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Lets introduce ourselves. Name, how old, grade, and what is your dream home? (Discuss)
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We can all say that we have an idea of where we’d like to live, what we’d like it to look like, or even who would be living with us. But how many of us have thought about what it looks like to abide with God.
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How does abiding with God look like to you?
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Is it to live like a nun or priest spending countless hours praying and reciting the Word of God? Maybe it’s getting up early in the morning like Pastor to pray and read and spend time with God? Or maybe it’s living your life normally but trying to do so according to God’s will or commandments?
Jesus showed us a great example of what it means to abide with God. Jesus obviously had intimate knowledge of being one with His Father. He compares it to something a lot of us consider simple. To love.
To abide with God is to abide in His love. To believe in Jesus Christ as our Lord is not a one time prayer kind of thing. That is not the faith we’ve been called to have. We’ve been called to abide in Christ. Not just believe in Him but live with Him. As He abides in the father, and He and the Father are One.
Paul reminds us later in the bible that Christ dwells in our hearts through faith, but that it still takes more effort to grasp Christ’s love so that we might be filled by the fullness of God.
That sounds like abiding to me, but why is Paul praying that we might be rooted and established in this Love? Why is it necessary for us to grasp this love that God has for us?
When we go back to Exodus we see Moses, a simple old man who had a dark past. But yet he is somehow the one that God chooses to meet with. And we see it in the passage that Moses was meeting face to face with God. So obviously Moses and God were abiding together in some capacity.
But when God threatens to not go with the Israelites because of their stubbornness Moses panics. He begs God. Why would Moses worry about God not going with them?
It’s because Moses up till that point had been relying on God to deal with the unruly Israelites. From the moment that God spoke to Moses in the burning bush to this point in the passage, Moses has spent everyday in the presence of God. You can see it in the passage. It starts in Exodus 3 and there is not a single moment where Moses is without God.
In fact before every plague, before the passover, before every step and word that Moses did God was there commanding him. Not a single moment until now in Exodus 33 did God leave Moses.
Moses knew that even if God completed the work He began that it meant nothing if God Himself didn’t accompany them.