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God's answer to the destroyer in Exodus 12 is a one-year-old lamb. Not an army or a show of strength, but innocence. The innocent took the place of the guilty, and Israel lived. Paul calls the cross foolishness to the world and God's power to us. This sermon traces how the Passover lamb points straight to Jesus.

We may never bow to a frog god, but our idols are just more polished. Comfort, success, approval, and self can all take God's place. Walking through the ten plagues in Exodus 7-10, we see that Jesus is greater than every idol. His glory is not the enemy of our joy. It is where our joy is made full.

Pharaoh looked like a good, moral person by his culture's standards. He worshipped faithfully by the Nile every morning. But in Exodus 7, God says his heart is heavy, guilty, hardened against the Lord. Jesus makes a similar point in Matthew 7. God didn't create us primarily to do good things. He created us for a relationship with him, and a heavy heart is one that hasn't given itself over to that.

In Exodus 6, God responds to a discouraged Moses not with explanations but with promises rooted in his own character. Seven times God says "I will," and twice he anchors every one of those promises with "I am the Lord." His promises are good because he is good. When circumstances make it hard to hold on, his character is the place we can always rely on.

Moses had every excuse ready. Wrong background. Wrong words. Wrong resume. And God acknowledged none of them as disqualifying. Exodus 4 makes clear that God is not looking for capable people who will take the credit. He is looking for people willing to step out of the corner of the cage. Weakness is never an excuse for disobedience. But it can be the very place where God's strength becomes impossible to miss.

Moses spent 40 years hiding in the desert, convinced his best days were behind him. Then God showed up in an ordinary moment and changed everything. Exodus 3 is not really about Moses at all. It's about the God who calls inadequate people and then supplies everything they need. The question for us is whether we'll stop trusting our excuses and start trusting Him.

God rescued Moses before he ever used him. That pattern runs straight through Exodus 2. Moses was helpless in a basket, unable to save himself, and God intervened. The same is true for us. Before God works through your life, he works in it. Your own redemption story in Christ is not incidental to your calling. It is the foundation of it.

Exodus is often summarized as a story of escape. The ten plagues, the Red Sea, the run to freedom. But that gets you only to chapter 15 of a 40-chapter book. The heart of the story is not just what God's people were leaving, but who they were walking toward. God freed them for his presence, not just from Pharaoh's grip. The same is true for us.

Psalm 133 opens with a simple declaration: how good it is when God's people dwell in unity. But unity is more than showing up in the same room. It's a shared identity in Christ, a shared commitment to one another, and a shared mission to a world that desperately needs the gospel. When those three things come together, something remarkable happens. Come see what that looks like.

Psalm 147 opens and closes with the same call: praise the Lord. But the psalmist isn't commanding praise because God is needy or easily angered. He's pointing to something more surprising. The benefit of praise runs in the opposite direction we might expect. God doesn't need it. We do. Praise reorients us toward the God who is both sovereign over the stars and personal enough to bind up broken hearts.

Time and money tell the truth about worship better than words do. Psalm 138 pushes us past surface-level praise to ask what we actually bow down to. David points to God's steadfast love and faithfulness as the fuel that makes wholehearted worship possible. When we understand who God is, not just what he gives, adoration follows naturally. The character of God is what draws the heart in.

Most of us handle personal failure one of two ways. We dismiss it entirely, or we try to perform our way out of it. Neither works. Psalm 130 cuts through both of those dead ends and lands somewhere better. The psalmist looks directly at his own sin, then looks directly at God's forgiveness, and finds the boldness to keep going. That same path is open to us.

Psalm 107 was the psalm the Pilgrims turned to when persecution drove them from Europe and across an ocean. It has anchored people in some of the hardest seasons in history because it does something rare: it speaks to every season, not just one. Whether you feel lost, trapped, broken by your own choices, or simply worn out by a busy life, this psalm calls you back to the same foundation. God has not forgotten you.

Most of us use the word "blessed" without thinking much about it. Psalm 67 pushes back on the easy version of that word. Real blessing is the presence of God shining on your life. And when that sinks in, it changes everything about how you live, how you worship, and how you treat the people around you.

Written a thousand years before the crucifixion, Psalm 22 describes pierced hands and feet, bones out of joint, soldiers casting lots for clothing. None of that is coincidence. It is God making clear that the cross was never an accident. Jesus went there deliberately, thinking of others up to his final breath, so that nothing you carry would be beyond his reach.