A family road trip starts with dreams of Disneyland but quickly devolves into complaints, blame, and chaos. Moses faced something far harder: leading a people from slavery to freedom, only to watch them reject the promised land itself and wander forty years in the desert. The heart, Deuteronomy 30 suggests, is the real problem—and no change of scenery will fix it.
The following study questions and transcript are AI generated and may contain errors.
This transcript has been automatically generated and may contain errors.
The sea behind us, the desert before us, we still needed His help, now more than ever. The pillars of mist, the fire we followed, He spoke at the mountain, gave us His law, showed us the way forward, but we chose to ignore it. A cycle of forgetting, generation after generation, chasing idols. The prophets warned us, but injustice kept rising, kings failed, people rebelled, temple destroyed, a nation in ashes, we abandoned His law. Had He abandoned us?
From Exodus to exile, that’s where we are today. Season number two, we’re in episode number six. Glad that you are here with us. For those of you who are joining online, super glad you’re here. But I’d love to invite you to join us at one of our campuses. In fact, I’d love for you to join us at our O’Fallon campus. If you’re at O’Fallon right now, super glad you’re here. If you’re online near O’Fallon, go there. Amazing congregation. If you’re near St. Charles, go near St. Charles. Just be here in person. We’re on this great journey together through the Bible from one side to the other. Cover to cover, we are six weeks in. So grab your Bible, pull it out. That’s where we’re going to be today in that book. And every Sunday, we use that book quite a bit around here. If you have your guidebook too that accompanies this series, you can pull that out and turn to page 26 and 27. I’ve got some of our sermon notes that you can follow along with on there as well.
Now, where we are in the story today. Last week, we ended with Moses receiving the law on top of Mount Sinai. And he’s getting ready to come down and deliver the law to the people. Now, when he delivers the law, then he needs to take them on a journey. And it’s essentially going to be like a family vacation. We’ve just ended summer. I’m guessing many of you have gone on summer vacation. Anybody have kids and had to drive their kids to a summer vacation? That always sounds like a really good idea, doesn’t it? Kids get in the car, pack up, we’re going to Disneyland. And we’re going to drive there. And there’s these dreams of grandeur about how great that drive’s going to be. But the best part of family vacation, whenever you’ve got kids, is usually the moment before you take off for family vacation, right? You get everybody in the car. And the moment you hit the gas pedal, everybody starts complaining. Nothing’s good enough. We’re going to Disneyland, but nobody is happy about it. They’re just mad at each other. My iPad’s dead. I don’t have enough food. He’s touching me. She’s touching me. I need air. I don’t want to sit here. And the parents are just like, shut it. We’re supposed to be having a good time on the way to family vacation. Is this anybody else? Just my family?
And that’s what Moses is getting ready to go through. So I think many of you are going to feel and empathize with what Moses is going through. He’s getting ready to take his people, not to Disneyland, but to the promised land. They’ve just been delivered from slavery. And so anything’s got to be better than that, right? So he’s on top of this mountain and he can envision the future of this nation, like taken off and taking shape. He’s got God’s people gathered together now. He’s got this law that he’s getting ready to give to them. He’s getting ready to tell them that God is going to be dwelling with them in the tabernacle. And all of our problems are solved, right? Things are going to be good from here on out, right? Well, he may have thought that until he gets down to the bottom of the mountain. And he finds his people have already abandoned God. And they’ve fashioned an image of this calf, this cow. They’ve taken all of their jewelry, melted it together into a shape of a cow. And they’re worshiping another God already. This is like day one of being freed from Egypt. They’ve already turned their hearts away from God. And I think that’s when Moses knew this is going to be a long trip. This is going to be a really long trip.
He can imagine himself already leading the people and reaching back from his caravan, swatting all the kids left and right saying, I’ll pull this camel over right here in the middle of the desert. And you know what he does? He has to pull this camel over here right in the middle of the desert time and time again. And what I want to talk about is this journey from Egypt to the promised land. Because what we’re going to see in today’s message is that the people are going to not just go to a home. They’re going to be wandering towards a home.
Now we’ve got a lot to cover today. We’re going to go through the book of Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua, and Judges all today. So grab your Bibles, open up to Numbers today. But what I want to do is I want to break this message up into three parts. And the first part is going to be this, that the people are circling the wilderness. And it’s featuring Moses as their leader for this part of the story. This is Deuteronomy and the book of Numbers.
Now, where it starts, this circling of the wilderness is at Mount Sinai. Mount Sinai, he’s getting down to the bottom of the mountain. He sees that they’re worshiping this golden calf. He gets angry at them. He yells at them. He berates them. And he essentially tells them, like, you guys have a problem with your hearts. If we’re going to make it to the promised land, you need to fix your heart. He says, you need to circumcise your heart. Get your life together if we’re going to make it through there. And so he gathers all the people together and he begins this journey right after that.
And essentially, the people are only an 11 day journey to the promised land. To walk from Mount Sinai to modern day Israel would take about 11 days to get there. But he has to pull the camel over many a times. So much so that it doesn’t take 11 days. How many days does it take? Or how many years does it take for you Bible scholars out there? Forty years. You’re right. It takes 40. What should have taken 11 days took them 40 years to get to the promised land. What went wrong? You know what went wrong? The hearts of the people went wrong. They were a rebellious people for sure. Forty years. They wander around in this wilderness. It’s this desert wilderness. And they wander around aimlessly through the wilderness in this difficult time. And all the while, a lot of their heart is being revealed. And a lot of what they’re praying is, why aren’t we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Why aren’t we there yet?
And I got to stop here and ask about you now. Not the Israelites, not your kids on vacation. But have you ever been in a time of life, a season of life, where you’ve just been praying to God, “Can we just be done with this season already? Can we just get there already? I know what you’ve promised. I know the goodness that you’ve promised me. Why am I wandering in the desert still? I feel like this season should have only been 11 days. It feels like it’s 40 years, God.” Have you ever been there? In those times where it’s like, “Lord, I’m done with this. Let us be done with this.” I think we’ve got to ask this question, both to the story as well as our own stories. Why does God leave us in the wilderness for so long? Why does He leave His sons and daughters in the wilderness so long?
And I’ll tell you this, I don’t know what wilderness you’re in. And so I can’t answer that question for your story. But I can answer it for the Israelites and their story. And maybe there’s a part of their reasoning that might also play to your life as well. Here’s where I think He leaves us in the wilderness, at least part of the reason. The wilderness is where hearts are formed. The wilderness is where hearts are formed.
Let’s remember who these Israelites are. They’ve just spent 400 years in slavery in Egypt. They’ve been freed from their circumstance, but they’re the same people as they were when they were in Egypt. Their hearts have been formed by Egypt for 400 years. By the ethics of Egypt, the morals of Egypt, the culture of Egypt. That heart is now taken out of Egypt into the wilderness. And the heart doesn’t just magically change because you move its context. And so it’s in the wilderness that God begins to do His forming work of the Israelites’ heart. At least that’s His invitation.
The wilderness is an invitation to formation. The question is, are we going to accept the invitation to formation? Or are we going to reject it? You know, the wilderness, it can form us. And the way it does that is it typically shows us two things. The wilderness will show you the darkness of your own heart and the goodness of God’s heart. That’s what wilderness times do. It’ll show us in the middle of the wilderness, all the darkness in our hearts. I’ll tell you those seasons in my life where I’m just sick and tired of being in them. That’s where I see the most unhealthy me. I don’t know if you’ve seen that for yourself as well. That’s where I do my grumbling. That’s when I do my complaining. That’s when I try to take control of my life. And that’s where I try to take control of other people’s lives. That’s where I begin to question God and His goodness and what’s going on. And it reveals a lot about the heart that’s in here. In the good times, I can hide that stuff easily. But it’s in the deserts that it’s revealed.
Also in the desert, what’s revealed is not just your heart or my heart, but God’s heart as well. If we’ll take time to notice in the middle of the seasons, what we’ll see is God is there in it with us. The Israelites, they’re wandering in the desert. You know what’s in the desert with them? The tabernacle where God dwells in the middle of the wandering, in the middle of the desert there with them. Where God is also, by the way, giving them drink in the desert. He’s giving them food in the desert. He’s giving them care and even forgiveness in the desert. And you get a real clear picture of God’s heart in the middle of wandering in the desert.
There’s an author, Dan Allender, he says this about our spiritual journeys when they come to those desert moments. He says, “Our spiritual journey must lead through the desert. The desert shatters the soul’s arrogance and leaves body and soul crying out in thirst and hunger. In the desert, we must trust God or die.” This is what God forms in our hearts. He takes us through deserts, not around deserts, not over deserts. He takes us through the valley of the shadow of death. And in that valley, that’s where our hearts are formed. Either they’re formed or that’s where our hearts are put to rest. We either trust God in those moments or we put our trust in our own understanding, ourselves, and we circle and circle and circle.
Well, the book of Numbers, that’s the story of the book of Numbers. Numbers tells the story of the Israelites with some pretty painful honesty about their hearts. Because in the wilderness, as they’re circling, they reject formation. And they don’t just reject formation, in the wilderness, they reject God. They’re not sure they want God to be their God. They reject Moses, their leader. They’re not sure they want Moses to be their leader anymore. In fact, their hearts begin to long, not for God, their hearts begin to long for Egypt. And a lot of their crying in the desert is, “Just take us back to Egypt. We were better as slaves in Egypt than we are as free men in the desert in the wilderness with God.”
And then eventually God’s like, “Well, Moses, just give them a glimpse into the promised land. Let them see into the promised land what it’s going to be like and what awaits them.” And so Moses sends some spies to the promised land. They bring back some of the goods of the milk and the honey from the promised land. But the spies have also seen something in the promised land. They’ve seen an enemy, an army, and they’re scared to death. And so the spies come back and say, “We don’t want to go there. We don’t want that.” And then in the middle of the wilderness, the Israelites reject the promised land. And here they are, stuck between Egypt and stuck between a land they don’t want to go to. And they wander for 40 years.
The wilderness was an invitation to formation, and they rejected the formation of their own hearts. So instead, the wilderness became the burial ground for an entire generation, including Moses. So God said, “You don’t want the promised land? Then in the desert, you will live.” And He allowed that generation of Israelites to live and die in the desert. And it wasn’t until their sons and daughters grew up that they got to go into the promised land. After 40 years in the wilderness, though, Moses, he’s gotten to the end of his journey. He’s not going to go into the promised land either. And he’s looking at the people once again. It’s been 40 years since they left Mount Sinai. And now near his last days, he looks at his people and he re-diagnoses the problem.
In Deuteronomy chapter 30, verse 6, this is what Moses says. He says, “And the Lord your God will circumcise your heart and the heart of your offspring, so that you will love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul that you may live.” Essentially, what he’s telling them here is, the heart’s the problem. Your heart’s the problem. Now remember, back when they were at the base of Mount Sinai, he came to them and said, “You guys need to circumcise your hearts.” He told them the heart was the problem, but he put the impetus on them to change their own hearts. Now he’s gone 40 years of wandering in the wilderness with these people, and he realizes you can’t do a thing about your heart, can you? And so with some of his last words, he says, “It’s the Lord your God who’s going to have to do the work. The Lord your God will circumcise your heart.” And essentially, the image that he’s given them, he’s saying that there’s this darkness that covers your heart. Your heart’s the problem, and there’s this darkness that covers it, and God needs to come in like a surgeon and remove that darkness from your heart. If you are going to love the Lord, it’s going to require that your heart change. If you’re going to stop wandering, it’s going to require that your heart change. If you’re going to live, something’s going to have to change in your heart. Your heart is the problem.
If we’re going to live and dwell in this new land with God, we’re going to need new hearts, not just a new land. And it’s God who’s going to have to do it, because obviously we’re powerless to changing our own hearts. This next generation, they would rise up and they would enter the promised land under Moses’ successor named Joshua. And the question that we get when we enter the second phase is, would this generation be different than the previous generation? And what we’re going to see is that while Joshua was their leader, they would actually be different. It seems like their hearts would take a step forward.
They enter the land, they enter the promised land, and they begin to claim the land that God has promised. And that’s where we get into the section of scripture in the book of Joshua that I’m calling conquering the land. So we’ve got circling the wilderness, shifts into now they’re no longer in the wilderness, now they’re going to the promised land, and God has given them the command to conquer it under the leadership of Joshua. And that’s exactly what they do. You’ve heard the story of Jericho, maybe. Jericho is the first city that they have to go to conquer it, and it’s this miraculous victory. The people, they see the walls of Jericho, it’s this big fortified city. They look at it and they’re like, “We have no power to do this. Lord, we need your help to do this.” Now their hearts are crying out to God.
Notice this. And God says, “Okay, here’s what we’re going to do. You do nothing, I’m going to do everything. How about that? Does that sound like a good deal?” All you need to do is walk around the city, worship and pray, worship and pray. That’s all I’m asking you to do, worship and pray. Don’t attack, don’t fight, just worship and pray. They walk around the city, eventually the walls come tumbling down and they conquer the city miraculously. Victory number one.
Now, the problem is they get a really big head. And they’re like, “We’re pretty amazing. Like we’re one for one.” And so then they see this city that they need to go defeat. It’s called Ai, the city of Ai. And it’s not the AI that you’re thinking of, although it needs to be defeated as well. It’s the city of Ai. And they see this, it’s a small city, not the walls of Jericho. And they’re like, “You know what? Just some of us, let’s go to this city and we’re just going to take it and capture it real quick and conquer it because that’s our land as well.” They go and attack the city and this tiny little city destroys them. Like miraculously defeats them because God didn’t send them there. And in their minds, like we’re going to conquer, we’re going to defeat these people, but God didn’t send them there. And so God defeated them. And their heart learns, “Oh, maybe the power is not in us. Maybe the power is with God. And maybe we need to submit to God.” And they learn their lesson in that moment. And they go from city to city, territory to territory in the promised land and claim the land.
Now, this section of the Bible presents one of the hardest questions in the Bible that is asked often by many people, both in the church and outside of the church. And it’s a question that’s usually framed this way. How could a good God destroy entire cities and societies? How could a good God destroy entire cities and societies? Has anybody ever asked that question as you’ve read through that? It’s like, “God, what are you doing to those people? Those poor, like you just sent the Israelites in to just stop everything and claim their, like what are you doing?” Now, I want to point out the posture of our heart as we ask that question. But then I want to question the posture of our heart to answer the question. Does that make sense? Here’s the posture of our heart. Those people are pure and God is guilty. The people are pure and God is guilty.
Now, let me push pause and take you back to season one, episode one. I told you right at the beginning that when we read the scriptures, there’s going to be some things that are very difficult and confusing. And what we have to go back to is the character of God. In the beginning, God. In the beginning, God. And right off the bat, we’re told who He is. And we’re told that He is powerful and mighty, that He’s sovereign above all things that He has created, that He is the king and we are not. We’re also told that He is good and we have something wrong with our hearts. We are told that He gives direction and we filter it through the darkness of our own heart. So when we read the scriptures and when we get to stories like this, where we begin to question the character of God, we need to push pause and say, “God, actually, I do know that you are good. I’m just not sure how you’re being good here. I know that you’re good. How is your goodness being displayed here in this story that’s confusing me?” And we need to do that here because our hearts are saying, “God, you look guilty here and the people are pure.” The problem is the story frames it completely different than the way that we assume it’s being carried out.
Open up your Bibles to Deuteronomy 9, verse 4. Deuteronomy 9, verse 4. God, He’s getting ready to send the Israelites into this land to claim the cities. And He knows that there’s going to be this dark filter on their own hearts about what’s actually happening. And He’s like, “I don’t want you to play the comparison game.” When you’re going into this land, I don’t want you to start asking who’s good and who’s bad because your heart’s going to lie to you about the situation. And so He tells the people this. God says, “Do not say in your hearts after the Lord has given you the opportunity to get rid of them, the people from their lands, that it is because of my righteousness that the Lord has brought me in to possess this land. Whereas it’s because of the wickedness of these nations that the Lord is driving them out before you.”
Here’s how God is framing it. Israel, you’re going to go into the land and you’re going to conquer Jericho and you’re going to be really big on yourself. You’re going to think like, “We are God’s chosen people. We must be the best humans that have ever been made. And we are so righteous and we are so holy. If you were like us, if you were as good as we are, you would have the same victories that we have.” But you’re not as good as we are. And God says, that’s not the case. Don’t forget the wilderness. Don’t forget the heart in the wilderness. You are guilty as well.
But here’s what He says He’s doing. He’s saying, “I’m not giving them over to you because you are amazing. I’m giving that land over to you because they are so wicked.” When Abraham stepped foot in the promised land hundreds of years before, Abraham gets there and these nations are already living there and exist there. And God essentially tells Abraham, He’s like, “Someday this is going to be your land. But it’s going to be a few centuries from now. And I want you to know why I’m not giving it to you now. Because right now, they’re sinning and they’re committing evils, but they’re not to a level of justice yet. I’m going to give them time to repent. I’m going to give them time to turn away from their sins.” He’s like, “But in 400 years, let me tell you what’s going to happen. Their sin is going to reach such a level that I’m going to say enough is enough. And then I’m going to give their land away. And it’s going to be your descendants who are going to come to claim it.”
By the time that Israel comes into the story, some 400, 500, 600 years later, Israel has entered the land under Joshua. And this land, the Canaan land, the Canaan society was steeped in unimaginable evil practices. And these people were calling it good. From city to city in this land, there was a worship of the demonic powers. They built their whole society on this religion and this faith of the worship of demonic powers. They would take their kids, their young children, and slaughter their children, lay their children on altars and burn them on fire, and worship to these demonic gods that they worshiped. They would sell their women into sex slavery or just drag them into the temples to be used as their bodies for sex as a form of worship. They would prostitute their women. Wickedness was their religion.
And not only did they practice in that day, but for 400 years, the scripture says that they would teach their kids to do this. And their kids would grow up, the men and the women, and they would participate in the same wickedness and pass it down to the next generation and the next generation and the next generation. And after four centuries of patience and mercy, God says enough. And so when we read these passages, we come in and we’re like, “God, what are you doing to these innocent people? You’re so unloving. You’re so unkind. You’re so unfair.” And what the story tells us is that we have a God who is so incredibly patient with them, giving them chance after chance after chance after chance to change their ways. And I’ll tell you this, hear me, God does not delight in destruction. He is patient and merciful, but He’s not indifferent. He’s not indifferent. God’s holiness matters. Sin is a big deal. He will be merciful. He will be patient. He will be forgiving. But a dark heart that continues to be dark century after century after century will be dealt with. A nation who operates from a place of darkness for century after century after century will be dealt with.
And this wasn’t just the warning for Canaan. This is the warning He’s giving to His people as well. He’s saying, Israel, when you come into this place, don’t you marry their people and then start participating in their practices? Don’t you pick up where they left off? Turn your hearts to me. And if you don’t, this will happen to you as well. You will be kicked out of the land into exile as well. For God, wickedness will end one way or the other. His preference is through patience, mercy, and forgiveness and a heart that turns to Him. But if the heart doesn’t turn, then He turns them away.
Under Joshua, Israel, they begin to claim this land. They’re the tool that God uses to bring justice to the land. And then God gives Israel this land as their new home. But what we see is a new land can be a new home, but it didn’t give them a new heart. It didn’t give them a new heart. And so Joshua, he passes away, and then the Israelites enter this third season, which is a cycle of rebellion, a cycle of rebellion under their new leadership.
Now, Joshua dies in the book of Judges. He’s no longer there, but Israel wasn’t leaderless. Israel has a king. Does anybody know who the king of Israel is in the book of Judges? It’s God. God is the king in the book of Judges. From the moment He delivers them, He sets Himself on the throne. He sets His presence in the middle of them. And He says, “Hey, I’m your leader. I’m your sovereign king.” And He does recruit like Moses to lead His people to the promised land. In this book, He recruits these people who are known as judges. And a judge is essentially a mix between a rescuer and a military leader. Because as Israel’s settling into the land, they’re facing these military attacks from other countries and other nations and other people really still living in their own land.
And what God does is He raises up these temporary leaders called judges. And the book of Judges is just story after story of these judges. And it’s a pretty interesting book. If you’ve ever read through that and you like war movies, this is the book for you. This is graphic. This is strategic. This is dark. This is gritty. It’s an interesting book to read. But the interesting thing about it is that there’s this cycle that happens in the book over and over again.
As you go through it, it’s just a cyclical story that happens. And Judges chapter two, verses 18 and 19 describes that cycle. It says this: “Whenever the Lord raised up judges for them, the Lord was with the judge and He saved the Israelites from the hand of their enemies all the days of the judge’s life. For the Lord was moved to pity by their groanings because of those who had afflicted and oppressed them. But whenever the judge died, the people turned back and were more corrupt than their fathers.”
And there’s a cycle that happens. Essentially, here’s a picture of the cycle of the book of Judges. You’ve got these people who were in the land. They begin to rebel against God. And in the rebellion, they move to suffering. They’re attacked and they begin to lose because they’re rebelling against God. In the middle of that suffering, that’s when they cry out to God. Oh, if we would just cry out to God earlier and not wait for the sufferings of life to come. But in the suffering, they would cry out, they would repent. God would send a judge to rescue them from their enemies. And as long as that judge was alive, the people would live at peace and rest.
And then the judge would die. And when the judge died, the cycle started over. The people would rebel. They would suffer. They would repent. God would send a judge to rescue. And then they would rest. And then a judge would die. And the cycle would start over. And the interesting thing about the cycle is that in the book, the cycle doesn’t just repeat but the cycle spirals downward and downward and darker and darker. The people each time become more corrupt from generation to generation. And not just the people become more corrupt in the rebellion, but the judges’ hearts become more corrupt. And it’s harder and harder to find a judge who would listen to the voice of the Lord. And this downward spiral culminates to the last judge in the book, which is Samson.
Everybody’s heard of Samson, right? Samson’s one of the more interesting ones that we see. And like, it’s taught a lot in Sunday school because he’s like a Hulk guy. It’s like a Marvel universe character. He’s got this long hair and he’s got this power. He can like rip animals apart, lions apart with his hands. He can destroy armies all by himself. And God sends this military leader to rescue the nation. And he has this supernatural strength who could defeat armies. But the contrast of that, what we see in his story is he has no strength to control his own heart. He has all the strength to win battles, but he has no power to do anything about his own heart.
And this is the lesson of Judges. Judges shows us that human willpower may be able to control our behaviors for a time, but it’s powerless to change our heart. Your willpower, hear this, your willpower, you might be able to stop sinning for a little bit and just pull your bootstraps up and just get along with life and stop sinning, get your life organized for a little bit, but your human willpower will never change the heart. The heart needs somebody else to deal with it.
The sad thing is in the book of Judges, it doesn’t come to a happy ending. If you’ve got your Bibles open, turn to the last page of Judges, Judges chapter 21, the last verse in there. It’s got this spiraling downward, downward, downward until it finally ends with these words: “In those days, there was no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes.” The end of the book of Judges. In those days, it was a mess. There’s no king in Israel. There’s no king in Israel. And everybody just did what was right in their own eyes. They essentially became their own kings. The problem is there were a million kings.
Here’s the problem though. Israel did have a king. There was a king. He was better than the judges. He was better than Joshua. He was better than Moses. They had a king who is good and patient and kind. A king who is holy. A king who when they were crying out in Egypt to be rescued, a king who heard their cries, stepped in and delivered them. A king who when they were going through the wilderness and the desert places, a king who said, “I’m going to be in it with you. I’m going to be right in the middle of it with you. And when you’re hungry, I’m going to feed you bread from heaven. And when you’re thirsty, I’m going to give you living water to drink. You’ll never go thirsty and hungry, even in a desert.” A king who, when they would cross into the boundaries and they were attacked, a king who would raise up someone to free them. A king who would lead them into victory and a king who would also forgive them when they would fail.
They had a king who was holy, just, merciful, and loving. Israel had a king. But their whole kingdom was destroyed. But their heart wanted to sit on the throne. That was the problem. That was the problem. And that’s not just Israel’s problem. That’s our problem as well. That’s you and me. We get to these times in the wilderness and frustrated at God, and we’re angry at God. God, this is how we do it. This is when I want to be done. This is when I want it to be done. God, if I were king, may we never pray that prayer. We’ve seen what our hearts do.
Here’s the question. Do you want God to free you from Egypt? Do you want God to free you from the wilderness, from the desert? Do you want to be rescued? I can’t tell you when that’ll happen. I can’t tell you when you will be removed from the season you’re in. But here’s the warning in the middle of the season. The desert may not be your greatest obstacle. The circumstance that you’re in may not be your greatest obstacle. It might be the heart that’s in the middle of it all. People were in a garden, but the heart rebelled. The people were in slavery, and the heart was a rebellious heart. The people were in the presence of God in a desert, and the heart rebelled. God put the heart in a promised land, gave the people a promised land, and the heart rebelled.
I think every single one of us assumes that if you just put my heart in a different context, then I’ll be good. The context may not be the problem. The context may be our hearts. Your greatest problem may not be the desert around you. It may be the rebel king that lives inside of you. You don’t need a promised land. You need a new king. You need a new heart.
And so Moses stands before the people and says, “The Lord God will circumcise your heart so that you might love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind, and that you may live.”
Start the Conversation