Leaving Egypt: The Night That Changes Everything | Passover Part 2

Automated transcript, lightly edited for readability. Scripture appears as spoken; the video is the authoritative teaching.

Shabbat Shalom everybody. So we're continuing this series as we're coming up to Passover.

Have you ever used Google Maps to try to get to a destination or Apple Maps, whatever? You tap in your address and it gives you two routes to take. One is a pretty short route that's going to take you 20 minutes to get there. And then there's this other route that spells some type of hieroglyphic around the map and it will take you 57 minutes to get to your location, right? And you can choose—by default it goes to the shorter one, but you can choose, right?

Why would you ever take the route that goes through roads you don't even know, this neighborhood, this side of town? Nobody takes the long way on purpose. Unless you're God. And then you always take the long way. And you don't explain why until the people in the car are already really upset. This is the track record, if you're willing to admit it.

The Question the Bible is Chasing

We are 2 weeks out from Passover and last week we kicked off a series called The Night That Changes Everything. And so if you weren't here, let me catch you up real quick. Last week we kind of took Genesis 1 and we zoomed all the way out. We know that God created the world. He places humans in a garden that functions as a temple. It's the place where heaven and earth kind of overlap.

And the job of these humans, well, to bear the image of God outward. They were to be his image. His Salem. The priests of the garden.

And then we couldn't make it three chapters and Genesis 3 happens. These humans reach for autonomy from God. They get expelled east of the garden. The cherubim, these angel beings, are blocking the entrance. The priests leave the temple.

And from the moment that happens, for the rest of the Bible, the story is chasing one question. The one question the Bible is chasing is how does God get his presence back to his people? Like, that's the thing, right?

For the first 11 chapters of Genesis, you have this huge crisis of the whole world where God's presence was with mankind and then it was separated from the whole world. You got the flood, violence, more violence. People are building empires. It's awful.

And then of course Genesis 12 is when we get introduced to his plan. And he starts to tell us and give us a glimpse of the rescue mission that he's going to put forth through a man named Abram and his lineage. We traced all of that all the way to Exodus 12. And we saw the Israelites in Egypt. And Egypt is presented as the anti-Eden of the story. The image bearers that are supposed to be the image and the light of God throughout the world, they're now enslaved. They're making bricks for a man who is called the son of Ra, the son of God.

We looked last week at the word Pesach. It has the same root meaning, of course, as Passover. And it turns out it means something a lot closer to hovering protectively over the threshold than just passing over a house. The blood on the doorpost wasn't just like a warning sign, it was a covenant declaration in Egypt. And that's where Yahweh hovered over the home.

And we ended last week's message with a question as well. We ended with the question: is the blood on your door? And so today we are going to find out what happens if the answer to that question is yes. And it's not really what most people picture.

The Wilderness, Not the Vacation

I think a lot of us kind of carry this vague picture of the Exodus where it kind of goes like: slavery, then Passover, then the Red Sea, then they went into the land and they had grapes and milk and honey. Like the wilderness was just kind of the travel montage between all the good parts of the vacation.

It's not at all what the wilderness is. Israel walks out of Egypt and they do not walk into freedom. They walk into the wilderness. And the wilderness is where Yahweh does some of his most deliberate work. Israel walks out of Egypt, and now things are going to get hard.

Exodus chapter 13, verse 17—I forgot my clicker, there it is. Thank you, sir.

Pharaoh lets the people go. And God does not lead them by the fast road. When you left Egypt in the ancient world, there was a direct route that was north along the Mediterranean coast. In Latin, it's called the Via Maris, the way of the sea. It was a major trading route and a major trading corridor with Egyptian military outposts all along the way.

If you had a map and wanted to get from the Nile Delta to Canaan in the least amount of time, that was the road. You would make it there in the matter of weeks. Not in the matter of decades with Israel. It'd be like needing to get to Toronto from New Jersey, and instead of just going through New York, you take what is it—I-80 out to San Francisco first. And then you do this whole thing. Like that's what happened in the story.

They Will Not Survive That Road

And God explicitly avoids taking that road. The text actually tells you why. God sometimes he just does stuff, and you're sitting there going, "Okay, I guess we're doing this, right?" And here's what he says: "The people will change their minds and return to Egypt if they face war." "Lest the people change their minds when they experience warfare."

Yahweh looked at the options. He saw the short road, and he said, "They will not survive that road." Not because the Philistines were more dangerous than the 40 years in the desert—because Lord knows a lot of people died there, a whole generation. But because Israel would hit military resistance. They would panic and they would walk straight back to Egypt.

The Israelites were not stupid. They were not faithless. They just hadn't become who they needed to be yet. And there's a big difference. Israel carries the image of God, the Selim, by virtue of just being human. But the particular vocation that God had set out for them of being Yahweh's covenant people, the kingdom of priests that are going to go out into the world, that didn't automatically register with them as they left Egypt. It's not like they were just Johnny Mnemonic and it was downloaded down, right—The Matrix or whatever reference. It didn't happen just like that. They had to live to become that.

The Classroom is the Desert

And apparently the classroom is the desert. And possibly the most uncomfortable part of the story is trying to relate to the Israelites and envision what it would have been like. Israel never got a vote in any of it, right? They didn't even know the coastal roads existed. They don't know that God chose the harder road on purpose. They just follow the cloud.

This seems motivational, right? Encouraging. Until you keep reading, and it's hard. The cloud goes south toward the sea. I don't love that in the story. I like happy stories. I like easy stories. The idea that God looked at two doors and picked the harder one for me without telling me, that messes with me a little bit. I think it messes with all of us when we contemplate those types of things—God's sovereignty and providence. I like knowing the plan. But that's not how this works.

And I think if we're honest, most of us have been on that road south at some point going, "This does not feel like the direction of blessing. This does not feel like the direction that we're supposed to be heading. This doesn't feel like the direction that God's supposed to be leading me—the way that I want God to lead me to this destination that I'm thinking he's leading me to." Right? We kind of build the narrative and then we're disappointed. But from the moment Israel steps out of Egypt, something travels with them.

The Presence Returns

A pillar of cloud by day and a fire by night. There's one presence that comes—two different appearances—and the text is specific. There's not two pillars. There's one. And it never left its place in front of the people. Not on the good days anyway, right?

The rabbis called this presence the Shekinah. And we love that word in more charismatic circles as well, right? Shekinah. It comes from the word shakan. It means to dwell. It's the spirit that dwells among you, takes up his residence.

And you've got to feel the weight of that narrative moment. Like, we started last week in Eden, the original sacred space, heaven and earth. Humans living inside the presence of God. Genesis 3 expelled the priests from the temple, and the whole Bible has been grieving that departure. And here, there's no building, there's no altar, there's no land, there's no institution of any kind. There's just a former slave population trudging into the desert.

The presence that we were asking the question about—when will the presence return? The presence comes back, and now it's mobile, right? It's a very exciting point in the story because—whoa!—this is a continuation of what we just had in Genesis 1, 2, and 3. It's walking out front. Yahweh is not waiting for them at the destination. He's choosing to be with them through the journey. The Exodus is God's self-disclosure that is occurring. The God of Israel is not a God who emancipates people and then sends them a postcard wishing them luck. He goes. The pillar isn't a GPS signal.

It's an announcement. I am relocating to be with my people right now. Paul picks this up in 1 Corinthians 10 in his little midrashic summary of it. He says, "All of our fathers were under the cloud, all baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea." And then Paul says that presence was always pointing at someone else. And we know that to be Yeshua. And so, back to the story—Exodus 14. We have Israel moving and they have the pillar and they're heading away from Egypt. And then Yahweh tells Moses to turn around and camp by the sea. There's water on one side and wilderness on the other. Obviously, there's nowhere to go. And then God says, "I will harden Pharaoh's heart and he will pursue them." Yahweh is setting up the chase. He's positioning Israel so that when Pharaoh looks at the map it looks like a tactical blunder—a panicked mob who wandered into a dead end. And Pharaoh being exactly who he is will come. Why? "And I will get my glory over Pharaoh and all of his host and the Egyptians shall know my name is Yahweh."

God's Plan, Not Pharaoh's

The 10 plagues in Egypt made the argument—the death of the firstborn of course was like the final verdict of everything—but Pharaoh still has 600 chariots. And 600 chariots have a way of making theological arguments feel less settled than they should. If we can be honest, right? The gods of Egypt got dismantled in principle. Now they're about to be dismantled for good. And so Yahweh is not reacting here. He's scripting. He tells Moses in advance what Pharaoh is going to do and why and what the outcome will be. Pharaoh thinks he's making a military decision. He is walking into a conclusion that's already been written. Israel doesn't know any of this. The plan is not explained. They're just asked to trust the cloud. So Pharaoh comes with 600 choice chariots. The text says choice, elite. Not conscripted. This isn't the standard Egyptian army. This is the special forces, or the special contracted mercenaries—Academy, Blackwater, whatever. This is the cream of the crop. They are going to destroy you. That's what they're sent to do. These are the F-35 jets.

Israel looks up and sees the dust cloud on the horizon of this army that's now coming to slaughter them because, hey, we let them go—let's go get them. And they lose it. Just like we would. "Is it because there are no graves in Egypt that you have taken us away to die in the wilderness?"

Reading Scripture as a Story

I love the Bible. I want everybody to be in the word every day. I think you should read the word every day and I think you should read it as an epic story because that's what it was written to be. Sometimes we get so hyper focused on memorizing verses, which is great for Awana's and stuff, but when you read it like a story it makes sense and the message is a lot clearer and the application is a lot clearer. When you walk outside, you understand who you're supposed to be and what you're supposed to do with it. And it's humbling, but it's also encouraging. And so whenever I come across verses where we today in 2026 can relate and even connect with ancient authors and the way they did something—I always love to do that.

So we glaze over this verse a lot. We grow up with it, and when I hear the Israelites speaking here they have a very serious tone because it's the word of God, right? "Is it because there were no graves in Egypt that you brought us here?" And that's a good tone to have. But this is an ancient people, and it was written somewhere between 25 to 3500 years ago. Someone recorded when they used dark sarcasm, dark humor in the middle of the Exodus story. That's what that is. It's dark humor, and I think that's funny. The reason it's funny is because Egypt was famous for what? Tombs, right? So whenever I read it now, it's more like Monty Python, you know? "There's no graves in Egypt," and you just get it—yeah, because they were famous for tombs and they're saying we came all this way to die outside when we had perfectly good burial facilities back home. And honestly, as far as complaints go, that's a really good one.

It's a good one. Give it credit—it's good. Thank you for that. The blood was on their doors 10 days ago. They're now standing under the Shekinah of Yahweh in real time. And the first move under pressure is to do what? We should probably go back. Gets you in a lot of trouble.

The Debt We Still Owe

So, we always look at them and we tend to want to judge them because, obviously, yeah, if I never complained. But before we judge them, let's go back a little bit because history has some things to say that will help us relate. In 1865 the Civil War ends. Slavery's over. Legally, instantly, by decree, millions of enslaved people are now free. Good. Victory. And a significant number of them chose to stay in the plantations. And there were some that were freed and left and ended up coming back. Not because they love slavery—they understood exactly what freedom meant. That's why they came back. For them, freedom meant no land, no money, no infrastructure, no path forward that someone, anyone had bothered to build for them. The people who told them they were free had not exactly stuck around to figure out what was next. "You're just free. Go." The system that had brutalized them also still controlled their access to food, land, and survival.

But look, General Sherman issued special field order number 15 because of this scenario. That was 40 acres and a mule for every enslaved person. It's what the US government owes you. It was a promise—at least this will get you back on your feet so you can start farming, start building, contributing to society on some type of solid ground so we can grow together, build something strong together. Land redistributed along the coast of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. 400,000 acres set aside for formerly enslaved families. And some did start building, started planting. They started becoming who they needed to be. And then Lincoln and Andrew Johnson reversed the order. Gave the land back to the Confederate plantation owners. The people who had started building got evicted from the land they were promised by their own government. And we still owe that debt, by the way. That's not politics—that's just math. It's a promise that was made and then was broken. And the people who were owed have never been paid. It's just historical fact.

Freedom Without Formation

So, what happened instead? Sharecropping. Legal slavery replaced by economic slavery. Different chains, but same plantation. Not because they chose it, but because the system had stripped them of land, capital, and any real path forward. Because the wilderness of freedom required something that four centuries of slavery had deliberately kept from forming: the capacity to survive uncertainty. See, freedom without formation feels more dangerous than slavery with structure. And obviously, not on any type of scale of slavery, but we still do this same type of thing in our own lives today. We leave the toxic job. And then, 3 months, maybe 5 months later, we're romanticizing the old one. Ah, yeah. Now you know where I'm going because we all do this. We tend to reframe memories a little bit differently. Maybe we'll forget all the old stuff, the bad stuff, and just focus on, "Oh, man, that was great." Yeah, no. It was toxic. You left. How about the toxic relationship when you finally break free of it? And a month later, you're looking at them on Instagram at a.m.

We say yes to the blood on the door, and then the wilderness gets uncomfortable. And we start thinking, "I don't like this new season that is not familiar because this is uncomfortable. Maybe Egypt really wasn't that bad. Look at what we had. Watermelons, right?" That's what they say. Yeah, it was though. Egypt was that bad. You just forgot. The wilderness has a way of giving you amnesia about the whips of the things that you endured, that you broke free from. So, when Israel says it would have been better to serve Egyptians, that's not ancient stupidity. That's what humans do under pressure. That is what happens when the thing destroying you was at least predictable and the thing in front of you is a cloud over an unknown wilderness with no map and no guarantees. The wilderness is not where people fail. It is where you find out what still owns you.

Stand Still

Yahweh already knew this when he chose the longer road. Moses responds with some powerful direction. He says, "Fear not. Stand firm and see the Lord's salvation that he will accomplish for you today. For the Egyptians you see today, you will never see them again. The Lord will fight for you and you must be still." You all just have to keep still. Don't fight. Don't negotiate a return to Egypt. Just stand still and watch what I do. Moses does not say, "Don't be afraid." He says "fear not" and "stand firm." I would say those are different things. Because the fear is real. The chariots are real. He's asking them to let the fear be present and not let it move their feet toward Egypt.

Feel the full weight of what is coming, the uncertainty, and stay anyway. Endure it. I don't know about you, but that's not my natural comfortable place to be. It's not familiar. My natural setting is to fix it. That's what we do—to fix it, or control it, or figure it out, or to make a plan. Stand still may be the hardest command in the Bible for me. I'm too busy thinking about what's going to happen next and what I need to be doing three steps ahead and what are all the worst-case scenarios that are going to happen and I need to prepare for all of them so I can know what to do, so I can be in control.

Biblical Courage and the Presence of God

But it's not my trip. Not my trip. And I think that's true for a lot of us. Biblical courage is not the absence of fear. It's what you do while you're afraid. The blood is on the door. The presence is in the pillar right in front of them. And all they have to do is keep still. What happens next is the climax, right? The pillar moves. It had been out in front leading Israel. Now it repositions behind them. Okay? Between Israel and the Egyptian army. Which would have been pretty cool to see. Just with the sound effects. Watching it like a movie. And here's what it says. At the bottom here, the cloud was there and darkness. Or with the darkness. And it lit up the night. So neither group came near the other at all. It's the same presence. It's the same pillar. There was a cloud and darkness. [snorts] It lit up the night.

It has. God's presence is not some neutral benevolence that floats around blessing whoever happens to be nearby. It is conventional. It is covenantal. It is directional. You could say Israelites saw the light and the Egyptians were still left in darkness. We've already seen that. Exodus is the most compressed version of what Revelation spends 22 chapters on. And it's asking you which side of the covenant are you on? Which side of the pillar are you on?

The Wind, the Water, and the Wait

And so the wind blows all night. Yahweh drives back the sea with a strong east wind all night long. And Israel is standing on the shore in the dark lit by a pillar of fire. Listening to wind. They cannot fully see. Watching water move in a direction water does not move. Hours of this just waiting. And can I reinforce that in all the movies they have this taking place at daytime. It was night. Scarier, right? And then the ground is dry. And now we got to start walking through it. Walls of water on the right and to the left. It's Genesis 1 language, right? The separation of the waters, dry ground appearing. Same God who ordered creation in the beginning is now reordering it to a type of new creation for Israel. This is not just a river crossing. This is the new creation story.

And the Egyptians see them moving. And so, what do the Egyptians decide to do? They follow them into the tunnel of water. Death tunnel. And at morning watch, the last watch before sunrise, God looks down from the pillar of fire and from the cloud at the Egyptian army in the seabed. And he throws them into a panic. And the chariot wheels get clogged, and they can't maneuver, and it's just this huge big ordeal. Verse 25. "Let us flee from before Israel, for the Lord fights for them against Egypt." They got the message. This is what they say to themselves. These are people who watched all 10 plagues. They all buried their firstborn. Pharaoh still mobilized them. It took standing in a seabed with clogged wheels and water walls starting to move before they said what they should have said 10 plagues ago.

Belief Came After the Deliverance

Moses stretches out his arm or his hand, and at dawn the sea returns. And the Egyptians who entered the water don't come back out from it. God is willing to share the ocean with empires. And the bottom half is going to belong to them. Israel stands on the eastern shore in the morning light and looks back. Egyptians dead on the sand. There's horses, there's chariots, the entire military infrastructure of the empire that held them for 400 years is gone at the water's edge. Notice when the belief came. Not before the crossing. Not when Moses said stand still. It came after. When they could see with their own eyes. And the text doesn't celebrate this. It doesn't condemn it either. It just records it, right? He brought them to this moment knowing exactly where they were at. He did not wait for better faith before he showed up. That's one of the messages here. He showed first. The belief came after the deliverance, not before. That's called grace. Yahweh has accounted for where you actually are, not where you think you should be.

The Song of the Free People

And what's the first thing the free people do? The first corporate act of worship Israel performs as a free people. It's not a sacrifice. It's not a structured service with a bulletin and a QR code on the pamphlet and a three-song, four-song set. No, they sing a song and it's spontaneous. Right there off the shore before they've ever taken another step. I will sing to the Lord. They said, "I will sing to the Lord, for he is highly exalted. The horse and its rider has been thrown into the sea." Who is like you among the gods, oh Lord? That's rhetorical, by the way, because they know the answer. They know the answer now, especially in a way that they didn't a week before. The answer is nobody, nothing. No one's like the Lord. The Hebrew inside Exodus 15, by the way, is some of the oldest dated Hebrew poetry in the entire Bible. Which is neat. I love that. It could have been something that was added later by a later author or editor, or it could have been the Exodus community's own voice in there. Still wet from the sea recording this.

And then Miriam picks up a tambourine and the women dance. Miriam, you remember Miriam from the story, right? She's the young girl that stood at the edge of the Nile watching to see what would happen to her infant brother in the basket as he was sent to the people that murdered the babies. Yeah. She's now standing at the edge of a different body of water watching what Yahweh has done with that same brother 40-something years later. And she leads the women in response. The text calls this woman a neviah, a prophetess of Yahweh. And her first prophetic act as a free woman is to pick up a tambourine and move.

Freedom Does Not Always Look Orderly

Freedom does not always look orderly, by the way. When you no longer have to carry the mask of being a slave or the mask of being enslaved to something, you're always going to look a little weird to the rest of society because of how you act and celebrate because it's not something everyone can relate to. And people will become very jealous. And people will make comments about you. And people will say things to you. And people will try to root for you to fail because they're jealous that they're seeing a freedom in you that they cannot latch onto. Some of you know exactly what I'm talking about. That's what it looks like.

And the reason why people get so upset when they see you celebrating as freely as Miriam was on the beach with the most annoying instrument ever known to man, smiling and dancing around, is because you're no longer trapped by what they're thinking about. And they get upset because they don't have that. Love this section. This is so applicable in so many ways. When you're free, it shows. And it looks chaotic and you might look a little crazy, but you're free. Sometimes freedom just looks like Miriam with a tambourine standing on a beach. I love that.

The Pattern Paul Recognized

Paul grabs hold of this entire message as we mentioned earlier in 1 Corinthians 10, and he calls the pillar. Well, here's what he says. 1 Corinthians 10. So he says this: "Our fathers were all under the cloud and all passed through the sea. And all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea." He's doing what every single first century rabbi did, Paul. He's reading the earlier story as a template for what is happening now. The people went through water and they came out on the other side as something they were not before. Not slaves, not defined by Pharaoh's system, not who they were when they went in, because the water changed them.

And then Paul drops this. He says the rock that followed Israel in the wilderness—the one that gave water when they were dying of thirst—that was the Messiah. Present with them. Walking through the desert before Bethlehem, right? Before anyone knew his name, Paul's saying that was Jesus. The Exodus was not just a moment in history. It was a pattern. Yahweh built the pattern so that when he ran in again at full scale, anyone paying attention would recognize it. And that's what Paul is igniting there. It's the same story. We've always been a part of it. We're still a part of it. The point being is that you're never supposed to stay on the shore.

After the Crossing—The Wilderness Begins

Israel comes out of the water and they sing. Tambourines, dancing, it's beautiful, right? Then what? The wilderness is still in front of them. Three days in and there's no water. And so they finally found some water, but it's bitter. It's no good. Manna hasn't started yet. Quail hasn't shown up, coming out of their noses, right? All that hasn't happened yet. The crossing ended Egypt, but it did not end the hard part. Because those are not the same thing. The wilderness is the place that God built between Egypt and the promised land where slave psychology gets confronted, gets exposed, and slowly replaced. And where God gets known in ways he cannot be known when you're comfortable. You don't learn that Yahweh provides when your shelves are full. You learn it when your shelves are empty and manna starts showing up on the ground.

And the pillar does not leave when it gets hard. It doesn't disappear when they complain in the story. It doesn't lift when they build a golden calf at the foot of Mount Sinai. Gosh, Yahweh's patience in that episode is next level. Something else. The presence stays, light in the dark. It's the same God who hovered over the doorposts in Goshen is the same God out front in the Sinai Peninsula. The rescue at Passover and the wilderness journey are not two separate stories. It's all one thing. The question Passover asked in the first message we did is the blood on your door. In the wilderness, the wilderness is asking something very different.

Was It Better Before?

It's asking, "Do you trust the cloud?" Israel kept discovering that the wilderness had a way of making Egypt look reasonable. Not good. They remembered the brutality. They remembered the whips and the bricks. But it was known. It was predictable. Egypt had food on a schedule. That's a big deal. Provision you cannot complain around, you know? They're out in the wilderness now, and they have none of that. Every time the water runs out, every time the food situation gets desperate for them, the same question comes back: "Was it better before?" And that question is not 3,000 years old by any means. It lives in anyone who has ever walked out something that was destroying them and found that the freedom on the other side required more than the captivity did. Because sometimes it does. And those can be private things, and those can be not private things. Those can be relationships, they can be patterns in your life. They can be things that you hold close. They can be the things that we're supposed to be purged from.

Wilderness Is Where Identity Gets Formed

Yeshua spent 40 days in the wilderness right after his baptism. Same pattern. In Jordan. Israel spent 40 years in the wilderness. Wilderness is where your identity gets formed. Where the self that Egypt built gets stripped down. Where you find out whether you actually trust God or whether you were just relieved to get out. The blood on the door is the beginning. The wilderness is where you find out what you actually believe about the God who put it there. And so the pillar is still moving. The question is whether you're following. Or standing at the shore looking back at the water wishing you were still in Egypt. Unwilling to move.

Fear Runs a Lot of Our Lives

And the thing that's so confrontational about the story of the Exodus is because every single one of us is finding some type of application right now based on past experiences, or an experience we're going through right now, or possibly a future that we know is coming. Because life gets hard, because life is uncertain, and we try to build framework around it to make it familiar, to make it predictable. Because fear runs a lot of our lives if we're not in control, if something changes. The Exodus story is meant not only to establish the pattern of God's salvation but also to establish how you form into a new creation. How you purge out the old system and how you embrace the kingdom life.

And as much as we want that to be outward things that we do — like keeping the Shabbat or doing the feast days, great things, yay — Jesus had a whole conversation with people who did that in Matthew 23, because it starts here. It starts with the mask. It starts with holding on to things just because they're familiar even though they're hurting you. And they're keeping you away from something that is going to be more fruitful that we call freedom. And God is standing there waiting for your feet to start moving into the unknown and into the uncertain with only one thing, and that's your trust in God. That's when you find out who you are, for sure.

An Invitation to the Altar

So, with that, please stand. And I don't know where you're at today, but as we work through the rest of the Passover story leading up to Passover, here at the end of this month at the beginning of next month, now is an appropriate time to just re-evaluate and take a pulse on where you're at in this busy life, in this busy world where routines become ruts in the road, and we do the same things over and over again, and sometimes it's easy to forget that we still have a mission, that we still have a vocation to be the image bearers of God. The Exodus story is preparing us to live out that vocation just as it was meant to do the same for the Israelites.

So, join us as we conclude with worship today, and if you need prayer for anything that's going on in your life, relating to the message or not relating to the message — guys, we have prayer warriors on either side of the stage, and all you have to do is come up, and they will pray over you, and lift you up before the Father. We also have an altar here that is, of course, symbolic, but it's an appropriate place to symbolically put something. If you carried something in today that you've been carrying for maybe way too long — maybe it's from Egypt — you can come up here, kneel down, and set it right here. And know that that is a commitment. You're crossing a threshold into a very scary place that you're not going to carry that thing back with you. And it's the first step in rebuilding your life. So, I invite you guys. I invite you. If you need prayer or need to leave something here, you can do that during this time.

Closing Prayer

Our Vino Malkenu, our Father, our King, Father, we thank you for this opportunity to come before you to revisit the template story of your redemption and salvation. And Father, I ask in the name of Yeshua that the Holy Spirit would do what the scriptures tell us it does. Father, that it would give us life. That it would give us power and authority to break chains. Even chains we don't want to break. That it would give us the courage to do so. That we would dare to follow you into the wilderness and let go of Egypt. We thank you, Father, for your grace and your mercy. And we thank you for King Yeshua. Yeshua's name we pray. Amen.

Closing Worship

Everything changed. It's getting harder to recognize the person I was before I encountered Christ. I don't walk like I used to. I don't talk like I used to. I've been washed from the inside. I've been washed from the inside out. Hallelujah. I know it was the blood. Could have only been the blood. I know it was the blood. Could have only been the blood. I cannot explain that nothing's more real than this. In the presence of God all what my heart experienced when my shame met the wayside and my sin met the Most High. I was washed from the inside out. I was washed from the inside I know it was the blood.

Hallelujah. Could have only been the blood. It's never been about performance, perfection, or striving for acceptance. Let me tell you it's only by the blood. It's never been about deserving or earning. It's a gift that's freely given. Let me tell you, it's only by the blood. Does anybody want to be holy, righteous, purified, spotless? Let me tell you, it's only by the blood. Does anybody want to be worthy, forgiven, justified, really living? Let me tell you, it's only by the blood. I know it was the blood. Could have only been the blood. Could have only been the blood. been the blood. It's never been about performance, It's never been about deserving or earning.

It's a gift that's freely given. Let me tell you, righteous, purified, and spotless? Does anybody want to be worthy, forgiven, justified, and really living? it's only by the blood. See His hands, see His feet, and receive. See His hands, see His feet, and receive. See His hands, see His feet, and receive. And receive. I know it was the blood, could have only been the blood. I know it was the blood, could have only been I know it was the blood, could have only been the Could have only been the blood. I see I see See his hands. See his feet. And receive. Shema Yisrael Adonai Eloheinu Adonai Echad Baruch Shem Kevod Malchuto Le'olam Va'ed Here, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is one.

Blessed is the name of His glorious kingdom for all eternity. May the Lord bless you and keep you. May the Lord make His face to shine upon you and be gracious to you. May the Lord lift up His countenance toward you and give you His peace. In the name of our Sar Shalom, our Prince of Peace, Yeshua Hamashiach, we pray. Amen and amen. Shabbat Shalom, family.