Our Spiritual Heritage

Hello to everyone on the webcast. Hopefully you can be back with us soon. I think we pulled a fast one on Mr. McKeelen here, so we'll get my name up there.

The Palace of Versailles, the Grand Canyon, Masada, and Israel, the Great Wall of China, Tyre of Lebanon, the walled city of Baku and Azerbaijan. All of these places have something in common. They have something in common. These and thousands of other, and nearly just over a thousand other locations around the world, have been named World Heritage Sites.

In 1972, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, known as UNESCO, adopted the convention concerning the protection of world culture and natural heritage. Give me one second here. I'm going to turn off this fan. It'll make it easier for me to stay on the page. And this convention called for the setting up and protection of cultural and natural sites around the world.

Over the past 46 years, about 1,100 sites have been selected. The United States has 23 of these sites. The nation with the most sites is actually Italy, of all places. It has 54 sites. And here in California, we actually have two sites that have been designated by UNESCO as World Heritage Sites. You might guess what one of those is. It's Yosemite Valley. And the other one is the National Redwood and State Park up in Humboldt County. Those are the two sites here in California that have been designated UNESCO sites. The selection of these sites was intended to help raise people's awareness and consciousness that some things around them are uniquely special and are part of their heritage.

It connects them to their past. It connects us to our past. It defines who we are as a people. And if it is allowed, it can actually shape our thinking about who we are. Webster's Dictionary defines heritage as property that descends to an heir. That's kind of, perhaps, obvious. Something transmitted or acquired from a predecessor, a legacy, an inheritance, a tradition. Or something possessed as a result of one's natural situation or birth. Birthright is actually listed in Webster's Dictionary on Heritage. Each of us has a heritage, no matter where we might be from.

It comes as a result of the family that we were born in, the place we were from, and, to a large degree, the circumstances in which we live at the present time. God speaks of a heritage in His Word as well. And He goes into painstaking detail to talk about the heritage that He would give to His physical people, Israel, and the Old Testament, and to His children, all children, in the New Testament. It involves property, certainly, in the case of the Old Testament.

It involves legacy. It involves tradition. It involves law. And it involves birthright. And most importantly, God inspired the Bible, the biblical record, to lift our spirits, to help us to see beyond our present circumstances by focusing us on our heritage, our physical heritage in the case of the nation of Israel, and our spiritual heritage in the case of those in the New Testament. Now, today we're going to say goodbye to Bob and Anna Kozer.

And they're going to make their way from California to North Carolina. And as I told them, probably the first thousand miles, they're going to be a little numb. And then it's going to hit them. 40 years, 40-plus years in California. And so California is part of the Kozer heritage. We had Nate up here, and we are part of their heritage.

And when they go to North Carolina, they're going to take that with them. But you know, California is a physical thing. We'll probably kind of fade into some memory. But the spiritual heritage of this congregation, of God's way of life, they take with them. And that doesn't change no matter where they are. It doesn't change no matter where we are, what circumstances, where we are in.

We are called to be first fruits of God's kingdom, and we will take that heritage with us. And with this in mind, I want to examine God's promise of heritage to his physical people in Exodus 6, and to his spiritual sons and daughters in Romans 8 and Hebrews 11, really for the purpose of grounding us in our spiritual heritage, and as a way of helping us understand how God wants to lift us up by grounding us in that heritage and what he has done for us and what he will do for us. So let's start in Exodus 6.

I was there a moment ago, but the fan changed me, so I have to turn back to Exodus 6 here. Let's go to Exodus 6 because there's something very profound that's discussed in the first few verses of Exodus 6 about heritage and about our reaction to heritage and how we as human beings tend to deal with adversity.

If we go to Exodus 6 and verse 8, we'll see this is Moses recording God's words to him in response to some discouraging news that Moses had received. Exodus 6 verse 8, God says, And I will bring you into the land which I swore to give to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and I will give it to you as a heritage. I am the Lord. The context, like I said, is some discouraging news. If you go back to chapter 5 and verse 21, you'll see the kind of the context about why God is saying this.

It says, And they said to them, The Lord, look on you, and judge, because you have made us abhorrent in the sight of Pharaoh and in the sight of his servants, to put a sword in their hand and to kill us. So basically here Moses, not wanting to really go back to Egypt, but there's this whole dialogue that happens in the first few chapters of Exodus, finally goes back.

He goes back with the power of God behind him to liberate, to take out of bondage and captivity the nation of Israel. And instead what happens is that Pharaoh gets even more upset and says, hey, you're going to make bricks without straw. I'm going to make your life even harder. And so all the elders of the Israelites there in Egypt, they're like, Moses, we don't want anything to do with you. You've just made our lives even harder.

And so Moses is a little discouraged by this and it says in verse 22 and chapter 5, so Moses returned to the Lord and said, Lord, why have you brought trouble on this people? Why is it you have sent me? What are you doing, God? You sent me here. And now, look, I've made even more problems than they had before.

For since I came, verse 23, to Pharaoh to speak in your name, he has done evil to his people. Neither have you delivered your people at all. And so this is Moses going before God saying, what's going on? And, you know, things aren't working out the way I thought they were going to work out. Things aren't turning out the way you said they were going to turn out. What's going on? And so God responds then to this concern in chapter 1 here of verse 1 of chapter 6. He says, The Lord spoke to Moses, Now you shall see that I will do to Pharaoh. Now you shall see what I will do to Pharaoh. For with a strong hand he will let them go, and with a strong hand he will drive them out of this land. Verse 2, God spoke to Moses and said to him, I am the Lord. I am the Lord. And what does he say right after that? I'm going to take care of this. I'm going to do this. This is how I'm going to do it. Let me give you the five point plan. No. What he says is, I am the Lord. I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob as God Almighty. But my name, Lord, that is Yahweh, I was not known to them. I have also established my covenant with them to give them the land of Canaan, the land of their pilgrimage, in which they were strangers. I made a promise to them. And I'm going to keep this promise, because I am the Lord. And I'm going to keep my promises, as I said I would.

In verse 5, I have also heard the groaning of the children of Israel, whom the Egyptians keep in bondage, and I have remembered my covenant. When God says he's going to make a covenant, and he does, and he swears by himself, he will fulfill that covenant.

What God is doing here is he's taking Moses back in time. He's taking him back in time 400 or so years, right? And he's taking him back and he's saying, I made a promise about what I would do, and I'm going to fulfill it.

Many times we have to be reminded of what God promised to our spiritual ancestors, because we can become very focused on what's happening right here in front of us.

We can become discouraged.

There's a movie that came out many, many years ago called Braveheart. It tells the story of William Wallace and the fight against the English at the time. And in the depiction, in the film, William Wallace goes right before the Battle of Stirling, a very famous battle in Scotland at the time.

And he's whipping up the soldiers to be ready to fight.

And what he says to them is he tells them about their heritage. He tells them, this is what you were like a thousand years ago. He reminds them that the Romans were so concerned with the Scots that they built a 73-mile wall just to keep the Scots out.

They didn't want to deal with them. He took them back to who they were before, and he reminded them of who they were so they would have the courage to go forward into battle. And God is doing something similar here. He's reminding Moses who he is. He is the son of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. And there was a promise made to his fathers, and God is going to deliver on that promise.

In verse 7 he says, God wants a relationship with us. He wanted a relationship with them. Which brings us back here to verse 8, this word, heritage.

This word, heritage, that we read is the Hebrew word, mohrashah. And it means an inheritance of possession. In this case, he's going to give them a possession. He's going to give them this land that he promised. God is saying he's going to deliver them to this land, and he's going to fulfill his promise. So, verse 9, Moses kind of pumped up, feeling a little bit better, reminded of what's going on.

It says here, So Moses spoke thus to the children of Israel. Moses goes back to the Israelites, and he tells them this story. And they said, great! We're so excited about this. No. Right? No, they didn't say that. But they would not heed Moses because of anguish of spirit and cruel bondage. This word, anguish of spirit, is an interesting phrase in the American Standard Bible.

It translates this as a broken spirit. Their spirit had been broken after 400 years of slavery. They were victimized is what they were. And when you're victimized, you are so into your own hopelessness. You are so into your own grief and pain. Somebody comes along and says, don't worry, it's going to get better. You're like, yeah, whatever. You are hopeless. They had a broken spirit.

They needed to be pulled out of that. Sometimes we can have a broken spirit, our health, our job, our family. There's a lot of reasons why we just become more inward and inward and inward. And someone comes along and says, in God's kingdom, you're going to be a king and a priest. You're going to be a king. You lose sight of that, of what's actually going to happen. And so the Lord spoke to Moses again in verse 10.

He says, Go in, speak to Pharaoh, king of Egypt, that he must let the children of Israel go out of this land. And so Moses is like, okay, these people, they're hopeless, and Pharaoh is making life even worse. But God told me, he told me he's going to fulfill his promise. So I'm going to go back to Pharaoh and I'm going to speak to him. And so he does in verse 11, 12 and 13.

And after that, right, the cheerleaders come out for a halftime show? No, no. Look what happens in verse 14. Look what happens in verse 14. These are the heads of their fathers' houses. The sons of Reuben, the firstborn of Israel, were. God puts a genealogy in the middle of this whole story. Right? We're waiting for a halftime show, right? Okay. You know, the first half was tough. We're down. But the second half, we're going to pull it out. We're going to win, right? We're waiting for, we're waiting for like, you know, the, you know, the getting pumped up.

God gives us a genealogy, right? And, you know, good luck in the pronunciation of all these names. The sons of Simeon and Jammel and Jammon and Abed and Jaijin and Jodur and Shaw and Bekanah, right? And it goes on. It goes all the way down to verse 26. A genealogy smack dab in the middle of this whole, like, what's going to happen next? And it's interesting that God would go to a genealogy. See, genealogies can, for us, can be a little bit boring, but what are genealogies? Genealogies are heritage.

Genealogies tell us where we're from. You know, we can go to 1 Chronicles or Numbers or Kings or Ezra, and there's all these genealogical tables about where people come from. Why does God take the time in the middle of this story to give us a genealogy of Moses and Aaron? Well, because it goes back to heritage. It goes back to who we are, who they were. This is the halftime show. This is where they say, Moses, remember where you came from. You came from my called-out one of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and I will fulfill my promise to you because I said I would fulfill my promise to them.

We're no different. We need to know where we come from. We need to know where our physical family is. You know, years ago, when we did the Growing Kids Godway program here, right, that was one of the key lessons that they taught there, is that children need to have a sense of who they are by seeing mom and dad actually getting along. That they're part of that family unit. That's their heritage. And that gives children a sense of comfort, a sense of security, a sense of belonging.

And we're no different. We're God's children, and we need a sense of comfort and belonging and who we are part of, what family we're part of.

We won't take the time to turn there, but Ezra 2, verse 62, gives the lineage of all the peoples that came back. So that everybody could trace, oh yeah, that's grandpa. Yeah, that's my great-grandfather over there. And of course, the most famous genealogies of all, right, in Matthew and Luke, right, Matthew and Luke felt it was so important that they wanted to give the genealogy of Jesus Christ in the Bible.

Let's look over at Romans 8, because now we transition to who we are. Romans 8, verse 14.

Let's look at our heritage as the sons and daughters of God the Father, Jesus Christ as our elder brother. Romans 8, verse 14.

It says, for as many as are led by the Spirit of God, these are the sons of God. See, is that interesting that God goes back to family, He goes back to heritage, He goes back to belonging? If you have God's Spirit and you are being led by it, you are a son of God. Everyone here today is here for a reason. And God says, you are a son of God. You are part of my family. For as many as are led, it says, by the Spirit of God, these are the sons of God. For you did not receive the Spirit of bondage again to fear, but you received the Spirit of adoption, by whom we cry out, Abba, Father, you are my children. I'm your dad. You belong to me. I'll take care of you. The Spirit itself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God. And if children, then heirs. Heirs! Here we go back to heritage again. We will receive an inheritance. Heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ, if indeed we suffer with Him, that we may also be glorified together. Just like Moses speaking to the children of Israel, Paul speaks to the Christians at Rome. And he reminds them of their heritage, their lineage, their family, and their coming inheritance. He tells them that they have a birthright. A birthright, not of a physical land, but of eternal life and freedom from bondage of this human body, this human condition. And even here we can see a claim that we can claim this promise, that we are heirs. Let's go over to Hebrews 11. Hebrews 11 is the genealogy of our spiritual ancestors. It's not a genealogy of my dad and my granddad and my great-granddad and so forth. This is the genealogy of our spiritual ancestors. This is the lineage from which we trace ourselves. Hebrews 11, I just want to just point out the names here of our spiritual lineage. Verse 4, Abel. Verse 5, Enoch. Verse 7, Noah. Verse 8, Abraham. Verse 11, Sarah. Verse 20, Isaac. Verse 21, Jacob. Verse 22, Joseph. Verse 23, Moses. Verse 30 and 31, Rahab. And now in verse 32 he says, And what more shall I say? For the time would fail me to tell you of Gideon and Beric and Samson and Japheth, and also of David and Samuel and the prophets and the brethren in the San Francisco Bay Area and Petaluma and San Jose. He could go on and on. He basically is like, look, I don't have enough time to go through all the names, but I want to tell you that there's a lot of them.

And then he says in verse 33, and this is how we're connected to these people. Who through faith? Faith! That's why we're here, right? You know, we got up and we drove an hour to church, right? Not to be entertained, but because we have faith that God is going to say something to us today, either through the special music or the fellowship or the sermons or whatever might happen, that God has something that is important. He wants us to hear today.

So others, verse 36, had trial of mockings and squergings, yes, and chains and imprisonment.

They wandered about in sheepskins and goatskins, being destitute of afflict, afflicted, tormented, of whom the world was not worthy. They wandered in deserts and mountains and dens and caves of the earth. And all these, having obtained a good testimony through faith, did not receive the promise. And now He's going to connect these people to us. Verse 40, God, having provided something better for us, that they should not be made perfect apart from us. Therefore, we also...you see, the whole point of this story is not to just tell a bunch of stories about what granddad did in the war. The point here is to connect us to them, to say, if you are part of this story, you too are going to experience these things. And you have, as it says in verse 1, a great cloud of witnesses. You've got this whole host who has come before you, that is going to, at some point in the future, see what you did, what you went through, the affliction, the torment, the difficulties, the challenges that you faced, the triumphs. How many triumphs are here? Quench the violence of fire, escape the edge of the sword, subdue kingdoms, obtain promises, stop the mouths of lions. See, it's good and bad. It's not all bad. These people are going to be there and they're going to say, wow, that was amazing what you did. And they're going to say, that's incredible what you endured. Welcome to God's kingdom.

And if we think about heritage, if we go back to that definition of heritage that I shared a moment ago, property that descends to an heir. Right? Verse 10 talks about that. Look at verse 10. Verse 10 says, See, there's a heritage of there's a property, as it were, there's a new Jerusalem that's going to descend out of heaven. That's going to be our property. This earth is going to be our property.

Something transmitted or acquired from a predecessor, a legacy, an inheritance, a tradition. This is the faith chapter. God has given us this faith to rise to the challenges. You know, we don't need to take the time to turn there, but in Deuteronomy 33 it talks about God's law being a heritage of Jacob. Right? We are given a heritage of his law and his spirit.

And then something possessed as a result of one's natural situation or birth. A birthright. And that's what we read in verse 40. They gave something. They would have something that was theirs because they were born into it. Then in chapter 12 and verse 1, as we said, That's our calling. That's our heritage. That connects us back to the beginning and brings us to where we are now and then propels us forward.

But sometimes the anguish of spirit is so bad that we can't even see it. We're like, yeah, okay. Yeah, that's right. I got to go to church today. I got to get myself together. I got to go figure out how to go get a job, even though I'm older and my skills don't seem to match. I've got to go back to that doctor again and listen to them drone on about how they're going to help me or whatever.

There's so many things that tend to cloud our mind. But no matter who we are, whether we're rich or poor, or whether we've come from the right side of the tracks or the wrong side of the tracks, or whether we've got two parents still alive or we're orphaned or we don't ever renew our parents, our names have been written in the Book of Life and our names are going to be a continuation of Hebrews 11.

Our names are part of this verse as we read in verse 32. For what shall I say? For the time would fail me to tell of. And then you can put your name in there. I don't have time to tell you about all the families in Arendelle and all that they did, all that they did, all that they went through. And God will say to us, I know your spirit of anguish.

You have a broken spirit, but Jesus came. What did he come to do? Luke 4, he came to heal the brokenhearted. We have got all this truth. We say to one another, when did you come into the truth? We have so much truth.

We have all this understanding. But at the very core of it, we have to go back to the fact that Jesus loves us. I was talking to someone this week about how that phrase is so hackneyed and lost. I would love to give a sermon on Jesus Loves Me. Because that phrase is so overused and worn out and tired and just beat to death like some horse.

But it's true. And at the core, we have to go back to that. And we can sit here and have all knowledge of prophecy, as Paul says in 1 Corinthians 13. We can have all the understanding of the feast, the holy days, the plan of God. But if we can't get ourselves to church, because we are depressed, if we can't get ourselves pulled together and actually pick up the phone and call somebody, a member of God's church, and say, I'm feeling bad, what does it matter? 1 Corinthians 13 says that. Love. Love. This is the greatest of those things. If I don't have love, then all these prophecies and all this speech and all the things I know, it doesn't matter for anything.

God came to preach deliverance. He came to preach deliverance. Failure is not an option. He who has begun a good work in you will see it through. He will lift us up. He will carry us on his shoulders. He will renew our strength. He will say, well done, my good and faithful servant. You who were faithful over a few things, I will make you rule over many things and enter into my joy. That's what God has promised to us. And he tells us about our ancestors and what they went through to give us a sense of our heritage, that we might use that as a launching point to fight the battles that we have to fight.

Let's turn over in conclusion to Malachi 4. Malachi 4 is the last chapter and the last book of this Old Testament that we have. In Malachi 4, in the first three verses, it really describes our inheritance. It describes our inheritance and it describes God's coming kingdom.

It says, For behold, the day is coming, burning like an oven. Malachi 4, verse 1. And all the proud, yes, all who do wickedly will be stubble. And the day which is coming shall burn them up, says the Lord of hosts. That will leave them neither root nor branch. But to you who fear mine aim, the Son of righteousness shall rise, with healing in his wings.

And you shall go out and grow fat like stall-fed calves. You shall trample the wicked, for they shall be ashes under the soles of your feet on the day that I do this, says the Lord of hosts. And so that's the inheritance. That's the birthright. That's the promise. But it's interesting that he concludes this section, these final words of the Old Testament, by taking us back to our heritage. He reminds us to hold on to our heritage.

He says, Remember the law of Moses, my servant, which again in Deuteronomy 33 says is a heritage, which I commanded him in Horeb for all Israel with the statutes and judgments. Behold, I send Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord. And what is he going to do? He will turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the hearts of the children to their fathers, lest I come and strike the earth with a curse.

We used to think about this in terms of actually building strong families, and there certainly is a physical component to this. That we need to turn the hearts of our fathers to our children, and the hearts of our children to our fathers. But there's a spiritual application here, too. A spiritual application that says that we have to connect back to our heritage.

Back to the law of Moses. Back to the prophets of old. Back to the writings and all the stories that we have here to give us strength, to give us encouragement.

It's not like a UNESCO World Heritage Site that we might think about with a cultural or natural site in Yosemite. These things here that are described in these final verses, these are things of a spiritual connection to our spiritual legacy, our spiritual forefathers, who lived and died in faith.

To set us an example that we might live like them. God and Jesus Christ are seeking a personal relationship with each of us.

God our Father and Jesus Christ our Elder Brother. Let's recognize our place as called sons of God, and seize our heritage, and run the race that is set before us.

Thank you.