Weird Laws in Exodus

When I read Exodus 20, the ten commandments mostly make sense. They are straightforward and easy to follow. I don’t have any problem understanding the application of “don’t murder, don’t steal, or don’t commit adultery.” When God says “keep the Sabbath holy” and “don’t worship other gods,” I can think of practical ways that impacts my life. 

However, when I continue to read Exodus 20-23, I am confronted with language that feels so far from the way I live. For example, “When you buy a Hebrew slave, he shall serve six years, and in the seventh, he shall go out free, for nothing” (Exodus 21:2, ESV). Or something like this, “But if the ox has been accustomed to gore in the past, and its owner has been warned but has not kept it in, and it kills a man or a woman, the ox shall be stoned, and its owner also shall be put to death” (Exodus 21:29, ESV). 

I know I’m not the only person who struggles with verses like these. So, I thought it would be helpful to give a little background on these laws and explain why they were given. Our church has been reading through Exodus this month, and we have been studying how verses like these point to Jesus. 

When Jesus was surrounded by Pharisees who used the law against Him, His reply was “For if you believed Moses, you would believe me; for he wrote of me” (John 5:45, ESV). After Jesus rose from the dead, He walked with men, “...and beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, He interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning Himself” (Luke 24:27, ESV). Jesus spent a lot of His ministry explaining to people how Jewish festivals, events, and laws were given to prepare people’s hearts for Jesus. 

When you read the Old Testament through the lens of Jesus, you see the Passover, the Red Sea, and Mt. Sinai in entirely new ways. You also see strange laws like this one, in a new light, “For six years you shall sow your land and gather in its yield, but the seventh year you shall let it rest and lie fallow, that the poor of your people may eat; and what they leave the beasts of the field may eat. You shall do likewise with your vineyard, and with your olive orchard” (Exodus 23:10-11, ESV).

The key to understanding why God gave laws like this starts with understanding what He was doing with Israel. God freed over one million Hebrews from slavery and brought them to a mountain in the wilderness. The point of this was two-fold. First, He desired to make them His people. He wanted their relationship and devotion. However, this required a specific lifestyle change and certain rules that must be followed. This relationship was on God’s terms, and it required the people to live differently than the rest of the world. If the world treated a slave one way, God said: “not in Israel.” If the world placed so little value on human life that an ox could kill someone with no repercussion to the owner, God said: “not in Israel.” If the rest of the world was working the ground bare, never giving themselves rest, and giving their heart to any idol made with human hands, God said: “not in Israel.” Israel was following God’s standard, not the worlds. 

This brings us to the second reason God freed Israel. In making their lives look so different from the rest of the world, Israel was reminded on a daily basis that earth was not their real home. God’s kingdom was their home. Therefore, in living like aliens for another kingdom, they stood out to the other nations around them. When other nations saw the fruit of living holy lives, they were interested. God’s commands had a profound impact on Israel, and it showed everywhere they went.

This brings me back to where I started. Reading the ten commandments in Exodus 20 is relatively straightforward in understanding and application. But, if you do the work to read the rest of Exodus through the lens of the cross, you will see an even deeper understanding and application. You probably don’t own farming land or an ox, but as a Christian you are called to live as “...a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light” (1 Peter 2:9, ESV).

Just like Israel, Jesus freed you from slavery. He has set you free and desires a relationship with you. But, He also wants you to respond to His love and grace with holiness and obedience. When you follow Jesus’ lead and arrange your life based on His teaching, you will look like a citizen from a different kingdom. You will look peculiar, but your lifestyle will proclaim the beauty of living in His light instead of the darkness of this world. 
 

-Marshall Ochs

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Build Your Kingdom Here

Rend Collective

Being A Dad

“All great change in America begins at the dinner table.”

- Ronald Reagan.

Any “man” can be a father, i.e., someone who is only there physically or who isn’t there at all. But, society has a growing problem (and it’s not the rising gas prices.) We need more dads. By more, I mean, a lot more. The sad fact is that today 1 in 4 children under the age of 18 — a total of about 17.2 million — are being raised without a father. Fellas, we can do better than this.

For many fathers, it’s easy to get caught up in being the “provider” and neglect the very thing our kids need the most- us.

Truly one of the most important lessons I’ve learned over the last nine years of raising three kids (yes I realize I’m not even close to being done yet) is they need my presence far more than they need presents. Don’t get me wrong, they like presents, and I spoil them every chance I get. But ten years from now they won’t remember the time I bought them a $10 dinosaur Lego set, but they will remember the time we spent putting it together. They won’t remember the clothes or the Disney Infinity characters, but they will remember the camping/ trips and all the times we spent hours playing board games as a family. It’s our time that matters most.

Becoming Dad

I remember having discussions with my wife during her pregnancy with our first born about the differences in motherhood and fatherhood. She tried to explain that a mom becomes a mom the moment she sees that little blue + sign, but a dad becomes a dad the moment he holds his child for the first time. I didn’t get what she meant at first, but indeed it all clicked the moment the nurse placed Katie Rose in my arms. I was a dad now. This little human would depend not just on my protection but my love and affection. She would need my strength and my hugs. A kiss on the forehead and the occasional slap on the wrist. She needed a dad.

But it’s not always easy being a dad. We work a lot, sacrifice so much, and sometimes feel like the pressure of the world is on our shoulders. Not always being around can make us feel inadequate as a parent and wonder if we are doing enough. Am I spending enough time with each kid? Am I correctly balancing work with being a father and husband? Am I neglecting my wife while trying to spend time with my kids or vice versa? Do I cut the grass or play catch? (Hint: Play catch)

While being a parent can be hard at times, the world doesn’t need perfect dads. It needs present dads. Dads who still know what it means to play with "army mans" (that’s what my son calls it), but who can also play dress up and afternoon tea. Guys who understand the words sacrifice, love, and discipline. We need more dads who aren’t there just for the fun and games (being the fun parent), but who also give their wives some time off by putting the kids down at night. Kids need to see their dads love on their moms. Also, nothing warms a mother’s heart more than seeing their husband loving on her kids. PRO TIP: that may be worth at least a couple folded loads of laundry.

So for this Dad’s Day, guys don’t get caught up in the things you aren’t doing or can do better. Just be there. Love your kids and spend quality time with them. Trust me, that’s all they really want anyway.

- Lyell Walker

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Good Good Father

Housefires

Identity

Have you ever asked yourself the question, “Who am I?” I would venture to say that most, if not all, people have asked themselves this question at least once in their lives. Some of us ask ourselves more often than others (pointing back at myself), but inside each of us is an innate desire to be known and to be understood.

Recently, I’ve been studying a system to classify personalities called the Enneagram and for years I have loved the Myers-Briggs Personality test. Both of these test, and many more, are trying to explain the human mind. They try to explain what our motivations are and why we do the things we do. They exist to help people find their identity.

Getting to know your strengths and weaknesses sound like a good thing, right? Right. These kinds of tests and self-reflection are useful tools that help us find what we are good at and what we need to work on. However, these tools are only helpful when we remember where our identity lies. Our identity is found in Christ.

“So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” – Genesis 1:27

We are created in the image of God. He puts bits and pieces of himself into each of our personalities. Every person that walks the earth displays some characteristic of who God is. This should fuel us to have compassion and love for everyone that we come into contact with. And yet, we still struggle with that. Paul addressed this very same fact in Romans 7, “For I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.”  

For the rest of our lives, we will be struggling with sin as we walk through the journey of sanctification. Sin not only causes us to DO things contrary to who God is but it also tells us that who we ARE is contrary to who God is. But God tells us a different story about our identity. We are adopted into His Kingdom as sons and daughters. We bear the image of Christ. Through Him, we trade our weakness for His strength. We trade rags for riches. We trade darkness for light.

“You have turned for me my mourning into dancing; you have loosed my sackcloth and clothed me with gladness, that my glory may sing your praise and not be silent. O Lord my God, I will give thanks to you forever!” – Psalm 30:11-12

-Kelsey Turner

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Who You Say I Am

Hillsong Worship

To Be Known By Love - Part Four

This is the final post in four-part blog series entitled “To Be Known By Love”. To catch up on the other three parts, click here.

To be known by love. What a legacy. It’s taken some time to get here, but this is how I want to be remembered. At my funeral, I don’t want people talking about my wealth (that I don’t have) or my love for Alabama football or my red beard or how much I enjoyed working in my yard. No, I want to be remembered by how much I loved others.

The reason it has taken a while to get here is because I had to walk through what we talked about in Parts 1-3. First, I had to come to the understanding that a Christian should not only be known by their love for God but also others. Then I had to analyze my own heart to determine if I operated out of love. Finally, I had to begin the difficult process of actually changing my behavior. How’s the rhyme go? “First came love, then came marriage”? Well, for the Christian it’s, “First came love, then came the ability to love others as Christ loved us”.

Ok, I know it doesn’t have the same ring to it, but I think you get my point. Before we can act, we must first have love in our hearts.

Love In Actions

"Let love be genuine. Abhor what is evil; hold fast to what is good. Love one another with brotherly affection. Outdo one another in showing honor." -Romans 12:9-10

Loving others is hard. It takes time, effort, but most of all, an incredible amount of grace. To love others as Christ loved others forces us to completely change not only our actions but our eyes too. We have to see people how Christ sees people. We have to see beyond the outward image and sin to see the fellow image bearer. We have to see them, not as one of the 99, but the one that Jesus left the 99 to go find.

Rick Warren said about loving others, “God teaches us to love by putting some unlovely people around us. It takes no character to love people who are lovely and loving to you.

It’s easy to love my family because they are my flesh and blood. Even when one of my kids causes my blood to boil, the next minute they melt my heart by a simple hug or a smile. But a random person, who I have no connection with, that just cut me off in traffic or some guy, that just from his appearance, looks to be a potential danger to my family? How about the homeless who seem to be a drain on society? Refugees who we are told could be terrorists. Drug addicts and drug dealers. Those who love evil. These people I have to force my heart and mind to love, yet they are the exact people Jesus tells us we are called to love.

It’s hard. This will be an exhaustive, yet incredibly fruitful, process.

The Fruit of Love

A few years back I began to work with those affected by addiction and seeking recovery. This was my first time ever dealing one-on-one with people who’ve been addicted to opioids, crack, cocaine, and meth. Some of their stories will turn your stomach and break your heart, but after spending just a few sessions talking with these men, I noticed how deeply they desired to be loved. They just wanted for someone to accept them as a fellow human who was struggling with an unbelievable sickness and to not be seen as a failure who wasn’t worth anyone’s time or effort. They didn’t know how to express it, but you could tell they were looking for someone to show them the physical, genuine, tangible, real life love of Christ. Why? (meaning why couldn’t they express it)  Because they had never received it and on some level they didn’t know it existed.

At first, I probably thought how much my words were going to change their lives. How I’d motivate them by my speech or bible study, and that these actions would result in their lives being changed. Nope, what I’ve found is actions do speak a thousand words. Simply being Jesus and embracing the two greatest commandments is all they needed from me.

Do we realize how much it means to a person to be loved? If not, oh how we have missed the point of Ephesians 2:1-10!  We forget that, “God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved.” (vs 4-5)

Our call to love others shouldn’t be to fulfill a desire in our heart or to check off a “good deeds” box at the end of the day. No! Our desire to love others should be based on the understanding that God, who being rich in mercy, loved us first even when we were dead in our trespasses!

Sometimes we forget we were once the addict and God still showed us grace.

Over the years I’ve learned how precious the gift (act) of love can be to others. By working with addicts who may be here one day and gone tomorrow, it’s been made very clear to me that I may only get one shot to show a person, any person, the love of Jesus. But the “ah ha!” moment for me was when I started to use this thinking in all parts of my life. It could be in the grocery store, the ordering line at Chipotle, the meet and greet time at church, or just walking my dog. All these tiny moments are just opportunities to “be Jesus” and Christians, as messengers of the Gospel, shouldn’t take these moments for-granted. We should be embracing them, actively looking for these moments to give a person just a little bit of Jesus.

Imagine what the world would look like if we, every last one of us, embraced the idea of being known by our love. How quickly would wars, racism, sexism, and needless death end?  How many broken marriages would be healed and the pain of abuse be removed? How many government programs would end simply because we loved the needy out of the abundance of love in our heart? How many people, who previously rejected him, would come to know Jesus, not by our words, but by our love? How many hearts would be changed?

So, are we known by our love? Will people look back at our lives and say, “Man, [insert person’s name] really loved like Jesus.” Or will they be turned off by our selfishness, our RBF, and harsh words? How we stood against the oppressed and not with them? Will we turn people away from Jesus because of our actions?

The ultimate question is will we be known by our love?

-Lyell Walker

Click here to listen to our latest sermon series “The Gift of Love”

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How He Loves

John Mark McMillan

To Be Known By Love - Part Three

This is part three of our “To Be Known By Love” blog series. To catch up on the previous two posts, please click here

The last two weeks we’ve been exploring this idea that as Christians we should be known by our love. In Part One we found that it would be near impossible for a person to claim to be a follower of Christ but not have love for others. Jesus commanded us to love our God with all our heart, soul, and mind but also that we should love our neighbors as ourselves. These are the two greatest commandments.  He takes it one step further and says [paraphrasing] that we’ll be known as one of disciples by the love we have for one another.

In Part Two we took this knowledge, that we must love others, and then asked the tough question, “Am I loving?” Before you can act on this knowledge you must, first, be aware that you’re lacking in this area. It’s only then can you do the hard work of changing.

And that is the subject of today’s post: Change.

“And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires “ Ephesians 4:24

Love, faith, joy, peace, kindness, gentleness, self control, and goodness. These should be the personality traits of a Christian. (Galatians 5:22-24) But what if they aren’t? Instead of gentleness we are stern and heavy handed. We are not peaceful but easily excitable and impatient. We neither have love for others or self control over sin. We realize after our self check that our personality traits look more like the desires of the flesh and not fruit of the Spirit.

Scientist say that by your mid 20’s or early 30’s your brain has stopped developing (mostly). This means by the time we’re 28(ish) most of our personality traits are well defined. By this time we’ll know if you’re a happy person or by nature more somber. Are you bubbly or melancholy? Do you have great patience or do things easily frustrate you? Do you struggle with a short temper or are you cool and collected in all situations? Quiet or loud. Meek or brave.

Our personality traits make up who we are and how people see us, but what if one of those traits is unbecoming or in fact is something the Bible says we should avoid? Can we change and how?

To answer the first question quickly, yes a person can absolutely change.

The mark of a believer is someone who is maturing in their faith while dying to themself by crucifying their flesh with “its passions and desires. This is how we change. We do the hard, laborious work of putting to death the things that are of our flesh.

Paul says in Ephesians 4:22-24

“To put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires, and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.”

In 2 Corinthians chapter 5 Paul says that in Christ we are a New Creation. Even the act of baptism is a reflection of the death of our old self and then new life in Christ. John the Baptist spoke of this need for change when we proclaimed “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” Repentance is the physical act of turning away from sin (desires of the flesh) and towards Christ (new life/fruits of the spirit) .

This means we don’t get a pass for a personality trait. Yes, God made us, each and every part, but we don’t then get to say, “Well since God made me and I’m impatient, then that means he wants me to be impatient”. This would be embracing the flesh instead of crucifying it (killing it). He is the potter, we are the clay, and we don’t get to ask the potter why did you make us this way? As Paul so eloquently states, “But who are you, O man, to answer back to God?”

We also don’t get a pass due to our season of life. This is a tough one because we want to believe that we are the way we are due to some external influence that was outside of our control.

1. I lost my faith after a family member died.

2. I’m going through fits of anger and rage (towards family and friends) because my spouse cheated on me.

3. I’m sick, so I’ve lost the ability to be kind to others.

4. I just want to have a good time or God wants me to be happy (no self control).

You’d be hard pressed to find examples in the Bible where these reactions to life’s circumstances (either fair or unfair) are acceptable and pleasing to God. In fact, we are told to stand firm in persecution and sickness. To turn the other cheek. That we should not be anxious about anything and we should not lose heart. Jesus tells us to love our enemies. To have faith and be steadfast when all around us seems lost.

This doesn’t mean we can’t be sad or angry when horrible, unspeakable things happen in our lives. Paul says “be angry and do not sin”. So it is not the anger that is sinful but how you react in the moment. Jesus says, “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted”  and “Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

The idea here is to acknowledge our weaknesses and not blame a personality trait as the reason for immaturity or sin. As followers of Jesus we should desire to be imitators of Christ. If we aren’t joyful, we should fall on our knees in repentance and ask the Holy Spirit to change us. If we aren’t gentle, Lord soften our hearts and gives us compassion for others. If we lack self control or faith, Spirit test us. If we are angry, break us. Ruin us, if need be.

Lord, if we are not loving, bring us to the place where all we have left is your love for us. The only love the surpasses all knowledge. The greatest of all love. The love that was willing to meet us at the cross and strong enough to defeat death.

Let us be known by this love.  

Get caught up on the Red Hills Church message series entitled, “The Gift of Love” via our podcast or website

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Here As In Heaven

Elevation Worship