Miraculously Saved

Well, once again, we’re so glad to have you here. If you’re a guest today, maybe you joining us for the first time, maybe you were part of one of our Christmas services, or you’re just checking out new churches in the new year. We just want to warmly welcome you and let you know that some of us on staff will be in the West Lobby after the service.

And if you wouldn’t mind just coming up and introducing yourself, and it gives us an opportunity to get to know you a little bit more, and then thank you for joining us today. And one of the things that we always encourage people that are guests to do is to come for three weeks, just come three weeks in a row, and to see if God would have you call this your church home. We also know there’s people that are streaming in online, or they’re watching later on demand, or they may be joining us from our partners over there at First Lutheran and Algonac.

We’re so glad that we’re able to stream into their worship service as well. As we are on week two of what we started last week, which is Exodus. And if you haven’t been part of Shepherd’s Gate, one of the things that we love to do is walk through books of the Bible, chapter by chapter, verse by verse, literally word by word.

And so what we’re gonna be doing now, and up to Holy Week, is going through the first 12 chapters of Exodus. So 12 weeks, 12 chapters. Doesn’t that sound great? Just makes it nice and easy.

So we would encourage you, if you weren’t here last week, you can go online, you can watch any of the messages on demand. We also encourage you to bring your own Bible. So if you have a Bible, to bring it so that you can follow along, you can underline and highlight in it, you can take that home and reference it later in the week.

I don’t have my Bible right now on me because my son stole it because he didn’t bring his Bible, so he’s borrowing it in the front row over here. But I know many of you have said in the past, you tell us to bring our Bibles, but then it’s too dark and I can’t see the words in front of me, right? Any of you, you’ve thought that, or you’ve told me that? Just so you know, Matt is our incredible tech guy back there. Matt, wherever he’s at, can we give Matt a hand? He just does a great job every week.

I want you to know the lights right now are at max capacity. This is a hundred percent. Don’t you feel brighter? You notice how some of you thought you were taking a nap today? Because by the way, I can really see all of you now, which means none of you can go to sleep, okay? So that’s how this works.

You can see your Bibles and I can see you clearly, and I’m so glad about that. Here’s the challenge though, is to be present in worship every single week. If you can’t make it, make sure you watch online, engage with the text during the week, and invest in your family every single week.

If your kids are in the kids program, they’re actually learning the same exact text that we’re learning. They’re just learning it at an age appropriate level. And so we’re not just telling you to do that, we’re giving you the resources to do that.

And the way that you have the resources available to you, they’re literally at your fingertips on our app or website. So there’s a reading plan, there’s some dig deeper questions, and there’s some family questions if you have smaller kids, that help you then talk about what you’ve learned and what they have learned on Sunday morning. Does that sound good? Now, I know you guys are busy.

Anybody not busy? Anybody not busy? Notice no hands are going up. Even the retired people are just completely busy. It’s crazy.

My family did the questions last night. We got through the week, and you know, I’m the pastor of the church, so I’m like, shoot, we gotta do this and set a good example. So last night at dinner, we sat it down at our kitchen table, and we went through the questions, and my oldest son looked at me and he said, Dad, these questions are really hard.

And I said, what you mean to say is they’re thought-provoking. Is that what you mean to say? They’re thought-provoking, right? And he said, did you write these questions? And I said, funny that you should say that, because normally I write the questions for the sermon series, but our new pastor, Eric, and his wife, Jenny, actually wrote these questions, and I’m glad that they’re tougher. And he’s actually a college professor, so he knows what he’s doing.

That’s what he used to do, be a college professor. So thank you to you two. Can you guys go ahead and wave so they know who you are? Jenny, is that a surprise? You did help them with the questions, right? Well, we won’t, all right.

I won’t repeat what she said. Anyways, this is what we’re gonna start today is a carryover from last week, and really the big question that we’re asking last week into this week is, when has your faith been tested? When has your faith been tested? Now, I’m very thankful today that my mom is not in worship. Her and my dad are members of the church.

They’re actually in Florida with my little brother because she hates it when I tell this story, okay? So all of you that are friends with her, don’t tell her that I told this story today. Got it? Okay, good. She’s at my brother’s church, which is great.

I don’t know how many of you you’ve ever been to the Upper Peninsula. There’s a little lake up there called Lake Superior. And we were swimming in Lake Superior, which I don’t know why any rational person swims in Lake Superior when it’s always 10 degrees.

And we were swimming in Lake Superior, and there was a moment where I got a little too far from shore. And in my childhood mind, I was convinced this was the moment I was gonna go meet Jesus. And so I said my final prayer.

I tried to confess all my sins, you know, to make sure God and I were good. You know, tears are coming down my cheeks, although the waves are crashing all around me, when all of a sudden, my older brother, who I don’t really like, he’s only 18 months older than me, miraculously shows up in a raft. And he laughed at me.

And he pulled my 40-pound body out of the water and into the raft, and he rowed me back to shore, and he saved my life. Isn’t that incredible? So that’s the only reason I’m here today. I also will not be telling him this story as well, because I do not like reminding him that he saved my life.

But it is true. So every once in a while, I do have to remember, especially if we’re getting in conflict with one another, that I still do owe him the fact that I’m breathing and on the planet today. But it’s interesting, because I guarantee you, all of us probably have something that happened to us in childhood, or maybe even later on in college, usually in the young adult phase, when you’re kind of like saying to yourself, do I really believe what my parents taught me? If you grew up in church, if you didn’t grow up in church, you’re kind of like assessing the world, and you’re trying to wonder, is this really all there is to life? And I had another crisis of faith, really, when I was at school studying to be a pastor.

I was actually in a class studying the first five books of the Bible, which Exodus is part of that. And I actually almost went and did something completely differently. I almost just decided to unenroll and go a completely different direction, until again, God got a hold of my heart and told me I was exactly where he wanted me to be.

And what’s interesting is that was actually 30 years ago now. I was in college 30 years ago. But I’m really still very young, just want you to know that.

So here’s where we left off last week. This was the middle of the text, verses 15 and 16. There’s a new king in Egypt.

There’s these Hebrew midwives, and they’re Shipra and Pua, they’re named for us. And the king tells them that every time that they’re delivering these babies of these Hebrew women who were their slaves, so you have the Egyptians and you have the Israelites. The Egyptians had enslaved the Israelites at this point, and they’re worried because they’re producing too many babies.

And so he comes up with this plan to tell the midwives that if it’s a boy, you kill him, but if it’s a girl, you let her live. Which, how many of you think that’s a good plan? And these are those moments when you scratch your head and go like, well, is this really true? Is this made up? Why would this be the way to control the population? And we find out from the text that the reason that he didn’t want the boys is because he’s worried those boys will become men, then they’ll become warriors, and they’ll fight in battle, and then we will lose our kingdom because they’ll join forces with our enemy. I don’t totally understand that because if you wanna control the population, who are the people that make the babies? The correct answer is the women.

God created two genders, male and female. And think about that, because that’s kind of debated in our society. And now, instead of it, you look back and you can see why he was doing it for that reason, but now what’s the issue? What’s kind of creeped in our society is there’s confusion.

Sometimes there’s boys that think there’s girls and girls that think there are boys, and for us that are raising kids, kind of the thing that’s a challenge now is the sporting industry, where you have boys that wanna play on girls’ teams and girls that wanna play on boys’ teams. More so, boys that wanna play on girls’ teams, and how that has caused havoc in our school systems, in our sporting competitions, all over the place. And so we’re trying to navigate that and figure out how you still value somebody, even if they disagree with us or see the world differently, and still love them while also protecting our women, amen? And that’s what we’re trying to do as a church.

Now, this is the verse, this was the cliffhanger we left off with last week. This was the last verse in Exodus chapter one, because the midwives didn’t do what Pharaoh told them to do, so he goes on to plan B, and the plan B is he gets everybody involved. He gets all of his kingdom involved, all his people, and he says, every Hebrew boy that is born, you throw them into the Nile, but let every girl live.

And what a difficult text to read, what a hard reality sometimes for our minds to grasp the gravity of such a situation. It just seems so awful. And so today, we’re gonna start in chapter two.

If you have your Bibles, you can go to Exodus chapter two, beginning in verse one, it says this. Now, a man of the tribe of Levi married a Levite woman. So Levi is Jacob, Jacob’s name’s also Israel, so Jacob becomes grandpa, Levi’s a child, he’s about to have some more grandkids.

She becomes pregnant, and what does she give birth to? A son, creates a dilemma. When she saw that he was a fine child. Ladies in this room, has anyone ever given birth and not thought your child was fine? I remember when Lisa gave birth to our second son, and I always had the opportunity to cut the umbilical cord and to announce, because we never found out the sex of our kids, to tell her whether it was a boy or a girl, and I placed this gooey child on her chest, and I said, Lisa, God gave us another boy, and I’ll never forget this, she just said, I love him.

And I remember thinking to myself, you can’t even see him, but that’s the heart of a mom, isn’t it? When you can feel that child on your chest, when you know that this is what you have been carrying for all these months. And so she sees this fine child, and what does she do? She goes into protective mom mode, she hides him for three months. And imagine, especially the ladies in here, the stress of doing that.

How many sleepless nights this woman must have endured, hearing other babies, other baby boys in her community being ripped from their mother’s arms, and violently and really just terribly thrown into the Nile and losing their lives. Innocent children. And here she’s doing everything that she can to protect this child.

She gets to a point where she can’t hide him any longer, and so she goes and gets a papyrus basket for him, and she coats it with tar and pitch. She uses her very hands, and she uses the resources, she’s enslaved, she’s using the very resources that she had available to her. She places the child in it, and she puts it among the reeds along the bank of the Nile.

And I want you to think about this. She’s actually doing what Pharaoh the King told them all to do. She’s not tossing him in the Nile, she’s putting him in a basket, and she’s placing him in the Nile, and what is she doing? She’s not just letting him float down the Nile, she made sure that he was tucked away in these reeds.

And now we find out that he has a sister, he’s got an older sister. She’s standing at a distance to see what would happen to him. How many of you are thankful for older sisters? God bless older sisters.

Now, before we go any further, it’s important for you to know this, that when we read the Bible, when we read the Old Testament, and if you’re new to Scripture, sometimes you’re hearing these stories for the first time, and you’re like, it just seems, it just doesn’t seem real, it doesn’t seem plausible. Here’s what’s important to know today. Scripture actually quotes Scripture, okay? All throughout the Bible, 66 books, from the Old Testament to the New Testament, Genesis to Revelation, and not only does Scripture quote Scripture, Scripture interprets Scripture.

So if you find yourself wrestling with a passage and it’s difficult to understand, you may have to go and reference it in another part of the Bible to help you better understand what it is that you’re reading. And someone was gracious enough to make a chart that shows you every time Scripture interprets Scripture or Scripture quotes Scripture. And here’s the chart right here.

Those of you that are good at counting, do you know how many these are? Anybody know? Oh, there we go. Somebody already knew this. There’s over 63,000 references of Scripture in the Bible to itself.

That line in the middle is the demartation between the Old Testament and the New Testament. I want you to see this because it’s really cool as we start Exodus. These two concepts, the basket, the papyrus basket, and the fact that she places them among the reeds, these words are written in Hebrew because the Old Testament’s written in Hebrew.

These are not the first time that these words are used or in particular, the basket. In fact, if you were here for Genesis, we talked about Noah’s Ark, and this is the same Hebrew word that’s used to describe Noah’s Ark. And so the writer of Exodus, who also wrote Genesis, is doing this on purpose.

He’s communicating a deeper meaning to us. And by doing this, he’s actually pointing to the sovereign work of God, not the work of man. And he’s saying that this is what God does, that when we think the world has gone dark and mad and confused and even some of the most painful, awful periods of human history, God is the one who is always at work.

God is always the one that is delivering his people. So much so that we’re gonna see this word reeds used again when we get to Exodus chapter 14. And if you grew up in church, you might remember that baby Moses turns into a man and he leads them through the wilderness, but he also leads them across something called the Sea of Reeds.

Does anybody guess what that might be? The Red Sea. And so those words are also used in that moment because again, it’s always God that’s delivering people and it’s always God that’s actually delivering you and me. And the way that he’s delivered you and me is through his son, Jesus Christ.

More on that in a moment. I want you to think about this. Because Jesus’ disciples, those that were super close to him, one in particular was named Peter.

He was kind of the leader of the pack. Many years later, after Jesus rises from the dead and he ascends into heaven and they’ve done their public ministry, at this point, Peter is well on in age. He writes this in one of his letters.

He says these words, to those who were disobedient long ago when God waited patiently in the days of Noah while the ark was being built. So what is he doing? He’s referencing back to the Old Testament. He’s actually validating that this was a real person at a real time and the ark event actually took place.

He says, in it, only a few people, eight in all, which was Moses and his family, were saved and they were saved through water. This is why water is so important in the Bible. This water, by the way, it symbolizes baptism.

And oh, by the way, it now saves you and it saves me. And you got to witness it. The nine o’clock didn’t get to witness a baptism.

We didn’t have one at nine. But you guys got to witness one today as God worked through water to bring a child into his family. And God continues to rescue and to save us today in the way that he does it, look in the scriptures, is through his one and only son, Jesus Christ.

Now another guy in the New Testament, his name’s Paul. He wasn’t part of the original pack of 12, but he ends up showing up later, ends up writing a ton of letters, is used mightily by God. This is what he did when he wrote a letter to a church in Corinth.

He said, I do not want you to be ignorant, which means I want you to know the truth. I want you to know that this is real, brothers and sisters. He’s talking to the church, that our ancestors were all under the cloud and that they all passed through the sea.

And what he’s doing is he’s saying that the account of Moses and all that happened in Exodus actually is our ancestry. They were under a cloud, a pillar of cloud by day. They also passed through the sea.

And oh, by the way, they were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea. Do you see how scripture is constantly referencing itself over and over again? That’s good, nobody saw that. You’re all just taking it all in, aren’t you? All right, so here we got up to verse five.

It says, then Pharaoh’s daughter went down to the Nile to bathe, right? You don’t have a shower in the castles. You go down to the water to bathe. And her attendants were walking along the river bank.

She saw the basket among the reeds and she sends her female slave to get it. Why? Because there’s not a lot of baskets in the Nile River. Something’s out of place.

What could possibly be in that basket? And look at what it says. She opened it and saw with her eyes the baby and he was crying. Any mom surprised that the baby’s crying? And what does it say, and this goes for everyone, when you hear a baby crying, what do you do? You feel sorry for them.

How many of you, when you’re out to eat at a restaurant and there are parents that can’t get control of their child, moms in particular, the thought that you have in your mind is, good Lord, just give me that baby. And I will show them how to calm that baby down. Any of you wanna confess that this morning? Any of you ever thought that? Come on.

It’s because that’s how God wired you and created you. You don’t want the baby to cry, you want the baby to be soothed. Now, there’s also a small segment of our population, the male population, I call them the male baby whispers.

And every time you give these men a baby, the baby just instantly snaps out of it. Everybody married to somebody that’s like that? Anytime you have an ornery baby, just give it to the man and you’re like, what is it about this guy? And you’re like, I don’t know, he just has this special gift from God. By the way, if that’s you, you’re one of those men you should probably volunteer for the nursery, okay? So she feels sorry for him, and then what does she say? This is one of the Hebrew babies.

How did she know it was a Hebrew baby? Color of its skin. She knew that this wasn’t an Egyptian baby. Now, I want you to think about this for a moment and just let this whole idea of what’s happening in the culture, because clearly she’s been protecting, his mom’s been protecting him for three months.

And Pharaoh’s daughter would have known about these babies being launched into the Nile and how many babies up to this moment had already met their earthly fate. How many of them had already lost their lives in such a gruesome way? What was it about this child? Was it just physically seeing the child and hearing its cries? See, here at Shepherds Gate, we have such a high value for human life. We believe that life begins at conception, because that’s what the word of God teaches us.

And we want all life to be valued at all times. And one of the things that happened in our community several years ago, we’re partnered with an organization called Compassion Pregnancy Center, and they were raising funds to buy an ultrasound machine. And they knew that once they bought the ultrasound machine, is that when ladies would come in who were pregnant and they were struggling on whether or not they were gonna keep their child or not, they believed and they were praying that if those mothers saw the image on the ultrasound, that that would soften their hearts.

And do you know that that is exactly what happened? That more babies have been saved in Metro Detroit because of an ultrasound machine at Compassion Pregnancy Center. And we thank God for that. And we continue to partner with them, and we continue to fund what it is that they’re doing, because we have, again, such a high view of life.

Now, if you’re here today, maybe you’ve had an abortion, maybe you’ve been part of somebody else having an abortion, and that weighs heavy on you. Know this, that Jesus Christ died on the cross for all sins. There is not a sin that you can commit that God will not forgive through his son, Jesus Christ.

And one of the things I also love about Compassion Pregnancy Center is they deal with people that have had abortions. They even have classes for men. Their kids have also, unfortunately, been lost through those means.

And if you wanna talk to one of us about this, or maybe you even disagree with us when it comes to this very issue, come and let us know. We would love to talk to you, or we’d love to give you the resources, or we would love to pray with you. Am I right, church? All right, now, I want you to see this.

Ladies in particular in the room, because oftentimes, especially with Old Testament texts, they can be very heavy on men, and the role of men and the male characters. And so I really feel like this is important for you guys to know this today, is I want you to see the way that God is working through the hearts of all of these different women. And I want you to see this again.

It started with his mom, fighting and protecting her son, even if it meant her own life. She was gonna do everything that she could. And then the fact that his sister wasn’t willing to let him out of her eyesight.

Or even Pharaoh’s daughter, that even though she was a pagan and worshiped false gods and believed in idols, that God was able to soften her heart toward this child. And all of the other women that were there to care for Pharaoh’s daughter. Absolutely amazing the way that God works in and through the hearts of women.

Now watch what happens next in verse seven. It says, then his sister asked Pharaoh’s daughter, shall I go and get one of the Hebrew women to nurse the baby for you? Again, how do you not love older sisters? How cool, I mean, it’s kind of parallel to what we talked about last week with the midwives going to Pharaoh and saying, you don’t understand, these women, they just give birth. We can’t even get there in time.

And here again, God giving her wisdom to be able to offer this. And it’s so cool because she responds by saying, yeah, that’s a great idea, go. And so his sister goes and she got the baby’s mother.

And I just pause in this moment as well as you read this text. And for a second, ladies in particular, enter in to the emotional roller coaster this woman must have been going through. You spend the first three months protecting your child.

Then you weave a basket with your very own hands, put something underneath it so that it doesn’t sink to the bottom of the river and you place it in the river, praying to God that maybe in some miraculous way, he would save your son. And then you walk away, probably go back to your house and bawl your eyes out because you think that that is the last moment you’re going to see your son. And the next thing you know that comes through the door of your house is your daughter.

And your daughter’s the one that’s saying, mom, you’re not going to believe this. Mom, you’re not going to believe what happened. You’re not going to believe the compassion that Pharaoh’s daughter had on my brother and your son.

You get to nurse your son again. And oh, by the way, she’s going to pay you to do it. Why? They’re slaves.

Why does she need to get paid to do this? Why is this detail even in the scriptures? Do you know why? Because it shows you how amazing and awesome our God is. It shows you that even in some of the most difficult times in the history of humanity, that God not only provides, he not only protects, he not only saves, but that God also, in these miraculous ways, heaves blessings on us that we do not deserve. Have you ever been so blessed that you have to tell God to stop blessing you? No one? I know you people.

I can tell you, I’ve seen God bless you. I’ve seen times when people have stepped out in faith and God has done miracle after miracle after miracle after miracle. And you go like, could you share one of those with another family? Because I’ve also seen it the opposite way.

I’ve seen people struggle. And sometimes I’ve said to God, God, if you could just give every family one tragedy in their lifetime, that would be great. But yet there’s people that deal with tragedy after tragedy after tragedy.

And in all of those times, somehow there’s a silver lining. Somehow God is still working out his plan for their life. I mean, can you imagine when she got Moses back in her arms? I mean, you imagine how many times she kissed that baby? And held him close to her? Now God is working through his own mom again.

What an awesome account in scripture. Of course he’s gonna grow and as he grew older, eventually his mom had to take him to Pharaoh’s daughter. And I think this would be really difficult because now he becomes her son.

Ladies in the room, imagine if you only had three months, you knew, or actually not three months, three years. If you only had three years with your child, the kind of prayers that you would be praying over that child. And the reason we know that it was right around three years is because that was what was written in the Hebrew traditions of nursing a child.

The amount of comfort and care, but then ultimately having to trust God once again, not just by placing him in the Nile, but now placing your child in the arms of another woman. And I want you to think about this, because here is God placing him in the home of his enemy. God is placing him and is gonna have him raised in a pagan culture around idols and false gods.

God puts him in the heart and in the epicenter, in the center of Pharaoh’s household. I mean, you don’t think God’s up to something? God knows exactly what he is doing. And even so, Moses’ biological mom didn’t even get to name him.

Pharaoh’s daughter got to name him. And so she picks this name Moses that we’re all familiar with now. And the reason she calls him Moses is because she’s the one that drew him out of the water.

So what is this text teaching us? In these first 10 verses of Exodus chapter two, number one is this, that no matter what Pharaoh or the devil or this world throws at us, God is always working a better plan. No matter what happens in our state, in our country, all around the world, with all the shifts and the things that we hear all the time that stress us out and get us all anxious and all worried, God is up to something greater. And by the way, he works through the hearts of ordinary people.

What was special about any of the people that helped Moses be saved from the river? Nothing, absolutely nothing. And yet those are the people that he used that didn’t even know they were being used. And that’s what I love what God does when he uses people that we would never pick and don’t even realize that he can use and he will use.

And what’s so beautiful about this text is that what does he save from? He’s saved and he’s preserved from water, which of course points us forward to our baptisms and what it is that God has done in our lives. And again, that he puts them in the center of Pharaoh’s home, because that’s all gonna be part of the plan that we’re gonna walk through as we continue to walk through Exodus together as we see unfolding in Moses’ life in the chapters to come. And so I wanna leave you with this verse, Romans 8, 28, where it says this, and we know that in some things God works for the good.

Oh, did I read it wrong? I’m sorry. Let me check my glasses. And we know that in what? All things God works for the good of those who love him who’ve been called according to his purpose.

I can tell you this, when it comes to baptism, and may you have more questions about baptism and Ben’s gonna tell you about a class that you can attend right after this service. I came here to Shepherd’s Gate when I was 27 years old. I was raised in an Assemblies of God church.

And so at that church, they believed in believers baptism. And so when I was a teenager, I went to a baptism class and then I went into a huge tank and I got to go under and be baptized and brought back up because that’s just what you did when you were in seventh or eighth grade. I got to do it with all my friends and I got to give my testimony in front of the whole church.

But when I was here at Shepherd’s Gate, I called my mom and I said, hey, mom, you’re not gonna believe this but Shepherd’s Gate believes in infant baptism. And do you know what my mom said? She said, oh, you were baptized as an infant. And I was like, wait, what? I said, don’t you think you should have told me that a long time ago? And she’s like, oh, your grandpa, because my grandpa was a United Methodist pastor.

She’s like, yeah, he baptized you when you were an infant and then you were dedicated as an infant at the Assemblies of God church and you were baptized as a teenager. And I was like, wow, geez. And then a few years ago, I went to Israel and I went into the Jordan River where Jesus was baptized and I went under and came back up.

So technically you could say I’ve been baptized three times. I figure all my bases are covered, right? But really all I was doing was remembering my baptism. And so if you’re here and you haven’t been baptized, we would love nothing more for you to experience God’s grace in the waters of baptism.

Regardless of your background or how you grew up or where you’re at, if you have not been baptized, we would encourage you to do that. In fact, today we’re gonna end by celebrating all that God did in and through this church, through you who have brought your family members and friends in 2025 because we had 52 baptisms that happened last year. Which again is another record-breaking year because the year before we had the most baptisms, we had 61 baptisms.

If you combine both years together, that’s 113 baptisms here at Shepherds Gate in just the last two years. Can we give God praise for that? And so we wanted to share that highlight video with you, so let’s watch this. This is one of our videos.