Dethroning the gods | Journey Up the Mountain [2 of 9] | Nathan Lawson

Reflection 2 | Week 5 | The Shape of Freedom

Before God says "do," he says "I already did." Exodus 20 opens not with a demand but with a rescue already finished: I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt. The Ten Commandments come after that, and they come to people who are already free. So they were never the price of belonging. They are the description of a life worth belonging to, the shape of a home where love and peace and joy have room to grow. We tend to hear the commandments as a fence. This passage asks whether they might be a floor plan.

A New Horizon | Journey Up the Mountain [5 of 9] | Nathan Lawson

We hear "law" and brace for a fence. Sinai opens differently. Before the first command, God names who he is and what he's already done: rescued them, brought them out. The commands come after the rescue, not before it. In this message, Nathan walks from that opening word through the command against coveting and finds the same thing running underneath all of it. The law at Sinai isn't the price of admission. It's a picture of what rescued, renewed humanity was actually made to look like.

Reflection 1 | Week 5 | The Rusted Bicycle

Freedom is more than the absence of restraint. It is the capacity to live the way you were made to live. Cut a seized, rusted bicycle free from the rack and you have removed the constraint, but you have not given the bike back to itself. The bearings are frozen, the chain is fused solid, the tires have gone to cracks. Someone still has to repack the bearings, work oil down into the chain, patch the tubes, before it can roll the way it was built to roll. Striking off the lock was only the beginning.

Reflection 2 | Week 4 | Raised Hands

The first fight Israel faces after Egypt is against the Amalekites, and you'd expect it to turn on the men with swords. It doesn't. It turns on an old man on a hill, holding his hands up in prayer. But Moses gets tired, the way anyone gets tired, and his arms begin to drop. Exodus doesn't treat this as a failure. It shows us Aaron and Hur climbing the hill, finding Moses a stone to sit on, and standing on either side to hold his hands steady until the sun goes down. This reflection on Exodus 17 sits with what that picture has to say about the people who hold us up, and the ones we're called to hold up in turn.

Reflection 1 | Week 4 | Open Hands

The moment Israel walks out of Egypt, God starts the long work of making them a people. There's no roadmap, no pantry, no plan they can see. Just a wilderness and a promise. So God feeds them, but the way He feeds them is the lesson: bread that falls fresh each morning, enough for the day and not a crumb more. This reflection on Exodus 16 sits with what God is teaching them in that daily dependence, and what He might be teaching us still.