Show Me Your Glory

Good morning, church. It is so good to be back in this room with you. On these gym chairs, with this family, doing this one more Sunday together. I hope I never get over what a gift that is.

Last week we sat together in Acts 2, and we watched the Spirit get poured out. On the young and the old. On the sons and the daughters. On a hundred and twenty ordinary people who did one ordinary thing. They came near. And I told you that the Spirit comes when we come near.

I have not been able to put that down all week. And there is one piece of it in particular I have not been able to put down. Last week I stood right here and told you that the body of Jesus was torn open on a cross so that two people who could not stand each other could be made one. That our unity was never cheap. It cost Him His flesh.

Jesus died for that. He died to make us one. I was pulling some old sermons together this week, and I found a journal entry I had forgotten I ever wrote. It was from a night back in 2022. And the second my eyes hit it, I was right back there. I could feel that night again.

The Lord had woken me up in the dark. I am not going to make it sound more dramatic than it was. But I came up out of sleep with a prayer already on my lips, and I could not shake it. Lord, if we are going to move forward as a church, we have to be desperate for You. So I got up before the sun, I sat down in the living room with that same journal, and one sentence was the only thing my heart knew how to say.

Are we desperate for His presence.

I wrote that four years ago. And church, I am still asking it. Different church. Different state. Different room. Same question. Because some questions do not get answered once and filed away. They keep circling back around until you finally deal with them. And this week, this one found me again, in my own handwriting.

Slow down over that word Now I want to slow down over that word desperate, because I know how it can sound. For some of us, desperate is not a comfortable word. It sounds dramatic. It sounds like panic. It sounds like someone falling apart at the seams. And if that is what you hear when I say it, I understand why you would want to keep your distance from it.

So let me tell you what I do not mean, and then let me tell you what I do.

There is a desperation that comes out of fear, and there is a desperation that comes out of clarity. They are not the same thing. Fear says, I am losing control. Clarity says, I finally know what I cannot live without. One of them is panic. The other one is the truest thing your soul has ever said.

That second one is what I am talking about this morning. Desperation for God is not panic. It is clarity. It is the heart finally seeing that God is not one more thing we need, somewhere on the list. He is the One we need underneath everything else we need.

Think about it like this. When you cannot breathe, you do not negotiate for air. You do not sit there and weigh your options. When someone you love is in trouble, you do not casually hope that help shows up eventually. And when you feel unseen, or unwanted, or alone, something honest starts to rise up in you, and the ache begins to tell the truth.

Here is what I have learned about that ache. We are very good at calling it other names. We call it ambition, or anxiety, or being busy, or just keeping everybody happy. We dress it up so we do not have to look straight at it. But underneath all of it, the soul is asking a few very old questions. Am I safe. Am I wanted. Am I alone in this. Is there anywhere I can finally set myself down and stop carrying my own weight.

And hear me, that ache is not a flaw in you. You were made to need. Not as a weakness, as a design. We were never built to stand on our own, and the loneliness so many of us carry around is not a small thing or a shallow thing. It is the soul telling the truth about what it was made for. And what it was made for is God Himself. This is why I love the way Jesus said it. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst. He did not say blessed are the impressive. He did not say blessed are the people who have it all together. He blessed the ones who feel their own emptiness and ache for what only God can fill. Hunger is not hype. Thirst is not drama. They are your body telling you the plain truth about what it cannot live without. And Jesus says the person who feels that, and brings it to Him, is blessed.

So when I ask if we are desperate for His presence, I am not trying to work you up. I am not asking you to manufacture a feeling or perform an emotion for me. I am asking if we are finally willing to be honest about what we cannot live without.

And here is the gospel underneath all of it. Jesus does not stand off at a distance and tell desperate people to calm down. He comes near. He takes on flesh. He walks straight into our loneliness and our striving and our fear and our shame, and He does not flinch, and He carries us home to the Father. That is the One we are dealing with this morning.

So open your Bibles with me to Exodus 33. Because there is a man in this chapter who got honest about all of this a long time before we did.

The blessing without the presence Let me set the scene for you. Moses is up on the mountain with God. And while he is gone, the people he led up out of Egypt go to his brother Aaron and talk him into building them a god they can see. So they melt down their gold, they shape it into a calf, and they throw a party around it.

And I do not want you to miss one small detail in how it happened. Watch Aaron's eyes. EXODUS 32:5 Aaron saw how excited the people were, so he built an altar in front of the calf. So where was Aaron looking? Look at the verse again. He saw how excited the people were. That is where his eyes were the whole time. Not up the mountain. Not toward the presence of God. He was watching the crowd. He read the room, and then he gave the room what it wanted. And I want to be gentle with Aaron here, because I am afraid I understand him better than I would like to. Aaron knew about God. He could have told you all the right things about God. He had just never been ruined by Him. And if I am honest, there is a little bit of Aaron in all of us. It is so much easier to watch the crowd than it is to seek the face of God. It is so much easier to hand people what they want than to lead them to the One they actually need.

So God sends Moses back down the mountain. Moses pleads for the people. And then God says something to Moses that I want you to really hear. EXODUS 33:1-3 Leave this place, you and the people you brought up out of Egypt, and go up to the land I promised. I will send an angel before you and drive out your enemies. Go up to the land flowing with milk and honey. But I will not go with you. Go. Take the land. It is yours. Everything I promised, milk and honey, all of it. I will even send an angel out ahead of you to clear away your enemies. You can have the whole thing.

But I will not go with you.

And do not miss who He is saying that to. These are not faithful people. This is the same crowd that, while Moses was still up on the mountain in the presence of God, melted down their jewelry and threw a party around a golden calf. They had just betrayed Him to His face. And He is still offering them the land. He is still offering to send them in with every promise kept. Church, that much, to people like that, is already grace. The staggering part of this is not the part He offers. It is the one thing He holds back. Himself.

So let me ask you something, and you can be honest, because nobody is standing at the door checking your answer. There is something you have been asking God for. You know exactly what it is. Some of you prayed about it on the drive in this morning. Now imagine He looks at you and says yes. Yes to the very thing you have been longing for. But understand, I will not be in it.

Would you take that deal? Be careful how fast you answer. Because if we are honest, that deal is the version of Christianity a lot of us have quietly settled into. Pray the prayer. Get the ticket to heaven. Collect the blessings along the way. And do not trouble Me again until something breaks. Somewhere along the line we learned to want the gifts of God so much more than we want God.

And I will not ask you that question without telling you where my own heart has been on it. Because you might remember, a few weeks ago I stood in this same spot and told you I would rather miss the blessing and still have hold of the hand of the Blesser. I meant it then. I mean it more now. That turn came slowly in me, slower than I wish it had, and lower than I want to admit. But my heart has been learning to pray something like this.

Father, even if I miss the blessing. Even if the thing I was so sure You were going to do never comes, let me be just as glad as I would have been if it had, as long as I still have hold of Your hand.

That is the truest prayer I know how to pray. And it is really just Moses, put into my own words. Keep the milk. Keep the honey. I want Your hand.

But I have to be honest about the other half of it too. Because the moment I take my eyes off Him, the moment I feel my hand starting to slip out of His, it is so easy. So easy for my heart to wander off and start treating Him as useful again. As the way to get the thing, instead of the thing itself. And here is the only thing I have ever found that actually holds me there. It was never the strength of my grip on Him. It was the strength of His grip on me. I slip my hand out. He does not slip His. My heart wanders. His does not. He has been holding on the whole time.

Because hear me, church. Jesus is not useful. He is not the road to the blessing. He is the blessing.

Think about the verse you have known your whole life. You learned it before you could tie your shoes. JOHN 3:16 For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. We can say it in our sleep. But stop on those last two words. Eternal life. When you hear that, what do you reach for? Streets of gold. A house with your name on it. Everyone you have buried, standing at the gate, waiting for you. All of it good. All of it true. But listen to how Jesus Himself defined it, in the same week, in the very prayer we are going to live inside this morning. JOHN 17:3 Now this is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent. That is the definition, and it came out of His own mouth. Eternal life is not first a place. It is a Person. It is knowing Him. And do not miss what that means, because we are coming back to it before this morning is done. To know Him like that is to be wanted by Him like that. So when the Bible says that Christ died to bring us to God, hear how far that goes. Not to bring us to a better version of this life. Not even, in the end, to bring us to heaven.

Then what is it? What are we actually chasing in this whole faith?

Listen to the prayer again. Everything Jesus prays that night is so that, through Him, He can bring us to the Father. As His own. That is the whole thing. Heaven is not the destination. The Father is. You could take away the gold and the houses and the reunions, set Christ alone in an empty room, and that room would be heaven. Because heaven was only ever the room where we finally have Him with nothing left in the way.

Because He was always the point. He is not the means to your joy. He is your joy. He is not the door to the treasure. He is the treasure. He is not the way to God that you leave behind once you arrive. He is God, come all the way down to get you.

If You are not coming, I do not want it So here is Moses, with the deal of a lifetime sitting right there on the table. Listen to what he says. EXODUS 33:15 If your Presence does not go with us, do not send us up from here. If You are not coming, then I do not want it. Keep the milk. Keep the honey. I would rather have a wilderness with You than a paradise without You.

And there it is. So what was the promised land, really? Strip God out of it. What is left? Without Him it is just real estate. Good soil and good weather under an empty sky. Milk and honey cannot comfort a soul that was made for the presence of God. Moses knew that. He had been close enough to God to know that nothing else would ever be enough again.

And notice where that came from. It did not come from a guilt trip. Nobody shamed it into him. It came from a man who had tasted the presence of God and could not take one more step without it.

Are we desperate for His presence?

Show me your glory Now watch what Moses does next. He has just turned down a paradise. And instead of asking for something smaller, something safer, he asks for more. EXODUS 33:18 Now show me your glory. Think about who is saying this. This is the man who saw a bush burn and not be consumed. The man who watched the sea stand up like two walls of water and his whole nation walk through it on dry ground. The man who had just come down off a mountain that was on fire with the presence of God. If anyone in history had seen enough of God, it was this man. And what does he say? Show me more.

How does a man who has seen all of that still ache for more? I will tell you how. Because that is what beauty does to you. Once you have truly tasted Him, you cannot stop. The glory of God is not like a good meal that fills you up and leaves you content to push back from the table. It is the opposite. The more of Him you see, the more of Him you have to see. He satisfies you and makes you hungrier in the very same moment.

And maybe that finally explains a prayer some of you have prayed a hundred times and never seen change. You have stood at your kitchen counter and said, Lord, I want to pray more. I want to be in Your word more. I want to know You more. I just cannot seem to get there. I have prayed that exact prayer with my own coffee going cold in my hand. And maybe the problem was never that you are lazy. Maybe the problem is that you have not yet tasted enough of Him to be ruined for everything else.

Because here is the truth about holiness, and I want to say it carefully. Holiness is not the old life managed better. Holiness is the old life losing its grip because Christ has become better. It is not mostly about trying harder. It is mostly about looking longer. You do not white-knuckle your way into loving God. You behold Him until the old appetites loosen their hold on you on their own. Now watch how God answers a man who asks to see His glory. Before anything else, before the cleft of the rock, before any of it, He says this. EXODUS 33:19 I will cause all my goodness to pass in front of you, and I will proclaim my name, the LORD, in your presence. Do you see what just happened there? Moses asks to see His glory, and God reaches for His goodness, as if the two words were the same word. As if you could not tell them apart. And in God, you cannot. His glory is not bare power. A storm has power. A mountain has power. The glory of God is all of His goodness and all of His mercy, the whole weight of who He is, bending low toward people who have done nothing to deserve it. That is what Moses was about to watch go by.

And this is the thing I do not want you to miss about Moses. He was not desperate because something was wrong with him. He was desperate because Someone was beautiful in front of him. He had seen enough of God to know there was nothing in all the world more worth having than more of God. That is what was driving him. Not his emptiness. God's worth. When you have seen even a little of how good He is, wanting more of Him stops being a struggle and starts being the most natural thing your heart has ever done.

But then God tells Moses the one thing he cannot have. EXODUS 33:20 You cannot see my face, for no one may see me and live. And even in the no, God is tender. He takes Moses and tucks him down into a crack in the rock. He covers him over with His own hand. And He lets Moses see only His back as His goodness passes by.

Sit with that for a second. Moses, the friend of God, the man who spoke with God the way a man speaks with his friend, got to watch the goodness of God go by from inside the cleft of a rock. He got the back. He never got the face. That was as close as anyone could come and still live.

He wanted you first And here is where I have to turn this whole morning around on you. Because I have spent all of it asking whether you are desperate for His presence. But has it ever once occurred to you that He wanted you first?

Go back to the night before the cross. Before the soldiers ever came for Him in the garden, Jesus prayed. And in the middle of that prayer, listen to what He asked His Father for. JOHN 17:24 Father, I desire that they also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory. I desire. For a lot of us, that is not a safe word. Almost every time someone has desired something around us, they wanted what we could give them. They wanted what we could do. They wanted us to perform, to provide, to keep it together, to be useful. And somewhere along the way you learned that being wanted always comes with a cost. That nobody wants you for free.

So when you hear that God desires you, part of you braces. Part of you waits for the catch. What does He want from me. What is this going to cost me. Am I going to be enough for it.

Look at the word again. Jesus is not standing at the door with His arms crossed, weighing whether you have done enough to be let in. He is not reluctant. He is not putting up with you. On the night before the cross, with the weight of all our sin and all our suffering bearing down on Him, with every reason in the world to be thinking about Himself, He turns to His Father and says, I desire that they may be with Me.

He does not want something from you. He wants you. Not the version of you that performs well. Not the you that finally has it together. You. The one sitting in that chair right now, with all of it, even the part you would never let anyone see. He is praying you all the way into His presence.

Some of you have spent most of your life wondering if anyone has ever wanted you like that. If you are honest, you are not sure anyone ever has. Then hear this, and let it land somewhere deeper than your ears. One Person does. And the wanting did not start with you.

Before you ever wanted Him, He wanted you. Before you ever prayed, show me Your glory, He had already prayed that you would see it. Before you ever reached for His presence, He was already moving toward a cross to bring you into it.

So you can stop bracing. The wanting was never the soul clawing its way up to God. It is the soul waking up to the fact that He has wanted you near all along. Already prayed you close. Already bled to bring you close.

So when people walk away from you, and when the room goes quiet, and when the one you wanted does not want you back, you take yourself back to that one word and you plant your feet on it. He desires me. He desires me.

And read just one line further in that same prayer. JOHN 17:23 I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that you sent me and loved them even as you loved me. Loved them even as You loved Me. Hear what Jesus is actually asking for. He is not asking the Father to tolerate you. He is asking that you would be joined to Him so completely that when the Father looks at you, He sees His own Son, and loves you with the same love He has poured over Jesus from before the world began. You are not tolerated in Christ. You are brought home in Christ. And do not miss what that means. The Son did not go to a cross for a people He was embarrassed to love. He did not die so the Father could just barely stand to have you in the room. He died to bring you all the way home.

The glory has a face now And now hear the best of it. What Moses begged for and never received, you have been handed. Moses got the goodness from behind a rock. He never got the face. But centuries later, a man named John picks up his pen and dares to write this. JOHN 1:14 The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth. Made his dwelling among us. Church, do not move too quickly past that. The word underneath it means He pitched His tent among us. He tabernacled among us. Think about what that is saying. The presence that used to fill the tent out in the wilderness, the presence Moses could only catch from inside a rock, has now come and filled a human body. The God who met Moses in cloud and fire has come near in flesh and blood.

Not as an idea. Not as a feeling. Not as a religious symbol to hang on a wall. As a Person. With eyes that wept at a friend's grave. With hands that reached out and touched the people nobody else would touch. With feet that walked toward sinners instead of away from them. With a back that was laid open with a whip. With a face that turned toward the cross and would not turn away.

So where do you go to see it? The glory Moses begged for, the glory God hid behind His hand, where is it now?

The glory has a face now. And His name is Jesus. 2 CORINTHIANS 4:6 God made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of God's glory displayed in the face of Christ. Moses saw the goodness of God from behind a rock. We see the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. And that face is not cold. It is not distant. To everyone who comes to Him through the Son, it is not terrifying. It is the face of the One who was born in a barn, who knelt down and washed dirty feet, who wept at a grave, who let them drive the nails through His hands so that you could come near.

The goodness Moses had to watch from inside a rock is now standing out in the open, in the daylight, with a face you are allowed to look at. And when you finally look, you find that the face is kind.

So when Moses cries out, show me Your glory, the Father's full and final answer, stretching across all of time, is not a thing. It is a Person. It is Jesus. You want to see the glory? Look at Him.

And once you really look, you will understand Moses. You will understand how a man could turn down a paradise just to keep the presence. Because the presence is Jesus. And He is worth more than every blessing He could ever lay in your hands.

Are we desperate for His presence?

A family we cannot forget Now I want to bring this home, because desperation for God was never meant to be a private thing, just me and my own quiet walk with Jesus. Watch Moses one more time. When he pleads, listen to who he pleads for. EXODUS 33:16 How will anyone know that you are pleased with me and with your people unless you go with us? What else will distinguish me and your people from all the other people on the face of the earth? Me and Your people. Did you catch that? Moses ties his whole future to theirs. He will not go in alone. He will not be blessed alone. If they are not coming into the presence, then neither is he.

Church, that is us. That is this room, these chairs, this family. And a family carries each other. GALATIANS 6:2 Carry each other's burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ. For a long time I read that verse as one more thing I had to work up the strength to do. Try harder to show up for people. But that is not what it is, and remember why. Christ is in you now. So when you sit with a friend in the worst week of her life, and you have no words, and you just stay there in the room with her, that is not you gritting your teeth to be a good Christian. That is Christ in you, carrying her. Sometimes Christ carries us Himself. And sometimes Christ carries us in the arms of the person sitting right next to us.

So here is a calling worth more than anything this world could hand you. Learn to notice what is quietly crushing the person next to you. And then spend yourself making it lighter. Help them carry it, all the way to the feet of Jesus. And when you have done it, you will look back and realize it was Christ doing it through you the whole time.

One more thing before I ask you to do something simple. Moses looks at the size of what God has handed him. Lead a couple million stubborn, frightened people across a wilderness and into a land full of giants. And somewhere down in his bones, he arrives where every honest person eventually arrives. I cannot do this.

And I have come to believe that confession is one of the holiest things a person can say. Because the moment you finally say I cannot, you are finally in the one place where you can hear God say I will. We tend to lose our desperation for the Spirit right about the time we start to believe we can manage on our own. Listen to how Jesus put it. JOHN 15:5 I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing. Not a little. Apart from Me you can do nothing. And that is good news. Because the size of what He has called us to is the very thing that drives us back down onto our knees. The day we finally say, God, this is too big for us, we have to have Your Spirit, that is the day we stop playing church and start being the church.

So look at Him So here is all I am going to ask you to do this week. I am not going to hand you a list. I am not going to give you five steps to becoming a more desperate person, because desperation does not come off a checklist. You cannot shame your own heart into hunger. I have tried. It does not work.

But you can bring your heart before beauty.

So that is what I am asking. Just look at Him. Look at Jesus until He becomes beautiful to you again. Look until the milk and honey of this world starts to look like what it really is next to Him. Look until you catch yourself, like Moses, turning down good things because you would rather have the presence. Do not try to feel more spiritual. Do not try to work up an emotion. Just look at Christ, and stay there, and let Him become beautiful to you again. Because desire is awakened by sight. The hunger comes back when the bread becomes beautiful again.

And when it does, when the wanting finally rises up in you on its own, pray it. Pray the oldest, boldest, most desperate prayer in the whole book.

Show me Your glory.

Pray it over your kitchen table. Pray it over your kids while they sleep. Pray it over this little church in this gym. Not Your blessings. Your glory. Your face. Your presence. You.

Because the same God who once let Moses see only His back has now shown us His face in Jesus. He wanted you in the room before you ever thought to want Him. And the same Spirit who fell in that upper room is still being poured out on every single person who will come near. He is not hiding from you. He is not far off. He is closer than your next breath.

And hear this last thing, because it is the whole sermon in one sentence. He is more beautiful than anything He could ever give you. The gift was never the point. He is the point. He always was.

So do not settle for the gift. Go after the Giver. Do not settle for the blessing. Go after the Blesser. Do not settle for the milk and honey. Go after the One whose presence was the only thing that ever made it the promised land. Are we desperate for His presence? Church, I think we are about to be.

Let's pray. Father, we come to You honestly this morning. We confess that we have wanted Your gifts more than we have wanted You. We have reached for the milk and honey while You stood there offering us Yourself. Forgive us.

Jesus, show us Your glory. Not from behind a rock. In Your face. Make Yourself so beautiful to us this week that the things we have been clutching lose their grip in our hands. Ruin us for anything less than You.

And thank You. Thank You that it was never the strength of our grip that held us. It was Yours. We slip our hands out. You never slip Yours. Hold on to us, the way You have been holding on the whole time.

Spirit, fall on this family the way You fell in that upper room. Take our I cannot and answer it with Your I will. Make us a desperate people. Not desperate out of fear. Desperate out of love. Desperate because we have finally seen how good You are.

We do not want the promised land without You. If Your presence does not go with us, then do not send us. But we believe You are going with us. So send us out of this gym wanting You, and finding You, all week long.

In Jesus' name. Amen.