 This is going to be an interesting, outside-the-box, make-you-think concept, which are bad enough when you've got an hour, never mind, 30 minutes. So we'll see how we go. You all okay? I'm going to read you from Exodus 32 verses 1 to 4, NIV version, and it'll come up on screen if you want to read and follow me with the screen reading. When the people saw that Moses was so long coming down from the mountain they gathered around Aaron and said, Come, make us gods who will go before us. As for this fellow Moses who brought us out of Egypt, we don't know what has happened to him. Aaron answered them, Take off the gold earrings that your wives, sons, and daughters are wearing and bring them to me. So all the people took off their earrings and brought them to Aaron. He took what they gave him and made it into an idol, cast in the shape of a calf, fashioning it with a tool. Not that phrase, we'll come back to it. Then they said, These are your gods of Israel who brought you out of Egypt. The title of this idea, this concept is going to be called the sin of certainty. The sin of certainty. Because I think that is what's going on here when we get behind the scenes of what is a well-known narrative for us all. I'm sure we've all read this, heard of this, been spoken to about this over the years. I certainly have, but saw something different and new here a couple of months ago that I wanted to figure out to be able to talk to people about around the world because we all know what happened next or maybe what happened next is when Moses and Joshua came back from being of the mountain judgment ensued and thousands of Israelites lost their lives because of this golden calf episode. But the reason God was so ticked off with them I think was below the surface and below the radar of where our attention normally is when we surface read these stories. What was happening for these Israelites if you can understand their plight for a moment and be in their shoes, all their certainty had abandoned them. They had no certainty of slavery. That may sound a strange thing to say to you but oppression and containment and slavery and pain and suffering becomes a comfort if that's the main thing you've only had in your life. This is why people that are struck in an addiction struggle to leave it because they prefer the addiction they know than the freedom they don't know. Freedom is terrifying to people who have never known freedom. And so the Israelites don't have the certainty of the routine and the regime and the non-responsibility taking in life that they had as slaves. They were told what to do. They had a purpose. It wasn't one they chose but at least had a purpose to build the infrastructure of Egypt and build the pyramids for the Pharaohs and for 430 years they had been in slavery. When they got it to the wilderness as you know later on part of their grumbling was we were better off back in Egypt and we rather have the variety of diet of onion, leeks and garlics than this manna every day. It seems a weird thing doesn't it that they would think that the good old days were good when the good old days were so bad. And the reason people thought that way and the reason all of us by the way do the same thing in case we're too harsh with them is that we do. We find a sense of certainty and a sense of orientation and comfort even in seasons of our life that we full well know I'm not living my best life. This is not great. This is not working. This relationship is stuck. I hate my job. My health isn't good. My attitudes are not good. But we stay in those things long term because somehow it becomes familiar to us. They even got stuck in Egypt and I don't know if I spoke to you about this before it's a two and a half years or so since I was here so forgive me if this is a repeat of what you've heard me say but for the purposes of letting you understand how entrenched they were in Egypt and how adrift they were since they left Egypt is that when Moses and Aaron rocked up and said to Pharaoh let my people go that was never going to be the problem the problem was never going to be would Pharaoh let them go Pharaoh wanted to say go on day one but God made him say no the Bible says God hardened his heart what means is God made him respond and react in a way contrary to what a smart leader would do and Pharaoh was no idiot he was a smart leader in charge of the most powerful nation in the world three plagues in maximum wherever this power is that Moses has it's going to destroy our economy so Pharaoh wanted to say get out of here but he couldn't because God made him say no because God needed him to keep saying no for the theater of the plagues to play themselves out none of the plagues were for God's benefit or for Moses benefit if for the people's benefit because they had formed a Stockholm syndrome attachment to Pharaoh that's what they'd done so Pharaoh letting them go was never going to have a problem them letting Pharaoh go was going to be the problem and when Moses and Erdogan rocked up to Pharaoh and said let them go Pharaoh said I'm going to teach you all a lesson I'm going to make it harder for you and then created a bricks without straw situation that made bad trouble on top of bad trouble and it says they realized they were in trouble when Pharaoh announced that if you need more trouble on top of the trouble you're in to realize you are in trouble it means you've made friends with the trouble you're in which is what they've done they've settled into a comfortable relationship with Pharaoh better the Pharaoh you know than the Moses you don't know seriously is what's going on there so they've lost all that certainty they've lost the certainty of the miracles that had finished way back including the final curtain call of the Red Sea opening and Pharaoh's army had been drowned in the Red Sea all of that certainty had gone the cloud by day and the fire by night but all of the supernatural manifestations of God is with them were kind of over in terms of the miracles the plagues the Red Sea so that certainty has kind of gone and finally what's happened to Moses Moses had been gone for six weeks but of course they didn't know it was six weeks because as you all know people in the Bible did not know they were in the Bible and they didn't think it was six weeks but they didn't know that week five it could have been gone for a year they had no idea what the outcome of Moses' absence would be like many of you have no idea what the outcome of something you're going through will be and you look back on it later and think wow it lasted a month but at the time I thought it would last six months or a year that's their situation so they don't have the certainty of Moses and Moses was no shrinking violet of a leader for Moses to be missing it was huge Moses was the deliverer he was the champion of their freedom he was the one that confronted the power of Pharaoh and Egypt he was the one that at the raising and lowering of his staff miracles happened so to not have that kind of leader was not incidental to their security so all of this uncertainty is in their lives and so they turned to Aaron who was the only remaining leader that was close in Moses' team and begged him to do something about this disorientation this uncertainty and they begged him to to create something to build something and so they gave their gold and silver and it got melted down and they made this idol that came out of the fire that came out of the smelting process and they danced around the idol and began to worship the idol because people like the idea and we do of having a God that we can point to and locate and identify with and align with and center our lives around and all of that uncertainty was what they were riddled with there was none of that left in their lives and so I understand where this desire to have some fixed kind of unmoving target that we can call God when everything was moving I understand where it came from in their humanity it's not a church problem humans in every generation battle with the need for certainty and if they don't have certainty they find ways to substitute it with other things it's a human issue is going on here just in the form of the Israelites and their journey and the creating of this golden idol involved the using of tools that's why I said note that phrase which God specifically forbade them to do 20 and verse 23 God said do not make any gods and if you build an altar of stones don't build with dressed stones do not use a tool this mattered so much because building an altar was permissible you could dig a stone out the ground or pick a stone up from a wall and build into a pile of stones like Jacob did and like Abraham did and others and you could build an altar to mark a significant encounter with God that you had there building an altar was permissible but what was not permissible was to take a hammer and chisel if you like and shape that stone and take off the corners and take off the rough edges and make it smooth and straight God said don't use a tool because the moment you use a tool you are deciding what God looks like you are deciding what kind of altar would God approve of you are deciding what is God worthy of I'm not going to just use rough ugly stones to worship God and to mark this place of encounter I'm going to do something that I think the kind of God that I think he is would want so God said do not use a tool because when you use a tool it becomes about the altar instead of about the encounter it becomes about you and your idea of me rather than about me my idea of you it becomes about the moment it becomes about marking with something that is your human version of commemorating something that God moved on from a long time ago and we humans get stuck in creating things that we think are what God would want us to do and this is where denominations came from denominations are just dressed stones when you think about them in that metaphor no denominations started in the way that they became Methodism and Baptists and Anglicans and Pentecostals and Charismatics and Presbyterians and all the rest of it all of them began with someone having an encounter with God and it was rough and raw and undressed and eventually at some point passed that encounter and someone decided this needs structure it needs systems it needs policies it needs organizing and that was the equivalent of men and women beginning to use a tool of their mindset about God to shape what was a dressed stone of a beginning with God that was rough and that was undefinable and that was messy and religion hates messy so they began to structure it into this systemized ordered form of relating to God and it became a religion it became a denomination and I am all for and this isn't a message about being against being organized and structured and having systems and things that work of course we humans need that that's not the problem here the problem is that they were crossing a line from worshiping and loving God in this messiness of the wilderness years and they decided we need to tidy all this up we want a golden calf and the golden calf represents their craving for certainty that's why I'm calling this the sin of certainty and this isn't about you not being certain that you are saved or that God loves you or that you are going to spend eternity with God in heaven if things not being valid to be certain of I don't mean that what I mean is that the way you think about God and telling yourself that that is the right God our thinking now metaphorically becomes the primary tool with which we shape God into our own mental emotional golden calves and we say this is how we think God would be worshipped this is what we think God would call faith this is what we think God would call belief this is what we think God would call love this is what we think God would call grace and what happens over time is that we get confused between God and our thinking about God and we form a relationship with our thinking about God and our thinking about God becomes God this is proved when God uses someone that you told him he couldn't use when God does something that's outside of your dressed stones when God does something uses someone appears in a form appears in a part of the world behaves in a way, says something does something when God does something outside of your box outside of your dressed stone idea of what it should look like outside of your golden calf mental image of him then you have a crisis of faith because you think your faith is dependent on right thinking and it's not faith is not about correct thinking about God correct thinking about God is a tool with which we use to bang everybody else into shape like we think about God and so what happens I think and why it's a sin of certainty is we so want our thinking about God to be okay and to know it's right that we form groups and the groups identity is not about Jesus and about God though that seems to be our common denominator but when you strip it all down this was the problem for our church by the way almost 20 years in is that I realized when I started bringing people to our church that were different to us when I started bringing in homeless people and prostitutes and transvestites and homosexuals and all kinds of people that our church loved in the lyrics of our songs we were including them all in our preaching until I started busing these people in when I started busing these people in and I started putting the proverbial cut amongst the religious pigeons we didn't know we had a problem until that day and you wouldn't believe the letters I got from good people who loved God who had known for 20 years on all hell broke loose in our church simply because I was bringing people in to our main stream Sunday morning services nobody would have minded if we would have reached them on Tuesday night downtown and we didn't have to sit next to them and I'm all for that by the way that's not a wrong thing to do I believe we should be serving and helping everybody in our community especially the people that are hurting and poor and suffering I get all that and you guys do lots of that I know but I was bringing them into main stream Sunday morning and of course when you bring in these people and I was busing in 500 a week I know it was I think 20 of them would have been enough to mess it up I think a couple of them would have been enough 500 and they're all around the place dropping the F bomb I don't mean faith these guys were just being themselves because we say don't we it's trendy now around the world come as you are that's some of the modern branding of the church come as you are no no no no what we mean is come as we are because if you come as we are we're going to use a tool on you we're going to start shaping you into what we think God will want you to look like and that's what they try to do with Jesus and that's what they were angry with him because he wouldn't do it with other people when the prostitutes at the party and the posh shware and they muttering if he knew who she was this is a bad idea this is going to damage his reputation Jesus set it up in the first place and he spent his life being excluded he spent his life being persecuted and suffered because of who he included you will suffer this church will suffer your friendships will suffer the moment you include someone that is excluded by your group you will suffer by including that person it's not just that person suffers by if looks could kill they'd be dead they suffer to come into a company where they feel everybody's trying to shape them but you will suffer by being the one that reached out to them and this was Jesus's life every day we think of Jesus as suffering and think we mean you know the passion week Jesus suffered every single day when he refused to tidy up people's lives when he walked away and said nothing when all the religious people said you should now be courting bible at these people you should be telling them their life is wrong you should be correcting them you should be rebuking them and because he walked away and didn't tidy things up he didn't use a tool of his correct thinking about God to impose it on other humans and say if you want to be accepted by God you've got to do this, this, this, this, this this tidy this up do that think this way believe this talk that way this is how you worship this is how you pray this is how you read your bible when I became a Christian from day one I was told how to do everything and most of those everything didn't suit me at all because I wasn't I wasn't that way wired I was told get up in the morning and have a quiet time with the Lord get the victory for the day none of that by the way is biblical it's not, it's a tool we've told people that's what God wants God couldn't care less what time it is you talk to him and if you get in the victory in the morning I didn't know you lost it by going to sleep in which case we should all we should all stay awake because in your sleep you are leaking victory in your sleep you are leaking dominion hello