Guide me O Thou Great Jehovah

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09 Aug 2026

Guide me O Thou Great Jehovah

Passage Exodus 16

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Service Morning

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Passage: Exodus 16

16 The whole Israelite community set out from Elim and came to the Desert of Sin, which is between Elim and Sinai, on the fifteenth day of the second month after they had come out of Egypt. 2 In the desert the whole community grumbled against Moses and Aaron. 3 The Israelites said to them, ‘If only we had died by the Lord’s hand in Egypt! There we sat round pots of meat and ate all the food we wanted, but you have brought us out into this desert to starve this entire assembly to death.’

4 Then the Lord said to Moses, ‘I will rain down bread from heaven for you. The people are to go out each day and gather enough for that day. In this way I will test them and see whether they will follow my instructions. 5 On the sixth day they are to prepare what they bring in, and that is to be twice as much as they gather on the other days.’

6 So Moses and Aaron said to all the Israelites, ‘In the evening you will know that it was the Lord who brought you out of Egypt, 7 and in the morning you will see the glory of the Lord, because he has heard your grumbling against him. Who are we, that you should grumble against us?’ 8 Moses also said, ‘You will know that it was the Lord when he gives you meat to eat in the evening and all the bread you want in the morning, because he has heard your grumbling against him. Who are we? You are not grumbling against us, but against the Lord.’

9 Then Moses told Aaron, ‘Say to the entire Israelite community, “Come before the Lord, for he has heard your grumbling.”’

10 While Aaron was speaking to the whole Israelite community, they looked towards the desert, and there was the glory of the Lord appearing in the cloud.

11 The Lord said to Moses, 12 ‘I have heard the grumbling of the Israelites. Tell them, “At twilight you will eat meat, and in the morning you will be filled with bread. Then you will know that I am the Lord your God.”’

13 That evening quail came and covered the camp, and in the morning there was a layer of dew around the camp. 14 When the dew was gone, thin flakes like frost on the ground appeared on the desert floor. 15 When the Israelites saw it, they said to each other, ‘What is it?’ For they did not know what it was.

Moses said to them, ‘It is the bread the Lord has given you to eat. 16 This is what the Lord has commanded: “Everyone is to gather as much as they need. Take an omer for each person you have in your tent.”’

17 The Israelites did as they were told; some gathered much, some little. 18 And when they measured it by the omer, the one who gathered much did not have too much, and the one who gathered little did not have too little. Everyone had gathered just as much as they needed.

19 Then Moses said to them, ‘No one is to keep any of it until morning.’

20 However, some of them paid no attention to Moses; they kept part of it until morning, but it was full of maggots and began to smell. So Moses was angry with them.

21 Each morning everyone gathered as much as they needed, and when the sun grew hot, it melted away. 22 On the sixth day, they gathered twice as much – two omers for each person – and the leaders of the community came and reported this to Moses. 23 He said to them, ‘This is what the Lord commanded: “Tomorrow is to be a day of sabbath rest, a holy sabbath to the Lord. So bake what you want to bake and boil what you want to boil. Save whatever is left and keep it until morning.”’

24 So they saved it until morning, as Moses commanded, and it did not stink or get maggots in it. 25 ‘Eat it today,’ Moses said, ‘because today is a sabbath to the Lord. You will not find any of it on the ground today. 26 Six days you are to gather it, but on the seventh day, the Sabbath, there will not be any.’

27 Nevertheless, some of the people went out on the seventh day to gather it, but they found none. 28 Then the Lord said to Moses, ‘How long will you refuse to keep my commands and my instructions? 29 Bear in mind that the Lord has given you the Sabbath; that is why on the sixth day he gives you bread for two days. Everyone is to stay where they are on the seventh day; no one is to go out.’ 30 So the people rested on the seventh day.

31 The people of Israel called the bread manna. It was white like coriander seed and tasted like wafers made with honey. 32 Moses said, ‘This is what the Lord has commanded: “Take an omer of manna and keep it for the generations to come, so they can see the bread I gave you to eat in the wilderness when I brought you out of Egypt.”’

33 So Moses said to Aaron, ‘Take a jar and put an omer of manna in it. Then place it before the Lord to be kept for the generations to come.’

34 As the Lord commanded Moses, Aaron put the manna with the tablets of the covenant law, that it might be preserved. 35 The Israelites ate manna for forty years, until they came to a land that was settled; they ate manna until they reached the border of Canaan.

36 (An omer is one tenth of an ephah.)

New International Version - UK (NIVUK)

Holy Bible, New International Version® Anglicized, NIV® Copyright © 1979, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

Transcript (Auto-generated)

This transcript has been automatically generated, and therefore may not be 100% accurate.

Father Almighty, we thank you for your word. We thank you for the challenge of it. We thank you for the power of it. Help us this day to be challenged and transformed by your Word. Amen.

That's the second time that's nearly happened to me, but it only nearly happened to me this time. A few weeks ago, I was in another church where I had prepared a fantastic sermon, if I do so myself, on anxiety, only to be told I was preaching about money.

But it's amazing how you can run material into each other if you've been a teacher for 33 years. You just know ways of bringing material together that doesn't normally fit. Anyway, on this occasion, I'm very grateful. We're still in Exodus 60 and given what I'm going to say, I'm not going to grumble because I don't want to be like these Israelites. It is six weeks since they have come through the Red Sea.

Six weeks they have seen one of God's biggest miracles. They've been witness to that. And six weeks later they are grumbling.

Amazing, isn't it, when you hear. You may sometimes hear somebody who isn't a Christian or a believer say, if only I saw a miracle that would completely change the way I think and, you know, I believe and I'd be so much better as a person. These Israelites see one of God's biggest miracles right in front of them and. And six weeks later, they're complaining very much about human nature. Complaining is, I guess, very easy to do.

I was in a meeting recently which was about complaints. There were six of them against this particular organisation. So I thought I'd turn things on the head and say, how many compliments have you had this year? Oh, we've had 230. Oh, can we look at some of those?

Do members of your staff hear the compliments or do they only hear the grumbles of the 6, 230 satisfied people? Six people not satisfied. There's something about human nature that we tend to listen to grumbles or negativity more than anything else. Even when, like the Israelites, we might have seen a great deal of the grace of God right in front of us. It's only human nature perhaps, to look, to be suspicious when you have those compliments and thinks, when is the criticism coming?

Now, the grumbling here is remarkable from the people of Israel. It's remarkable and extraordinary that six weeks after leaving slavery, they seem to think they were better fed in Egypt. Now, I don't think you need to know very much about history to know that one group of people that have not been notoriously well fed have been slaves. I cannot think in history of slaves who've died from overeating, malnourishment and abuse and lack of the right food. Many hundreds, thousands, perhaps millions over the years, but certainly not the description we get from the Israelites.

I just don't believe this. Endless pots of meat. We could eat everything we wanted. It was fantastic. You were slaves.

You were slaves. There's a nostalgia here that isn't very helpful at all.

It's another type of slavery. In fact. They're trapped in the past. They need to move on.

We as Christians should value the past blessings of God. We should value our past experiences. We should value what we've had and known of God's grace in our lives. But we also need to live in the present tense.

However blessed we felt 30, 40, 50 years ago or 30, 40, 50 days ago, we must continue to look for the God of the present tense as well as the God of the past. Yes. Israel's recent past, he would have thought, should make them grateful. What they've seen should transform them. They hadn't learned the right lesson from the past.

Instead they had a kind of distorted view of what had happened because they were grumbling. Some of the older translations talk about the murmuring, so there's a sense of them sort of murmuring away, grumbling about things, and that's very dispiriting. What we can learn from this is even the people of God can be grumblers and they need to be challenged. So I'm going to challenge myself and I'm going to challenge you to think about those areas where you have needlessly, this week been grumbling. Of course, if you're that saintly Christian who never grumbles, then obviously you don't need to do this exercise.

But I don't think there are that many of you. Sorry. Because human nature suggests that most of us grumble a fair bit of the time. And we often grumble because we have idealised views of the past. It was so much better then when it wasn't necessarily.

Or we are afraid of the present and we don't like the changes we might see in our own life. We need to come to God to realise that he is the God who wants to bless us today.

Israel should have been living in the glow of that blessing they've had six weeks ago. But they also need to learn that God blesses them today.

It's great if you came to faith in a fantastic and miraculous way, it's great. If you came to faith in a very quiet Anglican sort of way, right, that's great. It's great if you've been blessed by the Spirit on occasion, if you've known God's power in difficult situations, and that's absolutely fantastic. But don't let them be things of the past. Don't be enslaved by the past.

Celebrate those, give thanks to God for those, and then invite God to do a new thing in your life. Today, as Christians, we need to live in three tenses with God past, present and future.

God's promise is gracious to us, gracious to the Israelites. You know, if I'd heard all that grumbling, my natural reaction might well have been thought, I've had enough of these people, stop it. I know that because at a very small level, I've experienced grumbling within my own family. So I remember a day when we were on holiday. Now, this was back when I was a teacher, so school holidays were really, really important.

In a way, they're not quite so much now and perhaps a little idealised. I was going to go away, I was going to have a rest. And this particular day, my dear children, they were much smaller than they are now, had moaned about the beach, they moaned about the heat, they moaned about how boring it was, they'd moaned about the accommodation. I think they even moaned about ice cream, which is quite an achievement for small children to moan about the ice cream. Anyway, they had just moaned perpetually all day and it was getting a bit wearing.

So dad had got to the point where he decided there needed to be an intervention. So I sat my two kids down at the table and said, you are going to write a list of everything you need to be grateful for. And not unreasonably, my kids just sat there completely astonished and didn't write anything because, well, I mean, who can? When you're challenged to stop grumbling and write something you're grateful for in that kind of teacher voice? It didn't work.

God isn't like that. God's really loving to the people of Israel. At the one moment he could grumble back, he could be angry back. The manna and the quail are brought in the direction of the Israelites when they do not desire deserve them.

The manna and the quell are brought to satisfy their needs. God's grace acts at a moment when the people of Israel do not deserve it. They really don't. They are grumbling they are negative, they are ungrateful of God's grace that's been shown the crossing of the Red Sea. But God being God shows grace to these sinners and he meets their needs.

He meets their physical needs with manna, which literally means wotsits. If ever you have any of those dreadful sub crisps that are called wotsits, perhaps they might seem to you manner to me they're not anyway, but they are God meats. Then with some bread, a special bread and the quails he gives enough for everybody's need, so much that they can stack up one of these big containers. I didn't cheque exactly what an omer's worth is, but it's a lot. It's a lot.

There's probably some of you really Bible trained who will tell me the precise amount that an omer is, but it's a lot. God meets their needs. God meets their needs. Despite their grumbling. God transforms them by that challenge.

We need to learn to trust God. When our natural reaction would be to grumble, to moan, to lament, that's when we come to God. When we do feel that down or that introspective or whatever it is, we need to come to God more, not less. And God in His graciousness will meet us. God in his grace will answer our needs.

They need to learn too that God's guidance is day by day. Did you notice at the end of the text it said everyone had enough. Everyone had enough. Now there are some people in church today, or those that we know and love in our fellowship, who feel that they are in a situation. Where is God really meeting their needs.

They may be going through something very, very difficult, personally or in their family.

Well, God will meet your need. God will meet our needs. It may not feel like he does, but everyone had enough. God meets us by his grace. However difficult the situation we have, God meets us and wishes to guide us day by day.

You know, we tend to perhaps ask the young amongst us, what do you want to do with your life? I think I want to ask the 11:15, what do you want to do with your life? And I think what you should be replying is I want to live a life of thanksgiving and where I can serve, I will serve.

That should be our call. So what needs do we have today? Well, we need to take them to God. What cares do we have today? We need to take it to God.

Are we unsure about big decisions that we need to make in our lives? Take them to God.

We do not live in A time when the people of all the world have all of their needs met. So we, as followers, we should commit to making sure that other people's needs are met, spiritually and otherwise. That's part of our calling as the church, be it supporting a local food bank down the road, for example, or just giving time for somebody who's in a difficult situation. We need to be living as people under God's guidance, knowing that we have been the receivers of grace and that therefore we should live as graceful people, sharing that grace with others. We may be in the desert.

We may feel that we are like those Israelites, that we're in a desert. Perhaps God seems far away, Perhaps we've had difficult emotions and situations to cope with. In the desert, God comes to meet Israel. It's quite often the case that in the barren place or the difficult place, God blesses. And we know from other storeys in scripture that God produces water from a rock.

God produces manna and quail in the middle of this desert. We might think all kinds of things, but we need to know this. God's guidance is here. If you find walking difficult, pray.

If you find it difficult being alone, ask God to help you to pray and to find a way forward. And perhaps ask God for companionship. Ask God's guidance isn't just. God's guidance isn't just for the young or those called to mission. It's for you, it's for me.

Each day we need to start our days by asking God's guidance, what do I need to do today, Lord, to show your grace to the people around me? Who do I need to be prepared to spend time with, to talk to, to draw alongside or to pray for? That's a real challenge to all of us right now. So God's guidance, what would you have me do today for the kingdom? Well, I think we need to respond.

As Israel learned very slowly and had to be told many times, we need to respond to God's grace.

So we do need people to be evangelists, but we need people to be tea makers. We need people to be the sort of people who stand at the front and talk, but we need people to be quiet, who will just sit alongside those in difficulty. We need people who may find it very easy to sing a God's praise, but we also need people who struggle with that. You can spend all of your life telling boring storeys of glory days of the way God may have blessed you in the past, or we can live in the present tense knowing that God can bless us now. And into the future.

So just to bring my sermon to a close, nostalgia isn't a spiritual gift. It crippled the people of Israel because they had nostalgia for six weeks ago and yet it was distorting and not right. They had a wrong view of the past. We need to ask God to give a right view of what our past is. But we need to live with a God who is the God of three past, present and future.

God is gracious and and guides Israel beyond what they deserve. God is gracious to us in Christ in sending him to die upon the cross for our sins and in resurrection hope. That's way beyond what we deserve. We do not deserve that. But we should respond to his call to us and do not think that God's guidance is an issue for the young or the missionary inclined.

God's guidance is for you today and tomorrow and every day this week and every day of your life. That we should be seeking to live in God's guidance and we should seek to be not like the grumbling Israelites at the beginning of the passage, but the Israelites at the end who are just in awe of the blessings of God again to them when he shows his grace to them. Well, I feel challenged and I'm the preacher. Hopefully everybody else feels challenged too, because I know this is going to demand a lot of me this week to think about that God who is their past, present and future. And I know that I can grumble like everybody else.

So I'm going to try and stop that in the power of God this week. Let us pray, Father, that great hymn that we're about to sing. Guide Me, O thou great Jehovah pilgrim through this barren land. Oftentimes, Lord, we experience difficulty. We think of death, desert and barrenness in our own spiritual life, in our own lives in general.

But we need your guidance. We need your guidance in the big things and in the small things. In things that will alter decades of lives and in things that will alter days or hours. Help us to look to you and we praise you that you are the God of grace who supplies our needs and loves us even when we can be so negative in your direction. Praise you that you are a God who loves sinners even when they keep on sinning.

Amen.

16 The whole Israelite community set out from Elim and came to the Desert of Sin, which is between Elim and Sinai, on the fifteenth day of the second month after they had come out of Egypt. 2 In the desert the whole community grumbled against Moses and Aaron. 3 The Israelites said to them, ‘If only we had died by the Lord’s hand in Egypt! There we sat round pots of meat and ate all the food we wanted, but you have brought us out into this desert to starve this entire assembly to death.’

4 Then the Lord said to Moses, ‘I will rain down bread from heaven for you. The people are to go out each day and gather enough for that day. In this way I will test them and see whether they will follow my instructions. 5 On the sixth day they are to prepare what they bring in, and that is to be twice as much as they gather on the other days.’

6 So Moses and Aaron said to all the Israelites, ‘In the evening you will know that it was the Lord who brought you out of Egypt, 7 and in the morning you will see the glory of the Lord, because he has heard your grumbling against him. Who are we, that you should grumble against us?’ 8 Moses also said, ‘You will know that it was the Lord when he gives you meat to eat in the evening and all the bread you want in the morning, because he has heard your grumbling against him. Who are we? You are not grumbling against us, but against the Lord.’

9 Then Moses told Aaron, ‘Say to the entire Israelite community, “Come before the Lord, for he has heard your grumbling.”’

10 While Aaron was speaking to the whole Israelite community, they looked towards the desert, and there was the glory of the Lord appearing in the cloud.

11 The Lord said to Moses, 12 ‘I have heard the grumbling of the Israelites. Tell them, “At twilight you will eat meat, and in the morning you will be filled with bread. Then you will know that I am the Lord your God.”’

13 That evening quail came and covered the camp, and in the morning there was a layer of dew around the camp. 14 When the dew was gone, thin flakes like frost on the ground appeared on the desert floor. 15 When the Israelites saw it, they said to each other, ‘What is it?’ For they did not know what it was.

Moses said to them, ‘It is the bread the Lord has given you to eat. 16 This is what the Lord has commanded: “Everyone is to gather as much as they need. Take an omer for each person you have in your tent.”’

17 The Israelites did as they were told; some gathered much, some little. 18 And when they measured it by the omer, the one who gathered much did not have too much, and the one who gathered little did not have too little. Everyone had gathered just as much as they needed.

19 Then Moses said to them, ‘No one is to keep any of it until morning.’

20 However, some of them paid no attention to Moses; they kept part of it until morning, but it was full of maggots and began to smell. So Moses was angry with them.

21 Each morning everyone gathered as much as they needed, and when the sun grew hot, it melted away. 22 On the sixth day, they gathered twice as much – two omers for each person – and the leaders of the community came and reported this to Moses. 23 He said to them, ‘This is what the Lord commanded: “Tomorrow is to be a day of sabbath rest, a holy sabbath to the Lord. So bake what you want to bake and boil what you want to boil. Save whatever is left and keep it until morning.”’

24 So they saved it until morning, as Moses commanded, and it did not stink or get maggots in it. 25 ‘Eat it today,’ Moses said, ‘because today is a sabbath to the Lord. You will not find any of it on the ground today. 26 Six days you are to gather it, but on the seventh day, the Sabbath, there will not be any.’

27 Nevertheless, some of the people went out on the seventh day to gather it, but they found none. 28 Then the Lord said to Moses, ‘How long will you refuse to keep my commands and my instructions? 29 Bear in mind that the Lord has given you the Sabbath; that is why on the sixth day he gives you bread for two days. Everyone is to stay where they are on the seventh day; no one is to go out.’ 30 So the people rested on the seventh day.

31 The people of Israel called the bread manna. It was white like coriander seed and tasted like wafers made with honey. 32 Moses said, ‘This is what the Lord has commanded: “Take an omer of manna and keep it for the generations to come, so they can see the bread I gave you to eat in the wilderness when I brought you out of Egypt.”’

33 So Moses said to Aaron, ‘Take a jar and put an omer of manna in it. Then place it before the Lord to be kept for the generations to come.’

34 As the Lord commanded Moses, Aaron put the manna with the tablets of the covenant law, that it might be preserved. 35 The Israelites ate manna for forty years, until they came to a land that was settled; they ate manna until they reached the border of Canaan.

36 (An omer is one tenth of an ephah.)

New International Version – UK (NIVUK)

Holy Bible, New International Version® Anglicized, NIV® Copyright © 1979, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.
This transcript has been automatically generated and therefore may not be 100% accurate

Father Almighty, we thank you for your word. We thank you for the challenge of it. We thank you for the power of it. Help us this day to be challenged and transformed by your Word. Amen.

That’s the second time that’s nearly happened to me, but it only nearly happened to me this time. A few weeks ago, I was in another church where I had prepared a fantastic sermon, if I do so myself, on anxiety, only to be told I was preaching about money.

But it’s amazing how you can run material into each other if you’ve been a teacher for 33 years. You just know ways of bringing material together that doesn’t normally fit. Anyway, on this occasion, I’m very grateful. We’re still in Exodus 60 and given what I’m going to say, I’m not going to grumble because I don’t want to be like these Israelites. It is six weeks since they have come through the Red Sea.

Six weeks they have seen one of God’s biggest miracles. They’ve been witness to that. And six weeks later they are grumbling.

Amazing, isn’t it, when you hear. You may sometimes hear somebody who isn’t a Christian or a believer say, if only I saw a miracle that would completely change the way I think and, you know, I believe and I’d be so much better as a person. These Israelites see one of God’s biggest miracles right in front of them and. And six weeks later, they’re complaining very much about human nature. Complaining is, I guess, very easy to do.

I was in a meeting recently which was about complaints. There were six of them against this particular organisation. So I thought I’d turn things on the head and say, how many compliments have you had this year? Oh, we’ve had 230. Oh, can we look at some of those?

Do members of your staff hear the compliments or do they only hear the grumbles of the 6, 230 satisfied people? Six people not satisfied. There’s something about human nature that we tend to listen to grumbles or negativity more than anything else. Even when, like the Israelites, we might have seen a great deal of the grace of God right in front of us. It’s only human nature perhaps, to look, to be suspicious when you have those compliments and thinks, when is the criticism coming?

Now, the grumbling here is remarkable from the people of Israel. It’s remarkable and extraordinary that six weeks after leaving slavery, they seem to think they were better fed in Egypt. Now, I don’t think you need to know very much about history to know that one group of people that have not been notoriously well fed have been slaves. I cannot think in history of slaves who’ve died from overeating, malnourishment and abuse and lack of the right food. Many hundreds, thousands, perhaps millions over the years, but certainly not the description we get from the Israelites.

I just don’t believe this. Endless pots of meat. We could eat everything we wanted. It was fantastic. You were slaves.

You were slaves. There’s a nostalgia here that isn’t very helpful at all.

It’s another type of slavery. In fact. They’re trapped in the past. They need to move on.

We as Christians should value the past blessings of God. We should value our past experiences. We should value what we’ve had and known of God’s grace in our lives. But we also need to live in the present tense.

However blessed we felt 30, 40, 50 years ago or 30, 40, 50 days ago, we must continue to look for the God of the present tense as well as the God of the past. Yes. Israel’s recent past, he would have thought, should make them grateful. What they’ve seen should transform them. They hadn’t learned the right lesson from the past.

Instead they had a kind of distorted view of what had happened because they were grumbling. Some of the older translations talk about the murmuring, so there’s a sense of them sort of murmuring away, grumbling about things, and that’s very dispiriting. What we can learn from this is even the people of God can be grumblers and they need to be challenged. So I’m going to challenge myself and I’m going to challenge you to think about those areas where you have needlessly, this week been grumbling. Of course, if you’re that saintly Christian who never grumbles, then obviously you don’t need to do this exercise.

But I don’t think there are that many of you. Sorry. Because human nature suggests that most of us grumble a fair bit of the time. And we often grumble because we have idealised views of the past. It was so much better then when it wasn’t necessarily.

Or we are afraid of the present and we don’t like the changes we might see in our own life. We need to come to God to realise that he is the God who wants to bless us today.

Israel should have been living in the glow of that blessing they’ve had six weeks ago. But they also need to learn that God blesses them today.

It’s great if you came to faith in a fantastic and miraculous way, it’s great. If you came to faith in a very quiet Anglican sort of way, right, that’s great. It’s great if you’ve been blessed by the Spirit on occasion, if you’ve known God’s power in difficult situations, and that’s absolutely fantastic. But don’t let them be things of the past. Don’t be enslaved by the past.

Celebrate those, give thanks to God for those, and then invite God to do a new thing in your life. Today, as Christians, we need to live in three tenses with God past, present and future.

God’s promise is gracious to us, gracious to the Israelites. You know, if I’d heard all that grumbling, my natural reaction might well have been thought, I’ve had enough of these people, stop it. I know that because at a very small level, I’ve experienced grumbling within my own family. So I remember a day when we were on holiday. Now, this was back when I was a teacher, so school holidays were really, really important.

In a way, they’re not quite so much now and perhaps a little idealised. I was going to go away, I was going to have a rest. And this particular day, my dear children, they were much smaller than they are now, had moaned about the beach, they moaned about the heat, they moaned about how boring it was, they’d moaned about the accommodation. I think they even moaned about ice cream, which is quite an achievement for small children to moan about the ice cream. Anyway, they had just moaned perpetually all day and it was getting a bit wearing.

So dad had got to the point where he decided there needed to be an intervention. So I sat my two kids down at the table and said, you are going to write a list of everything you need to be grateful for. And not unreasonably, my kids just sat there completely astonished and didn’t write anything because, well, I mean, who can? When you’re challenged to stop grumbling and write something you’re grateful for in that kind of teacher voice? It didn’t work.

God isn’t like that. God’s really loving to the people of Israel. At the one moment he could grumble back, he could be angry back. The manna and the quail are brought in the direction of the Israelites when they do not desire deserve them.

The manna and the quell are brought to satisfy their needs. God’s grace acts at a moment when the people of Israel do not deserve it. They really don’t. They are grumbling they are negative, they are ungrateful of God’s grace that’s been shown the crossing of the Red Sea. But God being God shows grace to these sinners and he meets their needs.

He meets their physical needs with manna, which literally means wotsits. If ever you have any of those dreadful sub crisps that are called wotsits, perhaps they might seem to you manner to me they’re not anyway, but they are God meats. Then with some bread, a special bread and the quails he gives enough for everybody’s need, so much that they can stack up one of these big containers. I didn’t cheque exactly what an omer’s worth is, but it’s a lot. It’s a lot.

There’s probably some of you really Bible trained who will tell me the precise amount that an omer is, but it’s a lot. God meets their needs. God meets their needs. Despite their grumbling. God transforms them by that challenge.

We need to learn to trust God. When our natural reaction would be to grumble, to moan, to lament, that’s when we come to God. When we do feel that down or that introspective or whatever it is, we need to come to God more, not less. And God in His graciousness will meet us. God in his grace will answer our needs.

They need to learn too that God’s guidance is day by day. Did you notice at the end of the text it said everyone had enough. Everyone had enough. Now there are some people in church today, or those that we know and love in our fellowship, who feel that they are in a situation. Where is God really meeting their needs.

They may be going through something very, very difficult, personally or in their family.

Well, God will meet your need. God will meet our needs. It may not feel like he does, but everyone had enough. God meets us by his grace. However difficult the situation we have, God meets us and wishes to guide us day by day.

You know, we tend to perhaps ask the young amongst us, what do you want to do with your life? I think I want to ask the 11:15, what do you want to do with your life? And I think what you should be replying is I want to live a life of thanksgiving and where I can serve, I will serve.

That should be our call. So what needs do we have today? Well, we need to take them to God. What cares do we have today? We need to take it to God.

Are we unsure about big decisions that we need to make in our lives? Take them to God.

We do not live in A time when the people of all the world have all of their needs met. So we, as followers, we should commit to making sure that other people’s needs are met, spiritually and otherwise. That’s part of our calling as the church, be it supporting a local food bank down the road, for example, or just giving time for somebody who’s in a difficult situation. We need to be living as people under God’s guidance, knowing that we have been the receivers of grace and that therefore we should live as graceful people, sharing that grace with others. We may be in the desert.

We may feel that we are like those Israelites, that we’re in a desert. Perhaps God seems far away, Perhaps we’ve had difficult emotions and situations to cope with. In the desert, God comes to meet Israel. It’s quite often the case that in the barren place or the difficult place, God blesses. And we know from other storeys in scripture that God produces water from a rock.

God produces manna and quail in the middle of this desert. We might think all kinds of things, but we need to know this. God’s guidance is here. If you find walking difficult, pray.

If you find it difficult being alone, ask God to help you to pray and to find a way forward. And perhaps ask God for companionship. Ask God’s guidance isn’t just. God’s guidance isn’t just for the young or those called to mission. It’s for you, it’s for me.

Each day we need to start our days by asking God’s guidance, what do I need to do today, Lord, to show your grace to the people around me? Who do I need to be prepared to spend time with, to talk to, to draw alongside or to pray for? That’s a real challenge to all of us right now. So God’s guidance, what would you have me do today for the kingdom? Well, I think we need to respond.

As Israel learned very slowly and had to be told many times, we need to respond to God’s grace.

So we do need people to be evangelists, but we need people to be tea makers. We need people to be the sort of people who stand at the front and talk, but we need people to be quiet, who will just sit alongside those in difficulty. We need people who may find it very easy to sing a God’s praise, but we also need people who struggle with that. You can spend all of your life telling boring storeys of glory days of the way God may have blessed you in the past, or we can live in the present tense knowing that God can bless us now. And into the future.

So just to bring my sermon to a close, nostalgia isn’t a spiritual gift. It crippled the people of Israel because they had nostalgia for six weeks ago and yet it was distorting and not right. They had a wrong view of the past. We need to ask God to give a right view of what our past is. But we need to live with a God who is the God of three past, present and future.

God is gracious and and guides Israel beyond what they deserve. God is gracious to us in Christ in sending him to die upon the cross for our sins and in resurrection hope. That’s way beyond what we deserve. We do not deserve that. But we should respond to his call to us and do not think that God’s guidance is an issue for the young or the missionary inclined.

God’s guidance is for you today and tomorrow and every day this week and every day of your life. That we should be seeking to live in God’s guidance and we should seek to be not like the grumbling Israelites at the beginning of the passage, but the Israelites at the end who are just in awe of the blessings of God again to them when he shows his grace to them. Well, I feel challenged and I’m the preacher. Hopefully everybody else feels challenged too, because I know this is going to demand a lot of me this week to think about that God who is their past, present and future. And I know that I can grumble like everybody else.

So I’m going to try and stop that in the power of God this week. Let us pray, Father, that great hymn that we’re about to sing. Guide Me, O thou great Jehovah pilgrim through this barren land. Oftentimes, Lord, we experience difficulty. We think of death, desert and barrenness in our own spiritual life, in our own lives in general.

But we need your guidance. We need your guidance in the big things and in the small things. In things that will alter decades of lives and in things that will alter days or hours. Help us to look to you and we praise you that you are the God of grace who supplies our needs and loves us even when we can be so negative in your direction. Praise you that you are a God who loves sinners even when they keep on sinning.

Amen.

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