Moses said to the Lord, “See, you say to me, ‘Bring up this people,’ but you have not let me know whom you will send with me. Yet you have said, ‘I know you by name, and you have also found favor in my sight.’ Now therefore, if I have found favor in your sight, please show me now your ways, that I may know you in order to find favor in your sight. Consider too that this nation is your people.” And he said, “My presence will go with you, and I will give you rest.” And he said to him, “If your presence will not go with me, do not bring us up from here. For how shall it be known that I have found favor in your sight, I and your people? Is it not in your going with us, so that we are distinct, I and your people, from every other people on the face of the earth?”

And the Lord said to Moses, “This very thing that you have spoken I will do, for you have found favor in my sight, and I know you by name.” Moses said, “Please show me your glory.” And he said, “I will make all my goodness pass before you and will proclaim before you my name ‘The Lord.’ And I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will show mercy on whom I will show mercy. But,” he said, “you cannot see my face, for man shall not see me and live.” And the Lord said, “Behold, there is a place by me where you shall stand on the rock, and while my glory passes by I will put you in a cleft of the rock, and I will cover you with my hand until I have passed by. Then I will take away my hand, and you shall see my back, but my face shall not be seen.”—Exodus 33:12–23 

Introduction

We saw in Exodus 33 that prayer is a passionate plea for more of God. Prayerlessness says something profoundly disturbing: We are okay; we do not want more of God. 

We saw Moses plead three times for more of God, and then God says, “I am not just going to give you more, I will give you all.” “I will cause all my goodness to pass before you” (Exodus 33:19). But—there is a “but” in verse 20: “But you will not be able to survive the sight of all of it so I will let you see only part” (the back, the trailing afterglow of his glory).

Then we asked the question: How could any sinner ever see all of God’s glory without being destroyed? The ultimate answer to this prayer is found in the incarnation: “We have seen his glory” (John 1:14). Jesus is not part of God’s glory, but all of it. He is the image of the invisible God, the exact representation of his being, the whole fullness of his deity was pleased to dwell bodily in Christ (Colossians 1:15, 19; Hebrews 1:3).

The Lord made it very clear to me that I am supposed to stay in Exodus 33 this week. There is a mega-ton of application remaining for us to do from this text. I am going to come back and answer the main question I got from the last sermon: You said God wants to give us more of himself, but don’t we often struggle with a sense of God’s absence?

I am going to answer that question, but first I am going to show how the Word and prayer function together and why I believe the Lord wanted me to stay in this text. The Word and prayer are inseparable. We already saw it last week in the way Moses prayed so let us see it again.

Praying: Bringing God’s Promises Into the Present 

Moses said to the Lord, “See, you say to me, ‘Bring up this people,’ but you have not let me know whom you will send with me. Yet you have said, ‘I know you by name, and you have also found favor in my sight.’ Now therefore, if I have found favor in your sight, please show me now your ways, that I may know you in order to find favor in your sight. Consider too that this nation is your people.”—Exodus 12:12–13

We noted last week that Moses brings God’s promises into the present. He basically reminds God about what God has said and then he makes a bold, reasoned request that is built upon it: “You said that you know me by name and I have favor in your sight. If that is true, then you need to show me your ways so I can know you better so I can grow in this favored relationship.” This is pleading the promises of God in prayer.

What we did not address in the sermon is that this is not an isolated truth about prayer. In fact, Gary Millar wrote a book on prayer that traces the theme of prayer from Genesis to Revelation. He looks for the common denominator of what prayer is in the whole Bible. Do you know what his conclusion was? Prayer is “calling on God to come through on his promise.”[1]

Here is where we come to a crucial point of application for the connection between the Word and prayer. You can’t bring the promises of God into the present in prayer if you don’t know them. To bring them into the present you have to know them. There is a promise tailor-made for the moment you are facing. But you have to know the promise or be able to find the promise.

Application: This Should Change How You Read the Bible

But do you read the Bible that way? Are your eyes just passing over various passages filled with verses that contain various details and strings of propositions? There is a different between breezy reading and eager ransacking!

A Bible gathering dust is like buried treasure that never gets discovered. It is a treasure chest of holy riches. Don’t just read. Ransack! Don’t just skate on the surface with breezy Bible reading. Get your scuba gear and dive deep into this ocean of particular promises. (“Wow—I got one for today, and I have some for tomorrow. I don’t know if I can bring all of these up to the surface with me.”) You carry a portable ocean with you that you can dive into by just cracking open the Book.

Application: This Should Change the Way You Talk to Yourself

Once you find promises or memorize them, you need to do something with them. You must become a preacher. I don’t even mean become a preacher to others (though that should be part of the process), but a preacher to yourself! You must preach the promises to yourself if you are going to plead the promises in prayer. We need to bring these things to God with a head of steam behind them. It is not a passive process.

Pleading the promises with God means that we are preaching the promises to ourselves in prayer. Listen to Martyn Lloyd-Jones.

I am more than ever convinced that the trouble with many Christian people is that they do not preach to themselves. We should spend time every day preaching to ourselves, and never more so than when we get on our knees in prayer.[2]

Some of you may even know where that whole idea came from for Lloyd-Jones. It was while he reading Psalm 42. He noticed something odd. The Psalmist is talking to himself. There is an inner voice that is speaking to him. He is troubled and distressed and disquieted. He recognizes that his soul is cast down. This is going to happen. We are not robots. We have emotions. We are going to react to the circumstances around us and we are in a conversation with ourselves. But this is precisely where we need to bring our theology (truth) into the conversation. The Psalmist in 42:5 stops listening to himself and starts preaching to himself:

Why are you cast down, O my soul,
     and why are you in turmoil within me?
Hope in God; for I shall again praise him,
     my salvation and my God.

Who is he talking to? Himself: O my soul! He is commanding himself to “hope in God.” For I shall again praise him, my salvation and my God. He is talking to himself about God. He is not speaking to God; he is speaking of God in third person (him—he is my salvation and my God).

That means that this whole thing is a process, dear friends. It is the fight of faith. It is not automatic, and it is not easy or effortless. David is preaching to himself!

Application: This Should Change the Way You Pray (Speak to God)

Take Psalm 42:1–2 as an example first. The first verse declares his longing for God:

As a deer pants for flowing streams,
     so pants my soul for you, O God.
My soul thirsts for God,
     for the living God.
When shall I come and appear before God?

This sounds so inspiring and moving. This verse gets quoted often for that reason. And so it raises the same question that I heard from four different people last week. Are you saying that we will always have more of God in prayer if we just pray? Your sermon focused on our own sense of guilt or failure keeping us away from God. But my own struggle with prayer is not with the sense of my guilt, but with the sense of God’s absence. I don’t feel his presence in prayer. It does not seem like he is giving me more of himself. You said, “God is more eager to give us himself than we are even to ask for it.” That is not my experience.

Many people feel shame to even talk this way or admit their struggle with the sense of God’s absence. But the Bible talks this way. You often just have to keep reading (Psalm 42:3).

My tears have been my food
     day and night,
while they say to me all the day long,
     “Where is your God?”

One does not often see those verses quoted. “My tears have been my food day and night.” I am being taunted by the question: “Where is your God?” And the Psalmist does not simply start preaching to himself and then everything is better. After he calls himself to hope in God and after he says that he will praise God, he brings two thoughts together that many people struggle to connect. Psalm 42:8 says … 

By day the Lord commands his steadfast love,
     and at night his song is with me,
     a prayer to the God of my life.

But Psalm 42:9 says,

I say to God, my rock:
     “Why have you forgotten me?
Why do I go mourning
     because of the oppression of the enemy?”

You won’t see that verse cross-stitched on a pillow or put in a flowery Instagram arrangement. But why not? This verse is Exhibit A in spiritual honesty. God already knows what is in our heart before a word is on our tongue. Just say it— God already knows—and sometimes you will only be surprising yourself.

John Onwuchekwa tells a story about his turning point in learning to pray.[3]

A few years ago, something both terrible and wonderful happened. Six weeks before planting the church I currently pastor, my 32-year-old brother suddenly died. No explanation. No cause of death. Nothing conclusive in the autopsy. No foul play. Just gone. Gone. For the first time in my life, I felt like all the wind was taken out of me. I couldn’t breathe. If you’ve ever had the wind knocked out of you, then you know just how much it complicates everything. But this tragedy, in God’s grace, was the best thing that could have ever happened for my relationship with the Lord and our church. God used a terrible situation to birth a wonderful thing in me.

I’m crying right now for the first time in months. I thought I had worked through my brother’s death, but my heart is still incredibly tender as I reflect on this. Having the wind knocked out of me, literally and figuratively, was the tool God used to help me understand that prayer is breathing.

My filter vanished as my tongue was unhinged in prayer. I was both shocked and relieved, ashamed and angry, at the words coming out of my mouth. I called God a liar. He seemed cruel and uncaring. Then in the same breath, I asked him to shower me with grace. I felt disdain, anger, hatred. And I told him. I couldn’t help but tell him. It all just kept coming out. Pain felt like a truth serum that forced me to confess all of my unworthy thoughts of him. And he took it. Every ounce of it. He corrected my negative view, not with words of rebuke but with words of consolation.

While I was drowning in sorrow, he emptied my oxygen tank to force me to come up for air. When I came up to him, I wasn’t met with the cold shoulder I deserved, but with open arms. Whatever I was doing before wasn’t praying. It was formal, cold, sterile, rehearsed, and rote. For the first time in my life, I felt like I knew what it was to pray, to commune with God. When I offered the cares of my heart—every one of them—I met a God who wasn’t as sacred to take those cares on as I was to share them.

That is why we need to read and memorize the whole Psalm, not just random promises that we pull out of context because they sound pleasant. We need spiritual honesty, and we need the promises. And we need to bring ourselves and the promises into his presence. We bring our hurts and hopes and questions and doubts. Don’t you see the psalmist bringing his pain and the promises into God’s presence? 

But perhaps someone is thinking at this moment, “You know, you are talking a lot about the Psalms and Martyn Lloyd-Jones and John Onwucheckwa, and you are no longer in Exodus. Do we really see this same dynamic of struggle and process there?”

Coming Full Circle Back to Exodus

O my, “yes!”

Exodus 3–32

Moses certainly fits this pattern. Moses does not start out as the Moses we see in Exodus 33. I want to summarize the context of Exodus 3–32. I think it will become pretty clear pretty quickly why I am doing this survey.

In Exodus 3, God reveals himself to Moses at the burning bush. God Almighty is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—he has come to fulfill the promises he spoke to them. 

If God reveals himself as “I Am.” In Exodus 3, Moses defines himself as “I am not” in Exodus 4. Listen to Moses response to all that God is. He tells God that it does not really matter all that God is—it is all undone by all that Moses is not. 

But Moses said to the Lord, “Oh, my Lord, I am not eloquent, either in the past or since you have spoken to your servant, but I am slow of speech and of tongue.”

Then the Lord said to him, “Who has made man's mouth? Who makes him mute, or deaf, or seeing, or blind? Is it not I, the Lord? Now therefore go, and I will be with your mouth and teach you what you shall speak.” 

But he said, “Oh, my Lord, please send someone else.” Then the anger of the Lord was kindled against Moses and he said, “Is there not Aaron, your brother, the Levite? I know that he can speak well. Behold, he is coming out to meet you, and when he sees you, he will be glad in his heart. You shall speak to him and put the words in his mouth, and I will be with your mouth and with his mouth and will teach you both what to do. He shall speak for you to the people, and he shall be your mouth, and you shall be as God to him. And take in your hand this staff, with which you shall do the signs.”—Exodus 4:10–17

To make a long story short, this pattern follows at first: God would speak to Moses and then Moses would speak to Aaron and Aaron would speak for Moses—“he shall be your mouth” (Exodus 4:16, 7:1–12). 

They speak to Pharaoh in Exodus 5 and it does not go well. Pharaoh concludes that the people need to make the same amount of bricks as before but now they will have to gather their own straw. They cannot do it.

And the foremen of the people of Israel, whom Pharaoh’s taskmasters had set over them, were beaten.—Exodus 5:14

So the foremen blamed Aaron and Moses and ask the Lord to judge them because they have made them stink in Pharaoh’s sight. And Moses turned and blamed the Lord.

Then Moses turned to the Lord and said, “O Lord, why have you done evil to this people? Why did you ever send me? For since I came to Pharaoh to speak in your name, he has done evil to this people, and you have not delivered your people at all.”—Exodus 5:22–23

In Exodus 6, God tells Moses all that He is about to do to Pharaoh and how he is going to set his people free (Exodus 6:1–8). The Israelites don’t believe Moses (6:9). Moses keeps using his argument. The people of Israel are not even listening to him, so why would Pharaoh “for I am of uncircumcised lips” (6:10–12).

But an interesting thing happens if you keep reading. Moses begins to speak more and more without needing to go through Aaron. It is not Aaron doing things with his staff. It is Moses. It is Moses speaking to Pharaoh and speaking to the people. And then Aaron goes and does one of the dumbest things in all Scripture complete with one of the lamest excuses in all of Scripture. Compare two texts: Exodus 32:2–4 and 32:21–24.

So Aaron said to them, “Take off the rings of gold that are in the ears of your wives, your sons, and your daughters, and bring them to me.” So all the people took off the rings of gold that were in their ears and brought them to Aaron. And he received the gold from their hand and fashioned it with a graving tool and made a golden calf. And they said, “These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!”—Exodus 32:2–4 

 And Moses said to Aaron, “What did this people do to you that you have brought such a great sin upon them?” And Aaron said, “Let not the anger of my lord burn hot. You know the people, that they are set on evil. For they said to me, ‘Make us gods who shall go before us. As for this Moses, the man who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him.’ So I said to them, ‘Let any who have gold take it off.’ So they gave it to me, and I threw it into the fire, and out came this calf.”—Exodus 32:21–24.

Now you come back to Moses in Exodus 32–33. His closest partner in ministry has been the leader of the pack of this rebellion. But Moses knows what to do. He is not timid. He knows how to go right to God.

This is exactly like what my dad used to say to me when we would come to some difficult trial. I would be, “Oh no, what are we going to do?” My dad would often look at me calmly and say, “Jason, this is not my first rodeo.” Meaning, this is not my first go-round facing this. That is just something called life experience. And if you have a relationship with God through his word and prayer, and you walk with him through all the highs and lows—it creates a steadfastness.

This wrestling with God in prayer can only through the gospel because the gospel is the answer to our guilt and our struggle with a sense of God’s absence.

Conclusion: The Gospel, Guilt/Abandonment, the Promises, and Prayer

1. How does the gospel address guilt/abandonment?

So why focus on our guilt keeping us away from God’s presence? Answer: because that is what the text did. The guilt of the people in Exodus 32 was the presenting problem—the reason why God was not going to give his presence to the people. His presence meant that there would be a collision between his holiness and their sin, and they would be destroyed.

So Moses passionately interceded for the people of God. He pleaded for the presence of God to return to the people of God. God withdrew his presence because he said that there is going to be an inevitable collision between the holiness of God and the sin of man. Moses is pleading for God’s presence in the midst of God’s people—but how can that happen if God is holy and the people are sinful? God gives the answer when he reveals himself in Exodus 34. 

That is the ultimate fulfillment of both aspects of Exodus 34:6–7 …

The Lord passed before him and proclaimed, “The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty…

Observe the two parts: (1) forgiving transgression, but (2) by no means clearing the guilty. He is a forgiving God and a just God. But how do the two fit together? How can he forgive the guilty without clearing the guilty? He sends Jesus to pay for their guilt. Jesus cries on the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46). He experienced the full wrath of God as the Father turns his face away from his Son, and the sin of the world is placed upon him and the wrath of God falls upon him. 

Judgment will come for everyone, and there are two potential places for it: hell or the cross. God’s absolute holiness means that every sin must be judged and will be judged. It will be paid for by us in hell, or it will be paid for by Christ as our Substitute on the cross in our place.

Jesus was forsaken in our place so that we will never be. We may sense that God feels nearer at certain times or further at certain times, but all the time he is with us—he will never leave us or forsake us. That is a blood-bought promise.

2. How does the gospel relate to the promises of God?

Not only is that promise (God will never abandon his people) blood-bought, all the promises are blood bought. All the promises are “yes” in Christ.

For all the promises of God find their Yes in him. That is why it is through him that we utter our Amen to God for his glory.—2 Corinthians 1:20

3. How does the gospel relate to prayer?

The doctrine of the atonement doesn’t just make prayer understandable, it makes prayer possible. No one could come into God’s presence in prayer without the doctrine of the atonement. You cannot go into the presence of God apart from the blood of Jesus. 

Hebrews chapters 4 and 10 exhort the believer to come boldly to the throne of grace based on confidence in Christ and his atoning work.

Because we have a great high priest who can sympathize with us in our weakness…

Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.—Hebrews 4:16

Therefore, brothers, since we have confidence to enter the holy places by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain, that is, through his flesh, and since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water.—Hebrews10:19–22

The exhortation to come boldly is the result of the argument of the atonement. Therefore, one does not try to whip up oneself into a state of boldness or confidence based on spiritual performance. It is based on what Christ has done, not what we have done or left undone. 
____________

[1] Gary Millar, Calling on the Name of the Lord: A Biblical Theology of Prayer (InterVarsity Press: 2016), p. 27

[2] Martyn Lloyd-Jones, The Unsearchable Riches of Christ: An Exposition of Ephesians 3 (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1998), p. 102

[3] John Onwuchekwa, Prayer: How Praying Together Shapes the Church (Wheaton: Crossway, 2018), pp. 21–22

Sermon Discussion Questions

Main Point: Prayer brings God’s promises into the present.

Discussion Questions

• How do verses 12–13 demonstrate that prayer brings the promises of God into the present?
• How does this truth change the way we read the Bible?
• How does this truth change the way we talk to ourselves?
• How does this truth change the way we pray?
• Do God’s people ever feel a sense of God’s absence? What should you do when that happens?

Application Questions

• What are some next steps that you need to take in your prayer life?
• Describe where you are at in your journey of prayer and learning to walk with God. What parts of the sermon spoke to where you are? How can people come alongside of you today and pray with you in a 2 Corinthians 1:11 way? “You also must help us by prayer, so that many will give thanks on our behalf for the blessing granted us through the prayers of many” (2 Corinthians 1:11).
• How can the gospel and the word of God become a more central part of your prayer life in 2019?

Prayer Focus
Pray for a grace to bring yourself (all your hurts, joys, doubts, fears) and God’s promises into God’s presence in prayer.