Don’t Miss The Promise Land
Deutoronmy 3:21-29 2 Timothy 2:1-13 1-14-2007
Is there anybody here who was promised a gift for Christmas who once they received the promise fully expected to receive the gift. Now that promise alone caused you to change your behavior. If your parent said, “if you act like this you can forget about getting such and such on Christmas.” So you changed your behavior, just enough to keep the promise alive. Then on Christmas morning, you got what you had been promised, and you said “yes”. The promise had become a reality.
In the bible you will hear people talking about getting into the promised land. Well God gave a promise to a couple by the name of Abraham and Sarah. They were promised that their descendants would receive a beautiful section of a country that would be wonderful for living. The grass would be green, the land would produce a lot of food and crops. There would be plenty of water and areas for their animals to graze and eat food.
The fruits and the grapes that would grow there would be more plentiful than they could ever imagine. They would be in charge of their lives and they would live as free people worshipping God. This promised land was call Canaan. Sometimes you will hear people speak of the land of Canaan. That’s the same thing as the promise land.
There was one catch however, in that God told them, before they received this promise land, they would be slaves in Africa in Egypt for 430 years. After 430 years, God would deliver them out of slavery, and bring them into the promise land. What kept those people going through the midst of their trials and their struggles was the thought of getting into and receiving the promised land.
Everyone one of us lives our lives based on what we view as the promised land. Now some of us are building our lives around some very small promised lands, because we think too short term. For instance, if some of us received $10,000 we would immediately go shopping and start spending and all of it would be gone in less than a day. . Others of us would see that $10,000 as an initial investment into our education or starting a business and will have taken that $10,000 and turned it into a $100,000 or more. It all goes back to what do we see as our promise land.
Martin Luther King Jr. Day is not simply about a single man. It is about a struggle of Black people for nearly four hundred years of existence in this country. When I was born some 50 years ago, People were murdered because they tried to move into a neighborhood with whites. They were killed because they attempted to integrate schools. Churches were burned and bombed because they encouraged people to vote.
Black men were tied to stakes and burned. Others were lynched. Black women were raped with no arrests of the rapists. Blacks were hired last and fired first. There were very few black faces in any of the major league sports. The only jobs we got in banks, were cleaning the floors after everybody else left. If they got any credit, they were charged the highest interest rates. Blacks were considered inferior to whites and deserved to be second class citizens in their own country. We all lived together, worked together, and went to school together because there were no other options available.
Dr. King came along and gave us a dream of what could be for the races. That speech was given in 1963. But there would still be blood shed, battles fought, places burned down, people sent to jail, and a whole lot of abuse and humiliation before this nation would even consider the dream What motivated us as a people to keep fighting was a belief that there was a promise land involved in all of this.
That promised land was a place that, we as a people would be in charge of our destiny. We would soar in our education levels. We would live where we wanted to live. We would compete wherever we wanted to compete. We would be lifted out of poverty and have a much higher standard of living. We would be second to nobody and stand as an equal among all people, colors and races.
In our Old Testament reading today, we found that Moses wanted to see the Promised Land, because he was going to die before the people entered it. So God allowed Moses to climb up Mt. Pigsah and see the promised land from the top of the mountain. From up on the mountain, he could get the big picture of what God had in mind for His people and it was wonderful.
You have often heard Dr. King’s speech in which he says, “I’ve been to the mountain top, I’ve seen the promised land. He is simply restating what Moses had said in the book of Deuteronomy when God allowed him to see the promise land. Moses saw actual land, whereas Dr. King saw the promise land in terms of a new way of living. If you could talk to Dr. King today and bring him back and ask him about his vision of the promised land, he would probably be shocked to know what happened to us.
Let me be the first to acknowledge that God has brought us from a mighty long way since the year I was born. We can vote. We can be elected. We can attend the schools of our choice. We can live where we want to live. We can sit anywhere on the bus. We can play professional sports. We can be on tv. We can have high paying jobs We can do things our grandparents only dreamed about. There is not another group of Black people anywhere the planet that live at the level we live. Even the poorest among us would be considered quite well off by the majority of the people in the world. We have opportunities in front of us with all kinds of unlimited potential.
Yet Dr. King would be appalled at the promised land so many of us chose to settle for. As bright as a people as we are, why do only 58% of our youth graduate on time. As intelligent as our black men are, why do we allow 1/3 of us to get involve in the criminal justice system. With over 350 years of slavery behind us, how did nearly a million of us end up behind bars with no more freedom than that of the plantation slave.
We have a history of women in our past culture like Harriet Tubman who risked everything for their people, and yet today we have so many of us trading their precious bodies for crack and cocaine. If it had not been for the black church, there would not have been a civil rights movement, and yet we have a whole generation who have never been inside a church.
Back in the days of slavery, the overseer use to carry a whip and a gun to keep us in check. Today the overseer has become the drug lord or the gang leader who uses us for his own purposes of getting rich. Back then when the overseer called us nigga we knew it was a put down. When today’s gang leader calls us his nigga, we think we have somehow been promoted.
The white master use to call our women and young girls into his quarters, and use their bodies for his pleasure, and send them back out to work his fields or to clean his house. He could care less if they got pregnant or not. He had no intention of being a father to any kids he produced. He could make love to the woman one minute and beat her for something ridiculous before the day was over.
The master today is called the pimp or the lover. At least back then, our women knew they were being abused and despised the master for it. Today the young woman says, he loves me and she has child after child from this guy whose just using her for a little while. He has no intention of staying around. He’s in love with a stripper. As a result only one child in three will be born with a mom and dad who will call each other husband and wife. I was at the store last week listening to a young guy who could not have been more than 17 or 18 years old, and he was talking about his three kids by three different girls and how much drama they were giving him. He needed a whole lot more drama than what he was getting from them.
You know it is possible for God to have something great in store for your life, and you can miss out on it big time. The problem with many of us is with the size of the mountains we climb in order to see the promised land. Some of us climb such pitiful small mountains, that we cannot see beyond tomorrow. If you are a teenager, you should make your decisions based on a mountain that will allow you to see where you are at age 25. If you see that at age 25, you want a college degree, a great paying job, and the ability to go anywhere in the world without attachments, then you have a promise land that’s worth climbing that mountain for. It is not an easy climbing mountains.
But that’s what you do to see the promise land. Now if you got a mighty small mountain as your goal, when your girlfriend or boyfriend is wanting to have sex with you, you will think only of the next hour. You will forget about verneral diseases, you will forget about pregnancy, your will forget about child support payments that aren’t coming, and you will forget about the fact this person will be out of your life much sooner than you think.
Now if you’re going to be rebellious enough to reject what God has for your life, then be smart enough to use condoms and birth control, but remember these things will not guarantee you anything. They will simply reduce your chances of getting pregnant or diseases. But do remember this, that no matter how well you plan to choose to sin, God always reserves the right to determine the consequences. Consequences do not always show up the next day or so. Our sin will find us out and it will do so at a terrible time. Life is not fair. Just because someone else seemed to get away with something does not mean that you will.
If you are married, you ought to climb a mountain that allows you to see where you would like to be 5 years from now rather than wanting your way today. The same thing is true if you’re single. If you look further down the road, you’re going to live somewhat differently. Your actions today are determining where you are going to be then. Don’t every forget that none of us know how much time we have left to be the person we want to be. Where do you want to be five years from today in God. What does your promised land look like.
When God called Moses, God fully intended for Moses to enter the promised land. His job was to lead the former slaves out of Egypt into the land God had for them. Now there were nearly a million people on their way to the promise land. They had not been on the journey for six months before they started complaining about how hard it was to get there. Then when they got to the border, they said, “well even though it’s everything that God said it would be, we do not have the strength to go in and take it.” So they rejected this great offer from God.
Many of you here today are incredibly gifted. You’re bright. You’re intelligent. You’ve got great people skills. You are good at what you do. But you’ve rejected the promise land God has for your life. You sincerely believe that you really don’t need the Lord in your life. I can guarantee you, there will be a day a coming, that you will thoroughly regret that choice. You are nowhere near as in control of your life as you think you are.
Others want the promise land, but you’re not willing to let go of that which is going to hold us back. The word of God teaches that if you are a believer in Christ, you should not seek after a love relationship with a person who is not a believer. Your goals are totally opposite as far as God is concerned.
Others of us want to impress the wrong group of people. You’re not willing to pay the price to have a promise land that’s worth having. What would happen if we were more interested in impressing the people we live with every day with our faith in Christ, than we were in impressing people in the church? Many of us would have to become a new person. What would happen if you were more interested in impressing your teachers, than in impressing your friends in the classrooms? Your grades would improve, so would your attitude, and your homework. But if your promise land is nothing more than being the class clown, you’ll probably reach it.
One thing about God is that God requires more of us, whom He has given more to work with. Moses was a person who talked to God face to face. When Moses went into the tent to speak with God, each time he came out his face had this awesome glow about it. When Moses said something was going to happen, you can believe it was going to happen. Moses and God were about as close and tight to each other as you can get. So how did this mighty servant of God miss his opportunity to enter into His promise land? How did he miss out on what God had for him? You see for 40 years God’s people had been wandering in the desert. God had told them, because of their rejection of Him, they would wander for 40 years until a whole generation had died out.
The 40th year of wandering was just about over. But the people were still complaining about little petty things. Moses was getting sick and tired of it. Have you ever gotten sick and tired of dealing with a group of hard headed people? Well one day they were in the desert complaining that they wish they had died when their brothers had died of the plague. They said, why on earth did you bring us out of Egypt. This desert is miserable. The are no grapes, no fruit and no water to drink. Now get this the people are blaming Moses for the land they are in, when they would not go into the promised land when God told them to do it. They wanted somebody to blame for their predicament, rather than take the responsibility for their past actions.
You and I both know that racism is real. But our problem is not always racism. We are not in the promised land that Martin saw because of us. We’re the ones stripping the metal sidings of our houses leaving blighted neighborhoods. We’re the one selling the drugs on the streets. We’re the ones making the babies and dropping out of school. Oprah took a lot of heat for saying she was tired of trying to help inner city kids, who all they wanted from her was the latest pair of shoes. The kids in South Africa wanted an education so that’s where she built the school. Most of us do not need more government dollars. We need a change of mountains to climb and a new vision for our promise land.
These people were demanding more water. Moses and Aaron left the people and went to God for an answer. God told them, take the staff that you have and gather the people together. Once you have them,” Speak to the rock before their eyes and it will pour out its water out of the rock so they and their livestock can drink.” Moses then gathered the people. He was so upset with them. He said, “listen you rebels, must we bring you water out of this rock.” Then Moses raised his arm and struck the rock twice with his staff. Water gushed out and the community and their livestock.
For a moment, Moses lost his humility before God and took the center stage. He tried to give himself the glory by saying, “Should he and Aaron bring water out of the rock.” They had no power to bring the water out. The second thing he did was to let his attitude get the best of him, and in his anger he disobeyed God. God said speak to the rock. He chose to strike it. The people got what they wanted—plenty of water. Moses got what he wanted. A chance to just let his anger go for a moment. But Moses got more than what he wanted. He lost his chance at His promised land.
God said, “ Because you did not trust me enough to honor me as holy in the sight of the people, you will not bring the community into the land I gave them.” You see Moses thought he was merely striking a rock, so what was the big deal if he changed a little of the command of God. But many years later, we discover that the rock that gave the life-giving water was a fore runner of Jesus Christ our Lord and our Savior.
It only took Moses 5 minutes to lose the promise land that God had for him. All he had to show for what he lost was, the satisfaction of losing his temper for five minutes. He could have very easily said, “but God if those people had not been acting the fool causing all the drama they did, I would not have lost his temper.” God did not hold him responsible for what the people did. He held him responsible for his actions.
When Jesus said that I have come that you might have life, what do you think he meant by that. Do you think the only promise land Jesus had in mind was a mansion in the sky by and bye? Jesus was saying look, this world is going to sell you a bill of goods on what’s important in life. You will get so busy trying to get things, get attention, get admiration, get pleasures and other things, that life will surely pass you by. Some of those things are going to leave you pretty banged up.
What will you do when your dreams are shattered and your hope is gone. You were were created to be in a relationship with God. Jesus knows that life is going to be hard. He wants to give you life even in the midst of that struggle. We all think we have a good way to go through life, but Jesus said I am the Way, The Truth And The Life, noone comes to the Father except through me. Inviting Jesus into your life and choosing to follow Him is the only way that you will not miss the promise land that God has for you. It’s not a one time commitment. It’s a daily way of living. What mountain have you chosen to climb for your vision of the promised land? Ask God to show you what His vision for your life includes? Make up your mind that you’re going to make a positive difference for your life, for your race and for the body of Christ at large.
Sermon Outline Pastor Rick 1/14/07
“Don’t Miss The Promised Land
Deuteronomy 3:21-29 2 Timothy 2:1-13
A. The Promise Of The Christmas Gift
1. The Promise Affects Behavior
2. God’s Promise To Abraham & Sarah
3. The Promise Land Or The Land Of Canaan
4. 430 Years In Africa
B. We Live Our Lives Based On Promised Land
1. Trying To Handle $10,000.00
2. An Expense Or An Investment
C. The Reason For Martin Luther King Jr. Day
1. Not One Man But Many
2. Murder, Burns, Bombs, Rapes
3. Jobs, Sports, Banks, Credits
4. Inferior Group
5. The Dream That Kept Hope Alive
6. The Promise Land Is A Place We See
D. Moses The First To Climb The Mountain
1. Moses Mt. Pigsah—See the Big Picture
2. Dr. King—I’ve Been To The Mountain
Top
E. How Far Have We Climbed
1. The Good
2. The Bad & The Ugly
3. The Wrong Promised Land
F. What Has Really Changed
1. The Overseer—The Drug Lord
2. The Master—The Pimp
3. The Breakdown Of The Family
G. God Has Great Plans For Those Willing
To Climb
1. Which Mountain Will You Climb
2. Teenagers Think 25
3. But I’m Going To Be Sexually Active
5. Adults Project 5 Years
H. Moses Was Suppose To Go Into The Promised
Land
1. The People Did The Complaining
2. We Don’t Have The Strength To Do It
3. You Can Have It All And Miss It
4. There Is A Day Coming
5. A Willingness To Pay The Price
6. Will You Let The Person Go
7. Who Do You Have To Please
8. Choosing To Get The Promise
I. More Is Required Of Some Than Others
1. Moses Go To Talk With God One On
One
2. 40 Years Almost Over, The Promise
Right There
3. Beware Of Getting Sick & Tired
4. The People Complain Again
5. Blaming Everybody But Else
6. Racism Is Not The Only Problem
7. What About Oprah
J. Moses Gets The Orders From God
1. Just Speak To The Rock
2. Moses Forgot For A Moment
3. Attitude Got In The Way
4. A Missed Chance
5. The Rock Was More Than A Rock
6. Don’t Let 5 Minutes Mess You Up
K. God Only Holds Us Responsible For Us
1. Jesus- I Came That You Might Have
Life
2. Stop Running After It All
3. Created For Relationship
4. There Is But One Way
5. Jesus Still The Way To The Promise
Land
