Exodus 12:1–20Scripture
I've entitled this message "Jesus, the Passover Lamb." Everybody say "Jesus." All the kids in the room, let me hear you say "Jesus." Jesus is the Passover lamb. As we look at chapter 12, there's a fun twist here. We've spent a few months looking at all the plagues that God unleashed over egypt, and there's a swift change in the Scripture here. Very quickly we go from plagues to now we're talking about instruction, and it's detailed instruction. It's lengthy instruction. Some of it may seem even like unnecessary instruction. Oftentimes we read the Bible, and God's Word doesn't just give us what we think we need to know; it gives us incredibly more than we think that we need, and sometimes it seems overwhelming. Sometimes it seems like it might be a little much. Do you agree? And as we look through chapter 12, there's a lot in these 20 verses to really unpack. I'm going to do my best, but there's a lot of instruction here. And what's happening in these verses is God is laying out his means for Israel's deliverance out of Egypt. And this is what I find interesting: God designs the means for Israel's deliverance. He lays out all of these instructions, and Israel doesn't get to ask Moses doesn't get to ask, "well, why do we have to do that? What's the point? Is that necessary? What's the point in that?" Because it's God's design. God designs the means, and God also assigns the means. At this point in the Scripture, this is all foreshadowing, all foretelling of Jesus and how salvation will roll out to
Introduction
The church in the New Testament. Because in these scriptures we've already learned that Pharaoh's officials, Pharaoh's high servants, have already had their minds changed. They're no longer standing in agreement with Pharaoh, because they're even looking at Pharaoh and saying, "When is enough, boss?" But because of Pharaoh's heart being hardened, because of God's design, because of God's assignment, God chooses whom he delivers and whom he doesn't. I would imagine that there are lots of Egyptians at this point, not just the officials in Pharaoh's court, but there are probably many Egyptians who are fed up and tired of Pharaoh's resistance to obeying God's commands through Moses. But this deliverance, this Passover, was only given to God's people. What about all the innocent Egyptians?
None of us are innocent.
Pastor J.R. Brown · 2:57
It's God's design, and God assigns. He does it how he wants, and he chooses who he wants. Amen? And God spares his people. Through this text, I want you to look for these three themes. I'm not going to dig into these; I just want you to look for them. He spares his people by sacrifice, by grace, and by faith. All three are present. It's not just sacrifice that saves the people, it's not just grace that saves the people, and it's not just faith that saves the people, but sacrifice, grace, and faith are all present, as they are in our salvation in the New Covenant. There's a lot of text here, so I'm going to read this. Kids, do your best to stay focused and pay attention. Exodus 12:1–20 says: "The LORD said to Moses and Aaron in Egypt, 'This month is to be for you the first month, the first month of your year. Tell the whole community of Israel that on the tenth day of this month each man is to take a lamb for his family, one for each household. If any household is too small for a whole lamb, they must share one with their nearest neighbor, having taken into account the number of people there are. You are to determine the amount of lamb needed in accordance with what each person will eat. The animals you choose must be year-old males without defect, and you may take them from the sheep or the goats. Take care of them until the fourteenth day of the month, when all the members of the community of Israel must slaughter them at twilight. Then they are to take some of the blood and put it on the sides and tops of the doorframes of the houses where they eat the lambs. That same night they are to eat the meat roasted over the fire, along with bitter herbs, and bread made without yeast. Do not eat the meat raw or boiled in water, but roast it over a fire, with the head, legs and internal organs. Do not leave any of it till morning; if some is left till morning, you must burn it. This is how you are to eat it: with your cloak tucked into your belt, your sandals on your feet and your staff in your hand. Eat it in haste; it is the lORD's Passover. On that same night I will pass through Egypt and strike down every firstborn of both people and animals, and I will bring judgment on all the gods of egypt. I am the LORD. The blood will be a sign for you on the houses where you are, and when I see the blood, I will pass over you. No destructive plague will touch you when I strike Egypt. This is a day you are to commemorate; for the generations to come you shall celebrate it as a festival to the LORD, a lasting ordinance. For seven days you are to eat bread made without yeast. On the first day remove the yeast from your houses, for whoever eats anything with yeast in it from the first day through the seventh must be cut off from Israel. On the first day hold a sacred assembly, and another one on the seventh day. Do no work at all on these days, except to prepare food for everyone to eat; that is all you may do. Celebrate the festival of Unleavened Bread, because it was on this very day that I brought your divisions out of Egypt. Celebrate this day as a lasting ordinance for the generations to come. In the first month you are to eat bread made without yeast, from the evening of the fourteenth day until the evening of the twenty-first day. For seven days no yeast is to be found in your houses. And anyone, whether foreigner or native-born, who eats anything with yeast in it must be cut off from the community of Israel. Eat nothing made with yeast. Wherever you live, you must eat unleavened bread.'" There's a lot here.
This morning I want to draw just five distinct connections. If you're taking notes, five distinct connections. The title is "Jesus, the Passover Lamb," and there's five distinct connections in this text that we see connecting this text to the person and the purpose of Jesus Christ. And then I want to take some time to talk about how the Word should impact our lives. A lot of times, especially in Old Testament stories, we try to take the narrative that's written, and we try to place ourselves into the text. You know, you can find many pastors preach on David and Goliath and ask questions like, "What's the giant in your life that needs to be slain?"
Well, you're not David, right? Jesus is David.
Pastor J.R. Brown · 8:18
And in this Scripture, Jesus is the Passover Lamb. And while we're not directly in this text, we are the recipients of salvation in the New Covenant. So there is much for us to learn about salvation as we look at this foreshadowing of Jesus and his death and his crucifixion and how that impacts our lives as followers of Christ. There's five distinct things. The first one is
Point 1A new calendar centered on the Passover
This: the institution of a new calendar. This is important, that God tells Moses this month of the Passover will be the first month of the year for you. What God's telling Israel is, however you were keeping track of days before, you got a new system. Everything now is going to be centralized and focused on this Passover event. This will be the central, most important event of your entire year. Everything else is secondary. You have a new calendar. But establishing a calendar system is also one of the first things that God does to establish not just Israel as a people group, but as an actual nation. You know, we have a calendar system as the United States that most of the world shares, but not everybody shares our calendar system. And we're also one of the only, there's very few countries that use the imperial system and not the metric system. Like, we're in the minority in that, because we think that we're special as Americans, that we shouldn't have to use the same weights and measures system that the rest of the world does, even though we do. Like, we use liters for sodas, but then we use pounds for other things. Like, it's a mess. YouTube, I don't condone watching SNL because much of it's inappropriate, but YouTube "SNL George Washington's Dream." It's hilarious as this guy portrays George Washington casting a dream for America, and none of it makes any sense in their weights and measures and times and dates, and it's horribly funny, and that one's actually somewhat appropriate. But they're now being established as a nation, and this passover event will mark the first month of their year, the month that they refer to in Hebrew still today as Nisan being a Hebrew word that means both miracle and firstfruits. I think it's interesting that one word can have such different meanings. Isn't God cool, that he can take one word and give it two very different definitions, but they both apply very strategically to this month? It's a miracle and it's first. The Passover event represented Israel's independence from Egypt. First they were a tribe of sojourners under Abraham, then they were immigrants when they came into Egypt, then they became slaves, but now, through their Exodus from Egypt, they become an actual nation. This new calendar bit is significant. Just as the Passover brought a new identity to Israel, here's Jesus in the passover. Jesus said, "I came that you may have new life." The life that you had is gone. The system that you had is gone. The people that you were is gone. "I'm making something new." 2 Corinthians 5:17, the apostle Paul says, "Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come." The Passover event was so important and sacred that God instructed the Israelites to build a new calendar based on that one event. Let me ask us this question this morning, because this sermon is really gut-punching me this week: How would things look differently in our lives if the focus of our lives revolved around our salvation in Christ, the way that God's calling the Israelites to revolve their world around the Passover event? How would you prioritize things differently? How would you communicate differently with people? How would you parent differently? How would your work schedule look different if your salvation in Jesus Christ was the central event of your life that everything else revolved around? Paul says in 1 Corinthians 13:11, "when I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways." Paul's talking about a maturity here in the understanding of his faith.
And my belief today is that many within the body of Christ, we put too little significance on what took place when we came to faith in Jesus, and it shows.
Pastor J.R. Brown · 13:48
Let me repeat that: many within the body of Christ put way too little significance on what happened to them when they came to faith in Jesus Christ, when their old man was put to death and they were regenerated and given a new spirit through Jesus Christ. We put far too little significance on that, and it shows. It shows in our daily lives. It shows in our priorities. It shows in how we parent our children. It shows in how we raise our children up to prioritize faith in their life, to prioritize the body of Christ, to prioritize Scripture in their lives. It shows. I'm going to go there; I want to go there. It shows with how riled up and emotional we get over a presidential election. It shows when people are so on edge that, as one of your pastors, I don't even bring up politics, because the last thing that I want to do is stumble into a conversation with one of you who may think differently than I do politically in any way, and now all of a sudden we can't be friends anymore. It shows in the level of immaturity that we walk in as professing followers of Jesus. I saw something on Facebook a couple weeks ago that said, "The problem with the church in today's American culture," which this is about the election, "is we're trying to change the world the way the Romans did instead of changing the world the way Jesus did." Because at the end of the day, I've got to think through this before I say this, I didn't put this in my notes, at the end of the day, who cares who the president is? Because everything that impacts is all carnal, temporal stuff. It's my money. You don't take that with you to heaven. I remember a joke when I was a kid about a rich man who died and went to heaven.
But before he left earth, an angel came to him and said, "You can only bring one thing with you into heaven." And so he went and he opened his vault, his safe. He was a very rich man, and he grabbed the biggest gold block that he had, worth millions of dollars in just one gold block. And he brought it with him, and he was standing in line at the gate of heaven, and the guy behind him looked at his neighbor standing in line next to him and said, "We were allowed to bring one thing, and this dummy brought pavement."
You don't get to take it with you.
Pastor J.R. Brown · 17:03
Now, do I believe that elections are important? Yes, I do. Don't hear me say that elections aren't important, but they're not important in comparison. But we walk around in a sensitive, easily offended world today, where if you don't agree with each other, you're not allowed to be friends. You can't talk about it. I ended up in a minivan yesterday with a group of people that I'm friends with, and I was the dummy who brought up the election, and it turns out that I was the only conservative person in the van. And at one point somebody looked at me and they're like, "I bet you regret this decision." I'm like, I immediately regretted that decision as soon as I brought it up. But thankfully I can still be friends with these people. But how would your life look different if you prioritized what took place in your life the moment that the old man or the old woman died and you were given a new spirit in Jesus Christ? How would our lives look differently if we prioritized that, the way God's telling Israel, "Your entire world is going to revolve around this one event"? That's how important it
Point 2The lamb's characteristics are Jesus's characteristics
Is. Number one was the institution of a new calendar. Number two is the specific characteristics of the lamb. There's a whole list of characteristics that qualify a lamb for this Passover sacrifice, and each one of these characteristics are also characteristics of Jesus. Jesus is identified in these.
The lamb must be without blemish, perfect. 1 Peter 1:19 refers to Jesus when it says that we were ransomed "with the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without blemish or spot." It had to be perfect. It had to be male. Every household had to have their own lamb. Every person in the household had to eat of the lamb. My wife would have been in trouble, 'cause she's a vegan, but everybody had to eat of it. It wasn't just that it was one lamb per household, or if you were a small household you could share a lamb with another household, but every person had to eat of the lamb. And this wasn't like take-and-bake from a grocery store. They're slaughtering these lambs. Everybody had to eat of it.
Similarly, every person called by God must repent of their own sin and trust Jesus personally. As a mom, you couldn't eat the lamb to cover your kids; they had to eat of it themselves.
Likewise, there ain't any prayer that I can pray over my kids to cover them in salvation.
Pastor J.R. Brown · 20:11
Those kids have to seek him out themselves, and if they don't, it's their condemnation. We don't like to talk like this, but it's truth. Everybody had to eat of the lamb. No bones of the lamb could be broken. In John 19:31–36, the Bible shows us where the soldiers... So many things like this happened that there's no way you can call it coincidence. There's so many different specific details about prophecies of Jesus and things that had to happen in perfect alignment with Jesus's crucifixion and his death and his burial and his resurrection. And one of the things was that he wouldn't have a bone broken. And so as Jesus is hanging on a cross, and he has a thief to his left and a thief to his right, and it's nearing the end of the day, and the Jews don't want to have anybody hanging on crosses on the Sabbath day, and it's the day before, so they want to go ahead and just knock them out and kill them off. Their tortures lasted long enough. So they ask the guards. The guards go get a big hammer or a mallet or something, it says, and they break one thief's legs, which causes him to collapse, which then ruins his ability to breathe, and he suffocates to death. And he goes to the other thief and he breaks his legs, and he gets to Jesus and he realizes that Jesus is already dead. Why wouldn't he, if this was the instructions he had, why wouldn't he have taken the same club and just knocked his legs out too, just to make sure? By coincidence? No. But instead he takes a spear and he sticks him in the side, and the fluids flow out of his body. He had no bone broken. There could be no leftovers. All signs of the lamb should be gone by morning, God told Moses and Aaron. Similarly, Jesus was taken down from the cross and put into the tomb before nightfall, because the next day was the sabbath day. So many little intricate, perfect details fall into place. They were to eat it in haste. This wasn't a kick back, put your legs up, relax a little bit.
This wasn't a Thanksgiving dinner feast. This was, "We've got to get this sucker roasted and ready, and we've got to eat them, and we've got to eat them quick, because there's something coming that we have to be ready for." Eat it in haste. If they delayed a day, it would be too late.
Oh man, what if we had the same urgency with people's salvation?
Pastor J.R. Brown · 23:04
What if we had the same angst in our hearts? Imagine this was no easy process. Like, I've never killed a lamb, but I've done some weird stuff. Like, I don't look like a redneck, but I've done some weird redneck stuff. I have butchered pigs before, like Amish style, where you do everything with your hands and you use knives and saws and hand tools, and you're doing it on a kitchen table with newspaper laid out. We weren't in a fancy butcher shop. But for years growing up we lived near an Amish community, and it was part of what my dad and I did every January. We went, we helped butcher pigs, and then we got to take a pig home with us. And there was one year that my younger brother went, and Jacob's four and a half years younger than me, and he's always been a brat. He's in his thirties now; he's still a brat. And Jacob was one of the pickiest eaters. That kid could throw a serious fit. And he was my stepmom's firstborn, so you know, there was that whole thing going on too. And Jacob would constantly whine and complain and not want to eat, and we'd have to figure out something else for him. But one year, the first year he was old enough, my dad let him come, and he helped us butcher pigs. And that first night that we got some pork out of the freezer that was from the pig that he had helped slaughter, that kid licked his plate clean. And I remember my dad sitting there just mesmerized, going, "This kid has never eaten like this." And he's like, "Jacob, what's going on with you?" And this kid was only like 10 years old, 11 years old maybe, but had enough wisdom to say, "You know, when you had to work for the food, it tastes different." These people were slaughtering sheep by hand. It was messy, but they had to do it with haste. There had to have been plenty of scenarios where parents were getting a little stressed and a little anxious because kids were getting involved and things were getting messy, and maybe Grandma's cloak got some sheep blood on it and the mom didn't want sheep blood on it. This was being done with haste, because they knew that God was coming to kill the firstborn, and they only had so much time to have their sheep slaughtered and prepared and eaten and the blood over their door before the presence of God was going to come through town and start killing people. Why don't we have the same urgency and the same haste with the people in our lives that we know are lost, that we know that at the point that they stand before the presence of God in judgment, they're going to die, they're going to be condemned? We don't have that kind of haste in our culture because we're spoiled, really. They had to eat it in haste. Scripture warns that we don't know the day or the hour, and Job 14 warns us very clearly that our days are numbered. Not only how do we wait in haste for salvation, but how do we wait on the Lord after we've been called to salvation? Are we waiting for the second coming of Christ? Are we waiting for the return of the Lord with anxious preparation, or are we regularly just distracted with the world around us? We're more concerned about wealth and stability and our kids' college education, and worldly, temporary, carnal things. The blood of the lamb is a characteristic. The blood of the lamb was to be displayed publicly on the doorposts of the houses. The blood over the doorpost showed that they had made their sacrifice and were under God's protection. In similar manner, Jesus's blood on the cross was shed publicly, and his blood cleanses those who trust in him. The last of the characteristics of the lamb I'm going to talk about is Jesus died during the Festival of the Passover. Jesus was sacrificed on the cross during this festival as our atoning lamb. First, you have the institution of the calendar. Second, the specific characteristics of the lamb. Third is the
Point 3The Passover lamb was personal and costly
Passover lamb was personal. The third way we find Jesus in the Passover: the Passover lamb was personal. Exodus 12:6 said, "Take care of them until the fourteenth day of the month, when all the members of the community of Israel must slaughter them at twilight." If you look at this text, there's so many details, so many details that it's almost, for my type of brain, it's easy for me to just glaze my way through it and miss a lot of the detail. God's telling Moses to tell the israelites, on the tenth day you go pick out your lamb. On the fourteenth day, that's four days later, you slaughter that lamb. So for four days they had this lamb in their care. They had this lamb in their care. Often houses and barn-type structures were all one building structure. It wasn't, "I have my lamb out in the pasture." The lamb is in, and it had to be without blemish. This lamb had to be babysat for four days. I'm just telling you that if I brought a young, perfect, beautiful lamb into my house for four days, in two days' time that sucker is going to have a name, and it's going to be a pet, and Melody's gonna be riding around on it. Kayle's already taught her how to sit. Jackson's trying to figure out how to get it to do his chores.
And I'm so reminded by this part of the text, when I was a teenager. Again, I grew up out in the country, and we were weird rednecks. We had a goat. At one point we had lots of goats, but we had one little, it's called a pygmy, a billy pygmy goat. Full grown, they're only about this big. They're tiny goats. And Billy was white. He's a billy goat 'cause he's a male, but my sister decided to name him Billy. And then we had Billy, and it wasn't a week or two after we got Billy that Becca started running around with Billy, playing with him in the yard, and he would follow her around and they would play together.
And Becca had this wild idea, and my parents were crazy. Becca had this wild idea: "Dad, can Billy sleep in my room with me?" My dad said yes. Let a goat sleep in our house. Within a couple days, Becca had potty trained Billy. That goat would go to the back door and would tap its little hoof on the glass door, and we'd let him outside. He would walk out into the backyard, poop his little goat pellets, and come back in. And he was potty trained. And then when we would leave the house, because he's a goat, we didn't even let our dogs stay in our house when we would leave, because we lived out in the country. So when we'd leave, we'd kick the dogs out onto the porch and we'd kick Billy out onto the porch. And dogs are smart; goats are dumb. A dog will follow you to your car, and then you get in your car, and dogs are smart enough to walk away from the car so they don't get ran over, and they'd go back up on the porch. Well, goats are dumb. And so Billy, we'd have to get in the car, and I was the oldest of the kids, so one of my jobs was, when everybody got in the car, I would take Billy and I would run him back up to the porch, and I'd set him down, and then I'd run back to the van, get in, so we could start backing out, because he would just hang out around the tires of the van. We got in a hurry one day, and we left, and I forgot to run Billy up to the porch. And we backed down, we had a long driveway that was a little bit of a hill, and we backed down, and my brother Josiah, he was, oh, if I was 16, he was like five or six at the time, and he says, "Mom, ain't that funny?" We're backing down to the bottom of the driveway, backing out into the gravel road, and he says, "Ain't that funny?" And my mom says, "What?" And he says, "Just how Billy lays in the driveway like that." And our pet goat died. I'm just saying, they took these sheep into their homes, and they cared for them. They kept them spotless and without blemish and perfect for four days, and then they had to slaughter them. Oh man,
It annoys me. It annoys me when people talk about the free gift of salvation as if there wasn't a cost to it.
Pastor J.R. Brown · 33:17
The free gift of salvation, as if God's heart wasn't breaking in anguish when he watched his Son suffer under the weight of our sin, as the Father watched his Son's body be broken and watched him be slaughtered for the atonement of our sin. I can't imagine that on the fourteenth day there weren't a lot of cries coming out of those homes as people had to slaughter those sheep that had become so close to them. Because the Passover lamb was personal.
It wasn't just livestock. It wasn't just another sheep from the herd.
Pastor J.R. Brown · 34:27
It was a beautiful,
Point 4Those without the blood were condemned
Blameless, without blemish, sacrificial lamb whose blood protected them from condemnation. So is the Lamb of God. Number four: those without the covering of the blood of the lamb were condemned. There was death flowing through the streets of Egypt on the night of the Passover. There were many cries, many screams, many shrieks, because Egypt saw death like it had never seen it before. Because those who weren't called by God, who weren't given the instruction, and who didn't put the perfect, spotless blood of their sacrificial lamb over their doorposts lost their firstborn.
Likewise, God condemns those who aren't covered by the blood of the Lamb of God.
Pastor J.R. Brown · 35:48
We don't like to talk about condemnation and judgment a lot in Americanized Christianity. A few weeks ago I posted this picture on Facebook that I found. Just take it in for a second.
I'm sure if we're friends on Facebook, you saw it. As you're looking at it, I'll read it for you. John 3:16: "For God so loved the world..." For God so loved the world "that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life." This is the most memorized and most quoted verse from the entire Bible, because people love the idea of God's love.
Even the world loves the idea of God's love.
Pastor J.R. Brown · 36:52
Keep reading. That's why I love the second booth. Poor guy. "For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God. And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil. For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed. But whoever does what is true comes to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that his works have been carried out in God." Man, I'm so thankful. I'm so thankful for Pastor Shawn, and I'm so thankful for his leadership and his dedication to preaching the Word of God, regardless of how it stings, regardless of when it's uncomfortable, and regardless of when it may even be offensive. And there were a few years back, we've talked about it a lot over the life of our church, two years into Echo Church, this church was packed. We had two packed Sunday morning services. We had a Saturday night service. That was tiring. It was a lot of work, playing music on Saturday afternoon, Saturday night, two services on Sunday. We were drained by the end of the day, and we were running around 600 people in this building over three services. And then a shift happened, and I don't need to get into all of the details of the shift, but when the shift happened, it forced us as the leaders of our church to sit in the reality that we were building a church off of people's emotions and people's feelings, and we weren't building a church off of rooting and discipling people in the truth of what God's Word says and how it applies to us. And when we started doing that, lots more people left our church over the following years. And I remember this first series that Pastor Shawn had written out, and a lot of it was from Isaiah. I don't remember the exact text, but he came into my office and he showed me a graphic that he had made, and he showed me the theme text that he was going to be looking at and points that he was going to be covering. And I'm just reading this, going, "People are going to leave our church over this." And he said, "Yep." But he said something to me. It was one of the most influential things he's ever said to me, and one of the foundational reasons why I've been here for 12 years.
He said, "I'd rather stand in front of the Lord and be judged for a couple hundred people who are devoted disciples than 2,000, half of whom are going to go to hell."
Pastor J.R. Brown · 40:04
And that broke my heart. And from that time there have been a lot of hard moments, because everybody knows I'm a people person. I thrive on relationships. I thrive on spending time and hanging out and being social, having parties, having people over to my house, having dinners, having game nights. It became so much so that when I would hit Lacy up and be like, "Hey, what do you think about having some people over for Memorial Day?" The term that she would use is, "Can you just not J.R. It, please?" What she meant by that is, could it be five people and not 50? And when certain people would leave our church because they didn't like some of what was being taught, I heard one guy, that broke my heart, when he left, said, "There's just not enough grace preached." At the time we were going through 1 John, and I'm reading through 1 John. I'm like, the theme of 1 John isn't grace. The theme of 1 John is, you can't profess to be a follower and walk in the light while you walk in darkness; you're a liar. That's the theme of 1 John. Are you a Christian or are you not? He didn't like that. Like, so you don't think that Pastor Shawn's teaching the Scripture wrong? You don't think he's being heretical in his preaching? You just don't like the topic. You'd rather talk about grace and make people feel loved and encouraged? Yeah. I'm like, bye. There's so much more than that. There's so much more than that. Even in just the topic of salvation, there's sacrifice, there's grace, and faith. Grace is just one of the components of salvation. And I'm so thankful for our pastor, who will stand firm on preaching truth. I mean, y'all, Romans was rough. It was hard. It was hard even amongst some of us relationally. We disagreed to a point that was hard, because not every preacher, not every shepherd, holds God's Word at the value that Pastor Shawn does, at the value that I've learned to as one of your shepherds. You have preachers like Joel Osteen, who's well known for his willingness to dodge hard conversations on judgment and condemnation. But we talk about preachers like Joel Osteen, who's a multimillionaire, as if it's just the multimillionaires who convolute and water down the gospel. But this teaching is prevalent everywhere. And what I'm learning more and more in my life now, as I've been journeying, I mean, my family's been part of this church family for 12 years now. I've been an ordained minister, preaching when I get opportunities to preach, teaching kids, teaching teens. I've been preaching the Word for a little over 16 years. And what I'm learning in a deeper and more real way now is, it's not even just certain voices who have been misinterpreting the gospel all along who misinterpret the gospel, but it can even be voices who at one point interpreted the gospel well, whose position has changed. And somebody who used to represent the gospel well no longer does. And it's heartbreaking as a pastor, especially in the world we live in, with the internet and YouTube and media, the way that we have everything at our fingertips. It's heartbreaking to see pastor after pastor in our current world falling away from ministry because they allowed sin to be prevalent in their lives and they disqualified themselves, or just to see teaching that was once grounded in the Word of God but has become heretical. Most of that in our culture is driven by a desire to be relevant and be accepted and not be offensive to the culture. So we accept things that we didn't used to accept. We no longer condemn sin the way that we used to condemn sin, the way that the Bible condemns sin. Because if you stand in the face of the world and you condemn their sin, most of the time you get something thrown back at you. I just had a conversation this last week with a man, and we've been back and forth on social media over the last few months quite a bit, because I just noticed all of a sudden things that he was posting on Facebook. And this is a man who has served in pastoral ministry. This is a man who was influential in my life several years ago, before Lacy and I came to Echo. This was a man who, one coffee meeting with him and a couple questions that he asked me put me in a position to seek the Lord and to seek the Word, and, I can't think what I'm trying to say, we completely uprooted. That's what I'm trying to say. We uprooted ourselves and we switched. We left our church, we moved, we changed jobs, we ended up coming to Echo Church. I ended up becoming employed here as one of the pastors. Our entire life changed because of a coffee meeting I had with this guy. And over the last year or two, I've been watching as his posts have gotten further and further away from what I believe is truth in the Bible. Now, he would disagree with me. He would say, "No, I believe that this is truth." But the Bible only says what it says. And he and I got into a discussion, because he sent me a podcast, because we've been talking back and forth on different topics. And yesterday he sent me a podcast that was only about 16 minutes long, so I listened to it. The podcast was titled, "Listen: You Are Completely and Fully Loved, Accepted, and Forgiven by God." That was the title of the podcast. It was 16 minutes long, and nowhere in the podcast was there any mention of repentance or any warning of condemnation for those who are lost. It was just, "You are fully loved, accepted, and forgiven by God because of the work Jesus did on the cross. We are all fully loved, accepted, and forgiven." Is that the gospel?
Where's repentance at? Where's turning away from sin at?
Pastor J.R. Brown · 47:29
Where is an understanding of hell at? This distorted view of God's judgment and condemnation
Point 5From the Passover feast to the Lord's Supper
On those whom he's not called to himself is very prevalent in our world, in our culture. The fifth thing is this, from the Passover, from the Passover feast to the Lord's Supper. Write that down: from the Passover feast to the Lord's Supper. Israel was instructed to memorialize the Passover event with an annual feast. This annual feast was for their remembrance of what God had done for them in Egypt. There's mention a lot, it's like a solid paragraph in and of itself, of the importance of unleavened bread. Full transparency, I had never really studied the purpose of unleavened bread before. I know about it. I know where it's called for. I know the importance of it. But I didn't really understand the reason why it was clearly important, because God said it over and over again. But why? And I've learned two things. The first reason for unleavened bread is similar to one of the things we talked about earlier, which was haste. Unleavened bread doesn't take very long to cook. You don't have to wait for the yeast to rise. And this was a meal, the Passover meal, the first one, where they sacrificed the lambs so they could spread the blood over their doors. This was a meal that was prepared very quickly and very hastily. And so unleavened bread was used because it was quick. The second reason has some significance as well. I'm not really sure why this was symbolized for sin, but it is. Yeast. Yeast was symbolic of sin. Yeast grows and expands in the bread, and it symbolizes sin's presence and sin's ability to grow in our lives. And so it's significant. It's significant because Jesus turns the page from the Passover feast to the Lord's Supper, and he calls for the church no longer to observe the passover feast the way that Israel did in the Old Covenant, but he calls us to observe the Lord's Supper in the New Covenant. And just like unleavened bread, just like yeast, symbolic of sin, was to not be present in their feast, so when we come to the moments of communion where we observe the Lord's supper, does Christ call for us to make sure that sin is not present in our lives? There's literally instruction in the New Testament on how, if you have an offense against your brother before you're supposed to observe the Lord's Supper, you're supposed to go reconcile that offense, or you eat and drink judgment on yourself. When Peter quotes Christ and says things, where Jesus said, "Be holy, for I am holy," where in 1 John it says you can't walk in the light and also walk in darkness.
Darkness and light cannot coexist.
Pastor J.R. Brown · 51:18
There is either darkness or there is light, because light drowns out darkness. You cannot abide in Christ, you cannot eat the body and drink the blood in remembrance of Jesus, and allow sin to be prevalent in your life. Does that mean we walk perfect and blameless and without blemish? No, that was Christ's role.
But it means, just as God allowed his Son to be slaughtered, we slaughter sin in our lives.
Pastor J.R. Brown · 51:50
We don't allow it into the dough, into the mixture. Jesus turned the page from the Passover feast and called the church to remember him. Luke 22, there's several accounts of this Passover meal. It's interesting, because a lot of times we just jump, when we take communion, we just jump straight to this. The text: "When the hour came, he reclined at table, and the apostles with him. And he said to them, 'I have earnestly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer. For I tell you I will not eat it until it is fulfilled in the kingdom of god.' And he took a cup," this is where we start, "and he took a cup, and when he had given thanks he said, 'Take this, and divide it among yourselves. For I tell you that from now on I will not drink of the fruit of the vine until the kingdom of God comes.' And he took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and gave it to them, saying, 'This is my body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.'" When we take communion, we just jump straight to the "and Jesus took the cup, and Jesus took the bread." Oftentimes I forget, because our focus is on communion and on the Lord's Supper, oftentimes we forget that what had just taken place was Jesus observing the Passover feast with his disciples. He just observed this Old Testament feast that God orchestrated for Israel, and then he takes the bread and he takes the cup and he changes it. "This is now my body. Now when you observe this feast, do it in remembrance of me. Don't do it in remembrance of Egypt anymore. Don't do it in remembrance of the Exodus anymore.
Now you do it in remembrance of me, because I'm your Exodus out of sin and out of condemnation."
Pastor J.R. Brown · 54:00
You have a new covenant because there's a new Lamb. We don't have to take sheep into our homes anymore for four days and let our kids fall in love with them and then slaughter them. Thank you, God, that we don't have to do that, because I have very passionate children whose hearts are easily broken. That would be horrible. It would be horrible. They had to do it. Because we have a new Lamb. I'm going to ask this question as we get ready to close: How focused do our minds stay on what Christ has done? Jesus said, "Do this in remembrance of me." It's all right, buddy, i'm almost done. He said, "Do this in remembrance of me." This supper, this meal, is in remembrance of me, the Lamb, in remembrance of me, the perfect sacrifice that was without blemish. How often do our minds stay focused on what Christ has done? This is a topic that I keep hitting on, because it's like a resounding gong in my life right now, because I am a musical person. I am the one charged with organizing and leading our praise time as a church family. How awesome was it today to not have me on stage? I'm pretty excited for some new family members of our church that have come out and said, "I'd like to sing. I'd like to play an instrument." And I'm approaching it completely differently than I have before, so much so that I've admitted to everybody involved, like, I'm not even entirely sure what I'm doing. I just know what I'm not doing. I know I'm not creating this cool elitist band that gets to worship for you on Sundays. I am looking at our church family and saying, "You play guitar, you want to come up here and play? You play bass, you want to come up here and play bass?
You sing, you want to sing?" And I'm involving more of our family members that have musical gifting. If you sing like my grandma, I'm probably not going to give you a microphone. I'm just saying. But this is a constant issue for me when it comes to church music, musical worship, our time of singing in church, because the majority of modern praise songs aren't just focused on the Lord. Because we have sung, even in this church, we don't sing them anymore, because, you know, I'm growing up and maturing all the time, but we've sung songs like "This Is How I Fight My battles." We've sung songs like "I raise a hallelujah in the presence of my enemies." We sing songs, this throwback to the '90s, "I will give you all my worship." Now, are these songs bad in how they're written? Not necessarily. I'm not saying they're bad, but their focus isn't on adoring God. They're not written from a place of just pouring adoration out to God, because "I," "me," or "we" is a constant central theme. And if we're joining together as a church and our focus is on us in any way, our focus can't be on the Lamb. It can't be. So are the songs bad? If you are in the car and "Raise a Hallelujah" comes up on your playlist, should you skip it? No. Sometimes that song comes up on my playlist and I crank it up, because there are parts of that song that really excite me in my faith in God.
But if you find yourself being more energized and more excited about songs that you're the focus of than songs that he's the focus of, we have a problem.
Pastor J.R. Brown · 58:32
We have a problem because we're not remembering the Lamb. We're not just adoring God. Okay. My prayer for Echo Church is that we'll continue to be a church that remembers and worships the perfect Lamb of God, that we remember his innocent blood that was shed to cover our lives from condemnation, and that this isn't just something that we remember when we take communion, but that it drives our hearts and our minds every day. Jesus is the Passover Lamb.
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