 Well, Radiant Church, we so love you and so miss you. I've run into a couple of you at different places on walks and those kinds of things. And I'm so, so overjoyed to hear of God's staying power, His keeping power in all of our lives, the testimonies of God's faithfulness that we're hearing by letters and emails. And so many of you have dropped in the mail, little thank you cards to me personally, or to Jane and I. And we're just so grateful for that. And your encouragement has meant all the world. And I know a lot of us are in the midst of seasons where we're being stretched and we're growing in our faith. Some of the introverts are like, hey, this is the way life is supposed to be. And those of you who are extroverts and you love getting together and you love going to the mall, you love going to movies, you love coming to church. This has been a challenging time for you. And I'm grateful for the grace of God that meets us where we're at. And we're praying for each and every one of you. We miss you, we cannot wait to see you. Obviously we wanna do it in God's timing. We wanna do it safely and appropriately. And many of you have asked, hey, what is the plan moving forward? Well, I really believe that here in Michigan, our stay home order goes through, I think it's the 15th of May. In the next couple of weeks, we're gonna know a lot more about how we are being recommended to begin and when to begin to have public gatherings in our buildings. I wanna say that we are not in a hurry from the standpoint of trying to make it happen too quickly. We will let you know and be rolling out plans after we have prayerfully and professionally considered and curated those plans. We will make sure that you know. But as of right now, we are continuing to just utilize this incredible gift of technology to gather together for even our groups that are meeting together, our daily prayer meetings that have been incredible. And we're gonna do that until further notice. So stay tuned. But I know this. I know that God is not quarantined. His word is powerful. His spirit is moving mightily. People are getting saved. There is deliverance that is happening. Families are being reunited. Faith is growing. Prayers are being offered. And that's all kingdom stuff. And so as your pastor, I just want you to know, I'm encouraged. I am not at all discouraged. I look forward to the time where we can do services together, but we're never gonna be the same again. It's going to be better than it's ever been before because that's just how God works. And so we wanted to let you know that also wanted to invite you to join us on this coming Thursday, which is the National Day of Prayer. If you have not been a part of our prayer meetings, Monday through Friday at 8 a.m., we wanna encourage you to join us, but especially on that day, as we as a nation are praying. If there's ever been a National Day of Prayer that we all need to join together, this is it. So not only you, but would you help share the link to our different platforms and the 8 a.m. Prayer Service on Thursday at 8 a.m., as we pray for our nation. Okay, here we go. I wanna invite you today to turn with me in your Bibles to the book of Exodus chapter 16. Exodus chapter 16. This is part of our Out of Egypt series, kind of a sub-series underneath it called Lessons from the Wilderness. Lessons from the Wilderness. And over the last few weeks, we've been digging deep into how God prepared the children of Israel to be the people of God by means of the wilderness. And as you've heard me say, I think we can all relate in a lot of different ways to the lessons that were learned in the wilderness because in many ways you and I, and really the whole world, are experiencing a global journey through a wilderness. It's a pandemic, I understand that. It's an economic recession in many ways. I understand that, but there's also a spiritual component to what is happening, even on a global level and global scale. I believe in some ways, God is challenging the church to actually believe him in a greater dimension than we've ever believed God and be dependent on him in a way that for a lot of us, we haven't needed to be for a long time. And from a worldly standpoint, from those who are outside of the community of faith, I believe God is showing himself faithful, showing himself strong through the way that he relates to his people. I don't think that we're fully going to understand all the lessons that we're learning in this hour until actually we come out of this hour looking back. Do you know that looking in the rear view mirror of your life is always with 2020 vision. It always makes sense afterwards. But when you're in it, sometimes it's moving quickly. It's a blur, but we have to be faithful even in the midst of it. And there's so many lessons that God taught the children of Israel during their 40 years in the wilderness. And today I wanna talk to you about one of these lessons, one of these signposts. And so the title of this message this weekend is Bread from Heaven. Bread from Heaven, and look with me here at verse number one of Exodus 16. It says, And they set out from Elam and all the congregation of the people of Israel came to the wilderness of sin, which is between Elam and Sinai on the 15th day of the second month after they had departed from the land of Egypt. And the whole congregation of the people of Israel grumbled against Moses and Aaron in the wilderness. And the people of Israel said to them, Would that we have died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by meat pots and ate bread to the foal, for you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger. Then the Lord said to Moses, Behold, I am about to rain bread from heaven for you and the people shall go out and gather a day's portion every day that I may test them whether they will walk in my law or not. Jump over to verse number 11. And it says in the Lord said to Moses, I have heard the grumbling of the people of Israel. Say to them at twilight, you shall eat meat and in the morning you shall be filled with bread. And then you will know that I am the Lord your God. And the evening quail came up and covered the camp and in the morning dew lay around the camp. And when the dew had gone up, there was on the face of the wilderness a fine flake-like thing fine as frost on the ground. And when the people of Israel saw it, they said to one another, what is this? For they did not know what it was. And Moses said to them, it is the bread that the Lord has given you to eat. Really the whole chapter deals with how God supernaturally satisfied the hunger of the people of Israel while they were in the wilderness. And just like all of the other mile markers and pit stops that God takes Israel through in their 40 year journey of the wilderness, he has a lesson behind each and every one of them. The wilderness actually served or became a training ground. It became a training ground to actually develop Israel into the people that could actually possess the Promised Land. Because as they were, as they came out of Egypt, they were not ready at all to be able to go into the Promised Land, to defeat the inhabitants and to actually take possession of the promises. It wasn't that God's promises were not trustworthy and it wasn't because God's intentions were not to do so. It was that on the inside of them, there were belief issues, trust issues, mentalities and paradigms that so shaped them and became their construct out of which they lived their lives that they did not actually have the ability to possess the promises. And I believe that there's so many things that we can learn from Israel's story in the wilderness, in particular, how God dealt with them as far as feeding them and providing for them in the midst of an environment where there was not resources in the natural. It required a supernatural provision from God. And God did this for multiple different reasons. Number one, it was a testing ground because he was wanting to see how they would respond. How would they respond to the need and how would they respond to his voice that commanded them to do certain things? And so it was a testing ground. It was also a simulator. It was, if you've ever seen a flight simulator, you get into it and locally there's the air zoo that has a flight simulator and you can get into it and it simulates flying so that you can actually see what it's really like and your brain really believes and buys into the fact that you're flying. It can actually even give you motion sickness and you get sweaty palms. When deep in the recesses of your brain, you know that you're not really flying, but yet there's another part of your brain that switches on that believes that you are. And so it has the simulator effect. And in the same way these different mile markers where God provided for them supernaturally are a simulator for them to see not only in this moment but also in the future what God had promised that he would do for them. Where they could see it over and over and over again. And it was also a map. These tests and these locations that God brought them to, these pit stops each had a purpose behind them and they served as points on a map but not a geographical map. I'm not talking about following a map like you would or a GPS where the quickest point between point A and point B is a straight line. No, God didn't take them in a straight line. He didn't take them in an easy way because he wasn't following a physical map. God was following a heart map. And he was taking them on a journey and giving them a tour of their own heart. Where he was bringing them to different places to reveal different deficiencies in their faith and how they related and believed God. I said it a couple of weeks ago. God easily got Israel out of Egypt. Listen, it wasn't difficult for God to overthrow Pharaoh. It wasn't an even match at all. Nothing is too difficult for God but he did it in a certain way to reveal things about himself. He easily got Israel out of Egypt. God's biggest challenge was getting Egypt out of Israel. Getting Egyptian mines, slave mentalities out of the heart of people who from the foundations of the world were actually created to be those that reign and rule with God. They weren't created to be slaves but yet they had had so much training and discipleship, if you will, and development to where the constructs and the paradigms of their heart that shaped their decisions and what they believed was possible. Even what they thought about God and God's intervention into human affairs was shaped more by the idolatry of Egypt and by the slavery experiences that had been compounded for multiple generations. 430 years, think about that. We look at poverty even in our country and so much of it is because it is generational and it is systemic. It's from generation to generation to generation. So much what we believe about ourselves is passed down from generation to generation to generation. If a generation is 40 years in the Bible, they had 11 generations of slave mentalities that now that they've been brought out of Egypt and they're in the wilderness, God says, there's no way in the world I can take you into the promised land. If I bring you into the land of Canaan that flows with milk and honey, there's also giants. And in order for you to inherit the promises, you're going to have to confront some giants. And God says, I'll actually defeat them for you but you're going to have to believe with me. And the belief part was the biggest obstacle because our belief systems are attached to the constructs and the deep seated paradigms of our heart. That's why the Bible talks so much about faith. It talks about believing and walking by faith and not by sight. Why it's because just like the children of Israel we have a tendency to not walk by faith but we've been so accustomed and so trained at living in this world and believing the things that we see with our naked and natural eyes that when it comes to us believing God and his promises and his power and his character we get hung up on that. Have you ever, by the way, have you ever thought about this? Like think about people that have experienced abuse and you hear these stories about somebody who's been in an abusive relationship, a wife who's been in an abusive relationship and you watch it objectively from the outside and what do we say? We say, why do they stay? Why do they keep going back? It's like he's beating you, he's hurting you, he's not kind to you. He says he's never gonna do it again and then he does it and you're putting your life, you're putting your family in danger. As a pastor, I've confronted this many, many times and it's so frustrating because objectively from the outside looking in, you just think to yourself, this doesn't make any sense but what we don't realize is that the person who's in that situation has a different belief system that is actually the steering wheel and the control center, the motherboard, so to speak, by which all of the belief systems about themselves, about the person that they're with and about what they can expect or what they deserve is actually the control center of their lives. Do you know the same is true for slaves? You can set a slave free but when you give them all the opportunities out before them and say, do anything that you want, they'll actually go back to the familiar. That's what Israel wanted to do. We want to go back to Egypt. We're out here. We just saw your mighty deliverance, God, but you brought us out here to starve. We're all hungry. We're all hungry. I wish you had just left us in Egypt. They wanted to go back and I don't know about you but sometimes we can read stories like this in Xs and think to ourselves, what in the world was wrong with them but you know, we do the very same thing. We do the very same thing. God has brought such a magnificent salvation. What price Jesus paid on the cross, everything else pales in comparison to. The victory of the resurrection. Our own testimony about how we were saved, where we were saved, the circumstances of how God pursued us and this individual who shared their faith with us at just the right moment and I came to church where I prayed a prayer and how God has shown up in my life time and time and time again and then we find ourself in a wilderness, in a test. And a lot of times we think to ourselves, God, did you bring me here to destroy me? Is this where you walk away? Are you done with me? Or we get into a battle where we're praying and we're believing God for something or to do something and our old mindset pops up that says, you know, back before I was in Christ, back before I was a Christian, man, I used to have everything. The good old days, oh yeah, the good old days, the good old days where you were a slave, where the devil was destroying your life, you were spiritually dead, you were distanced from God, you had the things of this world but they were like sand in between your finger. The harder you grabbed them, the more they seeped out until you had nothing left but our old mindsets erupt inside of us and we do it because of familiarity, we do it because of our belief system about God and us and we do it because of our fears. The miracle of the manna of the bread from heaven is actually a lesson that Israel had to learn early on in their wilderness journey because it was going to be essential and necessary for them every single day from this point on to be led by God from where he saved them to where he wanted to take them. If they were in the wilderness for 40 years and there's 365 days in a year, that means they were going to daily have to obey God 14,600 times, wake up every single day, go outside and depend on God to provide food for them for that day. 14,600 times. Do you know they tell us that it takes 21 days to develop a habit? Some would say it takes 40 days to develop a habit but do you know that it can take up to two or three years to develop a belief? Those are drastically different scenarios. A habit can be developed quickly and it can be undone quickly but a belief system can take years. For them it took years to get doubt, slave mentalities, fears, familiarity, out of them and a generation under Joshua to rise up that had faith on the inside of them. The miracle of the manna was essential because what God was saying to them was every single day I'm gonna provide for you. You're hungry, I hear you. You're hungry, I hear you. I'm going to provide for you. And so what God did was he said when you wake up in the morning, go outside. And you're gonna find something, if you read the whole chapter it says it was like coriander seed. And it was like dew on the ground and the Lord said I want you to gather it up. I want you to gather it up and you can make it into bread but only gather what you need for today. And so you went out and you gathered it, the children of Israel didn't know what to call it so they called it what is this? Which in Hebrew is man who or manna. That's where manna comes from. They called it manna because it would be like this. What is this stuff? We don't know what it is but it tastes good. The Bible says it tastes like honey. It was a foretaste of how God was gonna provide for them in Cana which was described as the land that flows with milk and honey. And so every day they would go out and they didn't know what it was but they just gathered it up and they made bread with it and they would eat it and it would satisfy them. God said don't gather up more than you need because if you try and store it up the next day it will actually turn green and be full of worms and it will be nasty. He said no just gather enough for today so they would go out and they would gather it up and God fed them in the wilderness with bread from heaven for 40 years. Do you know the Bible says in the book of Joshua that when they went into the Promised Land under Joshua and they ate of the produce of the Promised Land it says it was only on that day that the manna ceased. God fed them until he gave them the fulfillment of his promise he provided for them but they had to learn this lesson early on because you see bread is a significant staple of life. Every culture you ask them what is the basis of your diet almost all cultures start with bread. It's basic, it's a staple. It's typically pretty easy to make somehow some way and so we have bread. I don't know about you but I love bread and Jane and I have tried to do diets where you don't eat bread and I can do it for a little while but then I start getting cravings. Man, I love bread. When we used to go to Karabas back in the glory days where they would wrap it in that warm cloth and they would put it in a basket on your table freshly baked bread and you'd take it and dip it in the olive oil with the garlic and the Parmesan cheese and I just love that and then they came out with these diets low carb diet and I know you lose weight but can I just tell you it's almost better to be fat for Jesus than to be miserable without bread because we just love bread and I can go all day without bread and then about eight o'clock at night I start thinking to myself, man, I want some sort of bread. I want bread and butter. I want bagel or I want chips or I want some type of bread because it's just an essential. Here's Israel out in the wilderness and we're hungry, God. We remember the good old days when we sat in Egypt next to pots full of meat and we ate bread and we got all fat and sassy just eating carbs and breads. They were looking back on it. They forgot about their slavery. They forgot about their taskmasters. They forgot about how miserable that they were. All they remembered was that their needs were satisfied physically and now God is going to show them the lesson of the manna that I'm gonna take care of you. You're gonna need to trust me every single day. You're gonna have to obey my voice every single day. You're going to have to trust me on the daily. It's not just gonna be automatic. You're not gonna set it up as a subscription. You can't gather more than what you need so that you have some level of independence. You're going to have to trust me on a daily basis. Do you know that bread in the Bible speaks of two things primarily. Number one, bread is often used to typify God's word and it's also used to typify or symbolize God's presence. In the tabernacle, when they would eventually build that on the table, they had a loaf of freshly baked bread every single day, one for each tribe, 12 tribes, 12 loaves of bread. It was called the bread of his presence. And also the bread, as we'll see here in a moment, was typified of the word of God. Not just the written word of God, but the proceeding, the spoken word of God. And what God was teaching them was, look, I'm gonna take care of your physical needs, but I want you to also know that you're gonna need my presence and you're going to need to be able to hear my voice on a daily basis. You need me daily. I'm gonna lead you and guide you through the wilderness, but you're not gonna do it on your own. You're not gonna find it on your own. It's going to be a supernatural deposit that I give to you of my presence and of my word. See, the man of test is this. Will you listen to the voice of God over all of the other voices? Verse number four says, God actually shows his intentions with this test. He says that I might test them, whether they will walk in my law or not. This was key because in order for him to get them into the promised land, they were gonna have to walk by faith and not by sight. Well, well, how does faith come? Faith comes by hearing and hearing by the word of God. The whole issue in the wilderness was centered around God bringing them to a place where they would trust his word over all of the other voices that were speaking to them. Do you know that God's test for you and I today is that same test? Will you trust me over all the other voices that are speaking to you? Will you trust my word says the Lord? Will you trust my voice? Will you trust my presence over the other voices? Will you trust my word? Will you trust my word over the voice of your hunger? Or what does hunger represent? Our appetites and our desires? The things that we want, the way that we want them, the appetites, the desires that talk to us are even talking to us right now, even in this hour, even in the time that we're in. It's like, but I've got these dreams or I've got these needs or I've got these desires. I want things to go this way. What is that? It's hunger. What did Jesus say? Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be filled. Other kinds of hunger come and go, but hunger is a voice and it speaks into us and it's not just a physical voice. Hunger and appetites are connected to every part of our lives. It's connected to our future. It's connected to the things that we have, the things that we want. It's connected to what we've had in the past. It's connected to appetites. Will we listen and obey God's voice over the voice of our hunger? How about this one? Will we obey God's voice over the voice of fears? For the children of Israel, the loudest voice for them that squelched their faith from growing was the voice of their fears. What is fear? Well, let me give you a working definition of fear. Fear is dread that comes as a result of us believing in a future without God. It's a belief system about our future that is absent of God that creates dread in our heart. And it comes from a lot of different sources, either A, because maybe God has neglected us or maybe God has rejected us or maybe God doesn't exist or maybe I'm all on my own because everybody else has rejected me or exploited me or abused me. So therefore I have to take matters into my own hands. If something good's gonna happen in my future, it's gonna be up to me. But the idea that we would go into it and the option of failure or of lack of purpose creates and stirs up fear on the inside of us. And fear is a loud screaming siren in the ear of our soul. Will we listen to the voice of God over the voice of our fear? How about this fear or how about this other voice? Our past, the voice of our past, be it the pleasures of our past or be it the pain of our past. The pleasures of our past, we don't always talk about that, but that's very real. Sometimes when we're in decision mode on a daily basis, hunger and desire is stirred up and we listen to that voice and we hear the past saying, hey, come on, do you remember how it used to be? Come on, you're 35 years old and you're still single. It's because you're holding out for this person that maybe doesn't even exist. Your options are getting limited. I know you want a man of faith, a man who's gonna lead your family, a man who's gonna treat you like a queen. I know that you're holding out for a woman who has her priorities right and she's beautiful and loves Jesus, but you know what, come on, let's just be real, those don't exist. And I know, hey, and your past will remind you back to your early 20s when you weren't serving God and says, remember, you had all the women that you wanted. You had all the guys tracking you down. Come on, maybe you just need to download that app and you just need to swipe on some names and maybe lower your standard. And the voice of your past pleasure begins to remind you about the fact that you are standing in the wilderness, not yet having inherited the promises of God. Or maybe it's the voice of your past pain. Can I really believe God? You know, I've put my trust in people before and I've got stripes on my back to prove it. The enemy, when I tried to go after God, the enemy attacked me so hard, I don't wanna experience that again. Whose voice will you allow to be your daily bread? Whose voice is going to satisfy you? Whose voice is going to nurture you? You see, when we're talking about complaining, because that's what they did to God, they complained about Aaron, they complained to God about Moses because they were in a difficult situation. Do you know where complaints come from? It comes out of a response of our flesh when our hunger is not met by what we readily see available to us. And it's always based on kind of a sense of injustice and entitlement. I deserve better or this is not fair and what that produces on the inside of us is a complaining. An entitlement and injustice is actually born out of a spirit of independence. We see ourselves at the top of the food chain. We see ourselves as number one. If anybody's gonna take care of us, it's gonna be us. And that produces unjust weights and unjust scales. But what's the result of that? Well, it always leads to disappointment. But the opposite of complaining is what we're actually called to when we find ourselves in the wilderness and it's Thanksgiving. See, Thanksgiving is a powerful antidote to unbelief. Thanksgiving is a powerful vaccine against the virus of complaining. Thanksgiving is actually a response to the spirit that is just as hungry as the person that complains, but it knows that God is more than what meets the eye. I may not see the supply around me, but I know that God is more than enough. He is my shield and my exceedingly great reward. And so I'm able to look ahead to God doing exceedingly abundantly above all that we could ever ask or think, why? Because I know that he's done it before. And Thanksgiving, thanks God for what he has done before, opening the door for him to do it again. It's actually rooted in a response to God's mercy and understanding his character. All of that is demonstrated in the life and in the ministry of Jesus. In John chapter six, do you remember the story? They had a crowd of people that were gathered around listening to Jesus' teaching and they all got, that's right, hungry. They're all hungry. And Jesus' response to his disciples was, hey, give these guys, give these people something to eat. How did the disciples respond? Just like the children of Israel. We don't have any food. Tell them to go and get their own food. Even if we had 200 denarii, which is about $25,000, we couldn't feed everybody. What was Jesus' response? What do we have? Not enough. Well, I got this little boy's lunch, couple loaves of bread, bread, and a couple fish. But it's not enough. Jesus says, bring it to me. Have everybody sit down. In other words, get them prepared. Prepare them, position themselves to receive God's miraculous provision. And it says in verse number 11, Jesus took the loaves, the bread, and when he had given thanks, he catch that, thanksgiving. When he had given thanks, he distributed them to those who were seated. So also the fish as much as they wanted. Notice who he gave the bread to, to those who were seated. In other words, those who were expectant. How did he take what was not enough and multiply it with thanksgiving? Thanksgiving in your life multiplies what you have because it's placed in the hands of God and it's actually prophetic. We're remembering what God has done before. We're reminding our hearts of who God is and it creates an expectation that he will do it again. See, you were created not to live in a life of independence by yourself. Independence is where complaining and injustice and entitlement comes out of. You were created to walk in close intimacy daily with the living God. Independence is a slave mentality. Dependence is a childlike characteristic. Children are dependent on their parents. They just know that mom and dad are gonna take care of them. They know that they're looking up for their best interests. They know that they would lay their lives down. Why do people take up independent mentalities? I'm not talking about that, they're not confident. I'm talking about I'm keeping everybody at an arm's length. I'm not trusting anybody. I'm gonna take care of me number one and we've got these mentalities that we call independence. Pull yourself up by your own bootstrap type of things. I'm gonna make it happen. I'm gonna create my own future. I'm the captain of my own ship. I'm the determiner of my own destiny. No, you're not. You were not created to live like that. That's like you trying to become God. But we do that because we've been enslaved and we've been trained and we've been taught about who God is by lies and not based on truth. God breaks in and delivers us and he says, now I wanna download truth to you about who I am and who I've designed you to be. But I'm gonna need to teach you to walk before you run. So step by step, what's the first step? Trust me, when, today, what's tomorrow? Trust me, when, today, how do I trust you? You believe me, what do I believe? My word, my voice in your life. But God, I've read your word and it doesn't make sense. It doesn't make sense to a slave but it makes sense to a son. It doesn't make sense in Egypt but it makes sense when you get into the promised land. Will you cross the bridge of the wilderness? Or will you allow yourself to be captivated in the cells of independence? You were created to live a life of intimacy. You were created to be led by God daily, not occasionally. Morning by morning, verse 21, Exodus 16. Morning by morning, they gathered it, what, the manna? Each as much as he could eat. But when the sun grew hot, it melted. Do you know that you need God every day? You need his word every day. You need his presence every day. You were created for his voice every single day. Not occasionally, not on Christmas and Easter. Not when things get really difficult, every day. It's interesting in the Garden of Eden before man declared his independence from God, before they believed the lie of the enemy, before the ate the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. It says that God came down every day in the cool of the day and he spoke with them. He walked with them. I love the words of the old hymn and he walks with me and he talks with me and he tells me I am his own. That's what God always intended to be, for us to need his voice, to need his presence daily. Number two, you were created to live in dependency. Not to be independent, but you were created to live a life dependent on God's provision. Jesus in his wilderness temptation says he was led up by the spirit into the wilderness. Isn't that interesting? Jesus also went to the wilderness to be tempted by the devil and he fasted 40 days. There's that 40 again. And it says he was hungry and the tempter came and said to him, if you are the son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread. But listen to Jesus' answer. He said, it is written, man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes on a daily basis, it proceeds from the mouth of God. He's quoting Deuteronomy chapter eight, where God, right before they do go into the promised land, reminds Israel, for 40 years I tested you, I trained you to know that what you need on a daily basis is my voice. What you need more than anything is spiritual bread from heaven, my word. This is my daily bread. It's not just reading the written word of God's Bible, but it's reading this with the Holy Spirit in his presence and letting God lead us, direct us and provide for us everything that we have need of. Jesus said, man does not live by bread alone. Why? Because bread will satisfy you and then you'll be hungry again. But Jesus is the bread of life. He is the living water that never, ever runs dry. He is the bread that satisfies his voice daily. And lastly, you were created to leave a testimony. You were created to leave a testimony of a life lived in faith. And right now I just wanna challenge you in this wilderness, in this pandemic, in this season, the stay-home order, and even over the next couple of weeks and months, we need to be people that are thinking about our witness and our testimony of how we're living right now. Am I trusting God today? Am I hearing his voice today? Am I being led by him today? Or am I letting the voices of fear and familiarity and my past and my hunger drive me? What's going to be my testimony? What's going to be my legacy when I come out the other side on this? What am I handing down? Do you know that God commanded Moses and Aaron? He said, I want you to take some of the manna that I fed you with in the wilderness. And I want you to put it in the Ark of the Covenant. In fact, it was called the Ark of Testimony so that in the generations to come, you'll be able to tell them throughout all the generations, this is how God provided for us in the wilderness. It became a testimony. The Ark of the Covenant was called the Ark of the Testimony. What is going to be put in the Ark of your testimony that you passed down to your kids? What are you going to be able to share as your witness to those who don't know God is a good God and a good Father who wants to provide for them and take care of them? Is it going to be, yeah, I got frustrated and angry like everybody else? Yeah, I was operating in the flesh. Yeah, the worst enemy came out and controlled me. Or is it going to be, you know, I came into the wilderness? We went through 2020 and it was one of the hardest years of my life but in the middle of it, my heart turned towards God and he trained me to hear his voice. He trained me to seek him daily. He trained me to be at home in his presence and he led me daily. He gave me supernatural provision. He blessed my job in ways that I can't even imagine how it happened. He met our physical needs supernaturally. He gave me ideas and strategies that actually created prosperity and I'll tell you, even in the difficulties, he did something in my life. He did something in our family. He did something in my relationship with him to where I trust him more and more, more than I ever had before. And you know what? My kids were watching. What are you going to tell your kids and your grandkids 20, 25 years from now? Like our grandparents talk about the Great Depression. Are we going to be able to say, you know, God was faithful. God was miraculous. God revealed himself as good and we believed him. Or is it going to be something that we wish we could go back and we could retake those tests? Hudson Taylor, the great missionary to China. Man of incredible faith once said that the real secret of an unsatisfied life lies far too often in an unsurrendered will that we're unsatisfied because we will not surrender to him. We will not believe him. But I want you to realize God's not looking for men of great faith. You might right now just say, you know, I don't have great faith. I have a hard time trusting him. I'm not exceptional. I'm just trying to get through. Well, you didn't know God's not looking for men of great faith. He's looking for common men who will trust in his great faithfulness. God is faithful. God can be trusted. God will provide the bread of heaven. Exactly what we need supernatural provision even when there seems to be no way because he's training us to trust him. He's training us so that he can lead us day by day. I want to pray for us. Would you wherever you are at, with whoever you're with, right now just bow your head, close your eyes, make this a sacred space. Lord, today we come and here we are, your people, journeying through various different wildernesses, traversing places we've never been before, trying to get our footing and chart out a path. But in the midst of it all, we hear your voice saying, will you trust me? Will you believe me? Will you keep my word? Will you listen to my voice? And we're saying to you, Lord, in all of our weakness, with all of our failings and all of our old mindsets and attitudes, we're saying, Lord, less of me, more of you. Lord, I want to know you more. I want to learn to follow your voice daily. I want to welcome and feel at home in your presence and I want to trust you and your goodness that wherever you lead me, you will keep me. That I don't have to live in worry. I don't have to be like the rest of the world. I don't have to live as a slave any longer. Today, I'm embracing being a son or a daughter. Today, I'm saying, God is good and He cares for me and today, Lord, would you help my unbelief? Would you stretch my heart? The wine skin of my heart to be able to hold more faith, increase our faith. And in this season, let it be said that we learned and developed an ear to hear the voice of the Lord speak and lead us. In Jesus' name, amen.