Address—Don Rule
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Our God, our Father, we ask for grace to put into practice.
Not just read a map.
Not even be able to tell the others the instructions of it.
Let it go.
Walk with thee, Lord Jesus. Start worthy.
The preeminent place now and forever reversals.
Three, 37137 versus 1:00 and 5:00.
OK. And why are you right on the big?
Our God and Father, we ask you for thy blessing on this time together.
The Lord Jesus might have the preeminent, the very first supreme place in our hearts, our lives. We ask our God and Father to bless Thy word to our present need as thou does see it. And so we ask in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, Amen. Amen.
Planning to come down here. One of the important things, for me at least in a trip like this, was to have a map.
I try never to leave home without one if I'm going somewhere.
And so I had a map which I used to identify for me where I was going for, where I was starting from.
And how to get there the route to take and along the way I checked the map.
To see what progress had been made and how much distance there was still to go.
Every one of us in this room is on a spiritual trip.
And we have started on it.
We have reached some places along the way.
None of us have reached all of them.
And we hopefully consult.
And get direction that we need for each step along that way. This afternoon we're going to look at God's map and instructions for seven selected steps along the way or locations that we go to in our journey. The first one begins for all of us in Egypt, and we're going to start in Exodus chapter 12.
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Exodus chapter 12.
And verse one. And the Lord spake unto Moses and Aaron in the land of Egypt, saying, This month shall be unto you the beginning of months. It shall be the first month of the year to you. Speak under the congregation, all the congregation of Israel, saying, In the 10th day of this month shall they shall take to them every man a lamb.
And verse 6 And you shall keep it until the 14th day of the same month. And the whole assembly of the congregation of Israel shall kill it in the evening.
Verse 12 For I will pass through the land of Egypt this night, and will smite all the first born in the land of Egypt, both man and beast, and against all the gods of Egypt will I execute judgment. I am the Lord.
And the blood shall be unto you, for a token upon the houses where ye are. And when I see the blood, I will Passover you.
All of us begin our journey in Egypt, and for purposes of illustration, I'm gonna suggest that some of us are born Egyptians. Some of us are born Israelites. In this sense, some of us were born in worldly families, families of this world having no family relationship or connection with God. Some of us were born in Christian homes. And in that way, from the time we were born, we were in a household that had an outward at least, and hopefully inward.
Relationship with God, but at the same time, as we begin in that relation, that place, we recognize that we're not right with God. And so there's a need for us because God is holy and God judges and we recognize at some point in our life that we were sinners and that we needed.
A savior.
From that judgment, and so the first of the seven places, if you will, is this place in Egypt where there is the Passover lamb, the Lord Jesus Christ, who goes to the cross to die for us.
To save us from God's judgment. When I see the blood, the Lord says I will pass over you. And so our journey begins, and I hope all of us have begun the journey and reality.
And the first place where it has to begin, it can't begin anywhere else is.
To come to the cross of the Lord Jesus Christ and have the.
Price Star Passover sacrificed for us for the salvation of our souls, and when that's done, we're then safe for eternity.
In the first few places we won't spend too much time, so let's go on to the second location.
That we will journey to, if you will, in our lives, and that's found in the 14th chapter.
Of Exodus.
Exodus chapter 14 and verse one. And the Lord spake unto Moses, saying, Speak unto the children of Israel, that they turn and encamp before 5th hire. Hire off between Migdol and the sea over against bail Zephan before it. You shall encamp by the sea.
And.
Uh, verse 13 And Moses said unto the people, Fear you not, stand still and see the salvation of the Lord, which he will show you to you today. For the Egyptians whom you have seen today, you shall see them no more again forever. For the Lord shall fight for you, and ye shall hold your peace.
And the Israelites crossed the Red Sea.
And verse 30. Verse 29. And the children of Israel walked upon dry land in the midst of the sea, and the waters were a wall unto them on their right hand and on their left. Thus the Lord saved Israel that day out of the hand of the Egyptians. And Israel saw the Egyptians dead upon the seashore. And Israel saw that great work which the Lord did upon the Egyptians. And the people feared the Lord, and believed the Lord and his servant Moses.
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Then sang Moses the song, and the children of Israel this song unto the Lord.
Here we find the second location on the map, if you will, that we journey to.
We leave Egypt.
Safe from the judgment of God for our sins to start a journey we know that as we start out that the.
The end point that we are going to.
Is Canaan.
But we need to take a route, and we have directions for it. The Word of God gives us those directions. And here we find that the 2nd place that it's not that we're going to go to, at least this afternoon, is the Red Sea.
And at the Red Sea, it's a picture to us of all that the Lord Jesus Christ is for us through his death. It's where we enjoy his work for us, where we learn certain things that we didn't know as we started the journey. Perhaps we learned that we have been justified, that is, that we are righteous before God and in his eyes now.
And perpetually that we'll always be, from now on, righteous before the eye of God. There is much most of us, and maybe all of us, when we first start the journey, a period of real joy.
Real thankfulness.
And it's like in the first joy of salvation, it could never be otherwise.
And so we we start out and we sing the wonders of God. We feel the burden of sin that has been lifted from us. We recognize at least a little bit that we have enemies and that the Lord Jesus has delivered us from them.
And we?
We rest, we enjoy.
All of us, I hope I don't know but have gotten that far in the journey. And one of the things that the burden on my heart this afternoon is that you have and I have a conscious sense in our souls of where we are on that journey.
And if you have been sheltered by the blood of the Lord Jesus, you know it.
If you have gone to the Red Sea and you have visited it, you know it.
It's a place of peace.
God saw the blood.
In my case and was satisfied, but in my personal journey there was a considerable period of time before I was satisfied, before I was free of doubt as to the reality or the certainty of my own salvation.
But if you will, when I got to the Red Sea and I looked not at myself and my measure of faith, but if the Lord Jesus and his work, God gives peace in that.
And joy. And so we reached that point in our lives. We reached that point and we have peace and we have a joy that results from it. It's a good start. It's a necessary start.
And in fact, from God's perspective, everything is finished there in the work of the cross, but in our own.
Spiritual trip, we learn it gradually, we don't see it all at once. And so God gives it to us in this form so that we can grow, so that we can learn, so that we can understand and develop in the our spiritual life.
I want to stop for the young people here this afternoon and challenge you.
Have you left home with the map?
Do you consult it?
Some here have come here for the first time, and I would dare to use the word if they were the driver, it would be a foolish thing for them to try to make the trip without a guide, without provision by way of a map. And I want to say it's a foolish thing to take this journey without the map and without consulting it.
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It started out all right for me to come here. I've been here multiple times. I might have said, well, I don't really need something. But you know, I hardly, I was an hour, maybe an hour and a half from home and came to a place called Gardiner, Illinois. And I got off 57 and I started down the country roads as I tend to do. And I get down a country Rd. not very many miles and I see a sign and it says close.
And so I had to detour.
I'm thankful that I carry 2 maps at least as relates to Illinois, so my Rand McNally Rd. Atlas wasn't sufficient detail. And so I got out my County Road map of the state that shows every gravel road and every well drink digging road and everything and I consulted it.
And it was necessary. And so it is with the Word of God, our road map, our directions. Sometimes we we get on detours as to our personal histories and we need to go back and search more diligently, more deeply and more detail to get the right directions. In my own case, I looked at the map a little bit too hastily because I was still driving and I had it in my hand. I would have been better if I stopped.
And I found myself down a road and I said, oh, oh, it doesn't look right. And I stopped and I got the map out and I studied it and I had to turn around and go backwards. And in our personal lives, in our journey, it's sometimes that way too. We go down the wrong road and we have to stop and get the map out and we have to study it. And we have to say, oh, and you know, there's no shortcuts on God's Hwy. We had to go back.
And retrace our steps.
And get back on the road where we had gotten off of it and keep on going. And it's going to be true in all of our Christian lives, our journeys. Let's go to a third place now. That's found in the 19th chapter of Exodus.
Exodus chapter 19 and verse one.
In the third month, when the children of Israel were gone forth out of the land of Egypt, the same day came they into the wilderness of Sinai.
And, uh, they were departed from Rapidum and were come to the desert of Sinai and pitched in the wilderness, and there Israel camp before the mount.
Moses goes up into the presence of the Lord in verse seven. And Moses came and called for the elders of the people, and laid before their faces all these words which the Lord commanded him. And all the people answered together and said, All that the Lord has spoken we will do.
And Moses returned the words of the Lord of the people unto the Lord.
We leave.
That place of rest and joy.
And shortly after, they briefly stopped in a place called Elam for further refreshment and enjoyment. And it's often true. But now?
They're three months into the journey and they come to a place that we called Sinai.
They're in the desert now.
And when we leave the Red Sea, we enter into the desert places, the wilderness of our trip. You can't avoid it. That's where you're going to go. That's where we all go. And so they go there.
And we're just going to look at a couple of very significant places.
One of them is Sinai.
And there's a principle in what the people say that is tremendously important for us in our in our lives. We stopped there. I dare say every one of us has gone there without any exceptions in this room. We've been to this place, if we're this far in the journey, and that is.
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Were saved through the work of the Lord Jesus Christ.
He has delivered us from the enemy of our souls.
And its consequences. And we're we're aware of it, we enjoy it, and now we're going to walk with God in our lives.
And we have this same feeling in us because it's true of every human heart, it says.
I can do it.
Tell me God what you want.
And I'll do it.
It's it's the principal that.
I'm gonna live right, and because I live right, God's gonna bless me and be favorable to me.
It's the root of law.
Actually, before we get to Sinai, they traveled a little bit, and as they traveled, they murmured.
But God was gracious to them.
And they murmured some more. They said you brought us out here and there's no food.
They they had to learn to depend on God.
There wasn't anything that they in themselves were able to do to supply food for where they were. They had to say, as it were, Lord, give us today Our Daily Bread.
And the Lord provided it in spite of their complaining about it, in spite of having believed God briefly before as the matter of salvation. Now, when it comes to daily life, they go back to their old way of thinking and feeling.
And.
They don't see.
Is it worth that they're going to earn the money to buy the food, to put it on their table? But but, but God has to somehow do it. And he he does show them. He gives them his grace and he shows it to them and he shows him his great power. But the human heart says, tell me what to do. I'll do it.
And man in spirit puts himself, even though he isn't morally. We aren't today under the law. Man puts himself under the law to God.
And in our journey, we have to go into the wilderness to practically experience the failure of self so that we appreciate and depend upon the grace of God, which is what really will carry us all the way.
Some of us spend years.
In our lives.
Some of us learn it a little bit.
And we forget it and we experience it again, because, you know.
We come under the chastening of the Lord for it.
When they laughed, the Lord was gracious and merciful and showed His grace to them. But when they said to the Lord, all that you tell us we're going to do after that, for the same murmuring came the chastening hand of the Lord.
And we experienced that, we experienced the chastening hand of the Lord in our experience in the journey, because we insist that our natural capacity, our natural character sufficient and we don't depend on the grace of God to sustain us.
And so we have this conflict between law and grace.
We're going to refer as we go along in the time we have to New Testament epistles.
Because some of the New Testament epistles take us and their their situated exactly where these places are in the Old Testament. And in this particular case, the book of Galatians is right where you are in your journey. When there's a conflict between law and grace, it takes you right to Sinai, as it were. As the people in Galatia said, yes, we crossed the Red Sea.
And Galatians takes it up right there at Sinai and gives us God's mind concerning it.
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But if we don't believe it, then we go into the wilderness, be it weeks or months or years, and we wander. We wander.
And we come under God's chasing hands to learn that lesson.
Well, we don't have time to spend much time at these places, so let's go from here to.
Umm, Numbers Chapter 11.
Verse 33 of chapter 10, Numbers 10 and they departed from the mount, so we're leaving Sinai now of the Lord. 3 days journey in the ark of the covenant of the Lord went before them in the three days to search out a resting place for them.
And the cloud of the Lord was upon them that day when they went out of the camp, and it came to pass. When the ark set forward, Moses said, Rise up.
Lord, And let thine enemies be scattered, and let them that hate thee flee before thee. And uh, so they journey. And verse 36 And when it rested, he said, Return, O Lord, unto the many thousands of Israel. Verse Chapter 11 And when the people complained to displeased the Lord, and the Lord heard it, and his anger was kindled in, the fire of the Lord, burnt among them, and consumed them that were in the uttermost parts of the camp. And the people cried unto Moses. And when Moses prayed unto the Lord, the fire was quenched.
And he called the name of that place to to bury a Because the fire of the Lord burned among them, and the mixed multitude that were among them fell a lusting. And the children of Israel also wept again, and said, Who shall give us flesh to eat? We remember the fish which we did eat in Egypt freely, and the cucumbers, and the melons, and the leeks, and the onions, and the garlic. But now our soul is dried away. There's nothing at all beside this manna before our eyes.
They come to this place in their journey.
And they lost.
For Egypt.
I lost Egypt.
Says in Psalm 106 they lost it exceedingly.
We have Innisfresh.
And it lust, it lusts for Egypt.
And said to me one time.
Sees. For a long time I was on the outside looking in.
And now, he said. I'm on the inside looking out.
We find throughout this journey that the heart of the people, over and over and over again, lusted for Egypt.
The flesh lusts.
It's never satisfied. It always wants what Egypt has and presents. Egypt is a whole system of things set up to satisfy the flesh and the heart goes perpetually back to it. If it's not delivered from it, they weren't delivered from it.
At this point in their history.
Where are you in your history?
Where are you on the map?
Are you outside of Egypt now?
Place that you've been taught is not for you. It's not Canaan, it's not where you're going, but it's there nonetheless. And it calls the heart. The heart says I want Egypt.
I want those friends, those things friends have. I want to go to those places that satisfy the lusts of my heart. It burns. It was a place of burning too. Because, you know, before we leave Egypt.
To some extent, we can enjoy those lusts without our consciences bothering us because because we don't have life with God.
And because our our consciences are perhaps not enlightened to the last, but then when God says by the law and when we enter into the desert and we learn by our road map.
It says no, and when you tell the flesh no, it says that's what I want.
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And so here they were in this place in their journey and.
Brethren, is that where you are? Is that where I am?
An experience of my life.
Let's go on.
To, uh, Deuteronomy chapter one.
Deuteronomy chapter one and verse one. These are words which Moses fake unto all Israel on this side Jordan in the wilderness, in the plane over against the Red Sea.
And uh.
Then over in chapter 8.
Verse 2.
And thou shalt remember all the way which the Lord thy God LED thee these 40 years in the wilderness, to humble thee, and to prove thee, and to know what was in thine heart, whether thou wouldst keep his commandments or no. And He humbled thee, and suffered thee to hunger, and fed thee with manna, which thou knewest not, neither did our fathers know.
Verse five And also consider in thine heart, that is, man chasteneth his son, so the Lord chasteneth them.
So the Lord chasing the.
Verse seven. For the Lord thy God bringeth thee into a good land.
Chapter 9.
Verse three Understand therefore this day, that the Lord thy God is he that goeth over before thee as a consuming fire. Verse four Speak not in thine heart after that the Lord thy God hath cast them out from before they saying, For my righteousness, Lord hath brought me in to possess this land.
Verse 5 Not for thy righteousness, or for the uprightness of thine heart, just go in to possess their land.
Back up for just one moment to make a brief comment. The book of Romans is that book which takes us.
From Egypt.
To Sinai.
And.
On to where you have lost.
It's a wilderness book. It's a book you need to go to and study carefully if that's where you are in your spiritual experience in life. To learn that the flesh profits nothing, that the flesh and the spirit are contrary. 1 to another, to go back and see the deliverance of the Lord, the man said in Romans, who shall deliver me? And to go back and understand the Red Sea.
And it's work of deliverance for your soul.
Now here we have them, just about in this 5th place, just about ready to enter the land.
And I just want to comment these people, it doesn't, it tells us in numbers 33, they went to over 40 different places in state.
Our lives are like that. The Lord alone knows what's necessary in this experience of each one of us. And we know we're in the wilderness, but we're not even sure where we are for times. And yet we don't understand why we can't make progress. We seem to stay at the same place in our life. And the Lord took the children of Israel. They didn't understand until they looked back later, but at the time they didn't understand and they went over 40 places.
In 40 years, and maybe we spend 40 years of our lives and we go to different places and we never, and I want to say this carefully, brethren, but some of us may be taken in death or raptured without ever getting out of the wilderness in our personal experience.
You know, you can know the doctrine, but unless you experience it with the Lord and it's living reality, you don't know it as it is in God and the Lord Jesus. I have been to Niagara Falls and I can by personal experience, I know what it's like and I can tell you all about it and you can't I you, you can have my report of it. You can be encouraged enough to want to go there.
But you don't know what it's like unless you've been there. And in our spiritual lives, there are things that are not comprehended, not understood correctly or properly unless you've been there.
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And perhaps some of us live in the wilderness.
And we don't go on.
We don't see and consequently we're losing out.
Tremendous joy to God.
And to our own souls.
Why are you in the wilderness? Why do we go in the wilderness? To humble thee, To prove thee, to see what's in my heart.
They needed the wilderness experience to learn their own hearts because they didn't comprehend. And in fact, as we read here in the 9th chapter, he reminds them again just before they're ready to cross the Jordan River. He says no, don't. Don't say you did it.
Your righteousness did it.
A problem of grace and love. It says no.
You didn't do it, I did it. And in the wilderness we learned the heart of God and we learned our own hearts. We're humbled. We're proven.
And if we try it on our own, it proves our failure.
Let's turn quickly to Ephesians. I mean, I'm sorry to uh.
Joshua, chapter four, I think it is.
MMM.
Joshua.
Chapter 3 Joshua rose early in the morning and removed from **** him, and came to Jordan, he and all the children of Israel, and they lodged there before they passed over.
They passed through the Jordan River. The Ark of the Covenant goes in the middle of the river. Verse 11 Behold the ark of the covenant of the Lord of all the earth passed over before you into the Jordan.
And uh, verse four and chapter 4 verse one, it came to pass when all the people were clean passed over the Jordan. The Lord said spoken to Joshua chapter 5.
And verse three. And Joshua made him sharp knives, and circumcised the children of Israel at the hill of the foreskins.
And verse 5, now all the people that came out were circumcised, but all the people that were born in the wilderness, by the way, as they came forth from Egypt, then they had not circumcised.
And, umm.
Verse nine. And the Lord said unto Joshua, This day have I rolled away the reproach of Egypt from off of you.
The Jordan River presents to us in our.
Doctrinally and also in experience, our death with Christ.
We learned there all that the death of Christ truly means to our souls. It's the same work that we have at the Red Sea and and we have in the Passover. But God brings it to us in a sense of.
I have died with Christ. My old man stays in the wilderness. I take up a new life in the land and I'm a new man.
It's the truth that you have in Colossians and Colossians chapter 2. It speaks of Christ, our circumcision, and then it speaks of us being baptized with Christ. And we learned there that we have truly.
Separated from Egypt.
The lusts of Egypt no longer control the person in the land.
Are you there?
Is this where you are on the map?
Just where I am on the map.
Chapter 3 of Colossians.
He says put to death.
Therefore, your members which are upon earth.
There is a practical guilty, there is a judging of that flesh.
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That is, has no place in the land.
It's learned taste of the bitterness of it in the wilderness, but when the soul truly gets into the land of Canaan, the reproach of Egypt is.
Just rolled away. It's gone.
It's no longer controlling, practically speaking, power. We don't have time to go into it, but I'll just that's what I'm saying, not be understood. We're taking these things as they are in scripture as a journey. But in actual reality, we are in Egypt, we are in the wilderness, we are in the land simultaneously and we experience different aspects of them in our lives. We we, we get a little bit here, a little bit there and we see some of that in the picture given in the word, but.
It's easier to follow it sequentially, and it's often our true experience in that way as well.
They're in the lab.
They recognized the true meaning of the death of the.
Lord Jesus is delivering power from all that.
Was in Egypt. Egypt becomes a dead thing.
To them as far as desires.
I wanna say when they start out and scripture always puts it this way, they always put the hope before a soul.
In Colossians, which just takes you to the edge of the land and crossing through the Jordan, that's its viewpoint. It says, brethren, you're me to be partakers of the inheritance of the Saints in life. That is you're there, you're you're meat, you're ready. And the hope is the Lord Jesus himself is the preeminent one before the soul.
It's Philippians takes the same. You go to Philippians chapter 3 and you have the same point on the map.
In Philippians chapter 3.
Paul says where are the circumcision?
That is, doctrinally, we're at Guildhall.
Brethren.
We worship God by the Spirit. We have no confidence in the flesh. Let's kill golf.
But you know, when it comes to actual personal experience from that point in chapter 3 on for much of the rest of the way, it's I it's as if the apostle Paul is saying to his brethren doctrinally were there.
But practically by experience, I can only speak for myself. And he says I don't count myself to have apprehended. I haven't searched out the whole land. I haven't put my foot on every spot, but at least I'm there And I I've left everything else behind and I'm going to I'm going to with get to know the Lord Jesus.
And a greater, fuller way as a heavenly man.
At this time to briefly talk about the 7th spot and that's Canaan itself.
The book of Ephesians.
Is really the only New Testament book that takes us much into Canaan.
It doesn't start exactly in Egypt. It starts with a man of the councils and purposes of God for us, and it starts with us as debt.
In Colossians we were alive and then we died, and as we went through the Jordan in Romans were looked at as alive. You don't have the resurrection in Romans at all, but in Ephesians you have us start out as dead.
And when Christ is raised from the dead, quickened, we are quickened with him to enter into, if you will, Canaan.
And then in in our Canaan, because it's not the rapture, it's not the end and rest in its present place. We have a land before us.
Of conflict in the 5th, the 6th chapter, we wrestle not against fresh and bought. It's not things down here on earth, but it is. It's the heavenly things. We're our the Lord is the second man out of heaven.
It brings before us the Church. The Church is a heavenly body in union with Christ in the glory and the churches associated with him there.
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Why do we have so many problems and?
Act living out practically the truth of the Church.
Because in our experiences, we're not in Canaan and you can't carry out the heavenly truth unless you're there.
It's not a matter of doctrine. You can look at the map all you want, but unless you go to the place, you don't know what the place really is. You've got to go there.
And to properly carry out the responsibilities of a heavenly people, you've got to be in Canaan, otherwise you're going to try to carry it out in the wilderness or we're still in the world.
And it doesn't work.
It leads to failure, dishonor to the heavenly man and your our association with him.
But.
It's wonderful, brethren.
I don't have these remarks to discourage, but.
Just to say, look at your map.
Do you know where you are?
On it.
Wherever you are on the map, look to the Lord to help you take the next step.
If you're in a place in the wilderness, there's going to be a reason for it. The Lord will give you grace to see that reason. You might not know where you're going to go the next time. It may be somewhere else in the wilderness, but it'll be progress.
And if by the grace of God, you cross the Jordan in the practice of your soul and get into Canaan.
Be like Caleb and Joshua. They brought back a report of the land.
They encouraged their brethren. They had seen the land like the Apostle Paul. He saw the land in its final state in glory, and it totally spoiled him for the earth.
As Paul in the end of the Philippians 3IN that chapter it was I this, I that by his own experience. And then he said, Where unto ye we have obtained? He brings his brethren back in. He said, where? Until we have obtained. Let us walk by the same rule wherever we have. Whatever progress has been made in our souls, let's walk in it. But let's want more. Let's put our eye on the Lord Jesus, the true perfect hope. And can I put it this way?
He's in the land.
Go to him.
Enjoy his company there.
And live with in the conquering of the land.