My offering, His offering

To those who might be here for the first time or maybe still feels like you’re new here, I’m hoping to meet you after the service in the lobby. If it is your first time, make sure you visit the Welcome Center because they have a gift for you.

So don’t miss out on that, but I’m so excited. And I know so far in the service, it’s been pretty heavy. It’s been pretty heavy and somber, and that’s okay.

That’s okay. That’s kind of the point of it, to feel the weight of it, the weight of the fallen world, the weight of our brokenness, our sin, the weight of the curse that we, the reality of the curse, we’re all going to die. Right? It’s heavy.

It’s a little dark, but that’s okay. But when I think about that, when I have those moments, maybe you have those moments, not just Ash Wednesday, maybe you have those other moments. Maybe you have them every day.

I don’t know. Maybe you’ve had them recently. But for me, I always want to fix it.

Any fixers here today? Anybody like to solve problems and that’s the first thing you go to? It’s like, Lord, what can I do to fix it? Just tell me. What do I got to do? Tell me what to do. What can I do? What can I offer? What can I do to fix this? And I think that’s kind of what man’s been trying to do from the beginning.

What can we do? You know, remember, they made their own outfits out of, you know, fig leaves, right? Adam and Eve. Trying to fix it. Trying to cover this on their own power.

We always try to do this. Try to fix it ourselves. I want to share with you just a little bit of part of my personal journey.

I’ve been around a lot in churches. I don’t know if anybody’s been around. Visited a lot of churches.

Been members of a lot of different denominations. Anybody? Maybe you’ve been a lifelong Shepherd. How many have been here their whole life in Shepherd’s Gate? Anybody? I don’t know.

I’m not sure we’ve been around that long. Some of you. Some of you.

Yeah. Some of you. Some of you younger folk.

Probably for sure. So I journeyed through United Methodist. I loved John Wesley and Charles Wesley and the songs.

And I was in a church called the Licensed Minister there. I’ve been in Baptist churches, Bible churches, non-denominational churches, Presbyterian churches. I actually went to Presbyterian Seminary.

I’ve been Anglican. We even checked out Catholic churches for a little small period of time. Like one of my Vineyard and Assemblies of God churches.

We were Eastern Orthodox for 14 years. Whoa, that’s a shocker. It’s true.

We were 14 years. So I’ve kind of been around and experienced a lot. And one thing I’ve noticed is that there are some Christian denominations who actually think you can fix this.

At least they encourage you to do something to fix it. Or they require you to do something to fix it. And the Orthodox Church and the Catholic Church sometimes will have that kind of language where you have to participate with God to fix it.

And I’ve been thinking about that. And I’ve been thinking about, well, didn’t God ask the people like Moses to do sacrifices, right? They had to bring offerings and sacrifices to him. Isn’t that the same thing? So I’ve been thinking about that with this message.

And I kind of want to take a deep dive. And maybe you’ve always wondered about that. Like what’s the deal with the sacrifices thing in the Old Testament? Like what is that about? I’m going to answer that question for you.

And I’m hoping to open your mind to something that you haven’t seen yet today. But here’s a picture of the tabernacle. Now we are studying the book of Exodus on Sunday mornings.

How many loving that right now? Look at Exodus. Pretty crazy stuff, right, so far? It’s been great. And Moses, eventually we’re going to get to this picture.

We haven’t got there yet, but eventually we’re going to get to this part where God gives Moses instructions, this is how you’re supposed to do these offerings and sacrifices. You can see the cute little lamb, lamby there, poor little lamby. And there’s a tabernacle, there’s the altar, there’s the washbasin, you can see all that.

You can read about that in the Old Testament. We’re not going to go into that today, but maybe you’ve ever wondered about what’s an offering, what’s a sacrifice? What’s the difference? You ever wondered that? Like is it the same thing? Is it different? What’s the deal with that? So think of it this way, a sacrifice is a kind of offering. So a sacrifice is where an animal’s blood is shed.

It’s a sacrificial offering. That make sense? So when you read the Old Testament, you’ll see there’s other kinds of offerings, grain offerings, and other kinds of offerings that they did. An offering was always a gift from yourself, from your resources to God.

It’s a gift from your resources to God. That’s why we call the offering plate in here an offering, because it’s a gift from your resources to God, to the church. So it’s kind of a similar language.

But in the Old Testament, a sacrifice was a kind of offering that involved the shedding of blood of an animal, killing a death of an animal. And we’re going to talk about that in a minute, because I’ve always wondered, when did this start? Whose idea was this? Anybody an animal person here? I love animals. Anybody else? Love animals.

What’s the point of this? When did this start? Not only in Israel and Moses and that and the Old Testament, but if you’re a history person, like anybody here read a lot of history, you’ll know that the whole idea of the sacrifices, it happened in all the other cultures, other religions around. Like from as far as we can remember, right? You can study the history of the sacrifices. Now what happened was, you also saw like as these cultures moved away from God, the sacrifices got really dark.

And humans were a sacrifice, even children. And it was a terrible thing and awful. And we know it existed because we can see it in the history and archeology.

So what was the deal with all this? Like where did this all come from? You ever wondered that? Anybody wondered that before? To answer that question, we have to go back to the beginning. We have to go back to the beginning. That’s what I’m going to do.

I’m going to go back to the beginning. In the beginning, God created all things good, right? That’s what it says. The Bible says all things were good.

He created male and female. He said, that’s very good. And it was a beautiful, wonderful creation.

And we know the story of Adam and Eve and the serpent, the deceiving serpent, the devil. And Adam and Eve separate themselves from God’s will and they choose their own way, the way the devil tempted them to think. And sin entered creation and all of creation falls with Adam and Eve because Adam was the head of creation at that point, right? He was, he named the animals.

So when he fell, everything fell with him. Sin and brokenness, it’s a part of our life. You probably experienced it today already, I’m guessing.

The sin and brokenness of our world, the shame that comes with it, and the death, the reality of our mortality. The story in the Old Testament, in the book of Genesis is that Adam and Eve, right after they chose their own way, they experienced something, shame, right? So they actually hid themselves from God. They separated themselves from God.

That’s what sin does. It separates you from God. They separated themselves from God.

That relationship was separated now. They experienced shame and death enters the world. It’s kind of like, you know, when we said, when we put the cross on your forehead, we said what? Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

That’s basically facing the reality that we came from the dirt. Remember God created man from the dust of the ground and that one day we returned back to that dust. Now we weren’t meant to be that way, but that’s how it is now.

Because of the fall, we return back to that dust and we die. That’s what that saying was. But yes, all was lost in that moment.

All was going to die. But God responded in two ways. That’s what I want to talk about.

How did God respond in these two ways? I want to tie this together for you. The first way is God responds with a promise of a Savior. In fact, the whole Bible is about this very thing, the promise of a Savior.

It starts in Genesis 3.15. Like after the fall of Adam and Eve, God speaks to Adam and Eve and the serpent, doesn’t he? And he tells them this is the consequences now. This is what’s going to happen now. And to the serpent he says, one of the descendants of Eve is going to crush your head.

You’re going to wound him, but he’s going to crush your head. And that’s the first promise of the Savior. You say, well, that doesn’t give us a whole lot there.

Well, the whole Bible is unfolding that promise. If you start there and you keep reading through the Old Testament, you’ll see more information about this promise. He’s going to be a descendant of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and Judah.

He’s going to be a son of David. He’s going to be a king. He’s going to be born of a virgin.

He’s going to be born in Bethlehem. He’s going to be an eternal king. He’s going to bring forgiveness.

And it goes on and on and on. That’s like the unfolding of that throughout the whole Bible about the promise of a Savior that God gave in that moment. So God responds to that decision that was made to turn away from him and that all was lost.

God responds immediately with the promise of a Savior. The other way God responds is the provision of a sacrifice. Now, if you go back and read the story, maybe you didn’t read this part, but Adam and Eve, remember I said they tried to fix it? They closed themselves with some fig leaves.

But what does God do? He comes in and what does he do? He sacrifices an animal and he takes the skin from the animal and he covers them. So Adam and Eve now have the covering of animal skin. So that’s weird.

Remember, death hadn’t occurred yet. This could have been the first death that occurred in creation was God’s having the sacrifice. Now, see to cover Adam and Eve in their sin and shame, it required the shedding of blood of a sacrifice.

And this act that God started, I’m going to show you, was repeated in the Old Testament over and over again. You might think, well, no, wait a minute. I thought that had started with Moses.

No, it actually started here in Genesis chapter three. I’m going to show you this. I’m going to walk through some people in the Old Testament.

Adam and Eve, okay, I’ve told you the story of Adam and Eve. God performed a sacrifice, covered them in their sin and shame through an animal sacrifice. Cain and Abel, these were the two sons of a couple of sons of Adam and Eve.

Maybe you don’t know this story, but there was a time when they were bringing their offerings to God as a regular practice. They’re bringing their offerings to God and God does not accept the offering of Cain, but he accepts the offering of Abel. Abel brought an animal sacrifice, Cain brought a grain offering.

You can read about it on your own time, but it’s right there. So right away you see this repeating of this sacrifice and this offering. Noah, this may ruin your childhood.

I’m forewarning you right now. I know you were taught that the animals came on the ark two by two. Okay, you ready for this? Are you sure? They weren’t all brought on two by two.

Only the unclean animals, all the clean animals were brought on 14 by 14, seven pairs. Go back and read it. And part of the reason was, well they had to eat something, number one.

Number two, when they got off the ark Noah and his family did something. What was the first thing they did when they got off the ark? If you go back and read it, guess what it was. They built an altar and offered a sacrifice.

It’s right there. So it’s continuing. And from, you know, think of from Noah and his family, all the cultures of the earth come from.

Right? Noah, three sons, three daughter-in-laws. According to the Bible, all of us, all the cultures, all the ethnicities, all the nations, all of it comes from that family. And so they started with a sacrifice.

So you can see this practice of sacrificing continues through all the cultures. And the further away from God gets, you know, it gets wonky and gets devolved and terrible. But with God’s people, it stays.

They keep doing it. You see with Abraham, the story of Abraham, we know the story that Abraham at one point, God says, okay, I want you to actually offer your son as a sacrifice. And Abraham, what does he do? He trusts God.

He says, okay, God, I’m trusting you. And at the last second, God says, no, no, no, no, no, no, we’re not, we don’t do that here. I got a lamb for you, but I just wanted to see if you trust me with your son, because there’s something I want to tell you, right? There’s something I got to teach you and teach me and teach you that God is willing to give up his son.

We’ll talk about that in a minute. So Abraham, sacrifice. Job, you read the book of Job, sacrifice.

Jacob, sacrifice. It’s all there in the Old Testament. And of course, with Moses, where we think of it mostly because he brings this fuller explanation of how to do it properly and how to build a place to do it at and all that, that’s what we see with Moses.

But it’s there from the very beginning. So the question I always, when I figured this out, I said, okay, God, okay, I get it, but like, why? Like, what’s the point? We got the promise of a Savior, so what are we doing this for? This isn’t making sense to me now. Why do we have to do it over and over again, right? Why did it have to be repeated, all this death? And I mean, the whole history of man is killing animals to eat and to offer.

I mean, we don’t offer as much to God, but maybe in Thanksgiving, right, you say grace, that’s kind of like a thanking God, right? In a sense, it’s similar to that. We don’t kill our animals anymore, but I bet your grandparents did. If they lived on the farm, they probably did.

I actually share a personal story. My family and I went, my wife and I went COVID crazy. Anybody go COVID crazy in 2021? The walls were closing in, you’re stuck in your house and you’re working from home.

And I was like, okay, let’s buy a farm. So we bought, we moved, bought a 10 acre farm in Jackson. It’s true.

We moved to a 10 acre farm in Jackson. So it was a horse farm, but we converted it into like homesteading. And I was like, yeah, and I’m going to like, I’m kind of weird.

So, but I was like, I want to like experience what it was like for my ancestors to have to kill their own meat and eat it. Maybe it will change the way I look at food and change the way I say grace at the table. This is what, this is my reasoning.

So we, so I went, you know, without consulting with my wife, I went ahead and bought lambs, rabbits, ducks, and chickens. Those are the four things we were going to do. And we did.

I ate, I ate a bunch of chickens. I ate a bunch of ducks. I ate snowy and snowflake.

I feel bad about it. I still feel bad about it. We bottle fed them cute little lambs.

They were very tasty. You roast them just right. But I still, I do feel bad about it.

And we had a rabbits, but my daughter, this is true. My daughter rescued the rabbits before I got to the rabbits. So let’s give her a hand.

Let’s give her a hand to rescue the rabbits. We have two rabbits that free roam in our basement to this day. Ethan and Rose.

Yeah. So, but the rest of them I ate. It was very good, very tasty.

The ducks, oh, those were so good. But, you know, killing an animal was one of the worst experiences of my life. I hated it.

I made myself do it. I hated it. I’ll never do it again.

It was terrible. Maybe, maybe, maybe some of you were fine with it. I just, I couldn’t get, I just did not enjoy it at all.

So I said, man, what was it like? All this killing of animals and what’s the point, God? And how does it make sense with the promise of a Savior? How does it all fit together? I’ve always wondered that. Have you wondered that? The book of Hebrews actually answers this question. That’s amazing.

Go back and read the book of Hebrews. It’ll blow your mind now that you’re thinking about this stuff. So we’re going to read a couple passages from it.

The first is from the chapter 10 from the book of Hebrews. Listen to what it says here. It says, for sense the law, and when I, when you, when you see the word law in the Bible, it’s talking about primarily the Old Testament law that God gave Moses, part of which was the sacrificial system, all the laws and requirements and how you do it.

Okay, that’s part of it. So for sense the law was but a shadow of the good things to come instead of the true form of these realities. Okay, so now God’s saying, look, all that stuff I asked you to do, it’s just a shadow of the true thing.

Okay, tell me more, God. It says, it can never, by the same sacrifices that are continually offered every year, make perfect those who draw near. It cannot fix the problem.

Right there. All those sacrifices that I asked you to do, guess what? It doesn’t fix the problem. It doesn’t make you good enough.

Doesn’t make you holy enough. Doesn’t fix the problem. Doesn’t change what we brought on ourselves.

But, he says, in these sacrifices there is a reminder of sin, right? Because you, you’re participating in this death, this sacrifice, which is the result of sin. So you can’t help but think, hey, this is my fault that I got to do this. So there’s a reminder of sin in it.

That’s one part of it. It says, for it’s impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sin. It’s impossible for all that to take away sin.

Which is weird because I’m like, wait a minute, I thought it did? It’s like, now I’m confused. So I went back and looked at the Genesis and I was like, okay, so God does the first sacrifice. He covers their sin and shame.

Okay, well, wait a minute. And I started looking at the word covering. It’s actually the same root word for the word atonement.

Atonement is a word you read a lot in the Bible and the Old Testament where it talks about that the sacrifices make atonement for your sins. And sometimes we don’t know what that word means. It actually, the root word actually is covering.

So think of it this way. All those Old Testament sacrifices that were done was like a cover, a temporary covering, like a Band-Aid. It didn’t fix it, it just temporarily covered it and pointed to the real fix.

It pointed to the real solution, which Hebrews does tell us is Jesus. Look at what Hebrews says here in chapter 9. Jesus, He, talking about Jesus, has appeared once for all at the end of the ages to what? What does it say? Put away sin. So Jesus is the sacrifice that takes away sin, that forgives sin.

All that other stuff didn’t do that. It just covered it temporarily and pointed to the real sacrifice, the one that takes away our sin, that provides forgiveness, that opens up a way of eternal life for us. It says here, put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself.

That whole sacrificial system, remember, it always involved the priest. Remember, that’s where we get the word priest from. It comes from that time of the priest was the one who offered the sacrifice.

That’s what the word priest comes from. In the New Testament, Jesus is called the High Priest because Jesus offers Himself on the cross. And it’s that offering, that sacrificial offering that the High Priest Jesus offers of Himself, that is the one true sacrifice that takes away sin.

It gives you forgiveness. It forgives all the sin of the world. Just as it was appointed for man to die once because of the fall, and after that judgment, so Christ, who was appointed and promised, right, having been offered once to bear the sins of many on the cross, will appear a second time.

Not to deal with sin. He’s already dealt with sin. What was His last words on the cross? It’s finished.

It is finished. It’s done. It’s completed.

It’s fixed. The problem is solved. Salvation is provided.

Forgiveness is provided on the cross. Amen? He’ll come back again to save those who are eagerly waiting for Him. So in closing here, I want you to hear this clearly.

Through Christ’s sacrificial death, He destroys death. That’s the kind of the poetic justice here. It’s like we brought death into the world through sin, disobeying God.

God uses that very thing to destroy that very thing. Pretty mysterious, isn’t it? Through His death, He destroys death. Through His shed blood, He washes away sin.

That’s what we sing about. That’s what we read about. That’s what we believe.

So nothing we have to offer is good enough. Nothing we have to offer is good enough. We cannot fix the problem.

You cannot be good enough. You know, it’s interesting. Do you know what the ashes are made out of? Palm branches.

On Palm Sunday, we like to wave palm branches. You ever do that? Remember as a kid, maybe as a kid, you like look forward. That’s what we look forward to on Palm Sunday.

You wave the branches. What did they say when Jesus was entering Jerusalem on the original, the first Palm Sunday? What did they say when they waved the palm branches? Hosanna. Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.

They were praising God. See, this is the, this, when you praise God in that moment, you are truly fulfilling God’s will for your life. That’s like the, that’s like the peak of who you can become is someone who praises and glorifies God.

Agree? Agree with me? Yeah, that’s like the best you can do. But even that is not good enough. Even that’s not good enough.

And we take that, we, we burn it and put it in ashes and put it on your forehead to remind you. There’s nothing you can do. You cannot be good enough.

You cannot do enough. And you say, well, that’s, that sounds kind of depressing, Pastor. Why would you tell me this? I truly believe this.

And I, and I, and I, I believe it because I’ve experienced trying to save myself. When you come to that realization that you cannot save yourself, there’s nothing you can do that is good enough, that all your righteousness is filthy rags in God’s eyes. In that moment, you can truly see and receive how great God’s love is for you.

Because if you believe you can save yourself, then what Jesus did, what’s the big deal? I can do, I can take care of this myself. When you realize there’s nothing you can do, you’re dead, you’re lost, it’s over. And in that moment, God reaches down.

Doesn’t it reach down? He sends his only son to experience the torture and the death and the sacrifice for you, because that’s how much God loves you. He’s willing to give up his own son for you. So you are loved, you are desired, and God wants to spend eternity with you.

So put your trust and faith in him, believe in him, believe what he’s saying that I love you, I died for you, I want to be with you, I’m coming back once again. Amen.