if you’re online, there are those online who would love to pray with you or you can, we have an email address that will pop up on screen or rather a texting line that will pop up on screen that’s new that you can write in. And someone would love to pray with you. Make this the last time. Hunger for it. And for all of us as we come every week, may we hunger to be reminded to taste and to touch and to feel the story that God has given us. This is the body and the blood of Jesus. Let’s pray before we partake.
Lord, thank you that you understand that we need to be reminded. Thank you for giving us this meal that we would be reminded of your redemption, of your love. And now, Lord, as we partake this body and this blood, as we take this bread and this juice, Lord, would you nourish us by the power of your Holy Spirit with our Savior’s body and blood? Would you strengthen us? And would you make us lights that people would look to us and want to be a part? Would you help this church to be a church that people see out in the community, being your hands and your feet, loving the people around us and loving you, and it would make people hunger for what they can only find in you. We pray this in the precious name of our Savior, Jesus, amen.
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