Field Notes is your daily 5-minute briefing designed to take Sunday's truth and put it to work Monday through Friday. Grab your gear and get ready for a daily rundown, challenge, and action step that will equip you to live intentionally for the Kingdom.
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Moses comes down the mountain glowing, and the people can’t handle it. That’s the spark for today’s Field Notes devotional from Mission Scent, where we sit with Exodus 34:33-35 and the strange, honest detail that Moses has to cover his face with a veil just to speak to Israel. If being near God produces a visible kind of “shine,” what does it say when we spend most of our week trying to hide it?
We talk about how easy it is to bring an uncovered faith into church, then step back into Monday and put the veil right back on. Not because we stopped believing, but because we don’t want to make anyone uncomfortable. We connect that fear to Jesus’ words in John 15 about the world hating his followers, and we name the real costs many people feel: strained friendships, family tension, and the pressure to choose comfort over conviction. The rich young ruler shows how quickly a “yes” can become a sad walk away when obedience has a price tag.
Then we flip the script on defeat. Light and darkness aren’t equal forces battling it out. Darkness is what remains when light is absent, and when the light turns on, darkness has to move. That’s why we refuse the mindset that everything only gets worse and the church can only retreat. God puts us here to shine, to push back darkness, and to point people to Jesus with courage and clarity.
Before you go, we give one simple action step: post something that points to Jesus. A verse. A sermon. A podcast. A devotional. Listen, take the veil off, and then share this with someone who needs a push today. Subscribe, leave a review, and tell us what you’re going to post.
Good morning and welcome to Field Notes, a five-day devo from right here at Mission Scent. Remember, you can always hear the latest sermon at missionscent.org forward slash church or wherever you listen to podcasts. Field Notes is taking daily discipleship by breaking down the sermon into bite-sized one-step pieces so that we continue discipleship throughout the week. Let's jump into it.
Welcome back to Thoughts for your thoughts. I am your host. I forget his name. But if you know what that's from, hit me up, let me know. Let's see who our real fans are out there. Well, happy Thursday. Welcome to day four.
Today's title is Take Off the Veil, and our scripture reference comes from Exodus 34, 33 through 35. And it says this, and when Moses had finished speaking with them, he put a veil over his face. But whenever Moses went in before the Lord to speak with him, he would remove the veil until he came out. And when he came out and told the people of Israel what he was commanded, the people of Israel would see the face of Moses that skin, that the skin of Moses' face was shining, and Moses would put the veil over his face again until he went in to speak with him.
See, when Moses came down off the mountain after speaking with God, his face was literally radiating glory. You had just been in the presence of God Almighty, and his face was showing it. We see the same thing in the Mount of Transfiguration when we see Jesus with John and Peter, and they said his face became like light. But see, here's the thing when your face starts glowing, it makes the people around you uncomfortable. See, the Israelites were so uncomfortable with the blinding light that Moses had to put a veil over his face just to talk to them.
And sadly, this is most how most of us treat our Christian walk today. We come into the church building on Sunday with our faith uncovered and on display for all to see. But the moment we hit the doors when we're leaving, we're back in the real world. Yep, we take that veil, we throw it across our face. We hide our shine because we are terrified of making the culture uncomfortable. Look, this is why Jesus tells us in John 15, hey, the world's gonna hate you. It's gonna hate you simply because it hated me first. And some of us we felt that pain. We've lost friends, we've lost maybe relationships with family members because of our faith. We've had to pick between. And some of us were like, we're not willing to pay that cost. And that's why the rich young ruler went away sad because Jesus was like, give away all you have and follow me.
See, physically speaking, we have to understand darkness and light cannot coexist at the same time. In fact, they're not even equal if you think through it. See, the only way for darkness to be dark isn't because it can overpower the light. It is literally dark because of an absence of light. Once light turns on, that's it. Darkness can no longer be. It has to give way to the light. See, we don't have to walk around with a defeated mindset thinking that the world is just getting worse and worse and worse and worse. I hate that. Why is the church doing this? Well, we've read Revelation, it only gets worse. God didn't put you here for that. God put us here to be lights in the darkness, to push back against the darkness, and Jesus himself promises us that even the gates of hell will not prevail against that. See, the world only gets darker in the places where the light refuses to shine. Yes, speaking truth might cost us relationships, and Jesus has already warned us about that. But we cannot let the fear of making someone else uncomfortable stop us from bringing light to the darkness.
See, think about it. Today, are you wearing your veil outside of your home in church because you're afraid of losing friends or causing an offense to someone? See, our action step today is this post something. A Bible verse, a podcast, a devotional like the one you're listening to right now. Feel free to share it. Feel free to review it. Feel free to subscribe to it. Feel free to comment on it. But what we have to start doing is being unapologetic in our approach to shining in the darkness. We have to point people to Jesus. We have to take the veil off while we are in
