After the Sermon: Deuteronomy 29

6/15/26 | Will DuVal | DEUTERONOMY: Remembering God's Faithfulness; Responding in Obedience

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Welcome to the After the Sermon podcast where Pastor Will answers follow-up questions and we share your personal applications from the sermon for the benefit of the church. My name is Brian and I'm here with our lead pastor, Will.

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Good morning.

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We want to remind you with this podcast that sermons are not just a Sunday thing. So Will, would you give us just a short summary of the sermon from yesterday?

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Of course. Yesterday we were studying Deuteronomy chapter 29 together and a message entitled Covenant Renewal. That is the Almai Bible section header titles this chapter, covenant renewal because in it, Moses is exhorting, encouraging, inviting the next generation of Israelites who are about to cross over the Jordan and go into the promised land. They're standing there in Moab and Moses is inviting them. Well, God really is inviting them through Moses to enter once again into covenant relationship with him. And we talked about how this is certainly not the new covenant in Christ. It's not even a new covenant. This is again, a renewing, a rehashing or reupping, however you want to think about it, reengaging of the covenant that God had made with their fathers, so to speak, 40 years prior at Mount Sinai or Mount Horib, as it's called in verse one.

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Israel, you remember, broke that covenant most notably in Numbers chapter 14 at Kadesh Barneo when God commanded them to go in and take the promised land and fight and they were too afraid and they doubted his promise and they said no and rejected and disobeyed. And so God caused that generation to wanna for 40 years to die out. And so anyway, now God has given him a chance at a fresh start, but it starts with being in relationship with him. And so we talked about what a covenant is, the terms and it's a formal promised relationship built on again, promises, usually mutual promises. And so God is promising good toward his people and protection, all kind of provision, all kinds of things we walk through. And in response, he says, "You need to obey me and be faithful on your side of it. " And so that's the kind of sermon in a nutshell and talked about how for us the application being that we've hopefully any of us certainly that are believers that are followers of Christ that have now entered into relationship with God through our faith in Christ, that there may be times when we stray and when we need to be called back and we need to hear God's voice calling us back into, again, reminding us of the relationship that he's built with us through Christ.

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And we talked about the difference now with the new covenant and how it's built on Christ obedience and not ours, praise God and that really basically the entire terms of the new covenant now in Christ is to believe, is to trust, is to just continue to cling to Christ and seek to make him the Lord of every aspect of our life, follow him. But when we don't, we disobey and we sin, we fall short. Again, we're trusting in his righteousness and not ours. Yeah. Ended with that gospel sort of reminder and praise to Jesus for being the guarantor and the author and the priestly mediator of a new and better covenant for us.

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Thanks. So we got a handful of questions from Brad. Thanks as always, Brad. Thanks, Brad. Sending these in. First one, you wrote yesterday in your first point, you mentioned that apostasy is a permanent strain from God. When a person has undiagnosed cancer, symptoms appear that can lead to death if those symptoms are untreated. What are some specific symptoms of early apostasy that will also lead to death if spiritually untreated?

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Yeah. It's a really good analogy and sort of metaphor way of thinking about sin as a cancer, sometimes fast growing, sometimes slow growing. The way that the Bible often talks about it is like leaven, that leavens a lump of dough and spreads throughout it. So like yeast, bacteria, virus, cancer, all kind of good metaphors for sin. I think if we want to think about apostasy being sort of the last stop to maybe continue just with using more analogies, if apostasy was like the last stop, the last off ramp on a train route, for instance, and you wanted to think about, okay, what are the other stops along the way that ought to be like warning signs that like, oh man, I'm on the wrong railroad here. I need to get off this train and get on a different one before I end up in apostasy or like to use Brad's thing with the symptoms.

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  I think a lack of maybe one of the first ones maybe would I think be a lack of hunger and appetite for spiritual things, whether that's God's word, whether that's being with God's people on Sundays for corporate worship or otherwise small group thing, a lack of desire to go to the Lord and spend time in relationship with him in prayer, progressive kind of propensity toward leaning on our own strength and answers and presumed wisdom or whatever, again, then we are going to him. So I think maybe the corollary of that would be a heightened appetite for worldly things.

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  So we know that it's not a straight line. Sanctification is not a straight line and there's going to be ups and downs, but we know that over time the Christian life is one of progressive sanctification, of progressively having more of an appetite for spiritual things and less of a desire and appetite for worldly things, things of the flesh. And we know that we have a part to play in that. I think about, I think it's Colossians three: five and I mean all over the place where Paul in particular in his New Testament letters exhorts his churches to put to death what is worldly in you. The way John Owen used to talk about mortify the flesh, kill what is fleshly and sinful within you, put it to death and live unto your new nature, live into the spirit, live into Christ, feed that godly part of you, spiritual part, the new creation part and don't indulge, don't feed, don't give a foothold to your flesh, to the enemy.

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  And so again, not a straight line. We all go through seasons. We have ups and downs. We have relapses, slip ups, whatever, but on the long haul, sorry, you should be able to look back and say, I have, again, a greater hunger, a greater appetite for the things of the Lord today than I did years ago or a year ago, or hopefully, just that is building. So I think again, I'm always encouraged when I see prayer requests, for instance, from members of our church saying, pray that I would have a renewed kind of sense of passion and desire to spend time with the Lord and his word and prayer and my morning quiet times or whatever because I think that's a good sign that someone you can't solve a problem that you don't know you have and oftentimes I don't know too many people that have gone as far ridden that railway all the way to the last stop of apostasy who really took seriously those warning signs that we're talking about of kind of lack of spiritual things.

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  I mean, that's maybe an obvious answer, but it really is the most obvious one that comes to mind for me. Yeah. I think a lot of it, like I think of one Corinthians 15 that talks about bad company corrupts good character. And so I think there's a huge emphasis in God's word about, I was actually just in the Proverbs this morning with my kids and our family devotional and just reading about that too and about the importance of friendships and the company you keep. And I think that would kind of go along with what we're talking about too as far as just when you find yourself more drawn toward hanging out with those that don't have any spiritual hunger appetite that don't make you better, that don't grow you in your love for the Lord and others.

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  I think that would go along with kind of warning signs. Now again, we're not certainly called to be in isolation from those of the world and we're not called to just stick to our little Christian holy huddles. We want to be salt and light, which means we need to be in the world, not of the world, but it should be different. It should be different when we, again, when we spend time with the church and with other fellow believers and it should be sweet in a different kind of way and we should feel a different kind of connection and closeness and familial bond there than we do with those of the world. So I think that would certainly be another, I mean if you found yourself just really being that kind of a bosom buddy kind of friendship with those who don't belong to the Lord, it's like two Corinthians four says, "What fellowship does darknes have with light?" And so if you know that they're not a regenerate believer, follower of Christ and you just feel this real closeness on a deep level, heart level, that should be a real stark kind of warning sign of like, "Oh, wait a minute, what does that say about me?

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  " And if I feel this tight-knitness, this kind of tight-knitness with someone who's not a believer. So yeah, just off the top of my head, some good warning signs to look for.

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  Yeah, that's good. Next one he wrote in your second point yesterday, you spoke about the completeness of the covenant relationship that God extends to Christians via grace. The Missouri adoption statute 453.090 states, "When a child is adopted in accordance with the provisions of this chapter, all legal relationships and all rights and duties between such child and his natural parents shall cease. Such child shall thereafter be deemed and held to be for every purpose the child of his parents or parents by adoption as fully as though born to him or them in lawful wedlock." How does this statute help us understand we are not only adopted into God's family, but we are also completely severed from the sinful line of Adam and his next question, should we stop there or keep going

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  Kind of related? Yeah, we can read them all, I think.

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  How should this understanding help us desire both obedience and fidelity, your second point from yesterday?

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  Yeah, that's a great ... I love Brad's sort of building out of the covenant example again, analogy that I referenced yesterday when we referenced a couple, we referenced marriage. You could build out that analogy with this as well. You've dated other women previous to being married, but when you enter into that covenant with that one bride or that one groom or whatever, you make no room anymore for, you sever all certainly romantic ties with previous partners. So that one's true and same with the church membership. We talked about the covenant, that being the third kind covenant relationship of church membership is ... Yeah, it's always concerning to me.

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  For instance, when a couple comes and they want to join the church and, oh, by the way, though we still attend this small group, this life group from our previous church, we just got close with this little group of people. And I'm like, "Well, that's not your community. That's not your church anymore." And yeah, I just put that out there too. We've got a couple people still hanging on to West Hills life groups and even though they've left our church on Sundays and it's weird and you shouldn't do it, you just shouldn't. You should sever ties and you should go be united with a new body, clean break. Yeah, that's the way it should be. So yeah, with adoption, I like it. The interesting thing is of all those three, the adoption might be the one that gets the muddiest because it's actually interesting thinking about this and Brad referencing this morning, you were asking how our weekend was Brian and Polly was at the Gospel Coalition Women's Conference up in Indianapolis.

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  And while she was there, she really just felt led to reach out to Elijah's birth mom who lives in Indianapolis and who we haven't seen in person since the delivery room six years ago when he was born. And so she did and they got together for lunch and was very emotional, very powerful and the long and short of it is that she ... And they've stayed in touch. They've texted on and off for the last six years and probably tries to text her pictures of Elijah and all that and updates and it's hard. So for those not familiar with adoption, everyone who's done any kind of research on this will tell you that what is best for kids and we have people at our church that were adopted that have never even met and that don't know anything about their birth parents, never been interested, don't need to know and there was that complete severed kind of break or whatever and parents didn't stay in touch with birth parents and that can be totally fine, but what anyone who's done lots of research studies and all of that on adoption will tell you is that by and large, for the most part, what seems to be best and healthiest for most children who've been adopted is for there to be some sense of connectedness and some sense of kind of knowing where you came from and actually in a lot of cases where it's possible to have like an open adoption and have even a relationship of some sort, that that can be really healthy.

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  And so we tried to keep that door open with Elijah's mom, birth mom, and yet it was always just too hard for her to call him, FaceTime him. It was really hard, but all that to say, six years later now, six and a half, that she's at a place where she's like, "I think I'm ready to ... I would really like to, if it's okay, to have a relationship with him and to see him, to meet him." And so we're actually going back through Indianapolis on our way up to Michigan, our annual trip to Michigan just next month and our plan is to meet up with her and let her meet him for the first time since the delivery room. So anyway, all that to say, the analogy with sin and our former way of life there is maybe not a perfect one because again, as Brad says, when we become adopted into God's family and we become that new creation, new identity, new nature, new family, we should absolutely sever all ties with our sin and not indulge it at all, not dabble with it, but certainly from the legal perspective of the rights and privileges and all that, the Missouri legal code that he quoted for us in relationship to adoption, that that is true.

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  There's not a shared custody and I think it is important for my son and for anyone who's been adopted to be clear on that, on who really where they most belong. And so anyway, I really appreciate the chance to share that and reflect on that. I'm sure more to come on that. As far as how that helps us desire both obedience and fidelity, I love that Brad is kind of given a chance for us to think about that because I think it absolutely should.

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  I mean, my hope in prayer would be not necessarily that Elijah would feel any greater sense of indebtedness to Polly and I for the choice we made to adopt him, which is a different choice than to have your own biological children. It's different. So not necessarily that Elijah would feel a different sense of like, "Well, I owe you something because of that, " or whatever, but I do think that desire to obey and to be faithful and to ... Again, the Proverbs I think about, we just rather proud of the other day, something to the effect of, I won't be able to quote it perfectly, but a good son is such a blessing to his father, but a wayward son is like smoke in his mother's eyes or something like that.

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  I think any child should want to honor and should want to bless their parents, should hopefully in time as that child grows and becomes less of that original sin clinging on and they become more able to see that other people exist and matter and all of that, that they recognize, "Oh my gosh, look at how much mom and dad do for me and how much they've sacrificed for me to have what I have, to be who I am." But I mean, yeah, maybe a little bit even more so in the case with adoption where you've brought someone, again, to make it about God, where God has brought us in by no virtue or merit of our own, but simply because of his grace, his love, his kindness to say, "You were in the pit, no hope, wicked, not worthy of being chosen. And yet because I am good and I am kind, I did choose you and I brought you out of the pit and I brought you into my home and I cleaned you off and I gave you the robe and I gave you the ring and I killed the fatted calf." So yeah, that ought to all the more so motivate our obedience and our desire to just be faithful and to enjoy that relationship, enjoy those blessings and be even sweeter when you see the alternative and what could have been ... And yeah, I think that would be my hope and prayer for my son as well, that with adoption, for instance, that as he grows and just comes to understand the way that things work in the world more and sees what could have been on the one hand, there may be some confusion, some sadness with that, missing out on a tighter relationship that he obviously would have had with his biological half brother, his biological mother and those things had he been raised in their home, but they didn't have a home and that's part of the point.

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  They were homeless. And so for him to be able to enjoy the home that he has and the blessings that he has all the more, kind of same with us spiritually, right? Especially when we have lived and we were born into the world, born into sin, born in the pig trough and so we know, I mean, we ought to know what we've been saved from and saved too and the blessing of it. So thanks another ... Yeah, thanks, Brad.

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  Yeah. And lastly, he wrote in your third point, you spoke about having doubts in unanswered questions. How should John the Baptist question to Jesus in Luke seven, "Are you the one who is to come or shall we look for another? How should this be a model for ensuring that our doubts lead us toward Christ and not away from him?" With emphasis on Jesus' answer in verse 28, "I tell you, among those born of women, none is greater than John."

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  Yeah, that's a really interesting good tie in I think here. An example to back up my point, so thanks Brad, my point that it's not sinful to have questions and what God condemned that faithless generation of Israel for a Kadesh Barnea was not necessarily ... Now you do want to be careful. There's a connotation of having questions that's different from questioning God. So I mean, they did question God and if you talk about those terms like should we question God, that's maybe not ... But to have questions that we bring before God I think is totally appropriate. It's interesting, you look at even like an example of Luke chapter one where you have Zechariah, you have John the Baptist father who's in the temple ministering and then the angel comes and Zechariah is like, "Wait, what? " And he asked a question and the angel says, "You know what?

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  Because you did that, you're not going to be able to speak now until John's born." But then maybe very next chapter where Mary, the magnificat, where the angel appears to Mary and says, "Hey, you're going to give birth." And Mary asked all kinds of questions. She's like, "How's this going to be? I'm a virgin and how's that going to work?" And yet then the angel says, "Blessed are you. " And he actually blesses her for her questions. So again, I think there's kind of a template there for thinking through like, it's not about whether or not we question any thinking person is going to have questions when it comes to this life of faith because yeah, you just look at the world and there's so much suffering. Read the Bible, there's so many things that you're like, "Wait, how did that really happen or how does that square with this passage?" So there's going to be questions, but again, it's about what you do with them.

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  I think clearly Zachariah was doing something different with his questions than Mary was. Same thing with John the Baptist that Brad's mentioning for us. And this is why I love watching shows like The Chosen or others that where you can see kind of how others are interpreting and painting that scene for us of what the tone was in ... And obviously this is a further complication because in Luke seven, John's not actually the one there in person asking Jesus the question, he sends his messengers. So then it's like there's all kinds of dynamics which make it interesting, but suffice it to say, of all people, John the Baptist was Jesus' cousin, of all people, they seemed to have this close relationship. He had baptized Jesus. He watched the dove, he watched the Holy Spirit descend on him, he heard the voice from heaven, "This is my beloved son with whom I'm well pleased." And So of all people John knew, he knew that Christ, that Jesus was the one that they'd been waiting for, that Israel had been waiting for.

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  He was the Messiah. You don't need to look for anyone else. He was the one, the very first one in John chapter one who said, "Behold the lamb of God who comes to take away the sins of the world." The very first declaration of faith in all the gospels, I think, other than maybe some of the birth stuff. So anyway, and yet even John sitting there in the prison hearing the rumors that maybe Herod's wife he wasn't supposed to have was going to ask for his head or on a platter or whatever. John knew it wasn't good and he was ready for God's kingdom to be ushered in and the new heavens and new earth and everything that they'd been waiting for. And so he's like just that why haven't you done it, Jesus? What are you waiting on? That would be a great time.

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  And yet I think there seems to also be enough humility in John's question that to be able to kind of like the Lord's prayer, but not, or sorry, Jesus' prayer in Gethsemane, but not my will, but yours be done. Even Jesus questioning Father, not questioning, but the prayer of let this cup pass from me. Please, will you? But not my will, but yours be done. And so again, like Brad said, I think you have Jesus' commendation in verse 28. I tell you among those born of women, none is greater than John. So be like John. Be like John the Baptist is a clear signal that this is the way you want to question. When you have doubts or like the man, that famous like, Jesus, do you believe? And the Father who wants healing for his child, Lord, I believe, help my unbelief. So he's questioning, but he's going to Jesus clearly with his doubts.

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  I mean, otherwise he wouldn't be asking for healing. Jesus, I believe. I believe you can do it. And yet I know there's still a part of me that has to see it, help that part of it. Anyway. And I think that's what Jesus is pointing out with the second half of that verse 28. But even the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than the one still here on earth because when your faith is turned to sight, yeah all doubts, all questions one day will be removed. And so we look forward to that day. Thanks, Brad. Great questions.

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  And then lastly, one application from Josh.

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  He

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  Wrote, "Praise God for his kindness that is meant to lead us to repentance. May I not take it for granted."

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  Yeah. Amen. May that be true of all of us. Yeah, that was that point number one. We only enter into, and really we only remain in and rest in a covenant relationship with God through his grace and kindness. So thanks for listening.

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  Yeah, we hope that this has been edifying for you as you seek to be changed and to love God more as you apply God's word after the sermon. So go apply the sermon, continue to make disciples and Lord willing, we'll catch you right back here next week.