When Moses stood before Pharaoh in the palace courtyard he asked for his people to be freed. Moses didn’t ask Pharaoh to let God’s people go surfing. Moses initially asks Pharaoh to allow the Hebrews to have a feast. (Exodus 5.1). Later, Moses asks Pharaoh to let them go and worship.

“Then the Lord said to Moses, “Go to Pharaoh and say to him, ‘This is what the LORD, the God of the Hebrews, says: Let my people go, so that they may worship me.” Exodus 9.1

Moses is not asking Pharaoh for God’s people to have a church service. God wants more for His people than a church service once a week. God is freeing His people to a way of life. God’s divine work in freeing you and me is not to encourage religious participation in a weekly gathering of Christians so we might become good moral citizens and improve the quality of our behavior, it’s to a way of life that set us totally free. Totally free.

God’s desire for the Israelite community and for you and me is to live in freedom. Paul writes, “It is for freedom you are free.” (Galatians 5.1)

One of the ways we are celebrating at Sanctuary is in the way we are growing, not in number, but in understanding and character. In this study, we’ll explore some familiar territory and look it at with new insight. We’ll continue to talk about what we always talk about, transformation, and we’ll explore what freedom looks like for us as a church, and as a people, and for you individually. We’ll examine what might hold us back from living fully free and how God continues to call into His freedom. Let’s go…surfing.

“So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you.” Romans 12.1-2 MSG