The Victory Celebration

Every year, as we head into the Passover season and at the Passover, even on the first day of Unleavened Bread, I have conversations with people that say, I don't know what happened, but starting about three weeks or so before the Passover, my life got out of control. I hear it all the time. You know, things just got out of control. This happened. That happened. This problem came up. I had problems at work. I had, you know, or people will say, I don't know what's wrong with me. I had the worst attitudes for the last three weeks. You know, I just was angry. I was distressed. It's amazing how many people before the Passover will experience deep depression. And it's Satan trying to convince us not to do this. There is an actual attempt to keep us from doing this by Satan. And part of it is he understands something that we don't recognize as much as we should about this time. He hates what the Passover and days of Unleavened Bread represent. He hates it. And he hates it for a very important reason. Sometimes people will go into the Passover with a sense of defeatism. A feeling like, why should I even try? You know, here I am up to another Passover, and I haven't made any progress since the last Passover. And I hear that, too. Why should I even try? You know, I'm just spinning my wheels. God isn't working in my life. And there's a sense of defeatism. The reason sometimes we experience this overwhelming feelings before the days of Passover and Unleavened Bread is because it is a sense of sort of hopelessness and defeatism that happens to us. We tend to look at all the negative. And there's a reason for that, because that's how Satan views this. And it's his attempt to keep us from really understanding what this is all about, because this isn't about defeat. It's about the opposite. This is about victory. And it's God who does the victory. Let's go back and look just at a couple places in the Old Testament where they were given instructions on keeping the Passover and days of Unleavened Bread. Let's start in Exodus 12. Exodus 12. And let's start in verse 21. Because if we're not careful, sometimes even, and I hear this from women especially, as they begin to prepare for Passover, they begin to get all the leavening out of their houses. And sometimes they enter into the days of Unleavened Bread absolutely distressed and exhausted because they spent hours and hours and hours and hours and hours just trying to de-leaven everything, making sure that there's no leavening every place. Now we shouldn't de-leaven. That's not what I'm talking about. But I'm talking about this exhaustion as we try to do this physical thing. And in doing so, we get defeated. I know every year when I clean the car, I can't get, especially when we had kids, there was no way to get every crew mount unless they tore up the carpet. Or I used to have a van and I would take out the seats because I can't do that with my car. I would take out the seats and I would find whole sandwiches stuffed down in the seats. How long they'd been there, they were green. They were sort of moving. I'm not sure what, but the kids would just stuff that in there. I'd be taking out this year. Fortunately, my wife and I don't do that. But you know, I eat in the car as I travel a lot. And I'm shocked at what I find in the car. So we are at the Unleavened Bread. But sometimes we can actually go in exhausted and defeated by our attempts to the Unleavened.

Let's look what He tells them here. Verse 21 of Exodus 12. Then Moses called for all the elders of Israel and said to them, Pick out and take lambs for yourselves according to the families and kill the Passover lamb. And you shall take a bunch of hyssop, dip it in the blood which is in the basin, and strike the lintel, and the two doorposts with the blood that is in the basin. And none of you should go out of the door of his house until morning.

For the Lord will pass through and strike the Egyptians. And when He does, the blood of the lintel and all the two doorposts, the Lord will pass over the door and not allow the destroyer to come into your house to strike you. And you shall observe this thing as an ordinance for you and your sons forever. So He says, Okay, this is what you're supposed to do. We know this. We rehearsed this as we enter into this time. But notice what He says. And it comes to pass, when you come into the land which the Lord will give you, just as He promised that you shall keep this service.

And it shall be when your children say to you, what do you mean by this service? When the children say, why do we do this? Why do we keep this as a special time?

And you shall say, it is the Passover sacrifice of the Lord who passed over the house of the children of Israel in Egypt when He struck the Egyptians and delivered our households. And so the people bowed their heads and worshiped. He didn't say, you will do this in remembrance of something you did. You will do this in remembrance of something God did.

The whole point of the Passover for ancient Israel was they could not get out of slavery. They could not free themselves. They couldn't do anything. They couldn't protest. They couldn't rise up in violence against the Egyptians.

They were in the worst, most cruel type of slavery, and there was nothing they could do about it. And the point of the Passover was, God did it. And generation after generation, they were to keep this and to be reminded, God saved you. You did not save yourself, but God did it. Let's look at chapter 13 here. Let's go to verse 3. They're still getting instructions now about the days of 11 bread. And Moses said to the people, Remember this day in which you went out of Egypt, out of the house of bondage, for by the strength of hand of the Lord brought you out of this place, and 11 shall be eaten.

Let's skip down to verse 6. 7 and 8. Now look what he said. He doesn't say, And remember this day because you took out the leavening. Yes, we're supposed to do that. Remember this day because you ate a lamb. He didn't say that. The purpose of eating the lamb, the purpose of taking out the leavening, was to show what God does.

So our rituals aren't centered on us. And when we look at the New Testament here at the Passover days of 11 bread, it's centered on God. And this is why Satan wants this time to be centered on us. He wants us to sense defeat. He wants us to feel like, I can't do this. I can't make it.

Because we can't. And he wants us to center on that. The Quiddah says in verse 6 here, 7 days you shall eat 11 bread, and on the 7th day there shall be a feast to the Lord. On 11 bread shall be eaten 7 days, and on 11 bread shall be seen among you. And you shall tell your son that day. Okay, here's why you tell your children we do this. This is done because of what I did.

No? That's what it says. This is done because of what the Lord did for me when I came up from Egypt. We do this because it reminds us that God did something I could not do. And that first generation was to pass that on. And then they were to make it so real that their children would pass it on, and their children would pass it on.

Instead of centering this on themselves, it was centered on God. I do that. We eat 11 bread because of what God does. What's really interesting is, of course, it wasn't long after He gave these as a special course. It wasn't long after He gave these instructions that they did leave. The first board of Egypt were killed by God. And they left, and they got out to an impossible situation before the Red Sea. Absolutely impossible. They couldn't go back. They couldn't go left or right.

They couldn't go forward. And Moses says, Behold the salvation of the Lord. Let's look at what God does and God opened the sea. And they passed through, and it closed behind them, and it destroyed the Egyptians. And Moses wrote a song. He wrote a song, and they all sang it. So let's go to Exodus 15 now. We're just sort of rehearsing this, and then we're going to go into what we do in the New Testament. So Exodus 15, verse 1, that Moses and the children of Israel sang this song to the Lord and spoke, saying, I will sing to the Lord, for He has triumphed gloriously.

The horse of the rider He has thrown into the sea. The Lord is the strength and song, and He has become my salvation. He is my God, and I will praise Him, my Father God, and I will exalt Him. The Lord is a man of war. The Lord is His name. Pharaoh's chariots and his army He has cast into the sea, has chosen captains, are also drowned in the sea.

The depths have covered them, and they sank to the bottom like a stone. And you read the rest of this song, and all these lyrics are, look what God did for us, because we could not do it. Now, they saw what things they had to do.

I mean, they had to put that blood on those zorpos. They had to stay in that house and eat a lamb that night. They had to walk to the Red Sea. They had to walk through the Red Sea. They had things they had to do. But notice everything they had to do was following what God told them to do. It was God who did all the great work involved. They just had to walk, which is a lot of what our Christianity is. It's just walking. It's just following and walking, going where God takes us. Notice that there's no sense of defeatism here.

The whole point is God is doing this in your life. And these people were considered worthless. They lived in a society which had a caste system where if you were on the bottom of this society, meaning you were slaves, you had no value. Your life had no value. They simply replaced you with another slave. You were worked till you died.

So they are worthless people in the eyes of the society they come out of. And so they understand only God can do this for me. Only God can do this, in our sense, in me. They had to submit. I mean, if you were an Israelite and you didn't put blood on that door, your firstborn died that night. And the Israelites, they didn't do that. Their firstborn died. But those who did, their firstborn did not die. But the emphasis is on, look at our victory. He just destroyed the greatest army in the world. I mean, the Egyptian army was like the American army today, the superpower that no one wants to mess with it.

The greatest army in the world was destroyed by God. And they said, what a victory. And they sang a song to it. As Christians, we have just participated in the Passover. And now, here we are, we begin the days of leavened bread.

Or we understand that sin is being taken out of our lives, and God is putting into us His Spirit, unleavened bread.

But the emphasis, again, is not to be on ourselves. Yes, it is our following is what we do. Yes, we avoid leavening. And yes, we eat unleavened bread. And yes, we, okay, we have to be careful and understand our sins. But we also have to understand that this for us, just like it was for those people that lived through the Exodus, it was all about God's victory, that they could not win by themselves. This is about God's victory through Jesus Christ, that you and I can't do by ourselves. All we can do is follow. All we can do is follow as He takes us to the promised land.

It's very interesting that it didn't take them long, you know that. By Exodus 16, we just read a couple of passages in 12 and 13. By Exodus 16, they're complaining because they don't have enough food.

And already some people are saying, oh, I remember Egypt. You know, we're out in the Sinai now. This is just desert. The Nile Valley, and by the way, they know now that the Nile river and the area around it was much wider than it is now. They're finding huge Egyptian cities, you know, 20 miles away from the Nile that at this time was lush land. Egypt was much bigger than they realized. And now archaeologists are saying they realize they've only uncovered a small part of ancient Egypt. That there's so much out there that they haven't even discovered yet. I've seen satellite photos where they're looking at, they can tell whether it's a natural formation of rock or not. And if you go along that Nile river and you go out from there for miles, the formations aren't natural. There are cities out there.

So they were used to, even as slaves, you know, at least something to eat. And the first thing they say is, oh, remember, remember the onions and the leeks and the big pots of meat we had. Remember that. And some of them wanted to go back right away. Which, and I say this every year at this time of year because it helps us focus in. God could take the Israelites out of Egypt. The big problem was getting Egypt out of the Israelites. There's the problem. And that's the same problem with us. We sit here today because God took us out of society and we believe He told us to come here. But have we carried in our own shackles? Are our feet and arms shackled like slaves? Because they wanted to go back to the people. They wanted to go back. Being shackled was better. God had already unlocked their shackles. But they preferred the shackles over the freedom of just following God. It was a frightening just to follow God. You didn't know what was going to happen tomorrow. They had a regular routine. They knew exactly what was going to happen day by day in Egypt. They weren't sure what God was going to do next. And they actually preferred the shackles. But the shackles had already been unlocked. They just had to take them off. Christ came to take our shackles off. And if we're not careful, we feel so defeated like they did right away. They weren't singing the Song of Moses anymore. They weren't thinking about the army that just days before had been destroyed. They're only thinking about, today, my belly is empty. And God gave them manna, which was the plan all along. He was going to feed them all the way there. He gave them food, which they were never quite happy with. They were never quite happy with. The food we had, the life we enjoyed as slaves, it's hard to walk. How far is this? We don't, we're just going to keep walking until we get there. Well, we thought maybe three days, five days. It took a year for them to go from one point to the point where they're at the promised land. They had no idea what that meant. Mile after mile across the Sinai, which was desert then to a great extent like it is today, mile after mile. And they kept their minds shackled to where they came from. Their bodies might have been unshackled, but their minds were shackled. I gave a sermon two years ago, and I want to go back and recap a few points, and then I want to expand it out a little bit beyond that. But the whole sermon, if you remember, was about how Jesus Christ is the second Adam. And He came to defeat three things, sin, Satan, and death. He came to defeat that. He defeated it. He defeated those three things. Do we wish now to continue the fight and participate in the victory because the victory has already been preordained? The only question is whether we will be there or not. Understand, it's already happened. The question is, will we be there when it happens? It's already preordained. It's going to happen. Let me show you what I mean. Let's go to Romans 6. Romans 6. We're not celebrating something that may be a possibility. We're not here celebrating it. Well, yes, sin can be destroyed. Sin, Satan, can be conquered. There can be a resurrection. We are here celebrating things that are already preordained to happen. They are going to happen. The question is, do we believe in that victory so much that we're going to be there? That's the question. Are we so wrapped up in our slavery that we can't get out of our slavery even though the shackles are already unlocked?

They're already unlocked. But are we still stuck in our minds that it's better to eat big pots of meat and onions in slavery than it is to have to eat manna for a year and cross a desert, which is pretty uncomfortable?

Verse 16. Paul says, Do you not know that to whom you present yourself slaves to obey, you are that one slaves to whom you obey, whether of sin leading to death or of obedience leading to righteousness? He says, Don't you understand? He's writing to Christians. You're still slaves. He's telling the people in Rome, in the church of Rome, this isn't written to the world. Romans is written to a church in Rome of Christians. He says, Don't you understand you're still slaves? You're slaves to sin. Well, yeah, I'm still a slave to sin. I'm still physical, and I'm defeated because I can't seem to overcome my sin. And his answer is, you still have to be a slave. You have to exchange one form of slavery to the other for the other. In fact, you will never experience freedom. I will never experience true freedom until we totally give ourselves as slaves to God.

The more we resist being a slave to God, the more we're actually allowing ourselves to be defeated and be slaves to sin. So this isn't a matter of, oh, Christ came to free me. And there's a lot of people who believe this. I just read something this week, and the statement was burned in my mind when I read it. It was some minister had a webpage online, and he said, God does not care about our behavior only in us believing in Jesus. I thought, he's still a slave. He'll never get out of his slavery, ever. Oh, good. I believe that I'm not a slave anymore, but I'm going to stay a slave. I'm going to keep the shackles on me, and I'm going to do what my master tells me. But my master isn't Jesus Christ because, well, I just have to believe in Him. I don't have to do anything.

He goes on. He said, but God be thanked, verse 17, that though you were slaves of sin, yet you obeyed from the heart that form of doctrine in which you were delivered. He says, you believed the teaching that you were slaves, and you decided, I can be free from this because God frees me. You and I can't get out of our slavery to sin any more than they could get out of Egypt. We can't do that ourselves. I don't care how much willpower you have. You cannot overcome and conquer your sins, and you sure can't save yourself from past sins. So we're stuck.

Our willpower is not enough. Our desire is not enough. And so we began to this journey from being a slave to sin to becoming a slave of God. And the word is slave. It is totally, completely dedicated to the service of God. That's our lives.

He says, having been set free from sin, you became slaves of righteousness. Now, he's talking to people who still sin. He says, you've been set free from sin. In other words, just like the Israelites going through the desert there in the Sinai, they weren't in the promised land yet. So we're still dragging a little bit of Egypt along with us. And we're learning this process of learning to give up one form of slavery, to receive the only real freedom you can receive as a human being. And it's actually another form of slavery. It's good slavery. It's the only way to have real happiness. It's the only way to have real peace of mind. It's only way to fix your problems. It's only way to overcome sin.

To overcome sin is because we become a slave to righteousness, the righteousness of God. He says, verse 19, I speak in human terms because of the weakness of your flesh. For just as you presented your members or your parts of your body as slaves of uncleanness and of lawlessness leading to more lawlessness. So now present your members as slaves of righteousness for holiness. It's a remarkable sentence. He said, if you think about what you used to be, you just did whatever you wanted, whatever you liked, slept with whoever you wanted, drank however much you wanted, worked yourself to death, just getting money so you could get things. And basically you just, lawlessness piling on top of lawlessness. That was your life. Well, you're basically a pretty decent guy or girl as long as everybody else is concerned, but inside you're a slave to these things.

And he said, but that bondage has been broken. What's interesting here even in the book of Romans, when you get to chapter 7, Paul says, and I understand because I still struggle. I still find myself in bondage sometimes. And he hated it. But he saw himself on a journey out of bondage. He wasn't defeated. That's what makes Romans 6, 7, and 8 so incredible. He ends up saying, and I still find myself in bondage, but I'm not defeated because God is freeing me. Once again, is Paul freeing himself? No. Now, is Paul participating? Yes. You and I can't free ourselves. Do we have to participate? Yes. You have to walk through the Red Sea, which is baptism. You have to walk. You and I are partway across the Sinai. And I have no idea how far that promised land is. I don't know.

And yet, going back to Egypt just means going back to slavery at its cruelest way. In its cruelest form. Verse 20 says, For when you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness.

We are. You know, when you're just caught up in selfishness, you're free in terms of loving others. When you're caught up in your own pride, you're free from having to forgive other people. When you're caught up in your own pride, you could force your will on everyone if you try and, you know, put everybody else in slavery too. Slaves enslave others. Abuse people abuse others. Right? When we're free from that, we begin to become now free to actually choose good.

Because he goes on, he says, What fruit did you have then in the things of which you are now ashamed? For the end of those things is death. Come back, if Christ conquers sin, He conquers death.

He said, Those things you're now ashamed of, what did that do in your life? It kept you in bondage that killed you. What was the only way out of bondage in slavery in Egypt? You died. There was no way out. Even in the normal world, you could get out of slavery easier than you could in Egypt. There's no way out. You died in your bondage. You got too old to work, too worn out to work way before you should, and you just get, you know, you're sent to your little hut to live in and eat out a little food to people give you and you die.

He says, But now, having been set free from sin and having become slaves of God, you have your fruit to holiness and the end everlasting life. He said, But now you have changed your form of slavery. We have received a victory and that you and I have already been freed from sin. But it's not complete yet. So we're on the journey to get there. But understand, the promise from God is if you don't go back to Egypt, you get there. Because He's already preordained what's going to happen. There's already a resurrection. There's already, Christ comes back. There's already God's Kingdom is going to be set up. God's already preordained that. As I said before, our only question is, will we be there or will we go back to Egypt? That's our only question. Do you go back to Egypt because you're already out? We already sang the song of Moses when we were baptized and received God's Spirit. We already sang that song. We're already marching along through the desert thinking, wow, this is harder than I thought. We're already on that road.

And God said, oh yeah, it's there. And you're going to be there unless you go back.

Of course, we have that remarkable statement He makes in that last verse here of this chapter, verse 23. For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus, our Lord. It is through Christ as Passover that the victory is sealed.

The victory is sealed. There's going to be people in that first resurrection.

Individuals decide whether they're going to be there or not, but there's going to be people there because there's been people for millennia walking following the pillar of fire, which is Christ. The pillar of fire, according to Paul in Corinthians, was Christ. Here we are following the same pillar of fire across the spiritual desert. And as long as we keep walking, you will be there, and we have to believe that. And then we'll have no thought of going back.

We'll have no thought of going back because we believe where we're going. Hebrews 2.

Yes, sort of now to sum up what I covered in that sermon two years ago. Hebrews 2, verse 14. I was thinking about that sermon, and I was putting this sermon together, and I thought, I want to go back and just touch on that again because that whole thing was about, God isn't playing at this. What He does through Christ is to achieve something in the end. And He's going to achieve it. With free will, we can choose not to be part of it, but it's going to be achieved. Verse 14, it is much then as the children, human beings, have partaken of flesh and blood, He Himself, speaking of Jesus Christ, likewise shared in the same, that through death, what we kept at the Passover isn't a commemoration of His resurrection.

What did Paul say? We do this in remembrance of His death because when He died, He beat death. He conquered it because He was going to be resurrected.

The whole Old Testament is filled with the resurrection of the Messiah. It was promised. He was going to win that fight. Satan actually thought he could defeat Him. God was going to win that. You know how I know God was going to win it? Because the Old Testament is filled with prophecies about Christ's return. He was preordained to win the first one. Boy, that was a tough fight, but He was going to win.

And He's going to win the second one too. He's coming back.

You and I have to believe that to be part of it. He says that He might destroy Him who had, not only that through death, He might destroy Him who had the power of death, that is the devil. And release those who through fear of death were all their lifetimes subject to bondage. You know, we're in bondage to sin. We're in bondage to our fear of death.

And we're in bondage to Pharaoh. There's a Pharaoh in this world. It's Satan. There is a cruel taskmaster. You know, Pharaoh was worshiped as God. Satan is worshiped as the God of this world. He has the majority of mankind believing He is God in forms of different religions. All paganism is just a worship of Satan, the demons.

And so we have a Pharaoh that we have to live with, that we have to face. For indeed, he does not give aid to angels, but he does give aid to the seed of Abraham. Therefore, in all things, he, Christ, had to be made like his brethren. That he might be a merciful and faithful high priest, and things pertaining to God to make propitiation for the sins of the people. For that he himself has suffered, being tempted, is able to aid those who are tempted. We have aid from God through His Spirit. We have aid from Jesus Christ because He knows what it's like to be you.

In other words, this was all set up to provide freedom for us. Freedom from the bondage of sin and the freedom here that the writer of Hebrews says is the bondage to Satan and death and the Passover. This is why. This is why Satan wants us to feel defeated before the days of 11 bread. Because he knows he lost.

This battle has already been fought. He lost. So he wants us to lose. He doesn't want us to receive what God has given us, which is, I've given you victory. Let's sing the song of Moses. He doesn't want us to do that. He wants us to give up and head back towards Egypt. There's nothing there. We can't even even cross the sea. The sea closed behind us. You can't get back to Egypt, but you start back and you will die. You can't get back across the Sinai back to Egypt. They couldn't. They didn't know that. We can't either. We can die.

He wants us to understand, I already beat him for you. I already defeated death for you. I've already defeated sin for you. You know how we know he defeated sin? Because when you were baptized, you were forgiven. You were forgiven. At every Passover, we have our feet washed because we're reminded, yeah, this year you didn't always do things right. But our feet are washed to remind us you were forgiven. So I always get really, really nervous when someone doesn't keep the Passover just because they got too busy every once in a while. I forgot about it. How can you forget the Passover? That means you're already halfway back to Egypt. You're already halfway back to Egypt?

It's interesting, in 1 Corinthians 15 here. 1 Corinthians 15. And then I want to talk about some encouragement and what we need to do to lock in on this victory, a battle that's already been won, but we can be part of the victory when it's actually claimed, when it's all actually over with. Of course, 1 Corinthians 15 is the resurrection chapter. And look at Paul, how he finishes this in verse 54. So this 1 Corinthians 15, 54. So when this corruptible has put on in corruption, he's looking ahead to the final victory, when the battles have been fought. And remember, it's already going to happen. He looked ahead at that and said, when we, when this corruptible was put on in corruption, this mortal was put on immortality, then shall be brought to pass the saying, it is written, Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is your sting? O Hades, where is your victory? The sting of death is sin. The strength of sin is the law. The sin kills us, and the law tells us why we're dying. So I'm lost. If that's all I have, I'm lost. Oh, the Bible, the law tells me, I've sinned, sin kills me. But he says, no, there's a victory. But thanks be to God, who gives us victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore, my beloved brother, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that your labor is not in vain in the Lord. As discouraging as this life gets, and sometimes when we fall down miserably through sin, through attitudes, when we do that, or when we serve and think nobody cares, or we're trying so hard and no one recognizes it, we've got to remember it's not in vain. He says, I've won this fight. Just end up at the end. Just be there while we celebrate the victory. It's already been won. In fact, it was won the moment Eve sinned. And then Adam followed. Because it says, from the foundation of the world, Christ was sacrificed. It was won then. It's just, Satan didn't know it. He doesn't seem to have known it. And we don't recognize it. It's already been won. So how can we keep focused that there will be there at the victory celebration? How can we be focused? Well, first of all, is you have to believe in that victory. You have to believe that sin and Satan and death have been conquered, and God has called you to walk across the Sinai and be there at the victory celebration. That He's going to take you there. You follow the pillar of fire, and you get there. 1 John chapter 5. You have to believe in this.

I mean, absolutely at the core of who we are, we have to believe that this is what God has called you to. He hasn't called you to fail. He's called you to see the mighty hand of the Lord. You read through chapter 12 and 13 of Exodus, and you will see the mighty hand of the Lord show up a lot of times. You know, what if there was an Israelite that said, you know, I'm not going to follow this Moses character. I think this is going to turn out badly. I'm going to stay here in Egypt. Then that person died in slavery. Died in slavery.

We have to believe in this. 1 John 5. 1 John chapter 5 verse 1.

Whoever believes that Jesus is the Christ is born of God, and everyone who loves Him, who begot, also loves Him who have begotten Him. It says, in other words, you can't focus in on Christ and not love the Father. Christ leads us to the Father. You know, Christ always, the focal point is, let me take you to the Father. By this we know that we love the children of God. Well, we love God and keep His commandments. You know, I'm thinking about giving a sermon. I've been working on this in my mind. It's going to take a while to put it together. Everybody talks about love, and Christianity is love. But you know, the Bible talks about loving God and loving the world, the love of God and the love of the world. And those are two different things. And if we're not careful, sometimes we confuse the love of the world with the love of God. Here it says, if you love God, you keep His commandments.

So commandment keeping is part of the way that we show our love to God. For this is the love of God, that we keep His commandments, and His commandments are not burdensome. For whatever is born of God overcomes the world. Whatever is born of God wins.

Now, we still have free will, so we can give up the victory. We can just go AWOL, head back towards Egypt. He says, overcomes the world, and this is the victory that has overcome the world. And he makes this statement just...I remember reading this statement and not understanding it. I understand it now. Here is the victory that has overcome the world. And he says, our faith — what do you mean, our faith? Look at the next sentence. Who is He who overcomes the world, but He who believes that Jesus is the Son of God? In other words, when you believe this, and you give everything — you become a slave of God, and you believe that God is doing this through Jesus Christ, and you believe He is the Passover, and you follow that pillar of fire, that cloud, and you cross the Sinai. He says, you believe that and you win. That's a remarkable statement, isn't it? We overcome the world. You know, I would think we overcome the world because of God. Well, He does say that in the next verse, because of Jesus Christ, or God's going through Jesus Christ. But He says, you overcome it because you believe it enough that you actually walk, you go, you follow. You're not defeated, you fall down, you lose sometimes, you get up, and you go. And it is our faith, and this is how we win. We believe God enough that we accept His victory. We believe God enough that we accept what He says to do. A second thing. So we have to believe it. We have to believe in this victory. Absolutely, completely believe in it. And second, we have to prepare for it.

We're living towards that time when I want to be at the victory parade. I want to be there at the victory parade, at the resurrection. We get to meet God the Father face to face.

It's interesting that when ancient Israel came out of the, or the Jews came out of the Babylonian captivity, and they come back, and they rebuild the temple. And once they rebuilt the temple, the first joyous thing they did was they had a Passover service. They kept the days of the beloved bread. So let's go to Ezra 6. Ezra 6.

So they've come back from the Babylonian captivity, and they've rebuilt a temple, which is just a shell of what it had been at Solomon's Day. And let's look at verse 19.

And the descendants of the captivity, most of the people that had gone into captivity, it had been 70 years before, most of them died. We know that Daniel was still alive when they first came out, but when they first came out, he stayed. He never even came back. So here's the descendants of the people who went into captivity. Kept the Passover on the 14th day of the first month. So they're keeping the Passover. But this next statement tells us how they could do it. For the priests and the Levites had purified themselves, and all of them were ritually clean, and they slaughtered the Passover lambs for all the descendants of the captivity for their brethren, the priests, and for themselves.

They prepared themselves.

They purified themselves. They dedicated their lives to being holy.

So they had come out of captivity. So here we have a second group of people being taken out of bondage, because they were slaves. They were slaves this time to the Babylonians. So we have a second group of people coming out of captivity. They keep the Passover, but they had to prepare for it. This victory that we're promised, we have to prepare for it. So we have to have faith in it, so that we keep moving forward. But we have to be preparing for that time. We have a goal here, and we have to be working towards it. Notice the next verse. "'Then the children of Israel, who had returned from captivity, ate together with all those who had separated themselves from the filth of the nations of the land in order to seek the Lord God of Israel.'" We have to remove ourselves from Egypt, or in their case, they had to remove themselves from Babylon, and seek God. You and I must live lives of being removed from the world that we live in, the culture that we live in, and seeking God. So we have to believe in what God is doing. We have to believe in the victory, and then we have to prepare for the victory. We can't just say, oh, I believe in it. Oh, yeah, Jesus Christ is coming back. And then live our lives as if, well, yeah, He's coming back. I go to church every Sabbath. Isn't that good enough? No, it's a daily preparation, a daily preparation, a daily seeking of God as He takes us across the sun. A third point is that don't allow unimportant distractions to keep this victory from slipping away. The victory that God's already won, He's already invited you there. He's already said, well, you've got to fight along here. But when you get there, you're part of the victory parade.

Don't let just unimportant things drag us down.

Don't let other people discourage you and drag you down. Don't let problems at work drag you down. I mean, we all feel bad about this, but don't let them drag you down. Don't let a fight you had with your wife or with your husband drag you down. Because God is doing something, and this is all part of the process. He didn't say, crossing the sign, it was easy. He just said, it waits for you on the other side. I thought when I was young, I remember when I was a child, I mean, seven, eight, nine years old, I would pray every night that God would please allow me to be alive when Jesus Christ came back because I wanted to see that. I wanted to see that so badly. And you know, recently I've been thinking, I may not be alive when that happens. Well, I'll be alive hopefully when it happens, but I may not be alive to see it happening. After a lifetime of waiting for it. But that's what it is across the Sinai. You don't know exactly where or when you get there. You just know it's there. You just know it's there. And you go. And you prepare for it. You prepare for it by seeking God every day. But we just get distracted over everything. You know, the person who cut you off, you know, you're trying to check out at some store and they cut you off.

The fact that, you know, you tried to get your reservations at the feast and it was full already. Well, those people must be evil. They must have called in early. We got all these evil people at our church. You know, I couldn't get what I wanted. We let these unimportant little things distract us to the point where our minds are not on what God wants it to be on. They're not. So we're in negativity all the time. We're upset all the time. We're worried all the time. We're worried about who's going to be president next. I hate to tell you this. I don't care who is president next. The country's headed down. I don't say that to be negative. I say that because the Bible says it's going to happen. The world doesn't work until Christ comes back. You and I just happen to live in a really good time right now. Enjoy it. This too shall pass.

Enjoy it because we happen to be at a time when we're, you know, we're in the Sinai and there's lots of water and there's some palm trees that's not so bad. Okay? Tomorrow we cross this Samora, the Sinai. I've never been to the Sinai. I've seen pictures. My daughter's been there. She says, it's amazing how there's places where there's nothing. Just nothing. It's like the moon.

That's what the Sinai is. It's what we cross. 1 Corinthians 9.

1 Corinthians 9. We've read this so many times because it's an inspirational little passage, but we need to read it from time to time.

Paul says in verse 24, 1 Corinthians 9, 1 Corinthians 9. Do you not know that those who run in a race all run, but one receives the prize? Now he's not saying, you know, push everybody else out of the way and run the race. He's trying to use an analogy here that runners look and they all head towards that point. You know, I saw one time where a bunch of little kids were running in a race and one of them fell down. They all stopped, went and picked the kid up and all continued to run. They're just running for the sheer joy of running. That's sort of what Christianity is. We're all headed to the same line and when one falls down, we stop, pick them up, dust them off and make sure they stop crying, you know, and then we all run. We all keep running because we have a point up there we're running to. He says, run in such a way that you may obtain it. In other words, you got to keep moving. We can't just collapse into some kind of tepid Christianity where, you know, we do our stuff, we clean our house for days of 11 bread and we, you know, oh yeah, it's another piece. It's another Passover.

We have to be alive. This is the victory of life that we're celebrating here.

And everyone who competes with the prize is temperate in all things. Now they do this to obtain a perishable crown. And of course, they still had the Olympic games then.

It's, you know, they... sports was a big thing in the Greek world and then in the Roman world. And, you know, in the Roman world, they had games constantly, especially in Rome. He's feeding people in Corinth. They had games in Corinth all the time. "'Therefore I run thus, not with uncertainty. Thus I fight not as one who beats the air.'" You know, they had a form of boxing and they had wrestling as was a sport back then. He said, "'I don't fight like someone who just swings wildly at the air.'" You know, sort of shadow boxing. "'But I discipline my body and bring it into this objection, lest when I have preached to others, I myself should become disqualified.'" What Paul is saying is, you keep that goal, you don't become just distracted by all the stuff that distracts us because Christ already paid the penalty. What more does He have to do?

What more does He have to do? He's already paid the penalty. He already won. Satan's already defeated. I don't know if he knows it or not. I get the feeling he doesn't. I don't think Satan actually knows it, but he's defeated. The victory parade is already planned and it's preordained. It's going to happen.

So we fight and we run towards that. We run towards it. Then one last point, one last scripture.

Don't let spiritual fatigue overcome you. We can get spiritually fatigued. I read a story once of a man who went to see his doctorate and a number of health problems, and the doctor told him, he said, you really don't have any serious problems yet. But the reason you have all these symptoms, he says, is because you're working yourself to death. You're literally working yourself to death. He said, you know, you just can't work this many hours, seven days a week. You've got... He said, first thing you need to do is take a vacation. Then he said, well, I've always wanted to go salmon fishing, but you know, I don't have time to do that. And he says, well, go. So the guy literally went to Alaska during the salmon run. And he said his whole life changed when he watched the salmon. I actually went and looked at this yesterday and found pictures of this very thing. He said there were salmon that were strong and they went up those rivers and they never slowed down. And they would get out in front of everybody else, you know, all the other... And they were going up the spawn and they were the strongest and they just pushed and pushed and pushed. And he said, many of them died. They literally wore themselves out and died. He said, the other salmon... And I looked up yesterday and I found pictures. They all... You know, when the river slows down a little bit, they all get in these little pools or along the river where they're at of the current and they're all clustered together, thousands and thousands of them. And they're all clustered together, sort of just resting. And then all of a sudden one of them will start out and the whole group goes out and they fight the next rapid and they get up and then they all rest. The strong ones may be 10 rapids ahead of them, but then they wear out and they die. Don't let spiritual fatigue keep you, distract you from the road. That's what makes what Paul says here, this often quoted verse in Galatians 6. Galatians 6. But he tells the people there are Galatians, it's this very thing. Galatians 6 verse 9, he says, And let us not grow weary while doing good, For in due season we shall reap, If we do not lose heart. I think it was Napoleon that said that fatigue makes cowards of all of us. I'll have to look that up. Don't quote me on that one. You know, I think I'm a ninja once in a while. So every once in a while I'll say things that have not. I don't know. I think Napoleon said that. It's been years since I read a biography of Napoleon, so I have one at home. I'll have to go see and see if he actually said that. But fatigue does make us give up. And there's times we're supposed to stop and spiritually get rejuvenated. That's one of the reasons for the Sabbath, by the way. It's one of the reasons for the Sabbath, to become spiritually rejuvenated, to let the world go and center in on what God's doing.

The victory awaits us. It's already preordained. It's already been won. The fight already took place. Oh, there's going to be one more. Well, there's actually two more. The next fight is Christ killing probably hundreds of thousands of people who Satan thinks somehow he's going to stop Christ from coming back. That one doesn't last long. And we already know about it because it's preordained. He says, yeah, Satan's going to try this and here's how I'm going to stop it. The next one is after the millennium, after the second resurrection, or before the second resurrection, when Satan is loose for a little bit and convinces a bunch of more people. Oh, yeah, let's go. We'll just go take over the government and throw this Jesus fellow out. And guess what happens to them? They all get killed. There's not much. The next two battles don't involve much. They're basically massacres. That's what the next two battles are. The hard one already has been fought. Jesus is a man defeating sin and Satan and death. That was the hard. That part of the battle's already been won. That part of the war is already over. The next two battles are massacres.

The victory has been already given and you've been called to be part of it. So we have to make sure that we believe in that victory. We have to make sure that we're preparing for that victory. That we don't let unimportant things keep us distracted all the time so that we let the victory just sort of slip away. And we have to make sure that we have spiritual renewal because if we don't, we will just become complacent. We'll just be complacent all the time. We have to be spiritually renewed. The Passover of the Days of Unleavened Bread are a celebration now, just like it was then, of the mighty hand of God. They're told, tell your children this so that they will know about the mighty hand of God. That's what Passover is all about. That's what the Days of Unleavened Bread are all about. It's about the mighty hand of God that He's doing through Jesus Christ. And remember, it's time to take these shackles off. The problem is, you and I think we have to carry them around. And what we don't know is the locks have already been unlocked. We're carrying around shackles of sin and fear and submission to Satan that they've already been unlocked. The shackles are already unlocked. We just got to let them go. We have to let them go. And remember that to celebrate, there's a time, not for, this is the time for defeatism. It is the time to celebrate that the victory has been won and that God has invited you personally. And He wants you there at the victory celebration.