Rhythms of redemption given to us in the scriptures will help us form healthy Christian habits. Could 2022 be the year you finally get in tune and in step?
Rhythms Of Redemption
What you and I need is objective truth that intervenes in our lives, that cuts through our subjectivity repeatedly
“As people we are wired to have rhythms in our lives daily, weekly, monthly, annually. And when rhythms break down people break down. Now the Bible is very cognisant of this fact, the Bible is very aware of how human beings work given that is written by God. And God made us and so you’ll notice that the scripture is actually very pro developing good spiritual rhythms.”
Topics & Timestamps
00:00 – Exodus 13
03:06 – Rhythms of redemption
08:19 – A true sign
12:26 – The threat of subjectivity to spirituality
19:40 – A true shield
24:58 – A true story
32:14 – Keeping Jesus centre of your life
Top Quotes: Rhythms Of Redemption // Building Healthy Christian Habits
“What you and I need is objective truth that intervenes in our lives, that cuts through our subjectivity repeatedly.”
“Friends, subjective you and I will not survive in our faith without rhythms of redemption that the Bible calls us to”
“Nothing has a more profound effect on the faith of children than how parents engage in rhythms of redemption at home and church.”
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Through Christ Alone – Solus Christus
God’s Great Redemptive Work across History
Let It Out: Why Confessing Your Sin Is Critical
Text: Exodus 13: 1-16
Date preached: 21 November 2021
Location: Hope City Presbyterian Church, Cape Town, South Africa
Transcript
Exodus 13:1-16
If you’ve got a bible you can turn to exodus 13, exodus 13. I’m going to read from verse 1 through to verse 16. Listen to these words. The Lord said to Moses consecrate to me every firstborn male the first offspring of every womb among the Israelites belongs to me whether human or animal. Then Moses said to the people commemorate this day the day you came out of Egypt out of the land of slavery because the Lord brought you out of it with a mighty hand. Eat nothing containing yeast today in the month of Aviv you are leaving. When the Lord brings you out into the land of the Canaanites the Hittites Amorites Hivites and Jebusites the land he swore to your ancestors to give you a land flowing with milk and honey you are to observe this ceremony in this month. For seven days you’re to eat bread made without yeast and on the seventh day hold a festival to the Lord. Eat unleavened bread during those seven days nothing with yeast in it is to be seen among you nor shall any yeast be seen anywhere within your borders. On that day tell your son I do this because of what the Lord did for me when I came out of Egypt. This observance will be for you like a sign on your hand and a reminder on your forehead that this law of the Lord is to be on your lips for the Lord brought you out of Egypt with his mighty hand. You must keep this ordinance at the appointed time year after year after the Lord brings you into the land of the Canaanites and gives it to you as he promised on oath to you and your ancestors you are to give over to the Lord the firstborn offspring of every womb. All the firstborn males of your livestock belong to the Lord redeem with a lamb every firstborn donkey but if you do not redeem it break its neck. Redeem every firstborn among your sons. In the days to come when your son asks you what does this mean say to him with a mighty hand the Lord brought us out of Egypt out of the land of slavery when pharaoh stubbornly refused to let us go the Lord killed the firstborn of both people and animals in Egypt this is why I sacrifice to the Lord the first male offspring of every womb and redeem each of my firstborn sons. And it will be like a sign on your hand and a symbol on your forehead that the Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand this is the word of the Lord.
Let’s ask God’s help. Father we need your help to understand the bible because this is not just an ancient history textbook it is the living word of God and so we need the living spirit of God to make the truth applicable to our hearts. So, meet with us this morning helps us teach us show us righteousness show us truth show us the gospel show us Jesus Christ and let us be changed by what we see, and we ask us all in Jesus holy name amen.
Rhythms Of Redemption
So, we’re picking up our study in the book of exodus we’ve got two more weeks in the book of exodus and then we actually get into the season of advent and so we’ll do four sermons around that in the book of ruth and then come back to exodus in the new year. Now I want to start um this morning this way by saying those of you know me know that I like to sit and read interesting studies about different things going on in the world. And I was reading a study that came out of china recently looking at social disruption of daily rhythms as a result of the pandemic and how that has led to higher levels of anxiety and depression in the general community. Now the basic, I can’t bore you with all the details because I don’t even understand all the details, but the basic conclusion of the study was that with people who did experience large disruption to their rhythms there was as much as a 24% increase in depression and anxiety. And these sorts of findings are echoed throughout the mental health literature at the moment around the world and in lots of publications. The disruption of rhythms is really, really bad news for us. It’s bad news for you and bad news for me. That’s true on a social level it’s also very much true on a spiritual and religious level.
As people we are wired, I think to have rhythms in our lives daily, weekly, monthly, annually. And when rhythms break down people break down. Now the bible is very cognizant of this fact the bible is very aware of how human beings work given that is written by God and God made us and so you’ll notice that the scripture is actually very pro developing good spiritual rhythm. That’s a big part of this section of the book of exodus. So, if you cast your mind back to a number of weeks ago, we looked at the Passover and we looked at the significance of the Passover what it means. That the Passover really is a very vivid picture of our redemption. The lamb stands as the ransom payment in the place of the life of the firstborn son and we saw that how the Passover points forward to our ultimate redemption in Jesus Christ our Passover lamb who ransoms us from sin and death through his own substitutionary death. So, Passover is very much a picture of redemption.
God institutes this Passover meal now around this event as a meal of remembrance so that once a year the people will sit together, they’ll eat some food, and they’ll reflect back on that great redemption. It’s an annual rhythm of redemption. But that’s not all God institutes here. He also institutes this thing called the feast of unleavened bread. Now maybe you’re confused like me because I read chapter 12 in chapter 13 and it’s like where is Passover and where is the feast of unleavened bread? Are they one in the same thing or they’re two different things? And it gets very confusing.
So, I had to do a lot of reading and researching to try and pull it apart, but it basically works like this – On the night of the 14th day of the first month of the Jewish calendar there’s a Passover meal okay to symbolize that Passover night then the next day the feast of unleavened bread starts, and it runs for seven days where they eat food without any yeast in the bread. Like Passover the feast of unleavened bread is also a reminder for the people of their redemption. It pictures how they had to kind of hightail out of Egypt so far so quickly that they didn’t get the chance to put yeast in the bread and so they had to take flat bread with them instead. It’s an annual seven-day rhythm of redemption built into the life of Israel.
Now that’s the feast that’s in view that we just read about you in chapter 13 but then there you would have noticed there’s an extra element that’s added to these rituals of redemption and that is the consecration of the firstborn. Not only are Israel supposed to observe and celebrate the Passover meal, not only do they then go into a week of eating bread without yeast, but they’re also then commanded somewhere in the context of that to consecrate or set apart their firstborn sons in remembrance of their redemption. So really if you look at chapter 12 and chapter 13 where we are today and you step back, you see there’s this picture of three rituals or rhythms of redemption that God institutes among his people. Passover, The Feast of Unleavened Bread, and the consecration of the firstborn. They are all to be regular occurrences in the life of Israel to remind them of their great redemption.
So, look at verse 10. You must keep this ordinance at the appointed time year after year. And so, this morning that’s what I want to talk about. I want to talk about rhythms of redemption. What do these ancient rhythms of redemption tell us about how we structure our own spiritual and religious lives today? Three things I want you to see. If you have rhythms of redemption in your life you have three things. You have, number one, a true sign. You have number two, a true shield. And number three you have a true story. A true sign, a true shield, and a true story.
A True Sign
Here’s the first one, a true sign. Look down at verse 9. So, verse 9 goes like this- this observance will be for you like a sign on your hand and a reminder on your forehead that this law of the Lord is to be on your lips for the Lord brought you out of Egypt with his mighty hand. Now jump down to verse 16 and it says, and it will be like a sign on your hand and a symbol on your forehead that the Lord brought us out of Egypt with his mighty hand. So after both an explanation of the consecration of the firstborn and an explanation of the feast of unleavened bread Moses turns to the people and says these things are a sign for you, these things are a sign for you. That is, they’re supposed to alert you to some sort of spiritual truth, a spiritual reality. Now in the bible there are lots of visible signs and what visible signs do in the context of the bible is they operate as what we might call objective truth tellers. They communicate truths to us about God about us about this world.
Now think for example about some of the more obvious signs that are instituted like the sign of circumcision which we looked at a couple of weeks ago. It’s an outward physical sign of God’s redemption. It’s his redemption promise to cut off and set a part of people for himself. Think about in the New Testament think about baptism the sign of baptism it’s an outward physical sign of what God does for us in the gospel. He washes us clean he takes away our sin. signs in the bible, and you might not know this, but signs in the bible are always objective. And what I mean by that is that the signs do not actually signify our subjective responses to God they signify God’s objective work, and his objective promises on our behalf. And so, the signs of the bible then our objective truth tellers. Passover the feast of unleavened bread, the consecration of the firstborn, they’re all objective signs that communicate the truth to us that God redeems. That’s what he does. God redeems, he is mighty to save.
Now that is so very important to us. We need objective signs in our lives. We need objective science because listen we are such subjective people. We are very subjective people. Our mood our circumstances our behaviour the weather the sports results make us subjective messes most of the time. I’ll give you a very silly illustration example of this. When I was um growing up in Durban, in our house we had a view of the sea from my bedroom and in the corner of our property was this palm tree with all these different branches coming up and facing in different directions. Now most of you know that I’m a surfer and so as a surfer I wake up every morning and the very first thing I do every morning is that open my curtain I look out the window to see which way the leaves of the palm tree are bending to tell which way the wind is blowing because wind is absolutely critical for surfing. Now in Durban there are two predominant winds there’s a northeaster that comes down the coast and there’s a southwester that comes up the coast. The northeaster is the horrible wind, it makes horrible messy conditions, and it brings those nasty little things called blue bottles to damage you. The southwester is the right wind. It’s this clean beautiful offshore that comes up and makes really nice conditions for surfing. And so, every single morning I wake up and I open my curtain and I look outside, and I say which way are the leaves bending is it a north easter is it the southwester? Whenever it was a northeaster, my entire mood would drop for the day. I’d be just like a little bit more grumpy on northeaster days than on southwester days and it actually had nothing to do whether I was going to surf or not on that day. Just knowing that the waves were bad made me a little bit more irritable a little bit more grumpy.
The Threat Of Subjectivity To Spirituality
We are very subjective people, incredibly subjective people. Swayed by everything around us swayed by every wind around us. And that’s a real problem for spirituality. It’s a big problem for spirituality because it means that our sense of God’s presence our sense of God’s love and his comfort goes up and down depending on a whole host of factors, internal and external. When your work is under strain when your job is under threat when you’re feeling family pressures at home or you’re struggling with bouts of depression and anxiety, there are all sorts of things that start to run through your head as those different things are going on. Do you really care about me? God do you really love me? I can’t sense your presence what’s going on? When you struggle with sin, and you consistently keep messing up in the same area then you start wondering God have you really saved me? Am I really a child of God? Am I really his has he really forgiven me?
What you and I need is objective truth that intervenes in our lives, that cuts through our subjectivity repeatedly.
What subjective you and I need is objective truth that intervenes in our lives that cuts through the subjectivity repeatedly. We need rhythms in our lives that arrest our subjective hearts that cut through the lies that we’re tempted to believe about ourselves and about God. When your heart comes and it says well maybe God doesn’t love me maybe God doesn’t care about me maybe he hasn’t forgiven me, you need rhythms that come into your life and stop you and say no that is not right that is not true. This is who God truly is this is what the gospel truly is these are his good intentions to you end of story. You need the weekly rhythm of worship for example where we come together, and we sing the object of truths of the gospel we pray the objective truths of the gospel we preach the object of truths of the gospel we eat the bread, and we drink the wine the object of signs of the gospel. The weekly rhythm of Lord’s Day worship is it’s almost like a cold ice-cold shower and a person who’s woken up in the morning all groggy and I can’t even tell what day of the week it is. That shower just strips away the fog and there’s clarity, okay this is what’s really going on.
Friends, subjective you and I will not survive in our faith without rhythms of redemption that the bible calls us to and there are a bunch of them in the New Testament for us. Things like baptism and communion the obvious ones. Things like Lord’s Day worship things like consistent private prayer and bible reading. There’s a growing trend among professing Christians and the pandemic has placed this trend on steroids, and that’s an understatement, but there’s a trend for Christians to create kind of very organic unstructured flexible versions of the faith where the rhythms of redemption become optional extras based on how you feel. So maybe this Sunday I just don’t feel like dealing with people I’m tired I’ve had a long week so I’m just going to watch a sermon online that’s what I’m going to do. In fact, why even do it on Sunday you know because I can listen to my favourite internet preacher on a podcast on the way to work in the morning in the middle of the week so I can kill two birds with one stone why do it on Sunday? Do we really have to gather on worship on Sunday every Sunday? Can’t we just be a bit more flexible around that? Friends I want to be deathly serious with you, I think that sort of self-designed spirituality that flexes around your own subjective experiences and desires week to week will actually kill your faith in the long term. as it might feel convenient, but it will kill your faith in the long term. I get it, I get it that there are thousands of different preachers online that are far more engaging insightful and uplifting than little old me, I get that. There is Christian worship music that you can download that will blow the socks off of what we do here on a Sunday morning. It’s all flexible it’s available to you in whatever format that you want it when you want it when it best fits in with your schedule and your life plans.
Friends, subjective you and I will not survive in our faith without rhythms of redemption that the bible calls us to
But here’s the thing what happens when you lose your job? What happens when your closest friend betrays you? What happens when you’re desperately sad and lonely? what happens when you feel like God has abandoned you? What happens when you’re angry with God for how things are turning out in your life? Are you then going to sign on to your favourite preacher’s podcast? You’re going to have the internal will to drive yourself to those sorts of things in that moment? Who or what is going to motivate and drive you back to the objective truth of the gospel? The objective promises of God.
But if you have the redemptive rhythm of Lord’s Day worship locked into your weekly rhythm in the same way brushing your teeth should be locked into your daily rhythm then you have access to something very powerful very transformative. You have objective truth repeatedly breaking into your subjective world repeatedly telling you that God is God and he’s got this. You might not feel like it now, but God has got this. How can you know for sure well because every single Sunday like clockwork you eat that bread, and you drink that wine, and you remember that Christ spilt his very blood to redeem you? So how can you possibly then doubt that he’s not watching over your every other moment.
I’ve noticed a very peculiar thing with Christians when it comes to the communion table sometimes is we put out the communion table and then I know this person who’s been going to church for a long time doesn’t take it. And I’m like why are you not taking? I didn’t feel pretty close to God, so I didn’t take it. That’s exactly the point of communion, that he will come in and say I know you feel far from me I know you feel like I’m distant from you, I know this stuff is going on in your life but here is the object of truth and the object of reality of what I’ve done for you in Jesus Christ. Here is the blood here is the broken body feast of it and know that I am totally and utterly committed to you. The only reason you shouldn’t partake in communion is if you’re not a Christian or you have something against a brother or sister in the Lord those are the only biblical reasons. Every other time you should get up and take communion so that that object of truth arrests you in your unbelief in your confusion and says this is who God is and this is what he’s done for you in the gospel. God has given us redemptive rhythms to stand as objective signs to his very good gospel promises to us, you dismiss them at your spiritual and emotional peril.
A True Shield
Secondly if you have redemptive rhythms in your life then you have a true shield. So, look down at verse four. Verse four says today in the month of Aviv you are leaving when the Lord brings you into the land of the Canaanites the Hittites the Amorites the hevats and the Jebusites, the land he swore to your ancestors to give you a land flowing with milk and honey, you are to observe this ceremony in this month. Now skip down to verse 11. After the Lord brings you into the land of the Canaanites and gives it to you as he promised on oath to you and your ancestors you are to give over to the Lord the first offspring of every womb. Twice it is stressed that Israel are to practice these rhythms of redemption when they get into the land, when they get into the land of the Canaanites and all the other parasites all the other people groups the people groups… Nobody laughed at that one jeepers tough crowd. All the other people groups who don’t worship God. All the other people groups who don’t worship God. people groups of unbelief that’s who they are.
Not only are these rhythms of redemption there to help you on a personal spiritual level to stay anchored in the objective truths of God but they are there to protect you and to shield you against the unbelief that is around you. Friends, I don’t think I need to tell you this, but we are very easily, very easily shaped by the culture around us.
I know we like to all think that we are like these super smart autonomous beings who make up our own minds about the world through a combination of kind of pure rationalism and reason but that is actually nonsense. You know that and I know that. We are all very communally shaped beings communally shaped by the culture and the influences of the communities around us. And we swim in a very, very secular culture right now here in the city of Cape Town. By God’s common grace there are a great many things that are beautiful in the secular culture around us things we can celebrate things that we can enjoy. And so, we are not Amish or monastic whereby we just kind of withdraw from the culture into this Christian holy huddle we all hang out and burn Harry Potter books together we’re not that kind of a church. But we still do recognize that at the heart of the secular culture is a world view that says Jesus isn’t Lord, Jesus isn’t king. At its heart is still a culture of unbelief and so to the extent that we’re shaped by it is still a threat to belief in the God of the bible.
Think about this, there are so many complex emotionally charged conversations going on the culture right now. Around things like gender, sex, justice, money, power, politics. How do you know if your thinking around those complex issues is being shaped more by God or more by the prevailing culture? Because we live in this culture and we must live in this culture, but because we live in the land of the Canaanites and the Hittites and the Amorites and the heavens and the Jebusites, because we live in that land we are being massively influenced by the Canaanites and the Hittites and the Amorites and the Hivites and the Jebusites. And without regular consistent rhythms of redemption that secular influence will be total in its shaping how we think about ourselves and about this world. And just well that’s what’s going to happen. The practice of regular consistent rhythms of redemption shields us against the negative impact of the secular culture.
Friends in 15 plus years of pastoral ministry when I observe people beginning to adopt unbiblical views on key issues or embrace unbiblical behaviours or patterns, it almost always comes hand in hand with patchy attendance and worship or patchy engagement with spiritual disciplines like consistent bible reading and prayer. Now you say well that’s my anecdotal evidence but there’s actually a lot of hard social science data to back this up. Ao try this one on people who attend worship services more frequently are less likely to divorce, less likely to engage in sex outside of marriage, more likely to be generous with their finances, giving away actually far more of their wealth to the poor or to charities or to NGOs than their secular counterparts or even other Christians who attend worship infrequently. There’s a mountain of data on this. The rhythms of redemption are a shield and if you lower your shield the secular arrows get in. they pierce right through and one day you’re going to wake up and you’re going to realize that you don’t have a faith that makes a substantial difference to your life or to the lives of others. One day you’re going to realize there’s no observable difference between you and the Canaanites. You need consistent rhythms of redemption in your life to shield you against unbelief.
A True Story
Now lastly if you have rhythms of redemption then you have a true story to tell, you have a true story to pass on. So go back to verse four and this time. we’re going to read all the way to verse 8 but listen to how the section ends. So, Moses says today in the month of Aviv you are leaving when the Lord brings you into the land of the Canaanites Amorites and Jebusites the land he swore to your ancestors to give you a land flowing with milk and honey, you are to observe this ceremony in this month. For seven days eat bread made with the easter on the seventh day hold a festival to the Lord eat unleavened bread during those seven days nothing with the eastern it is to be seen among you nor shall any yeast be seen anywhere within your borders. Now listen here, on that day tell your son I do this because of what the Lord did for me when I came out of Egypt. Further down verse 14. Same thing, in days to come when your son asks you what does this mean say to him with a mighty hand the Lord brought us out of Egypt out of the land of slavery. Why are the Israelites supposed to practice these rituals? To observe these feasts these rhythms of redemption. Is to pass the story of God’s redemption on to the next generation. Friends without us committing to regular consistent rhythms of redemption we will not disciple the next generation. do you want to know what keeps your kids in church? I’m glad there are lots of parents here this morning because I don’t often preach on parenting because I think I’m a bit of a sucky parent but here we go. Do you want to know what keeps your kids in church? What keeps your kids in the faith? It is not a hip youth ministry with a cool youth pastor. It is not a fantastic children’s program on Sunday mornings or a pumping bible class or something on a Friday night. Humanly speaking nothing, and we again actually have widespread statistical evidence of this, nothing has a bigger more profound effect on the faith of children than how their parents engage in rhythms of redemption at home and in the church. Absolutely nothing, it’s not even close.
What keeps your kids in the faith is them seeing you, seeing you going Sunday after Sunday, lifting up your voice in song, bowing your head in prayer, listening attentively to the word of God being preached, confessing your sins with earnestness, eating the bread drinking the wine with deep conviction. And then when they say mommy daddy why do we do this every single Sunday? You reply with these words with the mighty hand the Lord brought us out of Egypt out of the land of slavery. With a mighty hand through the blood of Jesus the Lord brought us out of the slavery of sin and death. You want your kids to believe in the gospel? The true story of the gospel? The best thing that you can do is repeatedly engage in the rhythms of redemption that tell them that true story of the gospel over and over and over and over and over again. For some for some bizarre reason people in evangelical churches seem to think that repetition is bad for faith, that it makes faith and church stale and so we have to kind of keep innovating we have to keep everything fresh we have to keep everything novel and yet the funny thing is that outside of the church we all believe that practice makes perfect so then why wouldn’t that be the same for faith?
James k Smith is a Christian philosopher in North America a very smart guy he writes a lot about Christian formation, and he says this – He says, “Quite simply there is no formation without repetition there is no habituation without being immersed in a practice over and over again. So, it is precisely our allergy to repetition in worship that has undercut the counter formative power of Christian worship because all kinds of secular liturgies shamelessly affirmed the good of repetition. We’ve let the devil so to speak have all the repetition and we as liturgical animals are only too happy to find our rhythms in such repetition. Unless Christian worship eschews the cult of novelty and embraces the good of faithful repetition, we will constantly be ceding habituation to secular liturgies.” You think bringing your children week after week to this repetitive ritual that we call church is going to make dull their faith, make them bored. I want to tell you that I think you are deeply mistaken. A family committed to the regular rhythms of redemption is far more powerful in the preservation of the faith than any youth or children’s ministry ever will be.
And maybe you’re sitting here this morning and you’re not a parent and you’re thinking well how does this apply to me? Well, I want to tell you might not be apparent in the strict biological sense of the word, but we are all spiritual family here according to the bible. And so, the children in this church are your spiritual children and you have a spiritual responsibility to them. I remember hearing the son of the well-known pastor Timothy Keller speaking I can’t remember what the exact context was that I heard him in, but it really stuck out to me his name is Michael Keller. He’s actually one of the pastors of redeemer now today after his father retired. And Michael Keller said he thinks that one of the reasons he is a Christian today having grown up in a very secular place like New York City at the time that he did, one of the reasons he thinks he’s a Christian today is because Redeemer didn’t have a youth ministry when he was there. Redeemer didn’t have a youth ministry but what they had was they had all these young professionals in this church who were passionate about Jesus. Lawyers, doctors, artists all sorts of creatives coming weekend week out to worship Jesus which is an incredibly counter cultural thing in a secular place like New York City and he looked up at these people and said I want to be like that, I want to be like those people.
Nothing has a more profound effect on the faith of children than how parents in engage in rhythms of redemption at home & church.
Maybe you’re a married couple without children maybe you’re single and without children but you can all be mothers and fathers to these children through the regular engagement of rhythms of redemption. When you pitch up to church week in and week out and you sound out that story of redemption to these little ones who are watching you. That’s why we keep our kids in as long as we can until the sermon because my preaching might be the one thing that kind of dulls stuff for them and then we bring them back in again. And we mainly got smaller kids so those of you getting slightly older kids look out for this because we’re probably going to cut off the age by which we want to take kids out pretty early on and get them back in here for that exact same reason. Because they’re watching us, they’re learning from us and they’re going to do what we do.
Keeping Jesus Centre Of Your Life
Let me close with this, look at verse 9. This observance will be for you like a sign on your hand and a reminder on your forehead that this law of the Lord is to be on your lips for the Lord brought you out of Egypt with his mighty hand. This verse and others like it in the Torah in the first five books of the bible became the basis for the Jewish practice of tying little boxes little leather boxes to the wrists and to the forehead that contain little scripts of the Old Testament law of Moses what we might today call phylacteries. It’s a bit of an extreme literal interpretation and application of exodus 13 verse 9 something that today we might look at and associate with religious legalism. And while I don’t think that this verse is commanding us to literally tie little boxes containing the law to our wrists and to our foreheads, the desire in orthodox Jewish religion to have that sign front and centre and to do something tangible to keep the sign front and centre, I think that desire is commendable. I don’t think you have to have a little box on your forehead but what are you doing day in and day out weekend and week out to make sure that the one who has a crown of thorns on his forehead is front and centre in your life? I don’t think you have to have a little box tied to your wrist but what are you doing day in day out week in week out to make sure that the one who has nails in his wrist is front and centre in your life? At the end of the day the power is not in the signs themselves it’s not in the ritual it’s not the actual rhythm of redemption it’s in Jesus Christ the firstborn son who was consecrated. That is, he was set aside he was set aside to die to die on our behalf to bring us out of the slavery of sin and death. Without consistent regular rhythms of redemption that true and glorious gospel story of our crucified saviour is going to fade from your vision and it’s going to fade from your heart. The Lord has brought us out of Egypt to the mighty hand and so as a church as two churches thinking about a united future through our worship and our practices let us make sure that we never ever forget that.
let’s pray together. our Lord our saviour our king we want to have the truth of the gospel impressed upon our hearts in a deep and a powerful way, so that it’s there when we wake up it’s there when we go to sleep it’s there when we’re at work it’s there when we’re with our kids it’s there when we’re taking down time and recreation. But we know Lord that we are finite, that we are very subjective people that we are easily blown around tossed around by different winds. Things going on in our lives the culture around us and so I ask that you instil in us the discipline to abide by rhythms of redemption, to create new rhythms of redemption as well in our home lives that keep that gospel front and centre. Father this is a fight we’re in, it’s a struggle we’re in. A struggle against spiritual powers a struggle against our own flesh a struggle against the devil to keep Jesus’ front and centre. Help us to do that Lord. Help us to do that as a church, may we keep preaching the objective truths of the gospel week in and week out and demonstrating them in song and prayer in the elements of the sacraments. And help us to do that as individuals Lord in our day-to-day routines. In our own personal bible reading, in our own personal prayer, what we do with our children, all those things Lord. Instil those disciplines those rhythms of redemption into us Lord and magnify the glory of your son in our lives. Father I want to pray for any person who’s maybe sitting and listening to this as an outsider and wondering have I actually ever been redeemed by the mighty hand of the Lord? Has Jesus really set me free from the slavery of sin and death? Maybe they have never trusted in the gospel in the objective truths of the gospel. I pray that you would provide them with faith this morning to trust in that very thing. We ask all these things in your name and for your glory amen
Stephen serves as a pastor of Union Chapel in Cape Town, South Africa, which he planted in 2013. He’s married to Robin, and they have two children. You can follow him on Twitter.