I will take you to be my people, and I will be your God, and you shall know that I am the LORD your God, who has brought you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians.
This promise comes to people who are still enslaved, still under Egyptian whips, with no evidence yet that anything is about to change. "I will take you to be my people, and I will be your God, and you shall know that I am the Lord your God, who has brought you out." Every verb is future tense. Nothing here has happened yet when it's spoken.
What's notable is the order: relationship first — "I will take you to be my people" — and the proof of it, the actual rescue, second. God doesn't wait to establish the relationship until after he's delivered them. He claims them as his own while they're still in chains, and the deliverance follows from that claim, not the other way around.
If you've assumed you'd have to get yourself out of whatever's holding you down before you could be worth claiming, this verse reverses that order entirely. The claiming comes first. The freeing is what proves it was real.
What if you didn't have to fix yourself first to be claimed — what if the claiming is what starts the freeing?
A short video on this is coming soon — for now, read on.