The only people who ever change our lives are the people who know the truth about us and yet understand, accept and love us. It is only in the presence of those who know the whole truth about us and in whose presence we find absolute unconditional love that we ever find the courage to change.

One of the best things about being the pastor of a church for longer than just a couple of years, the average tenure of a Baptist pastor these days, is that the longer you stay, the more stories you get to know. The more stories you get to know about your church family, the more there is to love. The more there is to love, the more possibility there is to change and to grow. Whole books could be written about the stories you tell me about yourselves while you pass through those doors leading out of this sanctuary each Sunday. That doorway may well serve not only as the exit from this sanctuary but also as the closest thing to a confessional Baptists may ever know.

You never know what people have on their minds or hearts, or what they have heard, or what they have experienced as we have shared together in worship in this sanctuary. It may have been something that was prayed, a word of scripture read aloud or something spoken in the sermon or a word of testimony. You just never know but something elicits a confession. Oftentimes, that confession is shared with me at that door.

Some of those confessions are very heart-wrenching. Like the day I had said something in my sermon about the people who stand on the street corner over here by the Burger King, holding up a sign saying, "Hungry. Will work for food." I believe I had said something in the sermon about the fact that we need to be careful about not judging those people, for oftentimes they are not lazy, as we would define lazy. Many times they are suffering from some form of mental illness. As she passed through those doors, a dear lady took my hand and said, "Please pray for my son. He's one of those people."

Then, there was Bill Curry, the great old gentlemen and life-long member of Cliff Temple who fought in World War II and, specifically, with the Marine Corps on Iwo Jima. About a year before he died several years ago, Bill came through those two doors and with one hand on a cane and the other grasping mine and with tears streaming down his cheeks, he asked, "Pastor, do you believe that God will ever forgive me for all those people I killed?" Though I don't recall having said one word in my message about war, something happened in that worship service that led Bill and me to have a conversation within just a week or so in which he was able to confess deep, dark secrets he had carried with him for sixty years and had never even shared with his own family.

Some of the stories that you hear going through the doors of the exit to the sanctuary, however, are a little lighter, even a little funnier. Like the times we'll have a guest preacher, like when Dan Griffin preached a few Sundays ago. People came up to me and said, after Dan preached, to me, "Pastor, that's the best sermon I ever heard you preach." I'm now firmly convinced that there really are people who can sleep with their eyes wide open!

Without doubt, one of the best stories I've ever heard came just last Sunday from Barbara Evetts. You may recall that, during the sermon, I had talked about how we as children sometimes play at worship, play at church. About how we were only reenacting or perhaps mimicking what we had come to believe was very important in the world of adults around us. About how it's hard to know whether, even in our play, God may be moving toward a call on our lives to vocational Christian ministry. You never know.

After the service, Barbara came through those doors and confessed to me that, as a little girl, she had played church. She said, "I didn't preach, but I did baptize cats." "You lived to tell about it?" I asked! Then Barbara went on to confess, "Well, we were Lutherans, so all I had to do was sprinkle the cats." Maybe it's true that all dogs and cats go to heaven! I hope so!

What is true for a fact is that most children, at first, even the children of Israel, know only of God what their parents or their elders give them or portray for them in their daily lives. Children believe what they do because their parents believe that way. It is almost as though children do their believing through their parents, because, in their earliest years, there is virtually nothing their parents believe that the children do not also accept as absolutely true.

What is also true is that the little Barbara who once baptized cats has now stopped playing church. At some point in her life the faith that had been her parents" she finally embraced as her own. She has personally experienced the transforming power of the risen Christ in her own life and followed her Lord in the baptism he commanded. Have you?

Whatever brings you to worship in this place today, this is your pastor's prayer for you. Today, before you leave this room, I pray you will have a personal encounter with the risen Lord. Despite the humanity of this place, I pray that you will encounter the Divine, whether you are a believer from years ago or this is your first time in church. Whether you are just now discovering the life-transforming power of Christ and your soul is hot with the passion of first love or your love has grown so cold that, even though you were raised in the church and you can still say the church words, you're not sure you believe what you say anymore. This is the key to the prayer that I have for you being answered. If you are to have a personal, transforming experience with Christ it won't be just because you just gathered with this crowd but because you and eternal God came face to face with each other, nothing to hide.

In the texts we've read this morning, we're given two distinctly different images of encountering God. First, from the book of Exodus, we have the ancient story of the children of Israel's exodus from slavery in Egypt and toward the Promised Land. During their wilderness wanderings, in the meantime of their lives if you will, Moses would go up to the summit of Mt. Sinai and there would have an encounter with God. It was such an awesome encounter that the Bible's human language fails at being able to express to us. It was something that happened between Moses and God alone and it was a face-to-face encounter of some kind. We don't know much more.

Whatever did happen up on that mountain between God and Moses the scripture records that Moses" face was transformed into something like a white sheen. It was something of which Moses was not even aware when he would come back down off of the mountain to report to the children of Israel what he had learned. It's one of the first hints in scripture that, once we encounter true holiness, we are never again the same.

When Moses would come down off of the mountain and the Israelites would see his shining face they were very afraid of it. It was something so outside their world of experience that they wouldn't come close until coaxed closer by Moses and Aaron. Once they drew closer, Moses would then deliver the word of God he had received up on the mountain. Then, he would cover up the shining of his face until he went back up the mountain, where he would take the veil off, so that he and God could see each other face-to-face and eye-to-eye.

Please trust me when I say that I'm telling you that I have said more than I understand. I have no clue what that was like for Moses. I don't know of anyone who could possibly hope to describe it. All we do know is that whatever happened between Moses and God in that private encounter was so overwhelming that it physically transformed Moses" appearance. Moses kept having these encounters with God.

As for the Israelites, the children, if you will, their only real connection with the voice of God was through the voice of Moses, who gave them God's word, even what we now call the Ten Commandments, the two tablets of stone. Almost like a child playing church, the Israelites could only experience God at a distance, through Moses, their spiritual father, who, in a way, did their believing for them. In time, as we come to discover in the New Testament, that all had to change. The faith of the father eventually is not enough for the faith of the child.

Which brings us now to the New Testament, to the 2 Corinthians text. Let's reflect on them again, with a little bit more context of what happened to Moses. "Since, then, we have such a hope," the hope that is ours in Christ, "we act with a greater boldness in this life. Not like Moses, who put a veil over his face to keep the people of Israel from gazing," and listen carefully to these words, "at the end [just the tip end, the fringes] of the glory that was being set aside. . . But when one turns to the Lord, the veil is removed. Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image" we see reflected in the mirror, the image of God "from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit. Therefore, since it is by God's mercy that we are engaged in this ministry, we do not lose heart. We have renounced the shameful things that one hides [behind the veil]; we refuse to practice cunning or to falsify God's word; but by the open statement of the truth we commend ourselves to the conscience of everyone in the sight of God."

Do you see that? In our new hope in Christ, we can come before God and, no matter what the shame of our lives may be, pull the veil back and let God see us for what we are.

God has come to fully reveal himself to us in Christ. We've all celebrated that. Though we celebrate that every Lord's Day, we especially celebrate it at Advent and Christmas. God, in Christ, has revealed himself to us. I think the question these texts pose to us is, "Have we ever fully revealed ourselves to God?" Until we do, whatever faith we may call ours is not really ours. As long as the veil is over our shame, we're playing church. It is only once we remove the veil and reveal ourselves to God as he has revealed himself to us that we move from playing out what others believed for us to a faith that is our own.

The people only knew about God what Moses brought them off of the mountain. In Christ, we are invited into a personal, fully open and transparent relationship with the Divine in which we remove the veil from our faces so that we see God and God sees us, both for what we fully are and can be.

What is this veil? It's the cover we put on, almost like the chameleon changes colors. We put on different faces when we're around different people, don't we? There are some people we only want to see us happy. There are some people we only let us see sad. There are some people at whom we only peek from behind the veil because we're afraid of their judgment and condemnation. In the presence of others we are more fully open.

With God, if our relationship is to be more than that of a child playing church, we must come before him, with unveiled faces, and tell him even the most shameful things. The promise of scripture is that "now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom." If you have come here this morning with more to hide from God than to reveal to God or if you have thought that coming in to worship was just to hear about God instead of coming also so that God might hear about you, then you have missed the bigger portion of what worship was meant to be.

There is a young lady who occasionally contacts me, who used to be in my youth group years ago, in another church. She lives in North Dallas now and has a very high-pressure job. I had not seen her for quite some time; she was a teenager when I knew her last. She called two or three years ago and we picked up the conversation again about where she is in life and all the things she's been going through. I told her my life's story, too. In the intervening years she's had a very difficult life despite what seemed to be the promise of happier beginnings years ago. She saw her grandmother commit suicide right in front of her. She's been through a very brutal divorce. Her father died before his time and she is now totally estranged from her mother. She came, after all these years, seeking me out for some reason.

She's a very attractive young lady with platinum blond hair and a beautifully sculptured face. So it was that I was shocked one day when she told me that she was going to have a nose job done on her fortieth birthday. I said, "You're so beautiful just like you are. Why in the world would you want to have a nose job?" She said, "As I turn forty, I become less competitive in the market and I've got to keep my edge so I've got to change my face." How sad! You see, the more we have to hide, especially from God, the less we believe the face he has given us is the face he wants to see and the less freedom we will have to ever know what his face looks like as well.

Sometimes all we do is hide behind the face someone else gave us, without ever making it our own. Then sometimes, sometimes, a child breaks out and they begin having a very personal encounter with God that may at first not seem like it.

One of the things I love about the young people who leave here and go off to college is that, sometimes, that's when we start actually having conversations. When students are in junior high and high school it can be very awkward talking to their pastor. When they're hundreds of miles away, they feel safe. That's when they sometimes start telling me the truth about what they were going through sitting here on the front two rows for all these years.

A young man who grew up in this church has been corresponding with me. He sent me an email recently. I've deleted anything that would in any way identify him but I want you to hear his confession of breaking out of the childhood mold of his inherited faith and coming to a faith that is his own. He writes, "I have no reason to believe in the Christian religion. As I learn more about the Jesus movement's origins [you see, he says he doesn't believe, but he's studying Jesus. You see that?], I can't help but wonder about a few things. I'm learning quite a lot, and I'm rather amazed at the lack of learning that occurred when I went to church. I am perturbed by this sort of pseudo-learned Christianity. Most people really don't know how to read the Bible, or, to be more specific, don't actually even read the Bible, but trust the church or culture they're raised in or attend to be accurate. Funny especially for Baptists," he writes, "they forgot their roots pretty quickly, didn't they?"

I'm going to tell you something that you should already know. But, if you don't know it, please let me give you this information. If the only person you trust to give you the word of God is this preacher, you're in deep trouble. That's not because I'm going to intentionally mislead you but because if you never read the Bible for yourself then your faith is not your own; you're borrowing it from me. If I may say so graciously, you can't have my faith because it's not mine to give or yours to receive.

Here's what Moses coming down off the mountain teaches me. There must come a time when are no longer satisfied to accept the faith of others and what they have told us about God and discover the freedom that is ours in Christ through our own personal face-to-face encounter with the living God. That's an ageless sort of thing.

In other words, you can be very old, or you can be very young and still just on the verge of discovering your own faith. It doesn't have anything to do with your age. It has everything to do with how willing you are to rip back the veil and have a face-to-face with God.

Michelle Collins was telling me part of her story from this past. She was driving down the street with her little boy, Robert, who's four years old. She was listening to some Christian music and got a little carried away in the moment and put her hand in the air, just lost in the moment and the worship. Robert asked, "Mom, who are you waving at?" Michelle said, "Well, I'm waving at Jesus." Michelle's four-year-old Robert then asked, "Isn't he in your heart?"

Well, is he? In your heart? Today?