2022-11-01 Day Old Doughnuts

The speaker talks about the concept of "day olds" in bakeries, which are baked goods from the previous day sold at a cheaper price. They mention that day olds are familiar and cheaper, but lack the fresh quality. The speaker then compares this to our relationship with God, emphasizing the importance of continually learning and growing in our faith. They caution against relying on past experiences and not seeking a fresh word from God. The speaker also discusses the Israelites' journey in the desert and how they complained about the food provided by God. They highlight the need to trust God and not hoard blessings or rely on past experiences. The speaker concludes by encouraging listeners to seek a personal relationship with God and not just focus on the blessings he provides. They emphasize the importance of growth and not settling for the same old ways of doing things. Does anyone here enjoy bakeries? Yeah? Yeah, okay. When I was a kid, the nearest town to my house had a renowned bakery, it was called Butter Tarts and More. People as much as two hours away or more, they would take day trips on the weekend to get the delicious baked goods from them. So one thing that most bakeries have is something called day olds. It's baked goods like donuts and things that were made yesterday or sometimes a little bit before, and they're sold today now for a cheaper price. Has anybody ever had day olds? Are you too afraid of that? No, you're good, okay. You guys are thrifty, you guys are smart with your money, I can see that. Some might say that day olds actually taste better, but that might just be our bias because it's cheap and we like deals and things like that, right? The thing about day olds is that they're easier, they're familiar, they're cheap, but they're never gonna have that fresh quality. But you know what's better than a fresh donut? A fresh word from God. Are you getting a fresh outpouring of the Holy Spirit in your life or are you eating the same stale donut from years ago? That's what I wanna ask you tonight because God doesn't serve day old donuts. That is to say that we need to keep learning about God, not just staying at our current level of spiritual maturity. Our first point on that tonight is don't ask for day old donuts. Don't simply try to live off what you learned before. The ancient Israelites in the Old Testament had a day old donut problem once. They've been held as slaves in Egypt for years, crying out to God to send them someone who could free them from slavery, to send them a deliverer. And finally, God sent Moses to be the one to lead them out of Egypt to a new land for them to live in. But on the way to the promised land, they started complaining to Moses that they had better food back in Egypt. Can you imagine that? Like just think about that for a second. God delivers them from forced labor to freedom and on the way they complain that the food isn't good enough. Imagine that we just rescued somebody who had been kidnapped, right? And we're bringing them home to their home now and they're complaining, well, the snacks on the car ride are not good enough. You'd probably wanna give them back to the kidnappers, wouldn't you? It's wild, right? So let's check it out in Exodus 16 and we're gonna start in verse one. Then the whole community of Israel set out from Elam and journeyed into the wilderness of sin. Between Elam and Mount Sinai, they arrived there on the 15th day of the second month, one month after leaving the land of Egypt. That wilderness was literally called sin. That's not like a metaphor for like sin or anything like that. There too, the whole community of Israel complained about Moses and Aaron. If only the Lord had killed us back in Egypt, they moaned. There we sat around pots filled with meat and ate all the bread we wanted, but now you've brought us into this wilderness to starve us all to death. Then the Lord said to Moses, look, I'm gonna rain down food from heaven for you. Each day the people can go out and pick up as much food as they need for that day. I will test them in this to see whether or not they will follow my instructions. You gotta put it in context. They've been slaves for hundreds of years. For some of them, this is all they ever knew and now they finally had a taste of freedom. Two months of freedom and Israel has already wanted to go back to slavery. They wanted to go back to the way things were, what was comfortable, familiar. Anybody felt like that in the last two years? So not only does God agree to give them the food, but to abundantly supply them by raining it down from heaven, like that's abundant. Have any of you ever seen the kids movie, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs? It's a really funny movie. If you haven't seen it in the movie, Flint Lockwood, he's an inventor and he accidentally makes it rain food and he gets real popular, real fast as a result until he causes a meat ear shower of meatballs. Now this wasn't necessarily meatballs from heaven, but God provided them with food. And he didn't just give them food though, he gave them a test as well. We just read that in the verse. So does anybody here like pop quizzes? Oh, you do? Okay, wow. Now you've won on earth probably. The Israelites got one too, to see if they would follow instructions. Why do you think God tested them? Just to see if they follow arbitrary instructions, to see if he said, you know, jump how high, all that kind of thing? No, it was to see if they wanted a relationship with him or they just wanted him to be their genie. What do I mean by that? Sometimes we treat God like a genie, something that grants our wishes and just gives us whatever we want if we just pray hard enough, read our Bible regular enough or we're a nice enough person. But when we relegate him to a genie, we overlook the greatest blessing that God has to offer, a personal relationship with him based on him rather than his blessings. A question I often try to challenge myself with is this, if God never blessed me at all, would I still be a Christian? Because if I wouldn't, I think that'd be the same thing as telling your parent, you know, you don't want to be their kid unless they give you presents or telling our significant other, we only love them because of the ways they make us happy. And as soon as they stop making us happy, we'll toss them aside for someone else. And that's why the question that guys often get asked by their wives or girlfriends, what do you love about me? It's kind of an unintentional trap sometimes, right? Because I understand the question, right? It's a way of looking for assurance, right? But answering it has some negative implications if you really think about it logically for a second. Because if you told your wife you love her beautiful hair, what happens if health concerns cause her to lose her hair? Do you still love her? If you said you love her chipper personality, then what about when she's sad? Does that mean you don't love her anymore? I'm nitpicking about words here, but it's something to think about. If God were to ask us, what do you love about me? Do we love that he blesses us? What about when we're not seeing those blessings we prayed for? Do we love how he comforts us? What about the days that it feels like your prayers are hitting the ceiling and verses you read in the Bible aren't encouraging you the same way that they did last week? Do we still love him for him or for what he gives us? And you might even be thinking, well, I don't even understand, what is God apart from those things? Well, then that's a question you have to ask yourself. That's something you have to dig into when you're in your times of prayer and stuff, because God has a personality. You think he has less personality than you or me? He's a person, he's not just this vague force that drops meatballs from heaven. He has a personality that we can get to know. So we see in verses 19 and 20 later on, even though God gave them what they needed, they wanted more. Then Moses told them, do not keep any of it. This is the manna, that is food that he was going to bring down from heaven. Do not keep any of it until morning. But some of them didn't listen and kept some of it until morning. But by then it was full of maggots and had a terrible smell. Moses was very angry with them. How often are we blessed with all that we need in our life, but we want more and more and more? And we think that if we just got that raise, we'd finally feel secure about our financial position. If we just had a better looking significant other or one who's more adventurous, we'd finally feel loved or that life wouldn't be so boring. Or if our kids were better behaved, we'd finally stop feeling like a bad parent. But the truth of the matter is that none of these things will satisfy us. The truth of the matter is, God has given and is ready to give what we need, but will we choose to find satisfaction in him despite the circumstances, good or bad around us, or will we choose to never be satisfied? Because unless we choose to be satisfied with what we have, God's ability to bless us is limited. Imagine for a minute that I'm handing out snacks to a kid to share with the other kids. But every time I pass him some, he keeps it for himself, right, because he's afraid he won't have enough or he just wants to keep it all for himself, right? Will I keep giving him snacks or will I decide he has enough and I need to give snacks out to the other kids myself? And with God, it can be the same. Is he going to keep giving us more and more and more if he sees we aren't reflecting his personality with the same generosity towards others? You know, I heard it pointed out before, you know, it was an evangelist I heard one time and they were mentioning that this person that they had met with a severe gambling problem told them like, you know, I'm just praying to God, you know, and they had a lot of financial mismanagement in their life and they said, you know, I'm just praying to God that when I win that lottery ticket, when I get that winning lottery ticket, I'm going to donate so much to the church, man, and I'm going to get my life together. I just need him to give me that. And the evangelist told him God is never going to bless that. He's never going to bless that. Do you think that God is going to give you the very thing that got you in trouble in the first place? If all of this finances has taken you down the tubes in the first place, do you think he's just going to give you more ammo? You've got to come to him to investigate what the real heart problem is first and allow him to change that in you before he's going to give you that. Maybe it's not something like that, but a lot of us might be praying. Before I met Hannah, I had times in my life where I was praying like, God, I just want to meet that right person. I just want this. And I had to go through seasons of admitting to myself because God was trying to tell me like, it's not going to happen until you take care of this. It's not going to happen until you take care of this. And it was not like this conditional thing in the sense, in a negative sense of like, I had to get it all together to be good enough for God. No, it's just, he's saying, look, I want you to have this too. I want you to have a good relationship too. But there's things you've put in the way of that. And we need to deal with those things first, or it's not going to happen for your own good because you will destroy that person. So maybe that's why some of us feel like we're not learning anything new as well. When we jump into the Bible for ourselves and we're not getting anything out of times of worship or sermons, is God going to keep teaching us new things when we haven't even put into practice what he's already tried to teach us? Will he keep handing us fresh donuts if we aren't eating them and we're just storing them for a rainy day? That brings me to my second point. Don't hoard day-old donuts. If we jump forward to verse 33, we read that they kept a portion of manna to remember what God had done and how he provided. Moses said to Aaron, get a jar and fill it with two quarts of manna, then put it in a sacred place before the Lord to preserve it for all future generations. They didn't store the manna so they could eat it later. And they weren't expecting new manna at that point either. They looked forward to what God would do next. And that's admirable because it's really difficult if we're honest. They didn't preserve this for future generations to eat and experience the exact same experience God did for them. But to show future generations that God provides, the exact methods may vary. Most of us want to hoard what we get for the future. And sometimes it's because we're afraid God won't come through like he did in the past. But sometimes it's because we're too comfortable with what he gave us this time and we don't want to try something new from him in the future. How many times, whether it's a matter of provision in a physical form, or whether it's a matter of God speaking to us and how we're growing in Christ and that sort of thing, how many times have you sat there and thought about a time in your life like, oh, I was so close to Jesus in that season of my life. If only I could have that again now. But you're not that person anymore. God doesn't need to do that because hopefully you've learned and grew through that experience. Now you're a different person than you were yesterday. I'm a completely different person than I was five years ago. I'm a completely different person than I was two days ago, right? Because God is doing things in us. What happens to things that don't grow? They die. Those are the two options. In the Gospel of John, which is one of the books in the Bible that talks about what Jesus did and said when he walked here on earth physically, the Israelites of that time wished that God would get back to his roots and perform the same miracle he had for their ancestors with the manna. Jesus had fed more than 5,000 people miraculously and people were amazed, right? And when he headed out of town, they all went searching for him. But when they found him, Jesus knew that their motives weren't to follow after him because of the life-changing teachings he was sharing or the amazing person that he was, but because they liked the food. And we can pick that up in John 6, 47 here. "'I tell you the truth,' this is Jesus speaking, "'anyone who believes has eternal life. "'Yes, I am the bread of life. "'Your ancestors ate manna in the wilderness, "'but they all died. "'Anyone who eats the bread from heaven, "'however, will not die. "'I am the living bread that came down from heaven. "'Anyone who eats this bread will live forever. "'And this bread, which I will offer "'so the world may live, is my flesh.'" The people longed for Jesus to bring them back to the good old days. They wanted day-old donuts when the bread of life was right in front of them, ready to give them a new and better blessing. If we backtrack to the Israelites in the desert, these people wanted something other than what God had prepared for them for that day and moment. First, it was what they already had back in Egypt. Then it was more than they needed instead of letting God sustain them. We're already trying to get more donuts before we've eaten what's on our plates. Why do we do this? I think fundamentally, all of these problems we've been talking about tonight point to when we're struggling to trust God. We want to control the experience and relationship with God. We say as Christians, it's not a religion, it's relationship. Some of us are okay with that. We just want to be in charge of that relationship. But when Jesus' disciples asked him how to pray, here's what he said in Matthew 6, 11. Give us this day our daily bread, not weekly, not yearly, not for life, but today. And maybe you're listening to me and you don't yet have a relationship with God. Maybe that's because you want it on your own terms. Or maybe you're realizing that you're in a season where you have a relationship, but you've been trying to have it on your own terms rather than his. It's an ongoing relationship and it can start today or it can course correct today. And we'll pray for some of that later on, but let's continue. My last point today is don't eat donuts for breakfast. I'm not judging if anyone has done that before. We've got uni students, I understand. Don't try to use something that worked before when it only worked because it was a different context. Donuts make a great dessert, but they aren't a nutritional breakfast. Are we truly seeking that promise plan ahead or are we tired of the ever changing journey through the desert and content to go back to Egypt to our same old way of doing things again? You know, I remember in the height of the pandemic, we kept having that goofy word about the new normal, right? What's the new normal kind of thing. Or people kept telling me, I can't wait till we can do X, Y, and Z again or still things get back to normal. And I was just like, normal's gone, get over it. It's never coming back, right? Everything is different now. Like we can't go back to the way the world was. Like, okay, I'll even give you in my short lifetime, I'll even give you an example, okay? So, you know, I've always grown up with the internet. That's my generation. It's always exist, but it sucked when I was a kid. You could barely use it. You know, if somebody called on the phone, you couldn't use the internet anymore, right? It was there, but it's not like something that like fundamentally changed how I live my life. You know, I went in the backyard and rode around my bike like previous generations. I didn't get a cell phone until I was in college. I didn't have an email address until then either. We didn't fundamentally shift my life, but then even in that time, the invention of the smartphone, that ready access to internet all the time has completely changed the way that this world exists. Completely. When I was a little bit younger, you could take a piece of paper into a business and be like, this is my resume. You can't do that anymore. That's just not a thing. You could walk in with a piece of paper and they're gonna tell you, I don't need this. Here is a website link. Go there, fill out that thing online. And then maybe we'll call you if the internet tells us we should first, right? It's completely changed the world. It's a before and after era. And COVID was one of those things. It's never gonna be the same again. It's just not. So what do we do with that? What do we do? And when each of us are gonna have something like that, forget COVID for a minute. Each of us are gonna have something like that personally in our lives. That maybe it was the loss of a loved one. Maybe you moved to a new place. Maybe you started a new job. There's gonna be things like that where there's just your life before and your life after and things are never gonna be the same again. So what do we do with that? We can't run on yesterday's outpouring of the Holy Spirit. God will teach us certain things over and over in our lives, but he also wants to spur us on to something new. Not just eating donuts day after day after day. He wants to give us new food as we grow in our relationship with Jesus and understand more. In Hebrews 5.12, it says, you have been believers so long now that you ought to be teaching others. Instead, you need someone to teach you again the basic things about God's word. You're like babies who need milk and cannot eat solid food. That's what the kids call a savage burn. It's a hard pill to swallow. Are we growing or are we drinking milk every day and doing the things that made us comfortable before? Are we doing things because it's the way we've always done it? Or are we trying to eat donuts for breakfast? Life with Jesus is the greatest adventure, but a wise man once told me that God always stays the same. The Bible teaches that. He is consistent in his character, in who he is. But that doesn't mean that he's always going to do the same in every single situation. And that's because things change. I'm not saying that the Bible changes. That is solid and nothing about that can ever change. But how things get applied in different situations. Think of when a kid runs and jumps into their parents' arms. A day comes when it becomes obvious they're too big for that now. They're gonna knock you over. What was adorable once is now problematic. We change, we grow, we have to. And you and I, as we grow, are not in the same situation anymore. And the world and our society, which will always need Jesus and the core truths of scripture, won't always get presented in the exact same way to them. I want to be very clear here because people can misunderstand this. I am not saying that we shift the truth of the Bible for our culture. We do not do that. But language changes, the culture changes. So how we express that in a way that our culture can understand, because if we're still speaking 1611 King James and nobody knows what on earth we're talking about, we have to be able to speak in a language that people can understand. So there's a time and place for everything. The mighty work of God in one moment in the past may not be the move of God we need in this moment of our lives. That's not to say that what God did before is useless, but there's a time and a place for everything God does. There's a reason he parted the waters to get the Israelites through, to help them escape. I once heard a pastor talk about this, his name is Francis Chan, and he was talking about how he was at this Christian conference, right? And he was so excited. Everything was going, the music was just right, everything was so exciting. He's like, oh yeah, God, I just want to see a move of God right now, an exciting move of God. I want to see like when Elijah was up on the mountain and fire came down from the heaven. And he said, God is like, dude, like he was up on the, think about the context. He was up on the mountain, surrounded by false prophets of Baal, and he needed God to come through in that way. He's like, you're at a Christian conference. You think I'm gonna burn the place? What's the matter with you, right? There's a time and a place for what, and a reason for what God does. We have to let go of any preconceived ideas of what God wants for your life and ask him today, God, what is your daily bread for me today? We spend so much time asking what God wants us to do with our lives in this big, and God, do you want me to be a missionary? Do you want me to go to law school? We spend so much time focusing on that that we don't ask him, what do you want me to do in this moment? At our nine to five job, while we're searching for a job, with our kids, with our spouse, when we're sitting in traffic or in line at the grocery store, God, what is this moment for? I like doughnuts as much as you guys, but we can't live on yesterday's word. Let's just pray real quick. Heavenly Father, each of us in this room is in different seasons of life and our own individual lives, Lord, and our families, and you know what you have for us. You know what you've been trying to get across to us. Maybe you've said it before over and over again. You've brought those verses and you've brought them for us, but we're just not, we're not clicking, Lord. Lord, I pray that you would help us to listen, to quiet our hearts, to quiet our lies and all the distractions or crazy busy schedules that don't have to be as busy as they are. Lord, help us to put those distractions aside and just be still with you. To get a fresh encounter with your Holy Spirit and not to live on yesterday's. Help us to trust you with this beautiful relationship that we have with you, Lord. In Jesus' name, amen. Hope to see you guys all next week, 5.30 for the meal again and 6.30 for the message and music. And yeah, please invite people as well. Let them know how God is speaking to you, not just here, anytime, you know? Thank you guys so much. God bless.