Today, we're going to take a posture of peace by being completely overwhelmed.
Posture is a short, audible fist bump to remind you God is with you in everything.
Together, we're going to be emboldened to take a daily posture of perfect peace.
In Exodus 33, y'all, I'm just gonna warn you,
I am so astonished by what happens in Exodus 33, I will never get over it.
And that might come across in this episode.
In Exodus 33, in verse 18, there's this encounter that Moses has with God that is just
mind-blowing to me.
Moses asks the Lord, he says, please show me your glory.
And God answers him and says, I will make all of my goodness pass before you.
But he tells Moses, he says, you're not going to be able to see my face because
no one can see me and live.
So the Lord puts Moses in the cleft of a rock and he covers him with his hand and his
glory passes by and then he removes his hand so that Moses can see the back of him, get
a glimpse, but he can't see his face.
When Moses asked to see the glory of God, God says, I will make all of my goodness
pass before you.
And the goodness of God was going to be so overwhelming that Moses's human frame would
not be able to survive it.
Even with just a glimpse, like Moses gets just a glimpse of God's goodness, if you
read later in the story, it says that after he gets a glimpse of God's goodness, Moses's
face shines so brightly that no one can ignore it.
No one can ignore it.
Like the evidence of Moses's encounter with God's goodness is so overwhelming.
He had to wear a veil in public.
Okay, here's why I'm so incredibly astonished by this.
This encounter, which is amazing and overwhelming, is an Old Testament encounter.
This happened when the presence of God was only an event for humans, only a visitation.
But because of Jesus, you and I, we now have God's presence in us permanently.
We're not having to go to a mountain to visit God or go to a temple to encounter his presence.
Jesus moved us away from that visitational relationship that Old Covenant people had
to experience, and he moved us into a habitational one with God.
So when I was rereading Exodus 33, I sensed the Lord asked me,
Linds, when was the last time you expected to encounter my goodness in such a way that
you would be overwhelmed?
I had to think about that.
I don't know if I had an answer for him in that moment.
I go back to Moses's encounter, and I'm like, what does this tell me about God's goodness?
It tells us that God's goodness is so powerful, so glorious, that it's beyond our capacity to
contain unless we become a new creation that was designed for the fullness of goodness.
You see, because of Jesus, wonderful, magnificent Jesus, you and I have a divine advantage that
Moses didn't have.
We are new creations in Christ, and our lives are all about living in the fullness of God's glory
and the fullness of his goodness.
Paul writes about God's glory in 2 Corinthians 3, verse 18.
He says, but we all with unveiled face beholding the glory of God are being transformed into the
same image from glory to glory.
For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit.
Paul's saying, in Christ, the veil, the separation between God and man has been removed.
It's been taken away.
And now we get to see the glorious goodness of God, and when we see it, we're being transformed
into the same image, ever increasing from glory to glory.
Did you realize that every day you should be overwhelmed?
And not overwhelmed by circumstances or by crisis, not overwhelmed by shame or feelings
of powerlessness or, you know, hopelessness.
No, we get to be overwhelmed by the goodness of God.
We get to choose what we're going to be overwhelmed by, because goodness is always present.
It's always a possibility.
We're in a joyful process every day of learning how to recognize God's goodness and respond
to it.
And when we see our lives from God's perspective, his goodness
is the most outstanding and obvious thing. It's like you won't even be able
to miss it. The gospel of Jesus, the good news of Jesus, it's so astonishing, it's so
magnificent, it's so overwhelmingly good that when you connect with it it's like
you're going to need your God-given imagination to experience its fullness
and its depths because there's no experience here on earth to compare it
to. There's nothing similar on earth that even comes close and so when
we try to fit God into our standards, our box of human understanding, our
human experience, it just can't be done. When we try to do that, when we
try to fit him in our box, we just get stuck living a frustrated, guarded life
believing that goodness is just an ideal, not a lifestyle, but because of Jesus
you and I can expect even greater encounters than what Moses experienced.
We can be in a continual encounter because goodness is now always present
in us and with us. We have been planted here to be a display of God's glory, to
be a display of his goodness, to live a lifestyle that says on earth as it is in
heaven, to experience every day the same reality on earth that heaven is enjoying.
That is what Jesus came to give us, that is what Jesus died for, to show us what
the kingdom is like. He didn't come to tease us with it, he came to invite us
into it and Jesus said whoever believes will do the same works that I have been
doing and will do even greater things. So let's use our God-given imagination to
explore the depths of his glory and goodness today. God's glory is in his
unending goodness. They are one in the same. God wants you to encounter his
goodness. So what does that mean for you today? What does that mean for a pandemic?
What does that mean for racism? What does that mean for the impossible
circumstances that you may be facing in your personal life today? Here's what it
means. It means that the plans that the enemy sent to take you out don't stand a
chance. The promise of perfect peace is found in Isaiah 26 3. In Hebrew it is
shalom shalom, meaning complete wholeness, nothing missing, nothing broken. This is
who you are in Jesus because of Jesus. You are a living testimony of Jesus's
ultimate win. With every step you take today you're putting Jesus's victory on
display and Satan's defeat on replay.