G'day, Dave here.

Welcome to stories of a faithful God for kids.

Hey.

Recently we passed 90 days of being live as a

podcast.

That's pretty exciting.

At the end of today's episode, I've got an update about where things are up to, why I'm

doing what I'm doing, and how you can be involved.

I originally recorded it for the longer podcast, stories of a faithful God, but I

wanted you to hear it as well.

If you aren't with a grown up, make sure they

get to listen to that bit.

Let me ask you a question.

What does kindness look like? How do you know when someone's being kind?

What's something kind that someone's done for you?

Let me ask you a different question.

Do you think that kindness ever hurts?

We've been looking at the plagues God sent on Egypt.

We've seen six so far, and there are going to be ten altogether.

Those plagues have hurt Egypt and the Egyptians.

I want to say, though, they're actually a great kindness from God.

God's giving them what they need, even though it hurts to save them from something much

worse.

Were going to see more of that today as the

plagues get bigger and bigger.

If you listen right to the end of the last

episode, youll have heard a clue about whats coming next.

Get ready for our next episode of stories of a faithful God for kids.

If youve been listening to what gods done in Egypt, you might not think that hes been going

easy on them.

In fact, if someone said hes been going easy,

you might think.

What?

What are you talking about? Are you crazy or something?

Turning the river to blood, sending gnats and flies and frogs, killing the farm animals,

putting boils all over them.

That's going easy.

Yes, it is.

It's much less than what God can do.

It's also much less than what they deserve.

God's been doing it out of kindness so they

can know him and start treating him properly.

Pharaoh keeps being stubborn, though.

God warns him not to keep ignoring what he's seen.

In Exodus, chapter nine, verse 13, we read this.

Then the Lord said to Moses, get up early in the morning and go to the king of Egypt.

Tell him this is what the Lord, the God of the Hebrews, says.

Let my people go to worship me.

If you do not do this this time, I will punish

you with all my power.

I will punish you, your officers, and your

people.

Then you will know that there is no one in the

whole land like me.

By now, I could have used my power and caused

a bad disease.

It would have destroyed you and your people

from the earth.

So why hasn't God done that?

Why has he kept them alive? It's so that people everywhere, all over the

earth, we'll know his power.

We'll know that he is the God of all the earth

and that we should listen to him.

And, you know, it's worked, right?

Here we are, three and a half thousand years later, getting to know God because of what he

did in Egypt.

And where I'm standing at the moment, it's on

the other side of the planet to Egypt.

Because Pharaoh's still being stubborn.

It's time for the next plague.

This time, God kindly warns them about what's

coming in such a way that if they listen to him, they'll be safe.

If they don't listen, they won't be safe.

In verse 17, he says this to Pharaoh.

You are still against my people.

You do not want to let them go.

So at this time tomorrow, I will send a terrible hailstorm.

It will be the worst in Egypt since it became a nation.

Now, send for your animals and whatever you have in the fields.

Bring them into a safe place.

The hail will fall on every person or animal

that is still in the fields.

If they have not been brought in, they will

die.

God didnt have to warn them like that, but he

kindly does.

And some of the people who work for the king

actually listen to the warning.

They've learned the lessons from the other

plagues.

They quickly get all their animals and their

slaves inside.

They're safe because they listen to God.

Other people who work for Pharaoh still don't believe the warning.

They haven't learned the lesson.

And everything that's happened, after all the

power God's shown, even after he's kindly warned them, they're just as stubborn as

pharaoh.

And so the lord says to Moses in verse 22,

raise your hand toward the sky.

Then the hail will start falling over all the

land of Egypt.

It will fall on people, animals, and on

everything that grows in the fields of Egypt.

So Moses raised his walking stick towards the

sky, and the Lord sent thunder and hail, and lightning flashed down to the earth.

So he caused hail to fall upon the land of Egypt.

There was hail, and there was lightning flashing as it hailed.

This was the worst hailstorm in Egypt since it had become a nation.

The hail destroyed everything that was in the fields, in all the land of Egypt.

The hail destroyed both people and animals.

It also destroyed everything that grew in the

fields.

It broke all the trees in the fields.

This is devastating.

It destroys so much.

Remember, Egypt at that time is like the strongest country around.

Other countries are afraid of their power.

But Egypt's power is nothing when facing God.

Just like we saw in the last episode, though, there's one place in Egypt where it doesn't

hail.

The part called Goshen, where the Israelites

live.

God keeps his people safe.

What's different to last time, though, is that this time some Egyptians are safe as well.

The ones who had listened to God's kind warning and believed him, they trusted that he

was faithful in what he was saying.

While the lightning is still striking and

thunder roars across the sky.

While the rain is pounding and the hail is

smashing onto the roof, Pharaoh calls Moses and Aaron in.

He says in verse 27, this time I have sinned.

The Lord is in the right, and I and my people

are in the wrong.

Pray to the Lord.

We have had enough of God's thunder and hail.

I will let you go.

You do not have to stay here any longer.

So again Moses prays.

And again, God stops the plague.

And again, you guessed it, Pharaoh changes his

mind, just like God said he would.

That was plague number seven.

Do you feel them getting bigger? It's time for plague number eight.

Before telling Moses what the next one is, he explains to Moses how he's not just kindly

sending a message to the Egyptians, he's also kindly teaching his people.

He wants his people, the Israelites, to know him.

Earlier on in Exodus, they hadn't trusted him.

They thought Pharaoh was more powerful than

God.

God's kindly teaching them, though, that it's

the other way around.

And he wants them to tell their children and

grandchildren everything God's done.

So that they can know that he really is the

Lord.

The next plague is locusts.

Locusts are like big grasshoppers.

They come in huge swarms and move through an

area, eating any plant they find.

If you're a farmer and you hear that locusts

are coming, it's terrifying, because it could mean that your whole crop is wiped out.

Chapter ten, verse three, says this.

So Moses and Aaron went to the king.

They told him, this is what the Lord, the God of the Hebrews, says.

How long will you refuse to be sorry for what you have done?

Let my people go to worship me.

If you refuse to let my people go tomorrow I

will bring locusts into your country.

They will cover the land, and no one will be

able to see the ground.

They will eat anything that was left from the

hailstorm.

They will eat the leaves from every tree

growing in the field.

They will fill your palaces and all your

officers houses.

They will fill the houses of all the egyptian

people.

There will be more locusts than your fathers

or ancestors have ever seen.

There will be more locusts than there have

been since people began living in Egypt.

Then Moses turned and walked away from the

king.

As soon as Moses has left the room, the guys

working for Pharaoh turn to him and say, we cant just let this keep happening.

Weve got to give in.

In verse seven they say to Pharaoh, don't you

know that Egypt is ruined? This is how bad things have become.

This huge powerful country is basically destroyed.

Pharaoh quickly calls Moses and Aaron back and he says in verse eight, go and worship the

Lord your God.

But tell me just who is going?

Moses answered, we'll go with our young and our old people, our sons and daughters and

sheep and cattle.

This is because we are going to have a feast

to honour the Lord.

In other words, everyone and everything.

And Pharaoh's like no chance mate.

Strangely, he says the Lord really will have

to be with you if ever I let you and all your children leave Egypt.

Umm, that's the point Pharaoh.

The Lord is with them.

That's why they're gonna win.

Pharaoh hasn't learned from the kind warnings

from God though.

So he forces Moses and Aaron out of the

palace.

He still thinks he has power.

He still thinks he can tell God what to do.

He still doesn't know God.

And so God sends the locusts.

Verse 14 says that swarms of locusts covered

all the land of Egypt and settled everywhere.

There were more locusts than ever before or

after.

The locusts covered the whole land so that it

was black.

They ate everything that was left after the

hail.

They ate every plant in the field and all the

fruit on the trees.

Nothing green was left on any tree or plant

anywhere in Egypt.

If only Pharaoh had listened.

If only Pharaoh had learned.

Again pharaoh asks Moses to pray.

Again Moses asks God to stop the punishment.

Again God stops the plague.

Not a single locust is left in Egypt.

But pharaoh still hasn't got the message.

So again God makes him stubborn.

And again pharaoh changes his mind.

That was plague number eight.

It's time for plague number nine.

This one's a sign of so much power, so much authority, so much control over the universe.

There's no question that only God can do it.

He's going to fill the land with darkness.

In verse 21 he says it'll be so dark you will be able to feel it.

Now that's not like the darkness in your bedroom at night.

That can be pretty dark, but even then you can see bits of things.

There are tiny bits of lights that your eyes can use.

This will be a darkness with no light.

The Egyptians will feel like there's a thick

blanket of darkness around them, so dark that they can't even see each other when they're

really close.

There won't be any stars or moon, there won't

even be any sun.

God sends the darkness and it lasts for three

whole days.

There's no difference between night and day.

The people of Egypt are terrified.

Verse 23 says no one could see anyone else and

no one could go anywhere for three days.

But, but the Israelites had light where they

lived.

Can you imagine the power needed to basically

turn off the sun? All through the Bible, the sky going dark is a

sign of God's punishment of sinful people.

When God first made the world, do you remember

the very first thing he made? It was light.

When we sin, it's like we're saying, we don't want you God, we don't need you.

The punishment for that is God giving people what they've asked for.

He takes away all his goodness, all his blessing.

Every good thing that exists comes from God.

And so how terrible is it to have him take it

all away? As bad as the darkness is for the Egyptians,

it still isn't everything they deserve.

It's just a taste of what they deserve.

Just enough to hurt them and help them say, I don't ever want that again.

Just enough for them to say, hey, if we're with God and his people, we get to have the

light.

I don't want to serve the fake egyptian gods.

I want to serve the God of Israel.

And God will welcome them with open arms.

They'll never be punished by him for their sin.

He'll forgive them and bless them and they'll be pretty happy that they had those hard

lessons, even though they hurt.

Theres one problem.

Though theyve still sinned, they still deserve to be punished.

How can God let them get away with that? Its because theres another time in the bible

where the sky goes dark, not for three days but for 3 hours.

Do you know when that is? Its when Jesus is on the cross.

At that time, God the father treats his son Jesus like he's committed our sin, even though

he never has.

All God's blessing, all God's light, all God's

care and kindness and life gets taken away from Jesus and in that horrible time, he dies.

At the same time, though, he gives life to everyone who turns from sin.

And puts their trust in him.

It doesnt matter if you lived three and a half

thousand years ago in Egypt, or if you live today in Egypt or Canada or Australia or

Russia or America or Germany or Singapore or anywhere.

One of the great things about living now instead of way back then, is that we dont have

to go through the ten plagues.

God taught the lesson back then, but we still

get to learn from it now that same lesson.

To not ignore God, but to trust him as the

true king of the universe, to come to Jesus for forgiveness and a new life serving the

true and living God, Pharaoh.

He's not learning.

So God's going to send one more plague, one last plague.

A plague that'll be so big and so powerful and so final that finally Pharaoh will let the

people go.

But that's a story for next time.

Don't forget to stick around after the music.

If you want to hear an update for the

podcasts, it's aimed at adults but kids, you're more than welcome to listen as well.

See you soon.

Hi there Dave again.

Thanks for listening to the episode.

I hope you enjoyed it as much as I enjoyed

putting it together.

As I mentioned, the podcast recently passed

the first 90 day mark.

That's a bit of a milestone.

And so I thought I'd talk to you about some of the great things God's done in that time.

A bit of my thinking about why I'm doing what I'm doing, where I'm hoping it'll develop, and

the support I need to get there.

If you're not interested in that, don't feel

at all guilty about switching off now.

You won't miss any of the Bible story.

I've come to podcasting from kind of two different angles.

If you want, you could call it the secular side and the christian side.

I started listening to podcasts when I had a long commute to work.

I listened to history podcasts, if you're interested.

My two favorites are hardcore history and the rest is history.

Those presenters are so captivating.

I listen to them, though, because the true

stories they tell are so fascinating.

After a while of listening, I thought, hey,

I've got an even better story to tell.

What's more, it isn't just an interesting

story, it's a story that everyone on the planet needs.

As I looked into it, though, I discovered that something like 95% of podcasts fail after

three episodes.

Of those that remain, 95% fail before 20

episodes.

I think a key reason for that is time to do a

really well researched and presented episode takes time.

A friend with a radio background said 1 hour of background work for every minute on air.

Also, podcasts take a long time to grow.

They're not like viral videos unless you

already have a strong media presence.

It's going to take at least a year to start

getting bigger traction.

Because I was working full time in gospel

ministry in a school, I figured I just didn't have the time.

When that position came to an end though, I thought, well, now or never.

I asked some friends to help with financial support and I've put in a bit of money of my

own to get it off the ground and then just went for it.

That's kind of the more secular side of things from a christian side.

God's given us a big book about himself.

He doesn't just say trust me.

He's worked throughout history to show that he really is trustworthy, and we need to hear

that because by trusting him he gives us eternal life.

He brings us into his royal family, he sustains us through this world and all its

hardships.

While we wait for this new creation.

We're constantly tempted to not trust him though.

In Psalm 22, when King David is taunted by his enemies and laughed at for trusting God, he

goes back in his mind to remember how faithful God has been in the past.

To him and to others.

He is sustained because he knew the stories of

the Bible really well.

I want all of that, the salvation, comfort,

knowing God being sustained by him for as many people as possible.

I want us to know that we can trust him, and podcasting is a way to take that good news to

the world.

Over the first 90 days, God's done some

wonderful things.

When you combine stories of a faithful God and

stories of a faithful God for kids, they've been listened to in 21 countries in Australia,

Singapore, New Zealand, Sierra Leone, Philippines, the United Kingdom, Russia, the

Democratic Republic of Congo, the USA, Brazil, Mexico, Canada, Romania, Ireland, Germany, the

Netherlands, India, Spain, Indonesia, Cambodia, and South Africa.

When I started, I had no idea that I'd be taking the gospel to so many countries.

In a sense thats quite small.

However, remember what I said about how

podcasts grow slowly.

Almost every episode has had a quicker uptake

than the one before it.

Also, although its hard to quantify download

numbers in general, if an episode gets more than 32 downloads in the first seven days,

that puts it in the top 50% of podcasts in the world out of about 3.2 million podcasts and

friends.

That's happened with every episode on both

podcasts for the last month, word is spreading.

Even more exciting than the numbers are the individual stories of a dad listening to the

kids episode with his daughter, a mum listening with her twins, of a family

listening around a dinner table, or a child listening as they get ready for school.

The story of new christians thirsty to know their God better, of long term christians

rediscovering the joy of knowing their God, of people who don't trust Jesus yet, but who are

listening and considering God is doing his mighty work by his holy spirit through his

word, God willing, this is only the beginning.

There are 1.2 billion Internet connected

english speakers out there, all needing the good news of Jesus Christ.

Also, only just in the past weekend, I've discovered a possible avenue for having the

podcasts translated so that they can go even further.

That's why I'd like to ask you for your help in a couple of ways.

I'd like to ask you if you'd pray for this work.

Pray that God would direct people to listen to the podcasts.

That he'd do a mighty work in people's lives.

That God would transform people and fill them

with the joy of knowing him.

A bit like what he was doing with Moses all

those years ago.

If you're willing and able, you can sign up

for my monthly news and prayer letter at the bottom of any page on the website

faithfulgod.net dot.

If you're driving a car at the moment, don't

do it while you're driving.

Just pull over right now and sign up

faithfulgod.net dot.

God willing, the next prayer letter will be

coming out later this week.

This is God's work much more than it is my

work.

God is the God who answers the prayers of his

people.

He loves his people, and often he answers

those prayers in better ways than we've asked for.

Not what we'd expect, but better.

If you're a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ,

if you've come into his family and submitted to him, will you pray with me and ask God to

do his mighty work? Secondly, would you consider supporting this

work financially? I'm very aware that more and more, the

podcasting world is a commercial world.

A number of people have kindly suggested that

I explore some of those commercial opportunities.

For example, many podcasts have some episodes free, but then you have to pay to get the full

library or bonus episodes.

That's a good business model, and there's

nothing inherently wrong with it.

My desire, though, is to provide the word of

God for free to anyone, regardless of whether they can afford it.

I'm very aware of the irony of asking you for money so that I can make this free.

And if you're listening, you are under no obligation to give.

I know money's tight.

I know we all have different things on our

plates.

It really is free.

If you are in a position to give, though, I don't want you to give as a financial

transaction for the episodes you've listened to.

Oh, I've listened to five episodes, so I'll give $5 or five pounds or whatever.

If you decide to give, I'd like you to give so that other people can hear this good news.

Give to make sure that this message is free and available for other people.

I don't have another job at the moment.

By giving financially, you'll be freeing me up

so I can keep producing podcasts.

If you'd like to give, please go to the

support page of Faithfulgod.net dot.

It's in the show notes faithfulgod.net dot.

You can give by credit card, either as a one off or even better, as a regular gift.

I use a system called Donabox which is powered by stripe and PayPal, so your details are very

secure.

You can give in virtually any currency.

I know a lot of podcasters use Patreon and people have suggested that I use that, but if

I do use them, 8% of what you give will go straight to Patreon, which doesn't seem like a

great use of your money.

Through Donorbox I can keep the fees down to

3.5%.

I'm also thinking through some resources to

produce for churches and schools to help other ministries in their work.

Over the next few months I'm hoping to announce a few different things, which I hope

will be a really great blessing for others.

They'll be lots of fun to put together as

well.

In the meantime, I'd love to hear from you,

ask me any questions or just touch base and let me know how you've found the podcasts.

That would be a huge encouragement to me.

As I said, personal stories are far more

exciting than numbers on a page.

If theres something on your heart that you

really want to pray about with someone else, id love to pray with you.

You can send through a request there as well.

I think ive said before, virtually the only

thing I dont like about podcasting is the fact that I dont get to connect with you.

So please get in contact@faithfulgod.net just in case you haven't heard the name of the

website yet.

If you haven't picked it up, it's

faithfulgod.net dot.

Thanks so much for listening.

Keep getting to know God.

Keep trusting Jesus.

If you have kids or know people who do, send them towards stories of a faithful God for

kids.

For this longer podcast, we've got two more

episodes in Exodus, and they're gonna be nail biters.

Bye for now.