The Plagues | 9:30

Deliverance doesn't begin, by the way, with trying harder. Deliverance begins by trusting deeper. And freedom doesn't come from negotiating our idols. It doesn't come from from surrendering our will to this world. It comes from surrendering ourselves to the one and only God so that we have no other gods before us. I love this last statement. God isn't lashing out. He's diagnosing. And if we'll listen, he's inviting us out of bondage into freedom, out of prison, and in the promise. [00:50:26] (41 seconds)  #TrustDeeperNotTryHarder

See, before god ever freed Israel physically, he had to reveal to them who and what was actually enslaving them. They weren't just being enslaved by Egypt. Egypt. They were being enslaved by the gods of Egypt. They were being enslaved by what they were giving their hearts to. And so god wasn't just removing the Israelites from Egypt. He was working to remove Egypt from their hearts. [00:39:45] (32 seconds)  #RemoveEgyptFromYourHeart

And god was working to get the Egypt out of them. This is why he attacked the pantheon of the Egyptian gods. He was delivering them through revelation. God brought all of their idols to light and exposed them as false. So the Israelites could say, he is the one true god. These are the things, they're just idols. They're just false gods. [00:40:41] (30 seconds)  #IdolsExposed

And so Israel learned through that that deliverance doesn't come by reforming our idols but by god dismantling them. The biggest problem in most of our lives is our love for Egypt. It's our love for this world. We wouldn't sin if sin were not fun. We wouldn't sin if sin didn't scratch some fleshly itch. [00:41:11] (32 seconds)  #DismantleIdolsNotReform

And then in the boils addressing Sekhmet, the god who protected us from disease through medicine. How many people do you know today who've made their physical health and their bodies a god? They literally worship themselves. I see it all the time. Just go to a gym, and you can see how people have done this. Here's the point. I'm not gonna go through all of them. Here's the point. The point is God isn't opposed just to evil. He's opposed to anyone or anything that we trust in over him. [00:35:37] (37 seconds)  #StopWorshippingYourBody

In turning the Nile to blood, god was attacking the god in the pantheon of Egypt called happy, the god who personified the Nile. Egypt's life source, its security was seen in the Nile. When the Nile River flowed, they prospered. For us, things like money and possession and people, we often put our security in them. We make them our god. Instead of allowing god to be our security, we allow something to this world to be our security. [00:33:06] (35 seconds)  #SecurityNotInStuff

So, I read this week about a family who bought a house that from the outside looked perfect. A great neighborhood, solid structure, no obvious problems. Didn't look like a money pit. But once they moved in, they started noticing crazy things starting to happen. Doors were hard. It was getting hard to shut the doors. In fact, some of them couldn't shut anymore. They started to notice cracks, and they were like going, what in the world's going on? And so they called in a contractor to kinda investigate, and much to their surprise, they discovered that they had a termite infestation. There were no obvious warning signs but underneath the surface, termites were literally eating them out of house and home and as a result, they realized their house was under attack. [00:28:53] (55 seconds)  #TermitesInTheWalls

And I think in this, there's a sobering truth. The most perilous things in our lives are rarely the loud obvious sins, but the quiet loyalties and subtle replacements that we allow to sneak in. Remember those termites? Termite the the those termites, we never invited in but have tolerated because everything looks fine on the surface. [00:47:29] (26 seconds)  #QuietIdolsHiddenLoyalties