The wilderness is a sacred, God-ordained furnace that shapes us into who He wants us to be. And in this place there were three things God was aiming to teach Moses: humility, dependence and obedience. He aims to teach us these things as well.

Often God does His most beautiful, sanctifying work in the lives of His people in the wilderness. Before the Lord used Moses to redeem His people, He first brought him to and through the wilderness.

In Exodus 1-2 we see two different pictures. First we see the plight of 400 years of bondage to slavery, culminating with the edict to kill all male Hebrew babies. But we also see glimpses of light; seeds planted that show off God in his sovereignty and that lead to the birth of a redeemer - Moses.

The story of the Exodus is the most significant, historical and theological event in the entire Old Testament. It’s not just a story about Moses, the deliverer who comes to save a nation of people. The book of Exodus and the Exodus story is a mirror image of our story. It offers us the greatest picture of redemption in the Bible, short of the person and work of Jesus. This is an introduction to this sermon series.

Community is not about you. It's about our Savior being glorified in how His people proclaim to the world through their words and theirs works who He is and what He has done on our behalf.

In Chapter 8 Mark lets us know we're at the turning point in this story of Jesus. Word is spreading about Jesus; at the same time opposition to him is growing. There’s deep urgency for the disciples to understand who Jesus is and what he is doing. But will they ever get it?

Mark provides two illustrations that continue Jesus' teaching that it's not ethnicity or clean hands that brings one into the family of God. It's choosing to trust him and turning to obey him. It's being willing to receive crumbs.

What makes us defiled is our dirty hearts. Unless we discover this, we'll keep attempting to live our faith and clean up our live's; we’ll attempt to find meaning and significance and cleansing from the outside in, instead of the inside out.

In Mark 6:30-52 we see that Jesus is the Truer and Better Shepherd. Unlike shepherds past, the Good Shepherd came not to be served, but to serve and lay down His life for the sake of His sheep.

In the words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, "What has cost God much, cannot be cheap for us", and in Mark 6:1-30 we encounter the sobering fact that there is a cost to following Jesus.