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Well, good morning Sower Nation. It is Friday, February 6th, in the year of our Lord 2026. I'm Andrew Forrest and this is your wake up call. Am I even allowed to wear a sport jacket on here? I don't know if that's permitted or not. I have some meetings for the next couple of days and I needed to dress up a bit. So is this even allowed? Am I permitted to be in the club wearing something like this? I hope you'll still accept me. Well, hello everybody. I'm the senior pastor of Asbury Church in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and I'm a seedbed author, author of the new book Love Goes first. And I've had the privilege of leading a couple weeks of wake up calls to the second half of Exodus. Today we're going to look at what might at first appear to be the most boring part of all of Exodus. But when you understand one little word in this passage, the entire Bible will begin to make more sense. So Lord, thank you for taking us out of Egypt. Now Lord, please take Egypt out of us. Let's go. Wake up sleeper. Rise from the dead and Christ will shine on you. Jesus, I belong to you. I lift up my heart to you. I set my mind on you. I fix my eyes on you. I offer my body to you as a living sacrifice. Jesus, we belong to you. Praying in the name of the Father and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Our scripture reading for the day is Exodus 25:31 36. Hear now the word of the Lord. You shall make a lampstand of pure gold. The lampstand shall be made of hammered work, its base, its stem, its cups, its calyxes and its flowers shall be of one piece with it. And there shall be six branches going out of its sides. Three branches of the lampstand out of one side of it, and three branches of the lampstand out of the other side of it. Three cups made like almond blossoms, each with calyx and flower on one branch, and three cups made like almond blossoms, each with calyx and flower on the other branch. So for the six branches going out of the lampstand, and on the lampstand itself, there shall be four cups made like almond blossoms, where their calyxes and flowers, and a calyx of one piece with it. Under each pair of the six branches going out from the lampstand, their calyxes and their branches shall be of one piece with it, the whole of it a single piece of hammered work of pure gold. The word of the Lord, when you Realize that the blueprints given in Exodus 25 are actually about creating a portable Eden. The whole rest of the Bible begins to make more sense. Let me explain. Let's start with a short summary of the Bible so far. The Lord created humanity in his image to represent him to the world. Humanity is both incredibly powerful and incredibly vulnerable. And so the Lord set up the man and the woman in the Garden of Eden to be instructed in how to live well. In the middle of the garden was the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. The fruit of both trees was meant to help the humans grow and learn and live in God's presence. Rather than trust the Lord, however, they reach out and take from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil on their own. This action tears at the trust that is necessary for people to live with God. And so they are exiled from Eden because if they were to take from the Tree of Life, they would end up living forever in a state of misery and mistrust. The Lord doesn't give up on humanity, however, and chooses one man, Abraham and his family, to bring a blessing to the entire world. Abraham's family finds itself enslaved in Egypt. The Lord rescues them and brings them to Mount Sinai and tells them they will be his representatives to the nations. He gives them the Ten Commandments and the Law so they will know how to live well. And then he gives Moses blueprints to create a tent in the midst of the Israelite encampment called the Tabernacle. The purpose? So that the Lord can be close to the people. Quote and let them make me a sanctuary that I may dwell in their midst. Exodus 25:8. It's as if the Lord is going to start all over again and teach people what they need to flourish and live at peace with the rest of creation. In Exodus 25, the Lord gives Moses instructions about building the Tabernacle. This is the kind of material in the Bible that many of us skip. But when you slow down and actually pay attention, what you see is that the Tabernacle is meant to be an imitation of Eden. The plan for the lampstand is obviously to make it look like a tree. Read the details and you can see that it will look tree like when it is completed. All this is to say that the plans for the inner part of the tabernacle are meant to evoke imagery from the Garden of Eden after those long years of exile from the Lord's presence. Now the Lord is making plans to be close to his people again. And so Listen, I can't be the only person who Number one faces discouragement. Number two faces confusion. I'm discouraged sometimes because so many things seem so difficult and depressing. There is so much bad news and life is so difficult for so many people. I'm confused because I often don't know what to do. The solution to both discouragement and confusion is to spend time with the Lord. The more we experience the Lord's presence, the more convinced we are that in the end everything will be okay. If it's not okay, then it's not the end. And if it's not the end, then the Lord still has work for us to do. It's not that the bad things go away when we spend time with the Lord. It's that we become more convinced that somehow and some way everything is going to be okay. We have the strength to carry on. And the more time we spend with the Lord, the more we become like him, and the more his wisdom influences how we see and act in the world. We learn how best to live. The presence of God is life itself, and apart from him, we can do nothing. What if you live today as if you were desperate for the Lord to be close? P.S. there's one word in the passage that really, I think, livens the whole thing up. It's the word calyx. Did you catch that word? Here's what a calyx is. A calyx is that like green part under the petals of a flower, the bud that kind of opens up. And so you can see that they're meant to kind of make an actual tree like image in the lampstand. I love this word. It's a word that I had to learn reading the Bible this week. Here, PPS Next point. One of the ways that I believe modern Christianity has lost its way is is in the manner by which we build churches today. Spare utilitarian spaces that don't look much different from department stores or schools or hospitals. What if we took inspiration from the tent the Lord has the Israelites construct in the desert and decided that spaces dedicated to the worship of God ought to be the most beautiful and best spaces we could build. So, Lord, be close to us today and fill our hearts with your presence. You are closer than our very breath, Lord. So come, Holy Spirit, and fill our lungs, lighten the load we bear and strengthen our hearts. All this we ask in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. So here are some journal prompts for you today. 1. How does the Old Testament change if you think of the tabernacle as a portable Eden? Two, why is it a mercy that sinful humans do not live forever? And three, is there a particular place in your life today where you need more encouragement and hope? I totally get it. It's easy to read this part of the Bible and think, what are they talking about? But when you step back and see the cliche forest for the trees, it does help, I think. And seeing the tabernacle as like this portable Eden is really lovely and beautiful, and I hope you find it encouraging. There's a lot more to say about that with the presence of Jesus, by the way, but that's for another time. All right, for our closing hymn, we're going to sing Holy Spirit, living breath of God. It's hymn 302 in the seedbed hymnal, Our Great Redeemer's Praise. This is one of these modern hymns by Keith Getty and Stuart Townend, and it is just an absolutely lovely hymn we're going to sing. There are three verses. We're going to sing verses one and verse three. Sing with me. It goes like this.