Knowing God's Name: Identity, Salvation, and Empowerment

Good morning, Victory family! We are so excited to see you here this morning.

I just would like to draw your attention to our communication card. This is a spot where you can update any information or any prayer requests that you may have. Additionally, for a first-time guest, you can bring this card to our Welcome Center to receive a free gift. Thank you so much for joining us this morning.

Our annual Church picnic is happening on July 9th. All food and drinks will be provided, and all you have to do is bring your lawn chair. Join us for a time of community and fellowship with our church family. To register for this, you can go online, but please register by July 2nd. If you want to serve for the event, you can sign up for that at the Welcome Center in the lobby. Thank you.

Let's stay and let's worship our Lord this morning. Psalm 138 says, "I give you thanks, O Lord, with all my heart. I will sing your praises before the gods. I bow before your Holy Temple as I worship. I praise your name for your unfailing love and faithfulness, for your promises are backed by all the honor of your name. As soon as I pray, you answer me; you encourage me by giving me strength." Amen.

Let's sing it up! There's an empty tomb, Christ is risen from the dead. Oh, you've never seen a sunrise like this. It came after three long days of darkness. You've never seen a sunrise like this, a New Day Dawning. Heaven's promises will come and see the night. Today is the day we see Resurrection. Come on, Church, let's sing it up! There's an empty tomb, Christ is risen from the dead.

Oh, you've never seen a sunrise like this. You've never heard the Earth sing like this. On that day, Creation's curse was lifted. Today is the day we represent it's risen from the dead. So you've never seen a sunrise like this. You've never seen a sunrise like this. Well, you've never heard the Earth sing like this.

Hell couldn't stop us. The stars, they seen a sunrise like this. Well, you've never heard the Earth sing like this. Heaven is reaching, oh can you hear it? Our God is speaking. You're here, Holy Spirit, oh Holy Spirit, please fall in this place. Fill our hearts, Holy Spirit, come. We're on the edge of a new beginning. God, we know you have so much. We're ready for a real River Revival. Oh, Holy Spirit, come.

You've never seen a sunrise like this. It came after three long days of darkness. You've never seen a sunrise like this, a New Day Dawning. Heaven's promises will come and see the night. Today is the day we see Resurrection. Come on, Church, let's sing it up! There's an empty tomb, Christ is risen from the dead.

Oh, you've never seen a sunrise like this. You've never heard the Earth sing like this. On that day, Creation's curse was lifted. Today is the day we represent it's risen from the dead. So you've never seen a sunrise like this. You've never seen a sunrise like this. Well, you've never heard the Earth sing like this. God, you're healing, oh just receive it. Receive the freedom. Thank you.

Good morning! My name is Steve, and I'm the lead Pastor here at Victory. I'm so glad you're here with us this morning. If you're a first-time guest with us, we'd love for you to fill out one of the communication cards. You can take that right out to the welcome desk, and we've got a gift for you. Otherwise, if you have any prayer concerns or other prayer requests, we'd love to have the chance to pray with you.

A couple of things I'd love for you to respond to on that card if you haven't yet already. The first is that next Sunday is our annual Church picnic here for the Painted Post campus. Food is free, and we're going to have a great time. All that you need to do is just let us know you're coming. This will just help us with food preparation and make sure we have enough food. So if you haven't done that yet, you can register online or you can even fill that on the communication card. Put your name and how many people are coming from your family. That's a tremendous help to us just to make sure we have enough food. We want to make sure that there's more than enough and that nobody has to leave insufficiently fed by that day.

The end of the month is our Baptism service. We have a core baptism service every summer, and that'll be happening on the last Sunday of this month. Baptism class is happening in the next two weeks. I know a lot of people have already signed up. I've heard from a lot of people who are planning who would like to be baptized but haven't officially let us know about that yet. Again, if you could fill that on the communication card and drop that in as it comes by, that's a great help as we plan for that day.

If you're not planning to be baptized, please come and cheer and hoop and holler with us. We thank you for the cross, Lord, and for the price that was paid for our freedom and for our salvation and for our forgiveness this morning. We gather in this place, casting our cares upon you. We bring to you our deep anguish and heartache. Many of us came limping into this place this morning, and we lay our cares at your feet, author and source of our lives and of our salvation. We entrust our deep hurts to you. We bring to you our relational hurt, the relationships that aren't where we want them to be or are there strains or friction. We trust them to you. Our hopes and our ambitions, our deep longings, our defeats, we place them at the foot of the cross.

We thank you for this morning for waking us up today. May you be honored and pleased with what you see here. We pray in your name, Amen. Amen. You may be seated.

It is one of the most encouraging things that happens in the life of our church when we get to celebrate those who are showing the outward symbol of the inward reality of being buried in Christ and raised up to new life. This is a representation of their sins being washed away and the new life that they are being raised to in Christ. This will be the last Sunday of this month after both of our services. We will head over to the Quarry, and we will have directions that Sunday.

I want to invite the ushers to come forward at this time as we have a chance to give back to the Lord through the giving of our tithes and offerings. As they come down, I want to let you know that I am very excited this morning to have with us to share the message my good friend Dr. Aaron Perry. He has been a pastor in New York state in the Southern Tier. He spent a number of years on staff at a church in Johnson City just up the road. His wife Heather is originally from the Binghamton area, and they have four kids. He is most recently been a professor at Wesley Seminary, and he is going to be continuing us in our series about the names of God. I am really glad to have him here to share with us this morning.

There are several ways you can give this morning. You can give in the boxes, you can give online, you can give by mail, and there are multiple ways you can give, and we are grateful for your continued generosity to the work of the ministry here at Victory. Let me pray for us this morning.

God, we thank you for the ways you have blessed us. There is nothing we haven't been given, and we pray now as we return back to you a portion of what you have placed into our hands that you would bless both the giver and the gift. We pray this in the matchless Name of Christ Our Lord, Amen.

You know, I just want to take a moment to encourage you right now. I think in times like this when we are in corporate worship, we think of the word worship and we think it is song, and that is a beautiful thing, but there is so much more to our worship than just singing songs. It's how you interact with your friends, your family, the kind things you do for a co-worker, the way that you just walk through your day and you just say something to the Lord all by yourself within your own mind. You say, “Hey Lord, am I here? Can you see me? Can you hear me?” That's worship.

And when we bring that to the Lord and we're honest with him, we give him our grief, we give him our joys, that's worship. The way that we interact with our children, we love them in spite of sometimes themselves, worship. So as you stand with us tonight and we continue to worship through song, I would love for you to remember all of those times that you worship throughout your day and throughout your week because God delights in you, and he delights in your worship.

So won't you stand with us and continue to sing this song? Here I am to worship, here I am to say that You're my God, You're altogether worthy, altogether lovely, here I am to say that You're my God, You're awesome, amen, thank You Jesus.

Foreign victory, that is the loudest good morning I've ever received back from any church I've preached at for the first time, not even joking, mark it down. And I know that means a lot of people are going to be interested in what I'm going to say next, which is books I've got for sale.

All right, one is on the Ascension that I wrote with my brother Tim. If you say what's the Ascension, it's when Jesus is taken up into heaven. Once you see it in the New Testament, you see it everywhere in the New Testament, and I've got a book for people who don't like to read, which is called Good News for All. It's a devotional in the Gospel of Luke; it's got big print and short chapters, so if you'd like to read, this one's for you. I saw those for 10 bucks; if you don't have 10 bucks, that's okay, I've got an ebook I can send you and would love to for free, and you can enjoy those resources.

Would you do me a favor if I mentioned festering in the Southern Tier of New York? My wife is from Castle Creek, New York. If you've ever driven up Highway 81 just north of Johnson City and Binghamton, you've driven right past the house she grew up in. I've got family that's here as well.

Any hockey fans in the crowd? Okay, I cheer for the Toronto Maple Leafs; I knew that was coming, did it right on schedule. If you're a hockey fan, you know the Toronto Maple Leafs, you've already got some sympathy for me, so I appreciate that.

I understand a number of things that we might have in common, but there's one thing that connects all of us, and would we do this? Would you do this with me? It would just help me out a whole lot. Would you just take a deep breath with me? Ready? One, two, three. Maybe one more.

I heard a statistic not that long ago; when I first heard it, it didn't make much sense to me, but as I reflected on it, it made a whole lot of sense. The statistic I can't remember, but the impression was this: that we get almost all of our energy not from food, which is what I might have thought, not from food, but from air.

At first, it didn't make sense because I'm like, well, if I don't eat, I'm going to run out of energy, but of course, I can go sometimes up to two or two hours without eating, but I can't go more than like 20 seconds or 25 seconds without wanting to draw a breath. To one of us, we draw almost all of our energy from breathing. That's why I'm sometimes whenever other things are happening just around us, all kinds of chaos, all kinds of stress, all kinds of strain, maybe even excitement and celebration and joy, it's like the very thing we just have to focus on when it all comes down to the simplest thing we have to do is just take a breath.

After a very difficult day filled with tragedy and all kinds of pressure in her life, mine was driving east from Toronto on the 401 in Canada. The rain was pelting down and hitting the windshield, and she was white-knuckling the steering wheel. I said, "Well, what did you do right? Should we just focus on one breath at a time?" All right, we can get to that spot in life where we just focus on one breath at a time.

I want you to turn to Exodus chapter 3.

Moses was tending the flock of Jethro, his father-in-law, the priest of Midian, and he led the flock to the far side of the desert and came to Horeb, the Mountain of God. There, the angel of the Lord appeared to him in flames of fire from within a bush. Moses saw that though the bush was on fire, it did not burn up. So, Moses thought, "I will go over and see this strange sight, why it doesn't burn up."

When the Lord saw that he had gone over to look, God called to him from within the bush, "Moses, Moses!" And Moses said, "Here I am." God said, "Don't come any closer. Take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy ground." Then he said, "I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob." At this, Moses hid his face because he was afraid to look at God.

The Lord said, "I have indeed seen the misery of my people in Egypt. I have heard them crying out because of their slave drivers, and I am concerned about their suffering. So, I have come down to rescue them from the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land into a good and spacious land, a land flowing with milk and honey, the home of the Canaanites, Hittites, Amorites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites. And now the cry of the Israelites has reached me. I have seen the way the Egyptians are oppressing them. So, now go. I am sending you to Pharaoh to bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt."

But Moses said to God, "Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?" God said, "I will be with you, and this will be the sign that it is I who have sent you: when you have brought the people out of Egypt, you will worship God on this mountain."

Moses said to God, "Suppose I go to the Israelites and say to them, 'The God of your fathers has sent me to you,' and they ask me, 'What is his name?' Then what shall I tell them?"

Why does Moses want to know God's name? There could be a couple of reasons. There are many gods and many Elohim and many gods in Egypt. So, if Moses is sent to the Israelites and they say, "Oh, really? God sent you?" Well, which one? Better get the name right. Maybe Moses wants to know the answer so that he doesn't get tricked or tripped up. Maybe Moses wants to know God's name because this God has promised to go with them, with him, into Egypt.

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