The God We Can Control: The Practice That Makes It Visible

The 12-week formation packet is still on the side table from last Tuesday. Week 6 is highlighted. Two names in the margin are behind. The facilitator has a sentence about keeping the practice. He has not asked who already made a god out of the packet.

This is a sermon for a church that already knows how to print a habit and does not know how to live under a God who will not be fashioned. If you preach Exodus 32 as a map of anyone's private impatience, you will lie. If you preach it as Israel at the foot of the mountain, you give this church a God who will not be managed, and you take away the cheap formation that hides behind a god we can carry.

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Hear the camp as Holy Scripture tells it, from the World English Bible: "When the people saw that Moses delayed coming down from the mountain, the people gathered themselves together to Aaron, and said to him, “Come, make us gods, which shall go before us; for as for this Moses, the man who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we don’t know what has become of him.”