Summary
Pastor Safrit walks through Exodus 32:7-14, highlighting Moses' intercessory prayer for the Israelites who had sinned by worshiping a golden calf. He emphasizes that true spiritual maturity involves shifting from self-focused prayers to praying for others, illustrating how Moses passionately, personally, and persistently sought God's mercy on behalf of the people. The sermon encourages the congregation to stand in the gap for others through prayer, reflecting on the importance of intercession in their own lives.
Welcome and Announcements
Thank you for listening to Pleasant Grove Baptist Church Sermon Audio. For more information, please visit our website, pgbcronda.com, or visit on all social media platforms. Thank you, choir. Thank you for singing along with us in that rendition of Down at the Cross.
If you have a child who wants to be dismissed at Children's Church, my wife will be taking them back today at this time. If you have your Bibles, if you would please turn to Exodus chapter 32, is where we'll be at this morning. Exodus chapter 32.
Got a cowboy walking across the front of the stage. Running now. Yes, wonderful. Exodus 32, verses 7 to 14.
Always an honor and a privilege when we do baptism as well. We can do these as many often as we want. And so if you've never been baptized, you want to be, please let me know and we will schedule a time for you.
Remember, next week is Graduation Sunday. I know Lucas, or Lucas, Logan has already said this. But if you want to have your eighth grade, high school, or senior, or college graduate recognized, please fill that form so that we can get that for them. So Exodus chapter 32 this morning.
We're going to continue our series in prayer this morning when God's people pray and what this looks like. We've looked at the last couple of weeks of mother's prayer, Jesus' teaching on the priority of prayer. And then today we're going to go to the Old Testament, look at Moses' prayer for others.
So if you found your place there, let's stand out of reading of God's word. The words will be on the screen as well for you. And the Bible says in Exodus chapter 32, verse 7 through 14, The Lord spoke to Moses, And I will make unto you a great nation.
But Moses sought the favor of the Lord, his God.
Lord, why does your anger burn against your people, who you brought out of the land of Egypt, with great power and a strong hand?
Why should the Egyptians say he brought them out with an evil intent to kill them in the mountains and eliminate them from the face of the earth? Turn from your fierce anger and relent concerning the disaster planned for your people. Remember your servants, Abraham, Isaac, and Israel.
You swore to them by yourself and declared, I will make your offspring as numerous as the stars of the sky and will give your offspring of this land that I have promised. And they will inherit it forever.
So the Lord relented concerning the disaster that he had said he would bring on his people. Lord, we love you. We thank you for what you've done for us.
Thank you for the opportunity to come into your house today and worship. Thank you for what you've given us and the ordinance of baptism for us to be able to follow you in our faith. We love you. In your name we pray. Amen.
You may be seated. To catch you up on the passage of where we're at, we're sort of springboarding into a passage. We have to understand where we're at. The children of Israel had been brought out of Egypt. They had been brought to this desert wilderness.
The Lord had protected them, had done a lot of great things for them, provided manna for them.
And now Moses is getting the Ten Commandments and the laws that God has given him. He comes off the mountain.
He goes back up to the mountain. And he begins to have this 40 days with the Lord. And as he's up there, the people say to Aaron, Aaron, we don't understand what's going on.
The Golden Calf Incident
Can you make unto us a golden calf? Can you make us something that we can worship, that we can see here? And Aaron at first is like, no, we're not going to do that. God told us not to have any graven images. The people continued.
And now all of a sudden he's made a golden calf. And God looks down from heaven with Moses. And he says, I'm just going to go and wipe everyone out. So that's the setting of where we're at.
So as we begin to walk through this in our own personal life, I want you to ask yourself, what is some keys to you having spiritual maturity?
When we go through life, when we begin to walk through life, we begin to see prayer revealing things in our life based on where we're at in life. Oftentimes, this is what happens in our life as kids begin to grow,
as kids begin to be more mature into young adults and teenagers, and they begin to mature in life. This is their statements. They go from mom and dad, give me this,
to mom and dad, how can I help with this? Now, some of us in the room, we're still waiting for that dad, how can I help with these things? Some are still waiting.
Some are, their kids are in their 40s and 50s. And they're like, please, Pastor James, when is my kid going to say, when can they help me, right? So they go from give me to how can I help? And this is beginning to show in our physical world how children begin to mature,
right? I can remember as a teenager going into high school and beginning to work a job and all of a sudden no longer going to my dad and saying, dad, I need gas money, but dad, I've got some extra
money. Is there something I can help out around the house? And thankfully my dad said, no, keep your money. I'm glad you're paying for your own gas. That's a great blessing to me.
But that is begins to be this shift in life where we go from give me, give me, give me to how can I help with what's going on? Dad, I see you're busy. Can I help with the laundry? Can I help take care of these things? Can I take these things going around?
And so most people in our lives, naturally, this is what happens. We pray for ourselves.
We go, God, these are the list of things that I need and I really need you to work in it. And there's nothing wrong with that. But what God really begins to see in our life when the spiritual maturity comes to happen is that we begin to carry other people's burdens
to the throne room of God. We go, we say, God, I know that I've got needs and I know I'm burdened, but so-and-so is hurting in this area.
I need you to work in their life. And all of a sudden your prayer time begins to go from what I need to how can I help other people in this moment? What?
Exodus 32 gives us one of the greatest pictures of intercessory prayer that I can find in the Bible. Israel, the Bible says, has sinned greatly and is now worshiping a golden calf.
God's judgment is beginning to burn hot. He looks at Moses and he says, your people who you let out, I'm gonna go and I'm gonna wipe them all out and I'm gonna start over with you, Moses. All of a sudden, Moses then has this opportunity. Moses could say, God, that's a great idea.
Wouldn't it be nice? For me to be one of the leaders, Abraham, Isaac, and Moses? That would be great. That's awesome. Wipe them all out, God. No, what does Moses do? Moses steps in and he says, God,
how would this look? Look at what you're doing. Look at what you're saying. He begins to intercede on the half of the people
that really don't deserve mercy, but God begins to show them mercy. So this is not a casual prayer.
This isn't, Lord, bless the food before we eat. This isn't just this right before we go to bed, help us have a good night's rest. No, this is coming to the Lord with deep burdened prayer,
bold praying, and really a heart that is broken before the Lord saying, God, I need you to work in this life and I need you to work in this nation.
So Moses, ultimately, as we're gonna look at, becomes a picture of Christ. And this is what I want us to think about as we get to this, because Moses is standing in the gap between a holy God and a sinful people. And he begins to work in this way.
So the first thing we'll look at is verses seven through 10.
We're gonna look at the people's rebellion and begin to identify some things that can happen in our life, because before we can even appreciate what Moses is praying for, we've gotta see where the people are at.
We've gotta see the depravity of the seriousness of where these people are at and understand what they're going through in their life and their mindset and how all this works together. The Bible says in verse eight, they have quickly turned from the way.
And all of a sudden, we see this people's rebellion because their corruption was sudden.
The Danger of Drifting
It says they quickly turned. Moses had only been gone a short time. He was up on the mountain, and this nation was already drifting away from what God had led them to. One thing we must understand in life is sin doesn't happen slowly. It happens when we're not guarded.
It happens fast, and it happens when our heart is most vulnerable. And God is telling us through this passage that this corruption can happen suddenly for each and every one of us. Remember what Israel had seen.
They had seen the plagues, and they had seen God work in each and every one of these plagues, how they were spared. They were up into this water, this red sea that they couldn't see the other side. They saw the mountains on both sides. They saw the Egyptians behind them.
And in one moment, God parted the Red Sea, and they walked across on dry land.
They were eating manna every morning. They were hearing God's word from the thundering mountains of Sinai. And yet, through all of this,
in the middle of all this, they turned suddenly from what God had done. They were saying, and God, we would rather see and experience something physical than worry about what you're doing right now. Spiritual experiences alone do not keep us faithful.
I have met some great people in life who went through some wonderful spiritual experiences where God has answered prayer, but just because they have that one experience does not keep them for the rest of their life. They must continue to allow their heart to be close to the Lord.
They must continue to allow their minds to be thinking on the things of the Lord. And they must continue to be in this constant prayer of intercessory moments between them and the Lord.
If you have ever been driving for a long period of time, unfortunately or fortunately, the Lord has given us many, many different long road trips where we'll go to Arkansas or we'll go to Texas. And our longest road trip was from Idaho to North Carolina, 2,400 miles that we drove.
And if you're ever driving through Kansas, these flyover states where there's nothing around to look at, and you just feel like you're driving on this highway forever and ever, it is easy for your mind to begin to drift.
It is easy for you just to sort of be lulled away with the tires on the road and the monotony of what's going on in life. And God is telling us this can happen in our life as well.
As things are going well, we can begin to be lulled away in this moment where we just don't even realize we've crossed the center line.
We're going to our destination, but now we begin to drift just a little bit and we don't even realize what's going on.
And God is telling us in this moment, we need to wake up and we need to plan our lives and not be lulled asleep as the devil wants us to be lulled asleep.
He wants us to understand that yes, some good things are happening, but we need to be aware and we need to be awake and we need to understand these things so that our heart is close to the Lord and we don't drift into disaster.
There are golden calves in each and every one of our lives.
They are easy to be golden calves that we set up, that we say, these are the things in my life that no one's allowed to touch, not even God. And oftentimes, God's going to come into our life and he's going to say,
Corruption and Stubbornness
are you willing to give that up for me? Are you willing to take this off the table and allow me to work in your life? And all of a sudden, their corruption in their life began to be sudden. The second thing was the corruption was shameful.
The Bible says that they made for themselves an image of a calf. Now, this was a direct violation to what God had told them. The people exchanged God's glory for an idol.
The people exchanged worship that God had given them to wickedness and they were now worshiping this golden calf and instead of God saying, I want you to be dependent on me,
they looked at God and said, we're going to disobey what you have to say and we're going to be dependent on something else. This happens a lot in our life when we begin to have our eyes not fixed on Jesus but fixed on the things that are around us.
One of the commentaries I was reading after this week said this, that the calf likely represented strength and fertility common in Egyptian worship. Israel did not completely reject God. They attempted to worship Him through an idolized image.
God, we're going to take this calf who is strong and is powerful and we're going to put it in the place of you. We're still going to worship you, God.
Their intention was never to take their ideas off of God but it's we're going to look at this and think of you. And God in this moment looked down and said, this is the most dangerous thing you can do.
Now you are not even having your eyes fixed on me as the writer says in Hebrews, fixing our eyes on Jesus, you are now fixing your eyes on this golden calf, this item, this thing that you see and now you are putting this in the place of God.
This is the most dangerous thing we can do and in our life you may say, well Pastor James, I don't have any golden calves in my house.
If you come to my house and I've been in most of your houses, you're not going to see any calves that are golden that are up on my mantle. You're not going to see anything that even resembles any type of idolatry worship.
My question would be put back to you is this, what is it in your life that has replaced your love for God? What is the thing, the item, the thing in your life that is still in your time that is taking your eyes off of Jesus?
Sometimes this is something that's comfortable. Sometimes this is something that is convenient or controllable and I can mold this or I can make this and in my life I understand that football is one of these idols for me.
I can worship football, right? We just had the draft, the NFL schedule just came out, my group text of the different guys that I've talked to, they're sending me this schedule and this date and these things and I can begin to be focusing
on the idea of worshiping my team that's probably not going to do really well this year.
Who I was telling Birdie, they may win five games if we're lucky. It's going to be a hard season and Birdie's talking about these things and we're listening to things and I can begin to worship that as an idol and if I'm not careful, if I'm not paying attention to these things,
these can be the idols in my life and they're different for every single one of us and God looks down at these people who were his chosen people and said their corruption was shameful.
The third thing we look at here is their condition was stubborn. Look at what it says here. I have seen the people and they are indeed a stiff-necked people. This word stiff-necked we don't use often in these days.
The word we would use would be stubborn or not willing to change and the word stiff-necked is a picture of an ox refusing to put the yoke on to plow the field and so it is trying to
do its own thing even though the master's coming in and trying to control it and this is what happens.
A stubborn heart, a stiff-necked heart refuses to listen to what God has for us and God is saying I've got this plan for you.
I've got the direction of your life laid out and all you got to do is get in line. All you got to do is put your will in line with my will.
As we looked at last week with Jesus' prayer, let your will be done in my life. Align your will with my will and allow me to do the things that you would want me to do. This is the opposite of a stiff-necked person.
This is someone who is saying God, my heart is so moldable that if you tell me to go left, I'm immediately going to go left.
I tell my kids often as we try to parent them to the best of our ability and I fail every single day and I understand that. They know that.
I think they take advantage of my failures as a parent at times and if you're a parent you understand this but there'll be times where I'll tell my kids to do something and they'll say yeah, yeah, I'll get to that dad.
And after like the 17th time of me telling them to do it and me having to bring in the wrath of pain and judgment upon them,
I tell them delayed disobedience is still disobedience. And God in our way is same way as telling us I'm wanting you to do some things and yet we can be stubborn in and of ourselves. I'm a redhead.
I'm stubborn. I have my own way. I have my own will. And we have to align our will with God's will. Look at some scenarios in scripture where intersection intercessory prayer involves people praying for stubborn people. Right?
Jesus gives an illustration of the prodigal child. The prodigal child who goes away does his own thing.
The Bible says that the father is standing at the house every morning and he's praying for his child. Lord, work on my son. Lord, allow him to come home.
Work on his heart. And it says that as he got up and went to the door as he did every other day, he looks out and from the distance he sees his son coming.
This is an image of someone who was stubborn and someone else is stepping in the place and praying for them.
We can look at people who have hardened hearts, spouses that have turned away from the Lord, spouses that are doing the wrong thing, family members who are not doing the right thing that they should be doing, rebellious friends in our life, and we get the opportunity to pray for them.
And sometimes you are going to pray for people who are most of the people who are changing the least.
And I've seen this in my life where you say, God, I want you to work in this person's heart, and the more you pray, it seems like the more they run away from God, the more they run away from what God has for them. And God just continues to tell us,
stand in the gap.
Moses as Intercessor
And this is where we get to the point of the prophet's response. In verses 11-13, we begin to see Moses, the Bible says he sought the favor of the Lord.
This is the heartbeat of the passage, this is the majority of the passage where God begins to pour out judgment, Moses steps up, and I want you to notice a couple of things before we get into this. Moses does not excuse the people of their sin.
Moses does not say, God, we're all human, we're going to make mistakes, you know we're going to make mistakes, God. He doesn't defend their sin, he doesn't excuse the people, and he doesn't ignore God's holiness. He steps in, he intercedes and he says,
God, I'm going to stand in the gap of these people. If you're going to do something to them, you're going to do something to me.
And I'm going to step up and I'm going to stand in the gap and I'm going to pray for these people. And he gives three main things in the way he prays. The first is he prays passionately for the people. The Bible says, as I read, Moses sought the favor of the Lord.
This phraseology of seeking the favor of the Lord is the idea of pleading or going to the Lord where God was in the garden, where Jesus was in the garden and he prayed with such fervency that sweat drops
of blood began to come out of our Lord and Savior's face. This is the same ideology that comes with us.
This was not a mechanical prayer where we get up and we say, our Father who art in heaven, hallowed by thy name. It's not a prayer that our kids pray sometimes when they begin to learn prayer, but this is a prayer that is so desperate.
This is a prayer that is so earth shattering for your life that you physically can't even stand up anymore.
You've got to lay down and you've got to get off your feet because you are now taking the burden of someone else. You're putting it on your shoulders and you're going before God and you're saying, God, I need this to be done more than anything else in my life.
The best way that I can explain this in any story, that I've ever seen or displayed is Jesus' teaching in one of the people's houses. As Jesus is teaching and the crowds are surrounding this house,
a group of four people come to the man Jesus who is teaching and healing and praying for others. These four people come to the house and they try to get in but they can't get into the front door. They said, let's go to the back door.
They went around to the back door. They couldn't get into the back door.
All of a sudden, they said, maybe we can shove this guy through a window and they get to the window and there's so many people they can't do that and they realize the only way we can get this man to Jesus is by picking up this cot that he's on,
taking him up to the house, to the top of the house and begins ripping off the top of the roof. I want you to think about that. I'm in here preaching right now
and someone climbs up onto the top of the church and begins ripping off the top of the church roof. How would we respond?
Claude Jr. is probably going to get up and get mad. Someone's probably going to pull a gun out and start shooting. What's going on? What's happening right now?
There would be chaos. All of a sudden these men knew that the only person that could help this man was Jesus and he was in this house and we're going to do everything we can to get this man to Jesus. If it means ripping the roof off of this house, we're going to do it.
These four men, they get to the top of the house, they rip the roof off, they lower him down and they are the ones that are intercessing for him. Jesus says it like this.
He says he doesn't look at the man and says your faith has made you whole. He looks at the man and he said because of your friend's belief, you have been made whole. These men were interceding for him.
This is intercessory prayer where people are so broken, they're so burdened that they don't pray for themselves but they're praying for others and they're bringing other people's burdens to the Lord.
When is the last time that our burdens for other people were so much that that's how we said we've got to go to God? God.
I've got to rip the roof off of my house in order for God to hear my prayers. I've got to do something crazy in order for God to hear what I'm going to say.
And how consistently do we pray for that? These men, they didn't just come to the house and say, well, there's too many people here. I give up.
They can go to the back of the house and say, well, there's too many people back here. Let's just give up. Let's just go home. This is too much for us to worry about. No, they consistently,
continually did everything they could to get this man to Jesus. And we in the same way must go in this passionate praying before the Lord.
Not only did he pray passionately as Moses prayed, but he prayed personally. Look at what he says here in verse 11. Lord, why does your anger burn against your people? Notice Moses now identifies with the people. Earlier, God was saying, Moses, this is your people.
Moses turns it back and says, no, no, God, these are your people. These are the people that you saved. These are the people that you rescued out of Egypt. These are the people that you chose as a chosen generation. And Moses refused to distance himself.
He said, if they have sinned, I have sinned. As I am the leader, everything rises and falls on leadership. I am going to be the one responsible. The real intercession, when we begin to pray for other people, prays with them, not just for them.
We go to where they're at and we begin to pray with them and insisting that God works in their life.
Moses is acting as this mediator and it is a relationship that is so beautiful as we look at because Moses is, he gets frustrated.
If you look at the life of Moses, it's like every other page you see Moses happy and the next day he's like so mad at the people, he strikes a rock. The next day he's like, people, we're going to go into the promised land. The next day, I can't believe you've done this.
God, what are you doing? Like Moses is the traditional leader of a Southern Baptist church that sees people and they're like, this is the greatest thing ever. Tomorrow I'm ready to quit. Like this is the worst thing ever. Like this is Moses.
I can relate to Moses so many times. Not that I want to quit. Don't hear what I'm not saying. But we begin to see this personal drain that happens and this personal mediation that is a struggle that every pastor deals with as we begin to intercede for the people.
It is not an easy task and Moses shows us that it's not an easy task. And it's easy to criticize struggling people.
It's easy to look at someone and say, yeah, that person's struggling. I really wish the Lord would just get a hold of their life. Moses sees the people struggling and he begins to pray harder for them.
He begins to say, God, don't let this happen to them. God, what are you thinking? What are you doing? How can you even imagine doing this? These are your people. These are my people. These are the people that I love. And I begin to ask myself as I begin to study this passage,
do we have people in our churches that are just spectators that are looking on the outside and saying, God, do whatever you want to do. We have people inside of our churches that are saying, God, I just can't not pray for these people that are in front of me.
The Power of Intercession
I can't not pray for the ones that are around me. I just have to continue to be intercessors instead of just spectators. He prayed personally. He prayed passionately. But then Moses prayed persistently.
He began to go to the Lord in multiple appeals. Verse 11, verse 12, and verse 13. You brought them out of Egypt. You redeemed them. He reminded God of his saving works. He went on to say in verse 12, why should the Egyptians,
why would God's reputation be left up to the Egyptians to say that you just saved them out of Egypt just to take them to a mountain to kill them all? He said, God, why would you allow this to happen? Your glory is among all the nations.
People are going to say things. People are going to hear things. People are going to talk about what happens in this moment.
4,000 years later, people are going to talk about this. Do you want them saying, God, you're the one that brought them out of Egypt just to go and kill them on top of the mountain? And then he begins to remind God of his promises. Remember your servant, Abraham,
Isaac, and Israel, and Jacob, and he prayed scripture back to God. We begin to truly pray,
truly get a hold of God's face. It begins to not just be words, but it begins to be scripture.
It begins to be rooted in God's character. As we looked at Jesus' prayer last week, it was God's glory worked in their lives. It was the things that were done in and through them. Before there were ever even needs that were brought to the Lord, it were these characters of who God is.
Effectual intercessory, as one person said this last week as I was studying it, effective intercessory is not trying to manipulate God.
It's trying to get our hearts to be molded to what God has for us. And we have to ask ourselves, am I aligning my request to what God has already revealed in scripture?
George Mueller, I quote him often. There's a statement that I heard this week that was so profound. It goes like this,
God's work done God's way will always be produced the way God wants it to be done.
God's work done God's way will always be produced the way God wants it to be done. And he'll provide those things if we're doing the work of God. But George Mueller prayed for several of his closest friends for salvation.
And then through his life as he raised and he went through different orphanages and he worked in many different areas, he prayed for them for many, many decades. Some of his friends came to Christ after 40 and 50 years of praying.
But that was one of his friends that was documented that did not come to know Christ until after George Mueller had died. George Mueller prayed for him for 40 and 50 years for him to come to know Christ. And yet George Mueller in his lifetime never saw that prayer answered.
Intercessory prayer is often so passionate and so persistent that it can outlive the person that's praying for it. People in this room can remember their parents and their family praying for certain things.
And those family members are now dead and gone and now their prayer requests that they prayed for 50 and 60 years ago have been answered now. And we get to be the benefit sharers of those prayers that were prayed before we ever came along.
And we must be in that same way praying so persistently that God decides and continues to work through our prayers even after we're gone.
Last thing we'll look at very quickly this morning is the power of intercessory. The power of intercession. The Bible says in verse 14 there's this phrase
that I could spend the next 45 minutes talking on. I'm not going to. I only spend the next 35 minutes talking on it. I'm going to give you a break. I'm just joking.
We'll spend just a couple of moments. It's one of the phrases in scripture that we see that people have debated on in and through to this day. The scripture says in verse 14 look at with me the scripture. It says this. So God relented
So the Lord relented concerning the disaster that he would bring on his people.
Many people will say Pastor James thought God doesn't change. Bible says here he relented. He changed his mind is what some people say. Now I'm going to give you a big theological word.
You can look it up yourself. It's called this word anthropomorphic language. Okay. If you want to know how to spell it ask someone else or chat GPT it or Google it. Anthropomorphic language just simply means this. It was language that was used in human terminology so that we could understand what's going on.
So oftentimes in scripture it will say God's hands. Does God have hands?
We're made in the image of God. There's a lot of likenesses that we can begin to pull from.
So what this is saying it's using human terms for us to be able to understand what this means. This verse does not mean that God changes morally or that God is unstable and he thinks one way and he gets angry and he gets mad. This is not what it's saying here.
What this is saying is this. God gave a conditional
treatment of judgment. He said I am going to destroy these people because of what they've done. And now it was this intercessory that comes upon Moses that brings mercy to the people because God values prayer.
God gave this statement and if Moses I fully believe if Moses would not have interceded for the people God would have went through with this judgment. But Moses stood in the gap.
He said I'm going to understand the reality of prayer. I'm going to understand the mercy of God and I'm going to come back and I'm going to say God this isn't what you want to do. God I want you to save your people. Remember your promises.
Remember what you've done. It is an idea that God values our prayer. This happens often times in scripture where
Abraham went to God was going to destroy Sodom. We looked at this last week in Sunday school or two weeks ago.
Abraham goes before God and he says if there's 50 righteous and Abraham says what about 40? What about 30? What about 20? And he begins to negotiate with God down to 10. Did God change his mind? He allowed his people to be able to work in this area.
And God allows our prayers to be coming up to him and it's dictated upon our prayers coming to him because God cares about our prayers to accomplish his purposes to get our heart in line with his ideology.
Now we're going to walk through this very quickly. The first thing is this. God honors intercession. God works through prayers of people throughout scripture.
Abraham prayed for Sodom. I just mentioned that. Samuel prayed for Israel. Elijah prayed for rain. Haven't we needed rain? And we've been praying for rain for like 65 days. We haven't had rain. I think is what it was.
It was a really long time. My grass is finally starting to look green. We pray for rain. God brings rain.
Elijah didn't rain for like three, four years. And all of a sudden Elijah prayed for rain and it begins to rain. And my date's off a little bit of that. Paul prayed for his churches and Jesus as we looked at last week prayed for his disciples. If prayer is important,
if prayer is not important, why would Jesus pray for his disciples? Why would Jesus in his last prayer pray for us the church 2,000 years later?
Jesus is modeling for us that God works through our prayers and prayers are not meaningless. It's not just a religious activity. James says it like this, the effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man avails much.
And so God honors prayer. God honors intercession and God has chosen to work in and through our lives through prayer.
prayer. Are we that committed to pray for people to go before God on our behalf to say, God, would you work in this situation? God, will you work in my life or my family's life through intercession? Number two, God responds with mercy. Israel deserves judgment.
Every single person in this room deserves judgment. We have all sinned. The Bible says in Romans, we have all sinned and fallen short of God's glory. We have all done wrong. And yet, God through his mercy was extended through us and to us so that we can extend mercy to other people.
The person that's the addicted, the person that's the bitter, the one that's wandering from the Lord, the one that's lost, the one that's discouraged, all needs the mercy of God. And we get to pray for the mercy of God to work in and through their lives.
What is the reason that some people are standing?
What, I'm sorry, what if the reason that some people are still standing today is because someone is continuing to pray for them?
What if the reason that someone is still serving the Lord is because there's a group of people that are praying for that person to still serve the Lord?
What if the reason that God's mercy is still shown upon this nation as we go into Memorial Day, what if the reason that God's mercy is still shown in this nation is because there's a group of people who are still praying for God's mercy on this nation?
Are we those people who are standing in the gap and saying, God, show us mercy? We don't deserve it.
We don't, we don't, there's nothing in and through the reason you would give me mercy, but we're pleading that you would give mercy. The people here, the Israelites, they didn't deserve mercy.
Jesus as Our Mediator
They had exchanged God's glory for a calf and God looks at them and says, because of the intercessory of someone else, I'm going to show mercy to you. And then we see here, number three, God gives us a greater mediator. Moses points us to Jesus.
As we look at Moses' life, we see Moses standing in the gap. Moses stood between God and Israel and Jesus came and Christ stands between God and the sinners eternally. Moses was temporary.
He stood there for a moment and then his life came and he died and Israel continued to go through their life. Christ came and he died and he rose again and he became the perfect mediator between you and our sins and God, the righteous judge. He is the righteous intercessor.
The Bible says that he sits at the right hand of the father and he makes intercession for you and for me every single day so that we can go before him.
It's Hebrews 7, 25 says, the one who always lives to intercede. Moses pleaded, Lord, spare them.
Jesus came and said, I'm going to spare my life so that you can have eternal life, so that you can come before the Lord and you can have eternal life through the blood of Jesus. Moses is a picture of what this looks like in our life.
As Terry comes to pray, I want to just give some concluding thoughts. Moses climbed this mountain to meet God.
I often, as I read through the Old Testament, I often imagine what it would have been like to be Moses walking up this mountain, knowing that God is at the top of this mountain, knowing that he is about to intercede and see and talk with God.
God's going to physically talk to him. He's going to give him 10 commandments. What would have been going through his mind?
I'm about to meet the God of the creation, the one who created everything, the one who spoke the world into existence is about to speak physically with me.
And all of a sudden, he gets to the top and God's working and he's intertwining with God and he's hearing what God says and then all of a sudden, God in his anger says, I'm going to destroy all the people. And Moses says, God,
your glory is too much. You can't do that. You must be the one that shows mercy upon them.
And Moses stands there in front of God as a mediator between the two people and says, Lord, bless these people. Lord, help these people. Lord, provide for these people. And oftentimes, this is what happens in our life. We go before God and we say, God, save them.
I've got a brother or a sister or a son or a daughter that needs salvation.
Lord, would you save them? Would you restore them back into your favor? Would you forgive them? Would you help them?
And this morning, as I've been preaching, I'm hoping and praying that the Lord would have laid a person on your heart today. Maybe it's a prodigal.
Maybe it's a son or a daughter or a mom or a dad or a brother or sister. Maybe it's a lost friend that you work with that you know needs the Lord in their life
and that you would be the person that says, God, I want to step into the gap. God, I want to step as Moses did for the people of Israel.
I want to step in between God's judgment and I want to be the person that prays for God's mercy for these people. Maybe it's this morning you've got a marriage that's struggling.
Maybe it's been a child that's ran from the Lord and you just need to pray for them to come back to the faith of Jesus.
Closing Prayer and Encouragement
I'm praying this morning that you would not stop standing in the gap. I'm praying this morning that you wouldn't get weary in doing well, as the Bible says, and that we would continue to pray for them so that someone's future may be changed by someone's prayers in this room today.
As Moses changed the future of the people of Israel, we have this same opportunity to go before God and say, God, work in this situation that he knows. Father, we love you this morning. We thank you for what you've done.
Lord, this series of prayer has radically changed my life and I pray that it would change our lives, it would change the way we see you, the way we interact with you in prayer.
And I pray, God, that you would allow us to be the one standing in the gap as Jesus stood for us, as Moses stood for Israel, that we would have the same testimony that I'm standing in the gap
for someone. Help us to have that person in our mind this morning and pray for them today. In your name we pray. Amen.
Thank you again for taking your time to listen to the sermon audio of Clever and Grove. Please subscribe to get our latest sermons each week. thoughts are continued... Thank you.
Auto-generated transcript · 7,506 words. May contain errors. Select a timestamp to play from that moment.
More from When God's People Pray
View all
Prayer And Spiritual Warfare - Pastor James
When Heaven Seems Silent - Pastor James
When God's People Pray - Praying Through The Storms
When God's People Pray - The Priority Of Prayer
When God's People Pray - A Mothers Prayer
Listen to this sermon