Moses: Part 6

Moses: Learning To Trust The God Who Leads - Part 6

Exodus 33:12-23; 34:5-7

SERMON TRANSCRIPT

Well, I am so excited that you guys are here with us. I know Lauren, Pastor Lauren, already mentioned it, but Sundays just aren’t the same when you guys aren’t here. We love having you guys here; it’s amazing. We are continuing in our Moses series. We are in Exodus chapter 18 today, and a lot has happened since last Sunday. We’ve jumped through a couple of things.

Pastor Andre talked about Moses going in and facing Pharaoh, so we are past all of that. The Israelite people are now out of Egypt, and they are wandering in this desert area. This is the Desert of Sinai, which is what it is technically called. We had the plagues. We had the moment where Pharaoh finally said, “Get out of here. I am so sick and tired of you. Take you and your people and just go.”

Then they get to the Red Sea, and they’re like, “Okay, what are we going to do?” All of a sudden, Pharaoh goes, “Wait a minute. Who is going to do all this pyramid building now? Because it’s not going to be the Egyptians.” They’re like, “All right, let’s go get those people and bring them back. We’re going to capture them.” So Pharaoh sends all of his armies to them, and they freak out. But then God does this miracle. He divides the Red Sea. The Israelite people walk on dry ground. Pharaoh’s army follows them in, and God just goes, “Whoop!” and closes up those waters. All of Pharaoh’s army is swallowed up and killed in one moment.

So they are on the other side of the Red Sea, seeing all of this happen, praising God. Then God shows up in a pillar of fire at night to guide them and in a column of cloud during the day. Then all of a sudden they realize, “Wait, we’re out in the desert. Where are we going to get some food?” God goes, “I got you,” and He brings manna and quail. Then all of a sudden they’re like, “Hey, that spring we passed like two days ago? Yeah, we’re all out of water now.” God goes, “Hey, Moses, go over to that rock. I’m going to make water come out.” God does a miracle, and water starts flowing out of the rock. It’s an incredible moment.

God continues to show up for the Israelite people. All of a sudden, they get attacked out of nowhere by the Amalekites. Moses goes up on the hill above the valley where the Israelite army is fighting. As long as Moses has his hands up, the Israelite people are winning. But if you’ve ever tried to hold your arms up for an extended amount of time, it doesn’t last very long, right? So when his arms start going down, the Israelite people start losing. He raises them back up, and they start winning. Aaron comes up on one side and Hur on the other, and they hold up Moses’ arms until sundown, and the Israelite people have victory.

This is where we come to the scene right now. They’re chilling. I have a couple of pictures of what the region would look like. This is where they’re at. There’s absolutely nothing out there. They’re just living their lives. And I would think they’re not really outdoorsy people. So things start getting a little restless. People start looking and saying, “Hey, that was my rock yesterday that I sat on.” “Yeah, you stole my rock.” And they start bickering. “Hey, you stole my goat.” “Hey, you stole my tent.” “Hey, hey, that’s my pillow. You bring that back.” They start getting at each other’s throats.

At the same time, Moses had sent away his wife and kids because of all the chaos of everything that was happening. He gets word from his father-in-law, and he says, “Hey, bring my family back. I think we’re settling down here where we are in the Sinai Desert.” So we come to this point in chapter 18. God has done some incredible things through the Israelite people, and yet they find themselves at this moment: “So what do we do now? Where do we go from here? What is going to happen?” God is going to use this moment, a little family reunion with Moses’ family coming back home and a conversation with his father-in-law, as a critical moment for the Israelite people in this section of Scripture.

So it says, “Now Jethro, the priest of Midian, the father-in-law of Moses, heard of everything God had done for Moses and for His people Israel, and how the Lord had brought them out of Egypt. And after Moses had sent away his wife Zipporah, her father-in-law Jethro received her and their two sons. One son was named Gershom, for Moses said, ‘I have become a foreigner in a foreign land,’ and the other was named Eliezer. He said, ‘My father’s God was my helper, and He saved me from the sword of Pharaoh.’ Jethro, Moses’ father-in-law, together with Moses’ son and wife, came to him in the wilderness where he was camped near the mountain of God, Mount Sinai. Jethro had sent word to him, ‘I, your father-in-law Jethro, am coming to you with your wife and your two sons.’ So Moses went out to greet his father-in-law, and bowed down, and kissed him. They greeted each other, and then went into the tent.”

The relationship that Jethro and Moses have is more of a friendship and kinship. This isn’t necessarily a father-son kind of relationship. They are more like best friends. This came from all the time that Moses had spent in the land of Midian with Jethro before the burning bush incident and being sent back into Egypt. This relationship is seen here in how they are greeted. It’s a very common friendship greeting. Moses received Jethro, but I can imagine some of the thoughts and hesitation that Jethro might have had.

All of a sudden, the man that he had given his daughter to marry, to have a family, and to take care of, comes back from this moment in the desert having hallucinations of seeing a burning bush that didn’t burn up. And what Jethro thought was going to be a quiet life for his daughter, his family, and Moses turns into this surprise roller-coaster of a life. So I can imagine the rumor wheel that had been spinning from what Jethro had heard from someone who had heard from someone who had heard from someone who had heard from someone in Egypt.

Guys, have you ever played the telephone game growing up? What is told to the first person is never what the last person says, right? Over time, it kind of tweaks a little bit and tweaks a little bit more. So I can only imagine the rumors that Jethro had heard: “Well, this happened in Egypt, and then this happened, and then this happened.” And the conversations that Jethro might have been having with his friends, his neighbors, and his family: “Man, that son-in-law of yours, whew. He went off the deep end, didn’t he? I mean, he came back talking about a burning bush that didn’t burn. There’s blood in the river in Egypt. There are snakes, locusts, people are dying. What is happening? Like, what? He made the sea swallow up Pharaoh’s army? Like, how?”

So I can only imagine he’s coming back and he’s going, “What version of Moses am I walking into? And what version of Moses am I returning my daughter and my grandkids to? I just had to take care of them. I’m pretty sure Moses, this was your job, bro. And then I’m having, like, what’s going on here?” Yet at the same time, there’s this beautiful image of Jethro also returning the greeting from Moses. I think there’s something profound here. I want to dig in a little bit more.

Verse 8: “Moses then told his father-in-law about everything the Lord had done to Pharaoh and to the Egyptians for Israel’s sake, and all about the hardships that they had met along the way and how the Lord had saved them.” I read this Scripture and I was like, “Oh, cool. So Moses is just giving his father-in-law, like, ‘Hey, oh, for the past couple of years, this is what we’ve been up to. We’ve been doing this, we’ve been doing this, we’ve been doing this.’” But the more that I dug into this, I realized that Moses is actually giving testimony of God to his father-in-law. Moses here is telling Jethro about Yahweh, telling Jethro, “This is what the Lord Almighty did for us.”

I love how in this, Moses just doesn’t give the good highlights. He just doesn’t give all the mountaintops. The Scripture says that it’s all about the hardships they met along the way and how the Lord saved them. I think sometimes in our lives we like to just highlight the good stuff, right? It’s kind of what social media has trained our brain to do, right? We just post about the good stuff. “Hey, family vacation, check this out.” “Oh, hey, got the new iPhone.” “Oh, hey, look at this thing my kid did.” But that’s not a true testimony.

See, our true testimony is when we share, yes, of the victory of God in our lives, but also the hardship. It’s a both-and. Because the reality is, in the modern church, we begin to sanitize our own testimonies. And we only talk about the happy things that happen. But the problem is that a biblical testimony includes the struggle. Because when we share the hardships and the deliverances, we show that God is not just a God of the destination, but that God is the God of the journey. And in that, we’re real.

I mean, we all have that friend who just talks about how life is just so great, right? “Everything’s good. No problems. This is awesome. This is awesome and this is awesome and this is awesome.” It’s like, “Are you a real person? Like, there’s no chance that you don’t have any hard in your life.” You come across fake, and I think sometimes in our intention to want to celebrate who God is, we begin to become fake to a very skeptical world around us that’s looking at us. And I want to tell you, it’s okay to share that life is hard. Moses did.

Moses here is saying, “Hey.” It’s one verse here in the Bible, but I can imagine they spent hours talking. And I think for Moses, this might have been the one closest friend that he could truly share with about what he was going through. He’s like, “Man, the people came at me. They were so angry.” Because the Israelite people were like they just had a memory of a goldfish. It was like yesterday they had manna on the ground and it was just a miracle, and the next day they’re like, “We’re out of water. We’re going to die.” Moses is like, “Uh, can we rewind to yesterday for like ten seconds, people?” But as a leader, I can only imagine. So I think there’s a little bit of Moses going, “It’s been rough. And I finally have a friend to share with.” But he doesn’t just complain either. He talks about, “Man, God did this miracle, Jethro.”

He continues on, verse 9: “Jethro was delighted to hear all about the good things that the Lord had done for Israel in rescuing them from the hand of the enemy, the Egyptians. He said, ‘Praise be to the Lord, who rescued you from the hand of the Egyptians and of Pharaoh, and who rescued the people from the hand of the Egyptians. Now I know that the Lord is greater than all other gods, for He did this to those who had treated Israel arrogantly.’”

Jethro was no stranger to faith. His title was priest of Midian. Jethro is a direct descendant of the children of Abraham. So Jethro himself had a faith of knowledge. But I think that’s where it ended. Because you and I, we can come into church every single day, we can sing these songs, we can read God’s Word, we can know and have knowledge of God. But there’s something different when we step into a knowing of a personal God. And Jethro here is having this theological moment where his background of knowing the stories of his great-great-grandfather and great-great-grandfather and great-great-great-grandfather, who lived among Abraham, those stories had been passed down to them. He had knowledge, but there’s a difference between knowing about God and knowing God Himself.

And in this moment of Moses giving testimony to Jethro, Jethro’s face becomes alive for the very first time. Jethro has this concrete belief that the stories that had been passed down for generations, which he probably knew as fairy-tale details, are real. He realizes this is the real Yahweh. And when he saw the evidence of God’s power over the superpower of the world, Egypt, Jethro knew.

So I want to encourage you today in this: your life may be the evidence for someone else to come to faith in Jesus Christ. Your testimony, with victories and the hardships, may be the catalyst for someone in your life for them to come to know Jesus for the very first time. Because you have people in your life and in your world that I don’t know. And God may be calling you to be the one to share with them, not me. You are going to be the one. You are with them. You are around them. You are in their presence. So our faith life is the evidence for others. And our testimony is the bridge between their heard stories.

“Oh, yeah, those Christians, those Jesus people out there. I’ve heard of them before. Don’t you have like a book or something with stories in it?” “Yeah, the Bible.” “Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Whatever that thing is.” But what if you’re the one by how you live your life, your testimony? How they watch you walk through hardships, but then see the victory of Jesus in your life? They know you’re a real person. They know who you are, and you’re not fake with them. You’re real. You’re authentic. You are the one in their life to bring them to know Jesus for the very first time.

It continues on, verse 12: “Then Jethro, Moses’ father-in-law, brought a burnt offering and other sacrifices to God. And Aaron came with all the elders of Israel to eat a meal with Moses, his father-in-law, in the presence of God.” So Moses’ testimony leads to a place of revelation with Jethro, which then leads to worship. Jethro in this moment realizes who Yahweh is, and there are three things that happen in this: the response of sacrifice, the response of a meal, and the location and the presence of God Himself.

See, this is faith in action. Jethro just doesn’t offer, “Hey, thanks, God. I appreciate who you are.” Jethro is moved to bring a burnt offering. A commentary I read noted that a person had to show that they had converted to their faith in Yahweh through action, and it began with the action of worshiping God Himself. I am so thankful that we live in a post-Jesus world. Could you imagine, for every little sin that you had, you had to go find an animal and then sacrifice them and kill them? I’m thankful that that is not the case now, and that Jesus is our ultimate atonement.

But in this moment in the Old Testament, Jesus hadn’t come yet, and so there had to be reparations for what had happened. This needed to be an atonement for their sins. And Jethro recognizes who God is, and this is a holy Yahweh, Almighty God. He couldn’t come on his own merit to the presence of God; he needed forgiveness and acceptance. And this is a reminder for us about how there has to be a shift in our thoughts, thinking that we must die to ourselves so that we can live in Christ Jesus. Jethro had to offer animals. We can accept Jesus into our lives. Jesus was the ultimate sacrifice for us, and He died so that we might be able to live.

And Jesus, in Scripture, before He was crucified and died, actually gives the disciples a gift of the Last Supper, and we celebrated last week communion of the bread and the cup and what that represents. And here Jethro gathers together with Moses and all the elders of Israel. And there is a feast that is had together. So you have this flow of Moses’ testimony, which brings revelation, which then leads us to worship, that leads us to community. Because a changed heart always brings about worship and praise. That’s why we gather. That’s why we’re here every single Sunday. Sunday is to give praise and honor to God because our hearts have been changed through the blood of Jesus, our atonement, sacrifice on the cross.

But there was this sequence that happened. And this piece of community was all done in this amazing place in the presence of God, because after Moses’ arms had been held up and the Israelite people had victory over the Amalekites, he built an altar there at Rephidim. And it was a place that Moses called the banner of God. In this place, there was an altar and sacrifice built for people to remember. So Jethro here, with all the Israelite leaders, Moses, and his family, worships God in His presence with his new relationship with Jesus.

See, our fellowship as a church is only healthy when it is centered around the sacrifice of Christ. You have permission that if you come here on a Sunday morning and sit through a whole service and we don’t mention the name of Jesus once, call us out. Because without Jesus, we’re just a country club; we’re just Rotarians. I’m not saying those things are bad. Rotary clubs are great. Those are awesome. They do amazing work in communities. But we’re called to something different as a church. We’re called to be a community of Jesus Christ for this world around us.

Moses continues on: “The next day Moses took his seat to serve as judge for the people, and they stood around him from morning till evening. When his father-in-law saw that all Moses was doing for the people, he said, ‘What is it that you’re doing for the people? Why do you alone sit as judge while all these people stand around you from morning till evening?’ Moses answered him, ‘Because the people came to me to seek God’s will. Whenever they have a dispute, it is brought to me, and I decide between the parties and inform them of God’s decrees and instructions.’”

Moses’ father-in-law replied, “What you are doing is not good. You and these people who come to you will only wear yourselves out. The work is too heavy for you. You cannot handle it.” So the next day Moses goes out, and he begins to gather the people, probably as he has done every day, and people get in line. Early bird gets the worm. So people are probably waiting out in front of his tent early in the morning. “Moses, you got to talk to my neighbor. They are off the deep end. You’re not going to realize what they did.” Moses is like the first HOA president of the Israelite people. Poor guy, he didn’t sign up for this.

So morning till night, he’s just listening to people bicker, and he’s like, “Okay, you’re dumb. Go away. You’re right. Do this. Okay, why did you steal his rock? Just give it back. Go on. Like, okay, you killed his goat. Give him one of your goats. Like, come on, guys. Like, really.” Just sitting there all day long. I can only imagine how exhausted Moses must have been, and just be like, “I get to do this tomorrow. Yay, me. Thanks, God.” And so Jethro’s over there going, “Bro, dude, you gotta stop. I get you’re tired, Moses. That person who’s been standing in that Sinai Desert for eight hours, by the time they get to you, they’re not thinking straight, and they’re angry. It’s like this is just going to completely implode. Like, everybody’s just going to turn on each other. Like, this is not going to go well.”

And so Jethro’s like, “Dude, you can’t be doing this, man. Like, I appreciate your heart. I appreciate where you are, but that’s just not going to happen.” Moses was one dude for all the Israelite people. And I’ll give you a confession from Chris: I’ve fallen into this. I’ve fallen into this. Well, at a church our size, we’re blessed to have multiple pastors around. But it is so easy for us as pastors to get pulled into something like this and just do everything. Everything. And Moses here gives words of wisdom. I’m preaching myself right now. But I think maybe some of you have found yourselves in that place, too. Maybe you’re running it solo at work and you’re burning yourself out. Maybe you’re running around ragged trying to do everything for your family.

And you have a good heart. You want to do it all for everybody. And that’s a great place to be in. But at what sacrifice? Some of the wisest leaders and people in this life that I know recognize this early in their lives, and it saves them heartache. And Jethro here is looking at Moses, going, “Bro, I’ve been there, man. I didn’t get the title of priest of Midian by just being the quiet guy in the back corner. I’ve been there.” And then there’s a danger in this: when we try to do everything ourselves, even the simple stuff, we become completely overwhelmed and we burn out. We have no energy left for the things that God has truly called us to. And we can’t fulfill the calling that God has for our lives.

So Jethro has some wisdom for Moses. He says this, verse 19: “Listen now to me, and I will give you some advice, and may God be with you. You must be the people’s representative before God and bring their disputes to Him. Teach them His decrees and instructions, and show them the way they are to live and how they are to behave. But select capable men from all the people, men who fear God, trustworthy, who hate dishonest gain, and appoint them as officials over thousands, hundreds, fifties, and tens.”

Jethro comes to him and says, “Hey, you need a team of people to help you.” But he doesn’t say you need to gather the most experienced, well-qualified, highly educated, degree-holding people. No. He says people who are capable. I want to inform you this morning: you are capable. You are capable. You are a capable person. He says there are three qualities that are required for those who are capable. One, they fear God. What does that mean? They have a spiritual priority in their lives. They have a heart of worship that they live every single day. Two, they are trustworthy. They are reliable people of integrity. They are dependable. You know you can depend on them to do something. You can tell them, “Hey, I need you to do this,” and you know it’s going to get done. Three, they hate dishonest gain. They have a moral purity in their lives. And they have biblical convictions that they live out, and can intercede and discern among disputes.

So if you check these three boxes, you are capable. God has a calling for you in your life, and you can live that out. You don’t have to have the title of pastor or a degree to be capable. God doesn’t view you this way. God has given you gifts, talents, and abilities, and ways that you can serve the church, build up the body, and care for those in your life. And if you love the Lord and you are a person of your word, you are exactly who God is calling to step up.

It continues on, verse 22: “Have them serve as judges for the people at all times, but have them bring every difficult case to you. The simplest cases they can decide themselves. That will make your load lighter, because they will share it with you. If you do this, and God so commands, then you will be able to stand the strain, and all these people will go home satisfied.”

See, there are two camps in this situation. One camp: Moses, keep doing what you’re doing. But you’re going to burn out. And then you won’t be a leader anymore. Because you won’t have the capacity, the ability, the time, the strength, anything to lead in a way that I have called you to, Moses. Or the camp of the bystander: the one who is standing in line every single day, waiting to go before Moses and to have their case settled. And that person would be the one who lets everybody else do the things while missing their own purpose and calling.

See, there’s a mutual blessing here in verse 20: “You will be able to stand the strain, and all these people will go home satisfied.” This is a beautiful picture of the church: that the pastors pastor in the way that they are called to, and the people serve and work with one another and care for the church body with one another. Paul writes about this in his first letter to the Corinthians, chapter 13, and he talks about the body of the church being an actual body itself. Is that the eye? The job of the eye is to see, right? We would laugh if we made sure to go, “Okay, I gotta listen to you. It’s not an ear, it’s an eye.” And an ear isn’t supposed to be able to see. And a hand is supposed to be able to grip, not like gripping with our eyelids.

There’s this old NFL commercial that’s hilarious where it talked about, like, Dak Prescott, and it was like a one-leg thing. And it was this idea that you can’t play football with just one leg. It’s like you need the whole team to be able to play football. And just like us, we need the whole team for the church. And Moses needed people at thousands, at hundreds, at tens, maybe even down to fives, to be able to care and to help and to work with the Israelite people. And when we do this, this is a beautiful picture of coming together, and the church is just built up and more glorified when that happens.

We have amazing people in this church that serve week in and week out. But for some of them, they need some breaks. They need some time off. They need to be able to come in here, especially if they’re in kids’ ministry. They need to be in big church with the big grown-ups and have grown-up conversations. They have an incredible heart to teach little children about who God is and how God loves them. And that’s their true calling and gifting. But that’s draining. They need to be built back up so they can go, and Scripture says they are spurred on in faith to keep going in their calling. But they can’t just always be pouring out. So we have to have teams where we can backfill and give them weeks off, and they can be here in church.

And I’ll say even this: if you’re serving on a regular basis and you have a week off, be in church. Don’t use that week off as the week that you just don’t come to church because you’re not serving. That’s not healthy. Saying you can’t go take vacations and have a week off and have a Sunday where you worship God from home? Yes. But you also need the body to worship with, to be around, to be encouraged, to spur it on. You can’t replace this with YouTube videos or podcast sermons. You can’t. And this world is heading in a trajectory where they think they can follow Jesus without ever talking to another Christian in person in their life, and it’s a lie from Satan. You will not survive in your faith without a church body.

So the question is: Are you the one standing in line for Moses to fix something? Or are you offering to be one of the tens, the fifties, the hundreds, to help carry the load? So we see this chapter, we see this beautiful full circle here where Moses’ testimony toward Jethro brings them into a revelation of Yahweh and a faith in God Almighty. And then Jethro has this ability to share faith with the Israelite people, and then to speak into the wisdom of Moses in his leadership, to give him wisdom. And that leads Moses to restructure the help and the care and support for the Israelite people, that glorifies God and lifts people back to God Almighty. And all the people are satisfied. What an amazing picture here.

So I have two closing questions for us this morning. The first of which is: What is your testimony? What has God done in your life that you should be telling other people about? Not just the victories, but also the hardships. No, don’t go out there and just be, “I gotta be a Christian. I’m just going to have a smile on my face, and life is just perfect.” If you follow Jesus for two minutes, you know life isn’t perfect with Jesus. But Jesus is perfect and He’s with you. And so what is your testimony? How are you sharing it with others? Maybe this week you need to tell somebody about your life and your hardship before Jesus, the moment you came to Jesus, and what your life looks like after Jesus now, living for Him. You’ve gotta have all those parts in there. Maybe you take some time this week and write it down. Because you never know when God might prompt you, “Hey. Go tell that person I love them.” “Oh Jesus, I don’t know. I didn’t practice my testimony this week.” Well, Chris told you on Sunday, “Might happen. You guys, like, you might really want to work on that this afternoon. Okay.” I’m praying for it to happen for you guys this week.

But then my other question is: How can you move from a consumer to a contributor? Because that line of people that were waiting for Moses, some of those people, God was prompting them to step up when Moses had open interviews for his new command. Are you going to be a consumer or are you going to be a contributor? Ask yourself: Am I standing in line waiting for a leader to fix something, or am I offering to help carry the load?

Your card today, the tear-off card on the program, says, “I’m taking steps from being a consumer to a contributor.” So I would encourage you this week: check that card, write your name down, drop it in the back. We’ve got ushers that’ll be in the back after service. And we want to be praying for you this week, this week specifically. And maybe that’s coming to one of the pastors and saying, “Hey, how can I help? What can I do?”

This week Pastor Andre started his new role as the hospital chaplain. And we’re excited for him. And we are so thankful; he could use your prayers. But there’s also a shift in his transition. And we’re shifting as pastoral staff in our leadership and responsibility. And so right now I find it very timely that God would put this sermon out there in the way that He delayed what was supposed to happen a month ago. This wasn’t even supposed to be this week. It’s funny how God lines some stuff up like that, right? So we’re going to need some extra help around here to carry the load. Are you willing and able to step up to be one of those who help carry the load?

Let’s pray. Jesus, we thank you for this morning. God, we thank you for Moses. But God, we also give you praise for Jethro. God, thank you for his wisdom that he was able to share with Moses at a critical point in the Israelite people’s lives. That yes, they had been wandering in the desert, and they’re about to wander for a whole lot longer than they even realize, God. But they needed a system in place to be able to care for the church and the body of the Israelites. And so, God, for us too, Lord, we need those able hands to help. And we also need to have our testimony, God.

Jethro was an old man, and he had heard the stories for decades and decades and decades and still didn’t believe. And it was through the power of Moses’ testimony that brought Jethro to faith in Yahweh Almighty the very first time. God, may our testimony lead people closer to You, Jesus. God, may we work on our testimony to have a time ready to share, not to get nervous or anxious, but just to be able to share of what You have done in our lives, God. We thank you for that. We thank you for being the ultimate sacrifice and the atonement of our lives, God. We praise You. We worship You. We thank You today. We love You. Amen.

Moses: Part 5

Moses: Learning To Trust The God Who Leads - Part 5

Exodus 18:1-27

SERMON TRANSCRIPT

Well, I am so excited that you guys are here with us. I know Lauren, Pastor Lauren, already mentioned it, but Sundays just aren’t the same when you guys aren’t here. We love having you guys here; it’s amazing. We are continuing in our Moses series. We are in Exodus chapter 18 today, and a lot has happened since last Sunday. We’ve jumped through a couple of things.

Pastor Andre talked about Moses going in and facing Pharaoh, so we are past all of that. The Israelite people are now out of Egypt, and they are wandering in this desert area. This is the Desert of Sinai, which is what it is technically called. We had the plagues. We had the moment where Pharaoh finally said, “Get out of here. I am so sick and tired of you. Take you and your people and just go.”

Then they get to the Red Sea, and they’re like, “Okay, what are we going to do?” All of a sudden, Pharaoh goes, “Wait a minute. Who is going to do all this pyramid building now? Because it’s not going to be the Egyptians.” They’re like, “All right, let’s go get those people and bring them back. We’re going to capture them.” So Pharaoh sends all of his armies to them, and they freak out. But then God does this miracle. He divides the Red Sea. The Israelite people walk on dry ground. Pharaoh’s army follows them in, and God just goes, “Whoop!” and closes up those waters. All of Pharaoh’s army is swallowed up and killed in one moment.

So they are on the other side of the Red Sea, seeing all of this happen, praising God. Then God shows up in a pillar of fire at night to guide them and in a column of cloud during the day. Then all of a sudden they realize, “Wait, we’re out in the desert. Where are we going to get some food?” God goes, “I got you,” and He brings manna and quail. Then all of a sudden they’re like, “Hey, that spring we passed like two days ago? Yeah, we’re all out of water now.” God goes, “Hey, Moses, go over to that rock. I’m going to make water come out.” God does a miracle, and water starts flowing out of the rock. It’s an incredible moment.

God continues to show up for the Israelite people. All of a sudden, they get attacked out of nowhere by the Amalekites. Moses goes up on the hill above the valley where the Israelite army is fighting. As long as Moses has his hands up, the Israelite people are winning. But if you’ve ever tried to hold your arms up for an extended amount of time, it doesn’t last very long, right? So when his arms start going down, the Israelite people start losing. He raises them back up, and they start winning. Aaron comes up on one side and Hur on the other, and they hold up Moses’ arms until sundown, and the Israelite people have victory.

This is where we come to the scene right now. They’re chilling. I have a couple of pictures of what the region would look like. This is where they’re at. There’s absolutely nothing out there. They’re just living their lives. And I would think they’re not really outdoorsy people. So things start getting a little restless. People start looking and saying, “Hey, that was my rock yesterday that I sat on.” “Yeah, you stole my rock.” And they start bickering. “Hey, you stole my goat.” “Hey, you stole my tent.” “Hey, hey, that’s my pillow. You bring that back.” They start getting at each other’s throats.

At the same time, Moses had sent away his wife and kids because of all the chaos of everything that was happening. He gets word from his father-in-law, and he says, “Hey, bring my family back. I think we’re settling down here where we are in the Sinai Desert.” So we come to this point in chapter 18. God has done some incredible things through the Israelite people, and yet they find themselves at this moment: “So what do we do now? Where do we go from here? What is going to happen?” God is going to use this moment, a little family reunion with Moses’ family coming back home and a conversation with his father-in-law, as a critical moment for the Israelite people in this section of Scripture.

So it says, “Now Jethro, the priest of Midian, the father-in-law of Moses, heard of everything God had done for Moses and for His people Israel, and how the Lord had brought them out of Egypt. And after Moses had sent away his wife Zipporah, her father-in-law Jethro received her and their two sons. One son was named Gershom, for Moses said, ‘I have become a foreigner in a foreign land,’ and the other was named Eliezer. He said, ‘My father’s God was my helper, and He saved me from the sword of Pharaoh.’ Jethro, Moses’ father-in-law, together with Moses’ son and wife, came to him in the wilderness where he was camped near the mountain of God, Mount Sinai. Jethro had sent word to him, ‘I, your father-in-law Jethro, am coming to you with your wife and your two sons.’ So Moses went out to greet his father-in-law, and bowed down, and kissed him. They greeted each other, and then went into the tent.”

The relationship that Jethro and Moses have is more of a friendship and kinship. This isn’t necessarily a father-son kind of relationship. They are more like best friends. This came from all the time that Moses had spent in the land of Midian with Jethro before the burning bush incident and being sent back into Egypt. This relationship is seen here in how they are greeted. It’s a very common friendship greeting. Moses received Jethro, but I can imagine some of the thoughts and hesitation that Jethro might have had.

All of a sudden, the man that he had given his daughter to marry, to have a family, and to take care of, comes back from this moment in the desert having hallucinations of seeing a burning bush that didn’t burn up. And what Jethro thought was going to be a quiet life for his daughter, his family, and Moses turns into this surprise roller-coaster of a life. So I can imagine the rumor wheel that had been spinning from what Jethro had heard from someone who had heard from someone who had heard from someone who had heard from someone in Egypt.

Guys, have you ever played the telephone game growing up? What is told to the first person is never what the last person says, right? Over time, it kind of tweaks a little bit and tweaks a little bit more. So I can only imagine the rumors that Jethro had heard: “Well, this happened in Egypt, and then this happened, and then this happened.” And the conversations that Jethro might have been having with his friends, his neighbors, and his family: “Man, that son-in-law of yours, whew. He went off the deep end, didn’t he? I mean, he came back talking about a burning bush that didn’t burn. There’s blood in the river in Egypt. There are snakes, locusts, people are dying. What is happening? Like, what? He made the sea swallow up Pharaoh’s army? Like, how?”

So I can only imagine he’s coming back and he’s going, “What version of Moses am I walking into? And what version of Moses am I returning my daughter and my grandkids to? I just had to take care of them. I’m pretty sure Moses, this was your job, bro. And then I’m having, like, what’s going on here?” Yet at the same time, there’s this beautiful image of Jethro also returning the greeting from Moses. I think there’s something profound here. I want to dig in a little bit more.

Verse 8: “Moses then told his father-in-law about everything the Lord had done to Pharaoh and to the Egyptians for Israel’s sake, and all about the hardships that they had met along the way and how the Lord had saved them.” I read this Scripture and I was like, “Oh, cool. So Moses is just giving his father-in-law, like, ‘Hey, oh, for the past couple of years, this is what we’ve been up to. We’ve been doing this, we’ve been doing this, we’ve been doing this.’” But the more that I dug into this, I realized that Moses is actually giving testimony of God to his father-in-law. Moses here is telling Jethro about Yahweh, telling Jethro, “This is what the Lord Almighty did for us.”

I love how in this, Moses just doesn’t give the good highlights. He just doesn’t give all the mountaintops. The Scripture says that it’s all about the hardships they met along the way and how the Lord saved them. I think sometimes in our lives we like to just highlight the good stuff, right? It’s kind of what social media has trained our brain to do, right? We just post about the good stuff. “Hey, family vacation, check this out.” “Oh, hey, got the new iPhone.” “Oh, hey, look at this thing my kid did.” But that’s not a true testimony.

See, our true testimony is when we share, yes, of the victory of God in our lives, but also the hardship. It’s a both-and. Because the reality is, in the modern church, we begin to sanitize our own testimonies. And we only talk about the happy things that happen. But the problem is that a biblical testimony includes the struggle. Because when we share the hardships and the deliverances, we show that God is not just a God of the destination, but that God is the God of the journey. And in that, we’re real.

I mean, we all have that friend who just talks about how life is just so great, right? “Everything’s good. No problems. This is awesome. This is awesome and this is awesome and this is awesome.” It’s like, “Are you a real person? Like, there’s no chance that you don’t have any hard in your life.” You come across fake, and I think sometimes in our intention to want to celebrate who God is, we begin to become fake to a very skeptical world around us that’s looking at us. And I want to tell you, it’s okay to share that life is hard. Moses did.

Moses here is saying, “Hey.” It’s one verse here in the Bible, but I can imagine they spent hours talking. And I think for Moses, this might have been the one closest friend that he could truly share with about what he was going through. He’s like, “Man, the people came at me. They were so angry.” Because the Israelite people were like they just had a memory of a goldfish. It was like yesterday they had manna on the ground and it was just a miracle, and the next day they’re like, “We’re out of water. We’re going to die.” Moses is like, “Uh, can we rewind to yesterday for like ten seconds, people?” But as a leader, I can only imagine. So I think there’s a little bit of Moses going, “It’s been rough. And I finally have a friend to share with.” But he doesn’t just complain either. He talks about, “Man, God did this miracle, Jethro.”

He continues on, verse 9: “Jethro was delighted to hear all about the good things that the Lord had done for Israel in rescuing them from the hand of the enemy, the Egyptians. He said, ‘Praise be to the Lord, who rescued you from the hand of the Egyptians and of Pharaoh, and who rescued the people from the hand of the Egyptians. Now I know that the Lord is greater than all other gods, for He did this to those who had treated Israel arrogantly.’”

Jethro was no stranger to faith. His title was priest of Midian. Jethro is a direct descendant of the children of Abraham. So Jethro himself had a faith of knowledge. But I think that’s where it ended. Because you and I, we can come into church every single day, we can sing these songs, we can read God’s Word, we can know and have knowledge of God. But there’s something different when we step into a knowing of a personal God. And Jethro here is having this theological moment where his background of knowing the stories of his great-great-grandfather and great-great-grandfather and great-great-great-grandfather, who lived among Abraham, those stories had been passed down to them. He had knowledge, but there’s a difference between knowing about God and knowing God Himself.

And in this moment of Moses giving testimony to Jethro, Jethro’s face becomes alive for the very first time. Jethro has this concrete belief that the stories that had been passed down for generations, which he probably knew as fairy-tale details, are real. He realizes this is the real Yahweh. And when he saw the evidence of God’s power over the superpower of the world, Egypt, Jethro knew.

So I want to encourage you today in this: your life may be the evidence for someone else to come to faith in Jesus Christ. Your testimony, with victories and the hardships, may be the catalyst for someone in your life for them to come to know Jesus for the very first time. Because you have people in your life and in your world that I don’t know. And God may be calling you to be the one to share with them, not me. You are going to be the one. You are with them. You are around them. You are in their presence. So our faith life is the evidence for others. And our testimony is the bridge between their heard stories.

“Oh, yeah, those Christians, those Jesus people out there. I’ve heard of them before. Don’t you have like a book or something with stories in it?” “Yeah, the Bible.” “Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Whatever that thing is.” But what if you’re the one by how you live your life, your testimony? How they watch you walk through hardships, but then see the victory of Jesus in your life? They know you’re a real person. They know who you are, and you’re not fake with them. You’re real. You’re authentic. You are the one in their life to bring them to know Jesus for the very first time.

It continues on, verse 12: “Then Jethro, Moses’ father-in-law, brought a burnt offering and other sacrifices to God. And Aaron came with all the elders of Israel to eat a meal with Moses, his father-in-law, in the presence of God.” So Moses’ testimony leads to a place of revelation with Jethro, which then leads to worship. Jethro in this moment realizes who Yahweh is, and there are three things that happen in this: the response of sacrifice, the response of a meal, and the location and the presence of God Himself.

See, this is faith in action. Jethro just doesn’t offer, “Hey, thanks, God. I appreciate who you are.” Jethro is moved to bring a burnt offering. A commentary I read noted that a person had to show that they had converted to their faith in Yahweh through action, and it began with the action of worshiping God Himself. I am so thankful that we live in a post-Jesus world. Could you imagine, for every little sin that you had, you had to go find an animal and then sacrifice them and kill them? I’m thankful that that is not the case now, and that Jesus is our ultimate atonement.

But in this moment in the Old Testament, Jesus hadn’t come yet, and so there had to be reparations for what had happened. This needed to be an atonement for their sins. And Jethro recognizes who God is, and this is a holy Yahweh, Almighty God. He couldn’t come on his own merit to the presence of God; he needed forgiveness and acceptance. And this is a reminder for us about how there has to be a shift in our thoughts, thinking that we must die to ourselves so that we can live in Christ Jesus. Jethro had to offer animals. We can accept Jesus into our lives. Jesus was the ultimate sacrifice for us, and He died so that we might be able to live.

And Jesus, in Scripture, before He was crucified and died, actually gives the disciples a gift of the Last Supper, and we celebrated last week communion of the bread and the cup and what that represents. And here Jethro gathers together with Moses and all the elders of Israel. And there is a feast that is had together. So you have this flow of Moses’ testimony, which brings revelation, which then leads us to worship, that leads us to community. Because a changed heart always brings about worship and praise. That’s why we gather. That’s why we’re here every single Sunday. Sunday is to give praise and honor to God because our hearts have been changed through the blood of Jesus, our atonement, sacrifice on the cross.

But there was this sequence that happened. And this piece of community was all done in this amazing place in the presence of God, because after Moses’ arms had been held up and the Israelite people had victory over the Amalekites, he built an altar there at Rephidim. And it was a place that Moses called the banner of God. In this place, there was an altar and sacrifice built for people to remember. So Jethro here, with all the Israelite leaders, Moses, and his family, worships God in His presence with his new relationship with Jesus.

See, our fellowship as a church is only healthy when it is centered around the sacrifice of Christ. You have permission that if you come here on a Sunday morning and sit through a whole service and we don’t mention the name of Jesus once, call us out. Because without Jesus, we’re just a country club; we’re just Rotarians. I’m not saying those things are bad. Rotary clubs are great. Those are awesome. They do amazing work in communities. But we’re called to something different as a church. We’re called to be a community of Jesus Christ for this world around us.

Moses continues on: “The next day Moses took his seat to serve as judge for the people, and they stood around him from morning till evening. When his father-in-law saw that all Moses was doing for the people, he said, ‘What is it that you’re doing for the people? Why do you alone sit as judge while all these people stand around you from morning till evening?’ Moses answered him, ‘Because the people came to me to seek God’s will. Whenever they have a dispute, it is brought to me, and I decide between the parties and inform them of God’s decrees and instructions.’”

Moses’ father-in-law replied, “What you are doing is not good. You and these people who come to you will only wear yourselves out. The work is too heavy for you. You cannot handle it.” So the next day Moses goes out, and he begins to gather the people, probably as he has done every day, and people get in line. Early bird gets the worm. So people are probably waiting out in front of his tent early in the morning. “Moses, you got to talk to my neighbor. They are off the deep end. You’re not going to realize what they did.” Moses is like the first HOA president of the Israelite people. Poor guy, he didn’t sign up for this.

So morning till night, he’s just listening to people bicker, and he’s like, “Okay, you’re dumb. Go away. You’re right. Do this. Okay, why did you steal his rock? Just give it back. Go on. Like, okay, you killed his goat. Give him one of your goats. Like, come on, guys. Like, really.” Just sitting there all day long. I can only imagine how exhausted Moses must have been, and just be like, “I get to do this tomorrow. Yay, me. Thanks, God.” And so Jethro’s over there going, “Bro, dude, you gotta stop. I get you’re tired, Moses. That person who’s been standing in that Sinai Desert for eight hours, by the time they get to you, they’re not thinking straight, and they’re angry. It’s like this is just going to completely implode. Like, everybody’s just going to turn on each other. Like, this is not going to go well.”

And so Jethro’s like, “Dude, you can’t be doing this, man. Like, I appreciate your heart. I appreciate where you are, but that’s just not going to happen.” Moses was one dude for all the Israelite people. And I’ll give you a confession from Chris: I’ve fallen into this. I’ve fallen into this. Well, at a church our size, we’re blessed to have multiple pastors around. But it is so easy for us as pastors to get pulled into something like this and just do everything. Everything. And Moses here gives words of wisdom. I’m preaching myself right now. But I think maybe some of you have found yourselves in that place, too. Maybe you’re running it solo at work and you’re burning yourself out. Maybe you’re running around ragged trying to do everything for your family.

And you have a good heart. You want to do it all for everybody. And that’s a great place to be in. But at what sacrifice? Some of the wisest leaders and people in this life that I know recognize this early in their lives, and it saves them heartache. And Jethro here is looking at Moses, going, “Bro, I’ve been there, man. I didn’t get the title of priest of Midian by just being the quiet guy in the back corner. I’ve been there.” And then there’s a danger in this: when we try to do everything ourselves, even the simple stuff, we become completely overwhelmed and we burn out. We have no energy left for the things that God has truly called us to. And we can’t fulfill the calling that God has for our lives.

So Jethro has some wisdom for Moses. He says this, verse 19: “Listen now to me, and I will give you some advice, and may God be with you. You must be the people’s representative before God and bring their disputes to Him. Teach them His decrees and instructions, and show them the way they are to live and how they are to behave. But select capable men from all the people, men who fear God, trustworthy, who hate dishonest gain, and appoint them as officials over thousands, hundreds, fifties, and tens.”

Jethro comes to him and says, “Hey, you need a team of people to help you.” But he doesn’t say you need to gather the most experienced, well-qualified, highly educated, degree-holding people. No. He says people who are capable. I want to inform you this morning: you are capable. You are capable. You are a capable person. He says there are three qualities that are required for those who are capable. One, they fear God. What does that mean? They have a spiritual priority in their lives. They have a heart of worship that they live every single day. Two, they are trustworthy. They are reliable people of integrity. They are dependable. You know you can depend on them to do something. You can tell them, “Hey, I need you to do this,” and you know it’s going to get done. Three, they hate dishonest gain. They have a moral purity in their lives. And they have biblical convictions that they live out, and can intercede and discern among disputes.

So if you check these three boxes, you are capable. God has a calling for you in your life, and you can live that out. You don’t have to have the title of pastor or a degree to be capable. God doesn’t view you this way. God has given you gifts, talents, and abilities, and ways that you can serve the church, build up the body, and care for those in your life. And if you love the Lord and you are a person of your word, you are exactly who God is calling to step up.

It continues on, verse 22: “Have them serve as judges for the people at all times, but have them bring every difficult case to you. The simplest cases they can decide themselves. That will make your load lighter, because they will share it with you. If you do this, and God so commands, then you will be able to stand the strain, and all these people will go home satisfied.”

See, there are two camps in this situation. One camp: Moses, keep doing what you’re doing. But you’re going to burn out. And then you won’t be a leader anymore. Because you won’t have the capacity, the ability, the time, the strength, anything to lead in a way that I have called you to, Moses. Or the camp of the bystander: the one who is standing in line every single day, waiting to go before Moses and to have their case settled. And that person would be the one who lets everybody else do the things while missing their own purpose and calling.

See, there’s a mutual blessing here in verse 20: “You will be able to stand the strain, and all these people will go home satisfied.” This is a beautiful picture of the church: that the pastors pastor in the way that they are called to, and the people serve and work with one another and care for the church body with one another. Paul writes about this in his first letter to the Corinthians, chapter 13, and he talks about the body of the church being an actual body itself. Is that the eye? The job of the eye is to see, right? We would laugh if we made sure to go, “Okay, I gotta listen to you. It’s not an ear, it’s an eye.” And an ear isn’t supposed to be able to see. And a hand is supposed to be able to grip, not like gripping with our eyelids.

There’s this old NFL commercial that’s hilarious where it talked about, like, Dak Prescott, and it was like a one-leg thing. And it was this idea that you can’t play football with just one leg. It’s like you need the whole team to be able to play football. And just like us, we need the whole team for the church. And Moses needed people at thousands, at hundreds, at tens, maybe even down to fives, to be able to care and to help and to work with the Israelite people. And when we do this, this is a beautiful picture of coming together, and the church is just built up and more glorified when that happens.

We have amazing people in this church that serve week in and week out. But for some of them, they need some breaks. They need some time off. They need to be able to come in here, especially if they’re in kids’ ministry. They need to be in big church with the big grown-ups and have grown-up conversations. They have an incredible heart to teach little children about who God is and how God loves them. And that’s their true calling and gifting. But that’s draining. They need to be built back up so they can go, and Scripture says they are spurred on in faith to keep going in their calling. But they can’t just always be pouring out. So we have to have teams where we can backfill and give them weeks off, and they can be here in church.

And I’ll say even this: if you’re serving on a regular basis and you have a week off, be in church. Don’t use that week off as the week that you just don’t come to church because you’re not serving. That’s not healthy. Saying you can’t go take vacations and have a week off and have a Sunday where you worship God from home? Yes. But you also need the body to worship with, to be around, to be encouraged, to spur it on. You can’t replace this with YouTube videos or podcast sermons. You can’t. And this world is heading in a trajectory where they think they can follow Jesus without ever talking to another Christian in person in their life, and it’s a lie from Satan. You will not survive in your faith without a church body.

So the question is: Are you the one standing in line for Moses to fix something? Or are you offering to be one of the tens, the fifties, the hundreds, to help carry the load? So we see this chapter, we see this beautiful full circle here where Moses’ testimony toward Jethro brings them into a revelation of Yahweh and a faith in God Almighty. And then Jethro has this ability to share faith with the Israelite people, and then to speak into the wisdom of Moses in his leadership, to give him wisdom. And that leads Moses to restructure the help and the care and support for the Israelite people, that glorifies God and lifts people back to God Almighty. And all the people are satisfied. What an amazing picture here.

So I have two closing questions for us this morning. The first of which is: What is your testimony? What has God done in your life that you should be telling other people about? Not just the victories, but also the hardships. No, don’t go out there and just be, “I gotta be a Christian. I’m just going to have a smile on my face, and life is just perfect.” If you follow Jesus for two minutes, you know life isn’t perfect with Jesus. But Jesus is perfect and He’s with you. And so what is your testimony? How are you sharing it with others? Maybe this week you need to tell somebody about your life and your hardship before Jesus, the moment you came to Jesus, and what your life looks like after Jesus now, living for Him. You’ve gotta have all those parts in there. Maybe you take some time this week and write it down. Because you never know when God might prompt you, “Hey. Go tell that person I love them.” “Oh Jesus, I don’t know. I didn’t practice my testimony this week.” Well, Chris told you on Sunday, “Might happen. You guys, like, you might really want to work on that this afternoon. Okay.” I’m praying for it to happen for you guys this week.

But then my other question is: How can you move from a consumer to a contributor? Because that line of people that were waiting for Moses, some of those people, God was prompting them to step up when Moses had open interviews for his new command. Are you going to be a consumer or are you going to be a contributor? Ask yourself: Am I standing in line waiting for a leader to fix something, or am I offering to help carry the load?

Your card today, the tear-off card on the program, says, “I’m taking steps from being a consumer to a contributor.” So I would encourage you this week: check that card, write your name down, drop it in the back. We’ve got ushers that’ll be in the back after service. And we want to be praying for you this week, this week specifically. And maybe that’s coming to one of the pastors and saying, “Hey, how can I help? What can I do?”

This week Pastor Andre started his new role as the hospital chaplain. And we’re excited for him. And we are so thankful; he could use your prayers. But there’s also a shift in his transition. And we’re shifting as pastoral staff in our leadership and responsibility. And so right now I find it very timely that God would put this sermon out there in the way that He delayed what was supposed to happen a month ago. This wasn’t even supposed to be this week. It’s funny how God lines some stuff up like that, right? So we’re going to need some extra help around here to carry the load. Are you willing and able to step up to be one of those who help carry the load?

Let’s pray. Jesus, we thank you for this morning. God, we thank you for Moses. But God, we also give you praise for Jethro. God, thank you for his wisdom that he was able to share with Moses at a critical point in the Israelite people’s lives. That yes, they had been wandering in the desert, and they’re about to wander for a whole lot longer than they even realize, God. But they needed a system in place to be able to care for the church and the body of the Israelites. And so, God, for us too, Lord, we need those able hands to help. And we also need to have our testimony, God.

Jethro was an old man, and he had heard the stories for decades and decades and decades and still didn’t believe. And it was through the power of Moses’ testimony that brought Jethro to faith in Yahweh Almighty the very first time. God, may our testimony lead people closer to You, Jesus. God, may we work on our testimony to have a time ready to share, not to get nervous or anxious, but just to be able to share of what You have done in our lives, God. We thank you for that. We thank you for being the ultimate sacrifice and the atonement of our lives, God. We praise You. We worship You. We thank You today. We love You. Amen.

Moses: Part 4

Moses: Learning To Trust The God Who Leads - Part 4

Exodus 4:1-17, 7:1-6

SERMON TRANSCRIPT

Well, I pray that you've been enjoying our Moses series so far as we're taking a deeper look into Moses' life and how God has been doing work and still does work. Over the course of Moses' entire life, not just at the beginning, but really from infancy to the very end, God continues to work in Moses, forming Moses, leading Moses. And we're seeing how Moses learns to put his faith and trust in God. I want to point out that today is Communion Sunday, so we're going to be taking communion later. And every time we receive this, we're saying yes to a God who uses broken, hesitant, unqualified people. He invites to his table not just the confident and not just the polished, but people like Moses, who were hiding in a desert, not confident, and shelling out excuses to God. And if God can use Moses to give words, to stand before Pharaoh, and to give instruction, then it serves as a reminder that it's never about having it all together before we come to the Lord's table. So we'll partake together later, but I just want to encourage you to put your heart before God and to have his heart for you at the forefront of your mind this morning.

Last week, Pastor Chris spoke on Moses being called by God from the burning bush. And we learned that God laid it all out for him: the instruction, the step-by-step, the mission. And today I want to continue right after that in chapter four and take a deeper look at Moses' response. We'll have a little bit of overlap, but I really want to focus in on what's going on in Moses' heart and in his mind as he has just been called by God to something amazing. And we'll see if he's gung ho and all about it or if he's a little reserved and has some other feelings. So we're going to start in Exodus chapter four. If you want to turn there, it'll be on the screens as well. I'm going to go ahead and read chapter four, verses one through seventeen. It says this.

And Moses answered, "What if they do not believe me or listen to me and say, 'The Lord did not appear to you?'" Then the Lord said to him, "What is in your hand?" "A staff," he replied. The Lord said, "Throw it on the ground." Moses threw it on the ground, and it became a snake, and he ran from it. Then the Lord said to him, "Reach out your hand and take it by the tail." So Moses reached out, took it by the tail, took hold of the snake, and turned it back into a staff in his hand. "This," said the Lord, "is so that they may believe that the Lord, the God of their fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has appeared to you." Then the Lord said, "Put your hand inside your cloak." So Moses put his hand into his cloak, and when he took it out, the skin was leprous. It had become as white as snow. "Now put it back into your cloak," he said. So Moses put his hand back into his cloak, and when he took it out, it was restored like the rest of his flesh. Then the Lord said, "If they do not believe you or pay attention to the first sign, they may believe the second. But if they do not believe these two signs or listen to you, take some water from the Nile, pour it on the dry ground. The water you take from the river will become blood on the ground." And Moses said to the Lord, "Pardon your servant, Lord. I have never been eloquent, neither in the past nor since you have spoken to your servant. I am slow of speech and tongue." The Lord said to him, "Who gave human beings their mouths? Who makes them deaf or mute? Who gives them sight or makes them blind? Is it not I, the Lord? Now go; I will help you speak, and I will teach you what to say." But Moses said, "Pardon your servant, Lord. Please send someone else." Then the Lord's anger burned against Moses, and he said, "What about your brother Aaron, the Levite? I know he can speak well. He is already on his way to meet you, and he will be glad to see you. You shall speak to him and put words in his mouth, and I will help both of you speak, and I will teach you what to do. He will speak to the people for you, and it will be as if he were your mouth, and as if you were God to him. But take this staff in your hand so you can perform the signs with it." So God called.

And as we see in our passage, Moses answers, maybe not in the way that we imagine the great leader Moses responding. He's very reluctant, and he refuses to be the voice of God initially. He even tries to disqualify himself. Whether it's from his identity issues, his insecurity, or just his lack of trust in God, he tries to back out. I don't know if you've ever been in a situation, maybe called from God, or maybe just in a situation in life where you've tried to get out of it by disqualifying yourself. Maybe you say, "Hey, you don't know this about me, but I'm really not suited for the job that you're wanting me to do. Or I can't do it. I'm just not able to." I did this when I was in junior high. I played soccer growing up, and I transferred schools. It was junior-high soccer, but it was still very overwhelming to me. I was on this new team, and the coach had this plan. He was like, "I'm going to put you in." For the first, I want to say, three or four games, I just kept giving him excuses, like, "Well, my knee, my knee's not good. I'm a seventh grader with a bad knee, so I don't know if you can play me. I don't know if that's okay." For the first game, I was very adamant, and he didn't play me. And then finally he said, "Hey, you're going in." I was like, "Oh, I'll give you what I can. It's going to be maybe a minute or two. You're going to have to sub me right back out." But sure, I'll go. And I played, and I was fine. I did something, and he gave me this look after I cleared the ball. He kinda had this look, like, "I know. I knew this whole time. You're just saying these things." And I, and he could see the confidence grow. But I was trying to get myself out of that job. I was like, "I don't want to play. I'm going to give you all the excuses as to why I can't play." And Moses is telling God, as if God doesn't know. He's like, "Hey, you know, I can't really speak well. That's not my thing. I really think you should find someone else."

Moses is reluctant and refuses to be the voice of God. In verse one, we see his doubt, right? Burning bush, and he says, "What if they do not believe me?" And God meets Moses where he's at. And he—the small interaction shows to me how amazing God is. You can tell that Moses is starting to reel. He's starting to backpedal. Maybe, maybe physically, he's starting to back up a little bit. "God, I don't know." His head is spinning, again full of self-doubt. And I love that God gets him out of his head. On a personal communication level, watch what God does here. It's masterful work. God gets Moses out of thinking, from spiraling, and shifts his attention to something physical. He says, "What's in your hand?" You can just see, like, "Oh, you know, I was in my head, but oh, it's a staff. I have a staff in my hand." And I read that second half of that verse like Moses snapping out of it. Even though he continues to doubt, now his attention is on something, and God has called him to something. He's like, "Let me just work with you right here." God meets Moses' doubt with a plan.

So in verses three through nine, God's laying this out for him, step by step. You have a staff; it's going to turn into a snake. And it's going to go back to a staff. That's going to be a sign that this is divine. This is divine power. If they don't believe that, we have the hand that becomes leprous, which is a disease that there was nothing to do about in that time. There's nothing. But you're going to put your hand back in, and it's going to come back out restored. Again, something that could only happen by divine power. And if they still don't believe, then we'll do the Nile. We'll do the water that turns into blood. So God is giving him these signs to perform to the people so that they'll believe. And how does Moses respond? Is he like, "Okay, got it? No, now I'm good. Now I'm good. That was enough. That was all I needed, God." No. In verse ten, he responds, and all that and says, "Pardon your servant, Lord. I have never been eloquent." He comes up with another excuse. He's like, "I just don't think it's me. I still don't think it's me." He's timid. He's doubtful. Moses' doubt is winning over his belief in God. In that moment, what's going on inside of him? And now he uses his speech as the reason for not wanting to go. And his speech may have been a legit concern. Maybe he's telling the truth and saying, "I just, I'm not very good talking in front of people." But I think it's also safe to say that Moses clearly just doesn't want to obey God yet.

And the tone shifts here, I think. Because I think God kind of reads the first part of his plan as coming alongside Moses and saying, "Hey, it's okay. I've got you. Here's the plan." And now maybe God kind of brings Moses in front of him and is like, "Hey, who do you think made people with mouths and tongues and gave the ability to speak?" God is trying to show him that whatever he thinks is too big, it is not too big for God: "I can handle whatever I'm dealing with. Whoever I'm using, whatever they have with them, I can handle it." And God counters that with verse eleven, right? "Who gave human beings their mouths? Who makes them deaf or mute? Who gives them sight or makes them blind? Is it not I, the Lord?" I just love that in this moment God is telling him that he has power over all of that. And in a way, he's saying, "I'm the creator. I made you. And I have power to use whoever you are, inside and out, for my purposes."

Verse twelve, God addresses everything that Moses has brought up. He's not eloquent in speech; it's impenetrable. He says, "I'll help you speak. I'll teach you what to say." God is saying, "I'll give you everything you need." And now do we think Moses is saying, "All right, all right. You've addressed all of my doubts. I'm on board now. You got it, God." No. In verse thirteen, he says, "Pardon your servant, Lord. Please send someone else." Three times Moses denies God. Three times Moses rejects God's call. Three times Moses' doubt is too much, and he ultimately does not trust God yet. And he says, "Please send someone else."

We say this often in our preaching, but repetition in the Bible is important. It should ring like alarm bells for us that something is going off here. And in this case, it's emphasizing just how much Moses doesn't trust God and doesn't want to obey the call. Moses has reached the bottom of his downward spiral. He just kept going down and down in his anxiety until he landed there, and he didn't think he was good enough. And he clearly also thinks that God isn't powerful enough to help him to do what God says he'll do. But God doesn't give up on Moses. He's not happy, but he doesn't give up on him. And like another repetitive moment in Scripture, Peter in the New Testament denies Christ three times, and then the rooster crows, and Jesus doesn't give up on him. Right? To Peter, Jesus empowers and loves Peter and says that Peter will be the rock on which the church is built. God wants Moses to feel some conviction over this lack of faith and trust, but doesn't let Moses leave. God knows who Moses can be and how he can learn to trust him more. God has chosen Moses to be the leader of his people. And not even Moses will get away from God's plans.

Verse fourteen shows us that now God gets angry. We'll find out later in our series that it takes a lot to get God angry, so we know that Moses has really crossed the line here. And even though God is angry, he remains committed to Moses. And he sets up this new plan and brings in Aaron. "What about your brother Aaron? He can speak. He doesn't have this speech impediment, whatever it is. He'll be a part of the plan. I'll tell you, you'll tell Aaron, and Aaron will tell the people and speak to Pharaoh." So once again, we have Moses being met by God where he is. And Moses keeps moving. First, he's like really close to the bush and he's listening to God. And then maybe not physically, but in his mind, he's moving farther and farther away from God: "God, it's not me. God, it's not me." And God keeps coming to him and says, "No, I've got something for that. We'll do this instead, but you're still a part of this plan." It reminds me of what God does for Adam and Eve in the garden. Even though they rebelled against God, even though they brought sin into the world, even though they could no longer dwell with God the way that he intended, God still showed them compassion. And he didn't abandon them. He provided for them. And he still gave them love, grace, and provision. So God is doing the same for Moses here, providing for Moses, not abandoning Moses. He has plans that include Moses, and they will continue to work in Moses' heart and mind for the future.

Just looking at this interaction, I find it so comforting that God's anger does not mean the end of the relationship. But rather, it brings holy provision. Think of it: whenever you get angry with someone, or someone's angry with you, you've been on one side, and there's space, right? There's a divide that sometimes occurs, and maybe even to the point where that relationship is broken. And you're like, "I'm done. I've had it. We're no longer going to be together. This is not happening." But even in God's anger, he continues to reach out and provide whatever that person needs. God does not disqualify Moses. God does not end the call and say, "All right, you rejected. I'm moving on." God meets Moses where he is, continues to draw Moses in, and invites him to be a part of his redemptive plan.

I mentioned this in the first week, but I think it's worth mentioning again that this plan of God, and the work that he is going to do to develop Moses' faith and trust in him, is the precursor and foreshadows the work that God will have to do with Israel. So Israel, too, will have their own doubts, their own times of not trusting God yet. So I love seeing that we're getting this; we're going to see this now: God doesn't give up. God doesn't stop. And there are going to be moments where Israel really makes God angry. And yet God continues to reach out and says, "But you're my people. I'm committed to you. We're going to continue along the plan." And he does this so that they would come to love and trust and put their faith in him. He does it for Moses, he does it for Israel, and it's the same work that he's doing for us today. That even when we doubt and try to disqualify ourselves, try to get out of what God may be calling us to, God still reaches out and says, "Nope. I'll meet you where you're at. You moved over there now. You've got a whole other set of issues that you're bringing up. I'll meet you there. I'll address all of that. I'm bringing you along." And he does that so that our faith and our trust in him will grow.

So we see in this first part just how reluctant and resistant Moses is. And maybe that resonates with you. Maybe there's been times in your life where you've been reluctant or resistant to follow where the Spirit is calling you to. Well, let's keep following Moses and see how he gets along. I want to move along in the story just to show how much work God does. So I'm going to go through chapters five and six. I'm just going to summarize them. We're not going to read them all together, but I want to share with you what happens.

So in chapter five, Moses and Aaron head down to Egypt. And in this section, we're going to see how Moses blames God for an apparent failure. He's going to learn in this moment. Moses obeys God; that's good. He gathers all the elders of Israel. Aaron talks to Moses, Moses talks to Aaron, and Aaron tells Israel everything. They perform the signs. And do we know how the people respond? Well, they respond positively. They worship God. So far, everything is going according to the plan, just as God said it could go. And the people of Israel feel seen and heard because, if you remember from Exodus one, they had been crying out to God in their slavery, in their state, and saying, "God, do you see us? Help us." And can you imagine this moment where this guy from the desert comes and says, "I've heard from God," and he performs these signs? And for the first time, generations of slaves crying out with no answer, and now they see and hear from God. And God says, "I've heard you. I've heard your cries, and I have a plan." And I just imagine the hopes swelling within them in this moment. I was just like, "Oh my goodness, God is real. God is real, and he's going to do something. He's going to do something for us. We don't have to live in this state of slavery anymore." So it's a huge moment. I think Moses is on a high right now. He's like, "This is so good. Man, God, yes, you told me to go. The people of Israel worshiped."

So then they go to Pharaoh, and Pharaoh has the opposite reaction. He disregards Moses and Aaron completely and even makes the work harder for Israel. It used to be that straw was given to the Israelites to make bricks for the buildings, but now Pharaoh says, "You have to go get your own straw, but you still have to make the same amount of bricks." So he has doubled their work with the same expectation. This is not what Israel had in mind. This is not what Moses had in mind. And so Moses in this moment was met with resistance. And the fallout for him is crushing. The people of Israel, now living in this new reality of harder work, absolutely despise Moses. They turn on him. Once they were like, "Moses, thank you for delivering this message from God." And after he went to Pharaoh, now they're saying, "Moses, you're the worst. You're the absolute worst. You made our lives so much harder. This outsider, the Hebrew-born, Egyptian-raised man who has been in exile, came into our lives and made our lives worse." So if you're keeping tabs on people's faith levels right now, Moses: way down. The people of Israel, coming from a real big high, way down at the bottom. No one really is trusting God or has faith in him that he can do what he says.

Moses begins doubting God again. The people of Israel are doubting Moses and therefore doubting God. Both Moses and the people seemed to have this expectation of immediate success. And just as quickly as they came to trust and worship God, they turned to complain to God. And this is going to be a pattern. If you read Exodus, you see this over and over again. There are these highs: "Oh God, you're the greatest. You delivered us. You did something amazing." And then the next verse, they're saying, "God, we were better off in Egypt. We should have kept being slaves." It's just the cycle, and it starts here. And how many of us have done this or something similar? Maybe we've prayed a prayer and seen God move, felt that rush of faith. And then one hard week later in our lives, we're doubting that God is with us. And the whiplash of our faith just moves us farther from trusting in him to really just doubting him, saying, "God, did you even hear me?" We forget the good week that we had, and that last hard week is the only thing that we can see when we look at God. Well, Moses in his whiplash, he blames God for this apparent failure.

And in chapter five, verse twenty-two, it says, "Moses returned to the Lord and said, 'Why, Lord? Why have you brought trouble on this people? Is this why you sent me?'" Oof, Moses. This is a man. Before we get all on his case, which we should, because this is failure, he is feeling crushed. He's feeling possibly even betrayed, set up for failure. He's saying, "God, was this your plan all along? I thought that it meant this. And now this is happening, and God, it's your fault." Now, maybe you, too, have experienced moments where you have obeyed God and only for it to immediately seem like it backfired. And you say, "God, I obeyed you, and now my situation is worse. Is this what you had in mind the whole time? Is this what obedience to you looks like? Does my life get worse?" And maybe that makes you hesitant to obey God again. Maybe it makes you angry, or you feel hurt. Moses was already feeling insecure, and then this happens. He's ready to shut it down. He's emotionally detaching from this relationship and this call from God. The Israelites are mad at Moses. Moses then turns and gets frustrated with God.

And so how does God respond? Well, in chapter six, God reassures Moses again and continues to meet Moses where he is. And he does this by restating who he is and what he will do. He doesn't just give Moses information, though. We read it as information. We say, "Okay, this is what God's going to do, this is what is going to happen, this is who God is," but he reassures Moses with his presence and with his personhood. His presence communicates who God is. This is kind of hard for me to explain, but I hope that you get it. That when you have these moments of doubt and you ask God, and then you read Scripture, there is a spiritual moment happening there where God can speak through Scripture. And even though it is just words on a page, it is not just words on a page. It is truth that speaks to our hearts and speaks to our doubt. And in that moment, we can feel the presence of God, saying, "God, you're with me. I don't understand the full picture, but you are with me." God is patiently regrounding Moses, remembering where he is, and saying, "This is who I am; this is what I will do." And he tells Moses to go tell Israel to go back and to tell them, "I'm going to redeem them, not just with words, but with mighty acts. Mighty deeds that will show the people that I am the God above all gods." And so Moses does this.

But in chapter six, the people of Israel don't have ears to hear. It's just too much. What Moses had already done, and the effects of that, and their worst slavery situation, they're not ready to listen again. But God keeps with the plan and says, "Now go to Pharaoh again." And in chapter six, verse twelve, we're feeling for Moses right now. He's hurt. He had to go to Israel, but Israel didn't listen. And God says in chapter six, verse eleven, "Go tell Pharaoh, king of Egypt, to let the Israelites go out of this country." But Moses said to the Lord, "If the Israelites will not listen to me, why would Pharaoh listen to me? Since I speak with faltering lips." And I think we just sense the frustration, like all those emotions that Moses is feeling; he just lays it out there. Like, "God, I don't want to do this. If this didn't work and you told me to go do this, why would this work? Why would me going to Pharaoh do anything?" And as I was reading this week and preparing, I just feel with Moses. He's not right in what he's doing, but I feel with him.

I think we've all had moments where we just do not get it, and we're going to God saying, "God, why? I don't like it. I don't like your plan. I don't think it's going to work. I don't want to obey you." I know it can be tempting to think, "Moses, you've already seen a burning bush; you've seen signs. How much evidence does it take to turn your doubt into obedience?" But, church, don't we find ourselves in that same position? And while God is gracious enough to give us proof, to give us evidence at times, it will always take faith. It will always mean trusting in God. All the evidence added together still doesn't equate to an automatic belief. We will always need faith. It will always require us to put our trust in him, to surrender to him, and to believe that God is who he says he is and that he can do what he says he can do.

I want us to read together kind of the bookend of this moment of transformation in Moses' life. So chapter seven, verses one through six. I'll start actually in chapter six, verse twenty. It says: "Now when the Lord spoke to Moses in Egypt, he said to him, 'I am the Lord. Tell Pharaoh, king of Egypt, everything I tell you.' But Moses said to the Lord, 'Since I speak with faltering lips, why would Pharaoh listen to me?' 'See, I have made you like God to Pharaoh, and your brother Aaron will be your prophet. You are to say everything I command you, and your brother Aaron is to tell Pharaoh to let the Israelites go out of his country. But I will harden Pharaoh's heart, and though I multiply my signs and wonders in Egypt, he will not listen to you. Then I will lay my hand on Egypt, and with mighty acts of judgment I will bring out my people, the Israelites. And the Egyptians will know that I am the Lord when I stretch out my hand against Egypt and bring the Israelites out of it.' Moses and Aaron did just as the Lord commanded. Moses was eighty years old, and Aaron was eighty-three when they spoke to Pharaoh."

God explains to Moses again that he is God's representative, God's spokesperson. He's going to be the voice of God. And that he's got control over the situation. He says, "Here's what to do." And in verses three and four, God also gives Moses the heads up that Pharaoh will not be receptive to this. He's addressing the part that Moses got tripped up on before. I think Moses was expecting, "As soon as I speak your words, God, they should take immediate effect. And that other party, whoever you're talking to, they should listen." But Moses learns that speaking the truth does not guarantee a receptive audience. He learns that it's not about him. It's about God. And it's not for him to take things personally. He needs to stop thinking that he's the problem that could ruin God's plan. And he learns that speaking the truth, the words given to him, does not guarantee that it will be heard, received, or obeyed. And that's hard for Moses.

And I think that can be hard for us. When we have something that we know is the truth and we state it, we expect that truth to take immediate effect: "Because this is so, therefore you should immediately get in line." He's spoken the truth multiple times now, to the people of Israel, to Pharaoh, and nothing has changed. In fact, things got worse. And now the people of Israel won't even listen to him. And it made Moses want to quit. Have you ever been in Moses' position? Have you ever felt like your words, your influence, should equate to more change around you, and it just doesn't? Have you ever been offended or so dismayed when your words of truth have fallen on deaf ears? And you would start to internalize those things and say, "Am I the problem? They're the problem. Something's the problem. There's a problem here. Is it me? Is it them?" But we need to recognize that we may not have a receptive audience. And that's not in our control. That may not be up to us. And we may have to not care about that. Our obedience to God is what matters. We cannot control other people, and we are not responsible for how it is received. We are responsible for our actions, and our actions are to obey what God has called us to do.

In Moses' case, he may have viewed success as Pharaoh heeding God's word and saying, "Oh, of course, let me just go ahead and free all these people right now." But what will happen, by God's way and with Pharaoh hardening his heart, is in verse five, when it says, "The Egyptians will know that I am the Lord." Things have to go the way that they're going to go, because God has a plan. And what Moses didn't factor in at all is that through this foreseen failure, God's name is actually going to be spread. The people of the world are going to know who Yahweh is. Even though Pharaoh will deny and reject God, his people will learn about Yahweh. God explicitly predicts the resistance and the outcome ahead of time. And this isn't God making the most of an unexpected setback. I want us to catch that. This is not God saying, "I know my plan is going to get messed up and I got to adapt." No. God is telling Moses, "This will go badly, and it's part of the plan. I'm not surprised that Pharaoh is going to reject you, Moses. And Moses, you should learn to not be surprised either. But trust that I know what I'm doing."

And then we read in verse six, and I want to mark this as the bookend, right? So Moses has been reluctant and resistant, but in verse six, without complaining, without pushback, and without trying to disqualify himself, Moses obeys God. And he goes. Moses learns that obeying God means trusting God. Moses is officially in the process of being formed to who God wants him to be. And this is one of the most prominent ways that God works in the life of Moses and in the lives of us today. Obeying God doesn't mean we understand how it all plays out. Obeying God doesn't require that it goes in a successful way by the way we define success. Obeying God means trusting and following God. And in our obedience to God, in our trusting God, the Spirit works in our heart, mind, and soul, and we are formed to be more like him. So the next time God calls, we're more ready to say yes.

So as we close, I just want to ask us this: Are we obeying God? Or is there a lack of trust that is keeping us from obeying God? Are you trying to disqualify yourself from what God is calling you toward? Because as we learned with Moses, if God's called you, he's not letting you off the hook. And the sooner we get that, probably the easier it is for us. This week I want to encourage you to trust and obey God. And maybe that area where you are feeling resistance, maybe where you are hesitant or leery about following God, maybe that's where God's saying, "That's the biggest step of faith that I need you to take right now." Moses learned to be the voice of God to the people, to the nation of Israel, and to the nations around Israel. And he learned that it wasn't about him. He was right. He wasn't qualified. He wasn't even eager to serve, but he learned that to be the voice of God, the first step was to trust God and obey God. The best way that Moses was to serve God was to obey him and trust him. And that's the biggest way that we can serve God today. To be a voice of truth, to be a loving neighbor, to be a source of compassion in a hostile world, to be the hands and feet of Jesus to the people in your lives, the best thing that we can do is to obey and trust God in every moment, in every day, and in every situation. So will you obey and trust God this week?

Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we come before you, Lord. And whatever we have on our hearts, whatever your Spirit is speaking to us right now, Lord, I pray that we would lay that back before you. God, if there are situations that you're calling us to that we are hesitant about, whether we are insecure, whether we feel unable to do it, or maybe we're just doubting you, God, and saying, "God, I don't know about your plan," I pray that you would help us in our faith. That you would help us to trust you, to know that it is not about us. And that if you are calling us to something, to someone, to a situation, whatever it may be, that you will provide. God, help us where our faith is weak, where we need more. Give us more faith. God, give us confidence in moments where we sense your Spirit calling and we need to take a step of faith. Help us to trust you. And that in our obedience, in our trust, you would continue to form us to be more like you. And that you would use us for your kingdom, for your good, and for your glory. Help us to learn from Moses.

Moses: Part 3

Moses: Learning To Trust The God Who Leads - Part 3

Exodus 3:1-21

SERMON TRANSCRIPT

I am excited to bring us on to week three of our Moses series. The last couple of weeks, we kind of got a jump right into Moses. In the first week that Pastor Andre shared, Moses couldn't even talk. So by week three, Moses is about 40 years old. It is a big jump. But we are in our Moses series, and really what the title says is learning to trust God, the God Who Leads. The heart of this series and teaching time each week is to have us, through the lessons, leading, and teaching of Moses himself, glean some more on how we can walk more in the calling and passion that God has placed within us.

So we are going to be in Exodus chapter 3, the famous story of Moses and the burning bush. If you guys had maybe been around church, you have probably heard of the story of Moses before, but we are going to jump right into this this morning. Last week, Pastor Lauren kind of set the scene of where we are: Moses, growing up in Pharaoh's household, knew that he was a Hebrew. He knew he was not of Pharaoh's lineage. He knew he was not Egyptian. And yet, growing up in Pharaoh's house, he had these mixed emotions. I can see at times: "I am in the house of Pharaoh. Pharaoh has given to me, provided for me, and allowed me to live through his daughter, who rescued him from the Nile. And yet I know that I am not like the people that I live with. I know I am like those whom I would look out in Egypt and see under bondage and slavery."

And so as Moses was out, he had an interaction with an Egyptian soldier who was beating up on a Hebrew, and he ended up killing this Egyptian soldier. And he buried him. He tried to hide it, and it came out. And so he just fled. He just ran away. He ran to this place in the land we are going to be in today, called the land of Midian. And little did he know that God was building his story. That even in the midst of sin and murder and the taking of a life that God does not condone, God is in the redemption business. And God was going to take Moses to a place where he thought he was running away. That was actually a place where he is going to be built up and sent back into Egypt to ultimately change the trajectory of the future of the world and the Israelite people.

And so Moses here has been chilling. He is about 40 years old or so. He is just living his best life. And he is a shepherd working for his father-in-law. I don't know about you. Has anybody ever had to work for their father-in-law before? I have. It can be contentious at times, even with the best father-in-laws. I am blessed with an incredible father-in-law, and I am still thankful for him and his life, but I pastored under him, under his staff for a season. And there were times where the family got in the way. That is just how it was.

And so we come to Moses. He has literally changed his identity. He is now the lowest of the low, a bottom-rung shepherd working for his father-in-law. And we know this is being the lowest of the low because the Egyptians themselves actually loathed shepherds. They viewed it as the worst job that you could ever have on planet Earth. And Moses willingly takes this on. He is hiding. He is settled in life. He is just trying to probably live out his days, not having to do anything else. He meets a wife, gets married. But he is just out in the wilderness by himself, shepherding.

And so we come onto the scene. Exodus chapter 3, starting in verse 1. It says, "Now Moses was tending the flock of Jethro, his father-in-law, the priest of Midian. And he had led the flock to the far side of the wilderness. So as he was shepherding by himself alone, he was trying to be away from everybody even further. And he came to Horeb, the mountain of God. But he did not know that. There, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in flames of fire from within a bush. Moses saw that, though the bush was on fire, the fire did not consume it. So Moses thought, like probably every dude, fire—must go see. I will go over and see this strange sight, why the bush does not burn up."

So Moses here is no longer an Egyptian prince. He has run away. He is a shepherd, living his life of obscurity. He is working for his father-in-law, trying to live an isolated life in Midian, but even isolated more so, taking the sheep as far as he possibly could. And then all of a sudden, he comes across a bush that is on fire. Now, I don't know the setting of all of this. I would assume this was maybe a familiar sight, whether it was finding another fellow shepherd out cooking over a fire, providing light at night. I mean, Moses was no stranger to fire. He probably had a fire every single night. But when you begin to build fires, you begin to quickly learn that bushes are not good long-term fires. Bushes might be good to get a fire started because they burn hot, fast, and quick. But you soon need to put other denser, thicker wood on it to sustain a fire for the long term. And so for Moses to see this bush that is burning, and seeing it not being quickly consumed, he goes, "What is going on here? Have I found a magical bush that I can go sell to other people to make millions and millions of dollars?" No, God is doing something here. And what I love about this is I see an extraordinary God showing up in an ordinary scene with a divine appointment for Moses.

God uses unusual circumstances to pique our curiosity and to bring us closer to Himself. I bet you Moses had no idea what he was walking into when he saw that bush on fire. His whole life was about to change in an instant. But God often interrupts our settled lives to redirect us toward His purpose. I think for some of us, we can get caught up easily in the quiet life, right? Go to work, do my job, go home, be with my family, do my thing, don't make a lot of noise, catch my paycheck, live my life out till retirement, live a quiet retirement, and then go be with you, Jesus. A lot of people have signed up for that. But I think the reality is that that is not the calling as a disciple of Jesus. See, when we accept Christ into our lives, into our hearts, and we become a disciple in the everyday stuff of life, there is a greater shift that happens within us. The one that Jesus Himself calls dying to yourself. See, for Moses, he had gone all in on this shepherd life. But God used this ordinary to draw him toward the extraordinary in him.

Continue on, verse 4. When the Lord saw that he had gone over to look, God called to him from within the bush, "Moses, Moses." And Moses said, "Here I am." "Do not come any closer," God said. "Take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy ground." Then He said, "I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob." And at this, Moses hid his face because he was too afraid to look at God.

When I first read this story, and looking at it, I am going, "Man, man, God had to call to Moses twice." I mean, the reality is I would probably walk up to this thing and have tunnel vision because I would have like a thousand questions, like instantly: How is the bush burning? Who lit the fire? Are they around here? Am I in danger? Why is the fire not burning up? Why is the fire not getting bigger? What is happening right now? Is there a lightning storm? Do I need like a thousand questions? And so I thought this was like just Moses being tunnel vision, not hearing. You know, sometimes you get so fixated on something that the whole world around you tunes out, and you are just like, "But what?" Come to find out, in the culture and in the ancient world, this was a call of endearment. This was a way that someone who knew you, cared for you, and loved you would call you twice. And so God here is saying, even this, "Moses, Moses." God is calling him in a caring, loving way. And so Moses in turn replies with the same, "Here I am." And this was the correct answer to this divine call and a response and expression of Moses saying, "I am available, I am listening, you have my attention, God, I am here."

What I love is that Moses is receptive to this calling of God, even if his heart is still uncertain. And God says to him, "Take off your sandals." What does this mean? Well, in ancient culture, at places that are sacred, people would remove their sandals out of respect and honor to the place or the person. And so immediately when Moses is told, "Take off your sandals," he is understanding that he is not just hallucinating. He is not just out of water, just having a mirage in front of him, but that there is God who is speaking to him in this moment, in this place, and he is going, "Oh my goodness, something is happening here." And God's holiness requires a respectful response. And what we later come to know as Sinai is to be established as Yahweh's home, Yahweh's place. And God gives him the link to the lineage. Moses would have known through the caring and the teaching of his mother, even though he lived in Pharaoh's house. He would have known what it meant when God said, "I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob." Moses would have instantly known that those three phrases there, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, were the defining terms of who that God was. And God is identifying Himself to Moses in this moment.

And in these short few verses, we see the character of God. We see that God is personal and caring. "Moses. Moses." We see that God is holy and deserving of respect. "Take off your sandals. You are on holy ground." And we see that God is being faithful to His commitment. He is unwavering because He made a covenant with Abraham that said, "I will care for you and your descendants." And yet they have been in bondage for generation after generation in Egypt. And God goes, "I have not forgotten my commitment." See, the calls of God are rarely random. And they are often the fulfillment of promises made generations earlier. And Moses' initial response to God comes with a mix of obedience, understanding, reverence, and holiness toward who God is, the God that is speaking to him through this burning bush.

So the Lord keeps talking to Moses, verse 7. Then the Lord said, "I have indeed seen the misery of my people in Egypt. I have heard them crying because of their slave drivers, and I am concerned about their suffering. So I have come down to rescue them from the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up out of the land into a good and spacious land, a land flowing with milk and honey, the home of the Canaanites, Hittites, Amorites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites. And now the cry of the Israelites has reached me, and I have seen the way the Egyptians are oppressing them. So now go. I am sending you to Pharaoh to bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt."

God here uses this threefold awareness of what is going on. He says, as God, "I have seen their misery, I have heard their cries, and I am concerned about their suffering." This divine idiom is what God is saying: that He has seen and He has remembered and He has not forgotten, and that He is determined and that He will act. This is the character of God. God is not some big man upstairs that just kind of watches and throws lightning bolts every now and then and lets us suffer and just ha, ha, ha, "Look at those little horrible human-feeling people." But God is a personal God. He is a loving God. He is a relational God. And so maybe you are walking through it today. I don't know where you are at. Maybe the weight of life is just so much to bear. I want you to know that there is a God who loves you. There is a God who cares for you. There is a God who sees you in your tears, whether you share those tears with anybody else or not. He sees your pain. He sees your sorrow. He sees your anxiety and your worry. And He loves you. And He wants the very best for your life. And He wants to show up in powerful ways. And I want to pray for you that you would begin to listen for His still, small voice. I don't know how loud the bush was. I don't know if it was echoing or booming or what it was. But I know that in Scripture, sometimes there are moments where God's voice is very small and still. And there are times where it is booming and echoing. And there are times where it is every other thing in the middle of that. But I want to encourage you: you are not alone. You are not alone in this church family, and you are not alone with the Creator of the universe. He cares for you.

So Moses is getting a new job. He is getting reassigned. And Moses is being told: "Hey, you are going to go, and you are going to face Pharaoh, and you are going to pull my people out of slavery, and I am going to take them to their new home through you." And I think maybe at this point the weight of what is happening and what the words he is receiving are starting to settle on him. And Moses is being called to lead a nation in defiance of the most powerful man on planet Earth in this moment. We do not know exactly who the new pharaoh was. It says that the pharaoh had died and a new one had come into place while he had been away in Midian. But what we do know is there is a high probability that Moses knew who this new Pharaoh was. I would think maybe word had spread that there was a new Pharaoh, maybe it had not. But how lineages are passed on, the reality was when Moses grew up in the house of Pharaoh, he probably had interactions with this new Pharaoh. Could have been a brother, could have been an uncle, maybe it was a cousin, but probably somebody familial. And so not only is Moses being asked to go in and take on this insurmountable task, but at the same time, there is going to be a whole family dynamic that is going to be wrapped up inside of this whole thing. And if Moses' brain is not spinning at like a thousand miles an hour right now, he probably cannot even think.

But this call of God is rooted in compassion. Moses knew exactly what was happening to his family. He knew the oppression. He saw it firsthand. He knew how Pharaoh and the Egyptians were treating them in their slavery. And he knew that this was not just going to be an errand that he needed to run. God was not like, "Hey, I just need you to go pick up my dry cleaning for me, bud, and just come on back, grab a coffee for me on the way home." But this was going to change Moses' life. Either he was going to fail the moment he walked in to talk to this Pharaoh, bro, or, if it was true that Jesus and God were calling him to do what He was saying, he was going to be the leader of millions of people. And he was just a shepherd out there, just chilling moments ago.

And so Moses responds, finally finds some words to say back to God. But Moses says to God, "Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?" And God said, "I will be with you, and this will be the sign to you that it is I who have sent you. When you have brought the people out of Egypt, you will worship God on this mountain." Moses just thought he was just taking the sheep for a stroll. But God was giving Moses this picture of this place to say, "You are going to go, and you are going to come back here. This is where you will be, and my people will be able to worship freely."

But what does Moses say? He is like, "Who am I? I am just a shepherd, bro. Like, God, do you realize who you are talking to right here? Is there another bro on this mountain that this burning bush was meant for? It was not, certainly was not me. There is no way. You have me confused with another Moses out there. Like, there is another dude running around, big beard, scraggly hair, robe, staff. Yeah, that is the Moses that you want." And one might argue that Moses was being humble here. Okay, sure. But this also is a reflection on Moses' past failures. He is like, "God, do you not remember when I tried to do this 40 years ago and I killed the dude? And then I tried to cover it up, and then it came out, and then that is why I am here. Like, do you not remember that?" But here is the wonderful thing about all this. God does not promise to tell Moses that he is enough. Instead, God says to Moses, "I will be with you. I am going to be there every step of the way." And this focus shifts. It is less about the messenger's ability and more about the sender's presence with Moses.

And this is a fulfillment of a future sign: that Moses, "You are going to go. You are going to have success. And you are going to bring my people back here, and we are going to do an old show-and-tell at this burning bush spot. And I am here to tell you in that place, the location, because that is the God I am. And we are going to take you to a land, to your own land, a place where you can call home, a land flowing with milk and honey, richness in the fullness of all of life." But the process is going to take time. Trust does not happen overnight, right? Trust is a process. And it requires vulnerability and insecurity to be a part of the journey. It takes time. And this pushes back against our world, right? Our life. We want it like now. But like now now is too late. Like we wanted it the first now, right? You guys started to see the drones doing Amazon deliveries and Walmart deliveries now? Like, the thing that we thought, "Oh, that would be, like, now. Like, delivery within 30 minutes. Like, are you kidding me? This is nuts." That is why drive-throughs are so prominent. How fast can I mobile order my coffee, walk in, grab it, get out, and go on with my life? This is not the walk and the way of trusting in God. Now, God sometimes comes into our lives and just does a miracle in a moment. I have seen it happen. But most of the time it takes showing up Sunday after Sunday after Sunday, praying the same prayer over and over, going, "God, I do not understand how you are doing this, but I trust you. You did something cool with Moses, and I am talking to the same God. You guys realize that? Like, the same dude that we have been singing to and praying this morning is the same God that showed up with Moses in a burning bush on Mount Sinai."

Moses got more questions. As would I. Verse 13. Moses said to God, "Okay, suppose I go and do this. Suppose, hypothetically, I go to Egypt and I talk to the Israelites, and I say to them, 'The God of your fathers has sent me to you,' and they ask me, 'What is His name?' Then what should I tell them?" God said to Moses, "I am who I am." Not the most earth-shattering words, right? Get into that a little bit. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: "I AM has sent me to you." God also said to Moses, "Say to the Israelites, 'The Lord of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob has sent me to you. This is my name forever, the name you shall call me from generation to generation.'"

Moses wanted a little bit of clarification here. Because the culture and the world in which the Israelites lived within the overarching world of the pharaohs was a massively polytheistic world. What does that mean? That means there were gods for everything. Every single little thing, there was a God to. And so Moses rolls in and says, "God sent me to you." They are going to say, "Which one? Because we got like 300 over here. Pick your choice." And God here is saying, "I am the God. I am the one. I am." And we could spend months breaking this thing down into the history of it and the background, and God is literally in a moment almost redeeming all of humanity up to this point when He says this, and He says, "My name is Yahweh. I am. I am the one that was before. I am the one that sustained. I am the one that holds it all together, and I am the one who will be your only one going forward." And this was a re-revelation of the generations that had lost a measure of the knowledge of the true God. God. Remember, the Israelites are living in captivity. They do not have their own personal freedoms to be like, "Oh, hey, we are going to go have church on Sunday." No, the Egyptians are like, "Uh-uh, get back to building that pyramid now." They are living in the homes of the Egyptians as servants, and there is influence over them. There is persuasion on them. They do not have the freedom to teach freely and to pass down from generation to generation these purposes and these covenants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. They are being divided, all without any freedom to worship the God that they knew, and yet still God is hearing their cries, working in redemption, and leading them to their freedom. God is still moving, and He has not forgotten them. And Moses here is being called to be their rescuer and the physical representative of the Almighty Yahweh in their presence.

Moses has his doubts. I would have my doubts. Really, God? You are calling the wayward, fleeing, murderer shepherd to be the one to lead? Like, surely there has got to be somebody better. Surely there is somebody else out there. But God here is saying, "Moses, all the authority is given to you. And I am calling you to let my people go. Your identity no longer resides with Moses. Your identity resides with Yahweh. And that is the calling that you are going to live out and move forward in." Moses needed more than a promise from God. He needed some holy credentials. And so God lays it out here, verse 16: "Go assemble the elders of Israel and say to them, 'The Lord, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, appeared to me and said, I have watched over you, and I have seen what has been done to you in Egypt, and I have promised to bring you up out of your misery in Egypt into the land of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, a land flowing with milk and honey.' The elders of Israel will listen to you, and then you and the elders are to go to the king of Egypt and say to him, 'The Lord, the God of the Hebrews, has met with us. Let us take a three-day journey into the wilderness to offer sacrifices to the Lord our God.' But I know that the king of Egypt will not let you go unless a mighty hand compels him, through the Egyptians and all the wonders that I will perform among them. I will make the Egyptians favorably disposed toward this people, so that when you leave you will not go empty-handed. Every woman is to ask her neighbor and any woman living in the house for articles of silver and gold and for clothing, which will be put on your sons and daughters, and so you will plunder the Egyptians."

Moses said, "Hey, gather everybody up. Bring the elders together, the Israelites, talk to them, let them know, and then you are to go before Pharaoh and ask for this three-day journey." And what is funny about this is this was not just a staycation or a quick three-day holiday getaway. Like, Pharaoh was no dummy. Like, he knew exactly what this meant. That if he was to let them go for their so-called three days, they were not coming back. They were going to be gone and gone forever. And Pharaohs are not soft. You did not get to become a pharaoh by being cuddly and loving as a pharaoh. We read in Scripture that they were vicious, they were ruthless, and they were evil. But that was no match for the Creator of the universe. God Almighty Himself was going to make this happen. And He was, God was giving Moses the play-by-play even before it happened. I could only imagine Moses in the moment going, "Okay, I am going to do this. Okay, wow, the Israelite elders did listen to me. Okay, cool. Okay, so I guess I go to Pharaoh, and oh yeah, yeah, Pharaoh, he is mad. He is not going to let this happen." And then things start playing out. He is like, "God said that it was going to happen like that. And then God said it was going to happen like that. And then God said it was going to happen like that, like the wheels must have been just spinning in Moses' brain as things were happening, of like, maybe, maybe we are going to be leaving Egypt together. Maybe, maybe this is actually going to happen. God, you got the craziest plan, bro. And it is going to actually happen." And God says, "I will have this not through human persuasion, but it is going to be through a mighty hand, through God's wonders. Spoiler alert, we are going to talk about ten plagues. And they are going to be vicious. These are what the wonders are going to be. Also, did you know that all the ten plagues actually lined up with like their gods in their world? And God was also at the same time just letting them know, like, hey, your God, he is puny, he is false, he does not exist. Like, I am who I am. I am Yahweh, by the way. So cool." And in the midst of all of this, I love that last part of the scripture. God says, "Okay, by the way, like you are going to go through this. It is going to be hard. I am going to get you through it. And then you guys are going to have freedom. You are going to get to go. Oh, and by the way, get your bags ready because they are going to be loaded down with the goods. Not only are you going to have freedom, but I am also going to take the fortune and plunder from the Egyptians and just give it to you guys to just take care of your travels. Like, only God does that, right? Like, only God would be the one that, oh, by the way, yeah, you are going to get all that freedom and you are going to have the rescue and all that. Like, sometimes we pray for something and we are, we just hope for like one thing, and then God goes, 'Oh, by the way, it is going to have threefold on top of that.' Like, sometimes when we pray, guys, I feel like we just pray so small. This is the God of the universe that we pray to. We probably can have some bolder prayers." And so God is calling Moses not just to a task, but He is also providing the resources for Him along the way. See, that is how God does it. God provides the strategy and the guaranteed outcome and the means by which to sustain and have success when He calls.

I have got three final thoughts I want to share with us. First of which is trusting God is a process. This does not happen overnight. I can imagine that the journey that Moses had from where he was back to drop off the sheep with his father-in-law, like that was a weeks' journey. And I can imagine the conversations he is having with God along the way. The restless nights by a fire, watching a bush burn with a fire right there, to be like, "Okay, God, I remember that. I remember that time I saw a bush burning and it changed my life. Okay, I got you." And then to think about the journey from where he was in Midian all the way to Egypt, those conversations: "Hey, okay, God, so like, what about this? We are like, so, like, what if, what if, like, this happens? What am I supposed to do?" It is a process. It is a journey. It takes time. The call of God is sometimes sudden, but it is always disruptive. It is sudden for us. It is never sudden for God, right? God knows what He is doing. God is not surprised. God knew when Moses was being put in that basket in the Nile for him to be redeemed, God was like, "That is the one. That is the one that is going to change all of this and get my people free into their promised land, the covenant I made with Abraham. Him." But for us, the call of God is always disruptive. That is the reality. I do not want to be bearer of bad news, but when you signed up to be a disciple of Jesus, you signed up for discomfort. It requires sacrifice to be a follower of Jesus. It requires different priorities in our life. It requires us to shift what maybe we want to do in our lives to be in line with God's calling for us. And by the way, each of us has a calling from God. You may know it, you may not know it right now. Sometimes it changes. But the God that I know, the God of promises in Scripture, says like He said to Moses, "I will be with you every single step of the way." And so this calling, although uncomfortable and requiring sacrifice, is always covered in peace and hope. Jesus Himself in Matthew 11:30 said that He says, "My yoke is easy and my burden is light." I think we have misread this scripture to think the life of a Christian is easy. It is not. A yoke, although easy and a burden, although light, is disruptive. The yoke does not allow the animal to go wherever they want to go. And it requires sacrifice and reordering our priorities. But see, it takes our everything. I came across this, I thought this was amazing. Deuteronomy 6:5 says, "Love the Lord your God with all of your heart, with all your soul, and with all of your strength." Do you know who wrote Deuteronomy? Moses. Moses, I could imagine penning that scripture by the power of the Holy Spirit to go, "I have lived this life. I have walked the hard. I have given God my everything. And He knew what it meant to follow God. And the journey from here I am of Moses to obedience, it takes time, vulnerability, and divine reassurance." God did not say, "Go get it, Moses. You got this, buddy. I will see you on the other side of the Red Sea. Peace." No. He said, "I am going to be with you every single day, single step of the way." And from this moment of the burning bush until we read in Scripture where Moses is able to be given the blessing of seeing the promised land upon a mountain, before he breathed his last breath, the presence of God was with him and walked with him for the rest of his life. That is amazing. That is the life that I want. I want to walk every single day with God, knowing that He is there with me.

So three questions to close this out. Where is God calling you to step outside of your comfort zone? I do not think it is going to be going up to a Pharaoh and having to shout to him, "Let my people go." But maybe you are supposed to have a spiritual conversation with someone. Someone in your life, maybe a friend, maybe a neighbor, coworker, somebody, you are supposed to talk to them about God specifically. Maybe you are supposed to begin serving in the church in some way. Or maybe God is asking you to step up and serve more in this church. Maybe God is asking you to give your everything. And unfortunately, or fortunately, you decide that means your finances and tithing and living a life of biblical financial discipleship with God. Maybe it means inviting somebody to church, even if you feel that you might get rejected or ridiculed for it. Maybe it means joining one of our Bible studies. Maybe it is men here Tuesday nights, ladies Thursdays. We are working to get some small groups going in people's homes. Maybe it is stepping out and being a little vulnerable in those moments of saying, "God, I do my thing. I live my life. I come to church. I get my muffin and my coffee. I sit down. I worship. I hear the sermon. I pray. I go home. I take a nap, watch some football, and pray my fantasy team wins. It is still baseball season. You are the only one in here? No, okay, we got two. We got two. But maybe we are supposed to get uncomfortable. But we need to get comfortable being uncomfortable to step outside of our comfort zones." Number two, how has God already reassured you of His divine promises? Maybe a time in the past when God showed up big time in your life. It is like, same God. Same powerful Yahweh. Maybe you needed to hear this story this morning of Moses to be reassured of that thing God is tugging on your heart for you to do. God is like, "Hey, I took Moses from a bush to Pharaoh, promised land, Red Sea, manna, 40 years in the desert, all this stuff, promised land. You think I cannot take care of the thing that you are praying about right now? This Bible, this Scripture of God is filled with promises from Him. Maybe God is going to reassure you through a Christian friendship. Maybe somebody in this church has reminded you of who God is in your life. And that is why we gather every single week to be reassured and encouraged and built up. Reminded of who Yahweh is in our lives." What is the first step that you can take in that calling this week? Simple step. Baby steps. It does not have to be this huge thing. I am not saying you have to pick a billboard up and go shout with a megaphone on the corner of Sunset and Fairway. But there is a step that God wants you to take. And He is putting it on your heart right now. I do not know what it is. He knows. You know. How are you going to take a first step? And so I want you, this tear-off card on your program, we want to be praying for you this week in that. And so there is a box down there that says, "I am stepping outside of my comfort zone to obey God's call on my life." We wanted to put this week in there, but we ran out of room. So it is this week, okay? We are going to have some ushers in the back, and have some buckets, and we want you to write down on this card and mark that checkbox. And we are going to be praying with you on what that is. Maybe also you can pray to be thankful that you did not get the call of Moses in your life, along with praying for obedience for the calling that God is asking of you right now.

Let us pray. Jesus, we thank you for your servant Moses. God, we are grateful for his heart and willingness, even though in the midst of all the questions in the world, and then some, he still said, "Here I am." So God, may we learn to trust in you and your leading in our lives even more this day. May we step out of our comfort zone this week, however that may look for us. God, there is a variety of ways that we can do that. And you are placing that on our heart right now in this moment. So I pray, God, that by the power of your Holy Spirit, you would begin to reveal it, if it has not already. But God, you would build up a boldness and a strength to make that happen this week, Jesus. Lord, we thank you for your promises of who you are, that you hear us, you see us, you hurt for us in the times that we hurt. And that, God, you have a calling, you have a plan for our lives for the redemption of this world. God, may we be faithful to play the small part in that. This week, we love you, Jesus. Amen.

Moses: Part 2

Moses: Learning To Trust The God Who Leads - Part 2

Exodus 2:1-25

SERMON TRANSCRIPT

Good morning. We are so happy that you are worshiping with us today. We are in our Moses series, and we just started last week. Buckle up. It is a hefty series, but it is going to be so good. We are just on week two, so we still have so much more to go, and I am so excited for what we are going to learn through this series.

We are really parking a lot in Exodus during this series, but really, we just want to learn from the life of Moses. He is kind of one of those big heroes of the faith, so we are diving into his life, his ministry, and his time leading the Israelites, and then also how he learned to trust the God who leads—trust in Yahweh. And we are actually going to take quite a bit of a look at that today. But we want to learn from his life, from his experience, and from God, who led him in this.

Last week, Pastor Andre really kicked us off with Moses's birth story: how his mother put him in the Nile, and how Pharaoh's daughter drew him out and then ended up adopting him. Then he lived as an Egyptian, and God was really faithful through all of this. He took something that was really awful—an order to kill all the newborn baby boys—and turned it into something good. And He was faithful in that.

As we see God's faithfulness throughout Moses's life, it encourages us to believe that He has been faithful before and will be faithful again. Just as we can look in our own past and see His faithfulness up to this point, we can trust that He will continue to be faithful.

So today, we are looking at the second half of chapter 2 in Exodus, but we are doing a bit of a time jump here. We just looked at his birth story last week, but in this part, when we are picking up in verse 11, he is 40 years old. So we jumped a lot of time. We don't really know from the Bible what happened in that time period, but we know he lived in Egypt and that he was in Pharaoh's household. That is what we know. We are picking up in verse 11 today.

Even though we are jumping a lot of time, these verses are really critical for us to understand the broader part of the story that we will continue to get into, and also who Moses is. We are getting to know our guy Mo just a little bit better today. So these verses, I think, are really important. It shows us that Moses had some identity issues. I mean, you could probably classify it as a crisis. He was having an identity crisis. He thought he knew who he was until he didn't. He thought he was confident in who he was until he wasn't.

I mean, he was born a Hebrew, but he was raised as an Egyptian, even though he still knew he was a Hebrew. I think a lot of people assume that he didn't realize he was a Hebrew until he was an adult. He knew. His name, Moses, is Hebrew. He looked like an Israelite, and he grew up... I have a feeling Pharaoh didn't let him forget that he was an Israelite. I don't know; we don't know that in Scripture. That might just be me reading into it. But Pharaoh's own daughter broke the law and kept a Hebrew baby. That might put some feelings in Pharaoh, right? That might make him feel a certain way about Moses. So I have a feeling that maybe there was some tension there, maybe a little bit of a rift in the relationship. So Moses was already kind of starting from behind in knowing who he was. Therefore, when we encounter him in the second part of chapter 2, he doesn't really know how he identifies.

So let's read Exodus chapter 2, starting in verse 11. It says, "One day, after Moses had grown up, he went out to where his people were and watched them at their hard labor. He saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, one of his own people." So you see, he already claims them as his own. "Looking this way and that, and seeing no one, he killed the Egyptian and hid him in the sand. The next day, he went out and saw two Hebrews fighting. He asked the one in the wrong, 'Why are you hitting your fellow Hebrew?'"

The man said, "Who made you ruler and judge over us? Are you thinking of killing me as you killed the Egyptian?" Then Moses was afraid and thought, "What I did must have become known." When Pharaoh heard of this, he tried to kill Moses, but Moses fled from Pharaoh and went to live in Midian, where he sat down by a well.

So, he was an Egyptian with all the rights and privileges of being an Egyptian citizen, but in this story, he defends the Hebrew and considers him one of his own. He was already kind of identifying with the Hebrew people, and in this instance, he tried to take justice into his own hands, even though he knew the way he was doing it was wrong. I mean, it says he looked around. He was trying to make sure no one was watching when he killed the Egyptian. He knew what he was doing wasn't right, but he was trying to take justice into his own hands, trying to be the hero here and the savior of the people.

And then he did it again the next day when the two Hebrews were fighting. But by then, his sin had been found out. See, he seemed confident that he was supposed to save the people, but the Hebrew people did not seem to be on board with that plan. He was shocked when they weren't ready to just receive him as their savior and redeemer. They didn't see him as their leader. They just saw him as an Egyptian, someone in Pharaoh's household that was oppressing them.

Now, we are not sure. We don't know what happened during this time, and we don't know if Moses specifically received a message from God telling him that Moses would lead the people. But for whatever reason, he felt that it was his duty. And his intent in killing the Egyptian wasn't necessarily wrong, in the sense that he was genuinely trying to defend the Hebrew. And from what we understand from the original text, the Egyptian was acting in a violent and aggressive way toward the Hebrew. He wasn't just saying some mean words, okay? He was violently attacking this Hebrew, and so Moses felt he needed to step in.

That wasn't necessarily the bad part. Defending the Hebrew wasn't wrong. It was how he went about doing it. The book of Acts actually implies that Moses felt like he should try to save the Hebrews.

Acts chapter 7, starting in verse 23, says, "When Moses was 40 years old—that's how we know he was 40—he decided to visit his own people, the Israelites. He saw one of them being mistreated by an Egyptian, so he went to his defense and avenged him by killing the Egyptian. Moses thought that his own people would realize that God was using him to rescue them, but they did not.

"The next day, Moses came upon two Israelites who were fighting. He tried to reconcile them by saying, 'Men, you are brothers. Why do you want to hurt each other?' But the man who was mistreating the other pushed Moses aside and said, 'Who made you ruler and judge over us? Are you thinking of killing me as you killed the Egyptian yesterday?' When Moses heard this, he fled to Midian, where he settled as a foreigner and had two sons."

He was trying. The intention was good. He was trying to save the Israelites from their slavery, but he wasn't doing it in the right timing or in the right way.

So not only did Moses have these ethnic identity issues, now he was having an identity crisis of his purpose, of his calling, of what he was supposed to do. So he fled Egypt. He had to get away, partly to save himself because Pharaoh was going to kill him for killing the Egyptian, but also probably to get away from it all: the noise, the struggle. He didn't really identify with the Egyptians who raised him, and the Hebrews didn't really accept him as one of their own, so he just went away.

Picking up in verse 16, it says, "Now a priest of Midian had seven daughters, and they came to draw water and fill the troughs to water their father's flock. Some shepherds came along and drove them away, but Moses got up and came to their rescue and watered their flock.

"When the girls returned to Reuel, their father, he asked them, 'Why have you returned so early today?' They answered, 'An Egyptian rescued us from the shepherds. He even drew water for us and watered the flock. And where is he?' Reuel asked his daughters, 'Why did you leave him? Invite him to have something to eat.' Moses agreed to stay with the man, who gave his daughter Zipporah to Moses in marriage. Zipporah gave birth to a son, and Moses named him Gershom, saying, 'I have become a foreigner in a foreign land.'"

Again, lots of time hopping here. In like two verses, he met this family, got a wife, and had sons. So lots of time jumping here, right? But it's really interesting to see how he interacted with the daughters: that once again, he is trying to rescue them. Again, not a bad thing. But I think he's kind of trying to grasp at straws about who he is and what his role is. He's putting his identity in being the hero, in being the savior, in rescuing others. He did it much better this time. No one died that we know of in this particular instance. So there's improvement, right? But he's still just trying to figure out who he is.

It's also interesting that even though he fled Egypt and he was trying to get away from that, Reuel's daughters called him an Egyptian. So they saw him as an Egyptian. Now, maybe it was his clothes. Maybe it was some sort of cultural attire or accessory. Maybe it was the way he spoke. I imagine he had an Egyptian accent. So, however he spoke or what he looked like, they thought he was Egyptian.

See, the thing is—and what I want us to get from this is—that we can't hold on to an old identity when we're trying to put on a new one. We cannot hold on to our old selves when we're trying to put on the new identity that Christ gives us. Moses hadn't fully let go of that old identity. He got away for a time, but he hadn't fully let that go. And so that's why I think he was really struggling to understand who he was and in whom his identity should be put.

2 Corinthians 5:17 says, "Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: the old has gone, the new is here." Christ wants to bestow a new identity on us. But if we are holding on to our old identities, our old sense of self, the old words that were spoken over us, the titles that were given to us, the lies that we believed about our old selves, we will have a really hard time receiving the new identity that Christ has for us. See, Moses believed that he was a leader. He was perhaps even believing that he was the one to set the people free from slavery, but he kept placing that identity in the wrong things instead of in God, whom he was trying to serve.

We do this too. We put our identity in our jobs or our relationships or our roles, maybe in our acts of service, in what we can produce and show for our work. Those things are not bad things, but we cannot put our identity into them. We do that instead of putting our identity in God and in who He says that we are.

Once again, Moses found himself in a foreign land. He went from being a Hebrew to being an Egyptian, and now he is in Midian. He literally named his son Gershom, and that word sounds like the word for a foreigner there. That kind of connotes this idea of uncertainty, of loneliness, of being the odd one out. It was so prevalent in his life that he would name his son that.

Moses was searching for his identity pretty much his whole life up until this point, trying to figure out who he was. And I think he didn't know who he was because he didn't fully know Yahweh. Now, he knew the God of the Hebrew people. He knew that they served the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. But he did not know Him intimately enough to trust Him with his identity, with who he was meant to be.

Now, I don't mean to just spend this whole sermon dogging on Moses, okay? I believe his heart and his intentions are in the right place. And even Hebrews tells us this: "He had faith, and he persevered because he saw Him who is invisible."

It took faith to choose his Hebrew brothers and sisters over his Egyptian ones. It took faith to leave Egypt and all that it had to offer him—all the worldly pleasures and sin it had to offer him. It took faith to eventually trust in the God that his people knew and loved.

And for us, it takes faith to surrender our identity to God. It requires us, with our spiritual eyes, to see the One who is invisible and to trust Him. It takes faith for us to put off our old identities, to take off our old selves, and allow Christ to put on that new identity. It takes faith. It takes trust. It takes believing in the God who made us and who loves us.

But, even with all this faith, we know the end of the story, and we'll get there. We'll get to when Moses really, truly starts to trust God. But right now, Moses is struggling. In this part of the story, he's struggling to know who he is and what his role is in God's plan.

You know, Moses, I assume, had a lot of education. He learned a lot in his time in Egypt. You know, he was in Pharaoh's household. He probably had the best education money could buy. I imagine he was even being groomed for a position in leadership in the country, being technically Pharaoh's grandson. But he also learned a lot in Midian.

It's not clear yet in the text that we have, but we find out that Moses was in Midian for 40 years. So basically, he was in Midian for as long as he was in Egypt. So he started to go to work for Reuel, also known as Jethro. And Jethro was a priest. So Moses got to learn from his father-in-law what it meant to be a priest, because later on down the road, Moses was going to take on that role as one of the first priests of the Israelites.

He became a husband and a father, and I don't know any more refining roles than parenting and marriage. He became a shepherd. He was a shepherd for Reuel's flock. God used this time in Midian not only to grow Moses's faith, but to teach him the skills he was going to need for his time of leading the Israelites.

He needed the skills that it takes to parent and to be married. He needed the skills of a priest. He needed the skills of a shepherd. I imagine there were some times wandering in the desert that Moses was like, "Um, can I get my sheep back, please? Because these people are crazy." But he had to learn that skill of how to lead sheep. It was probably like herding cats out there, right? But there, he needed to develop these skills.

One commentary I read said, "Moses would become a shepherd in the family, leading a flock on their behalf. This period of training would both foreshadow his future activity as shepherd of the Jewish people and prepare him for the positive and negative aspects of leading a flock of people through the desert for 40 years."

He was discovering more about himself and more about who God is. He was being trained up in these skills that were needed for the role that was coming. And he was figuring out his identity. That's a lot happening for him in this time in Midian.

Because the beautiful thing about God is that God wastes nothing. He uses every stumble, every sin, every misstep, every mistake, every bad circumstance, every waiting period. He uses it all for our good and His glory. He wastes nothing. He's always working in the waiting. He was preparing Moses for the biggest leadership role of his life. And He wastes nothing in our time too. He wastes nothing of our issues and problems and missteps.

See, Moses wasn't just going to negotiate the release of the Israelites. He was going to lead them into becoming their own nation. All of this required training. He was not just going to lead them into being their own nation. He was going to lead them to trust the God that they felt had been quiet for 400 years while they were in slavery. That required time and time-built trust between Moses and God.

God wasted none of the time that He spent in Midian or even in Egypt. God wastes nothing. He uses all of it. The Bible says in Romans 8 that He works all things for the good of those who love Him, who have been called according to His purpose. How many things does He use? Some of them? All of them. All of them. He uses all things for the good of those who love Him.

So we talked a lot about Moses and what he did and what he is learning. But the beautiful thing about the Bible is that it says very little about us and actually says a lot about who God is. So I want to make sure we are focusing more before the end of today on who God is in all of this.

I've been doing just a personal devotional about the attributes of God. And I got to the attribute of His immutability. And for some reason, that one just really stuck out to me. God's immutability means that He does not change in nature, in character, or in purpose. He is unchanging.

Malachi 3:6 says, "I, the Lord, do not change; so you, the descendants of Jacob, are not destroyed." So He declares that He does not change. And then He tells us why. Because if He did change, they would have died. They would have been overtaken by another nation or by the detriment of their own sinful behavior and rebellion. But if God changed and forgot His covenant with them, they would have died. But praise the Lord, He does not change. He is immutable.

James 1:17 says, "Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows." God's nature and His character don't change like shifting shadows. He is constant, even in our changing circumstances, even when our identity seems to be changing.

The interesting thing is that we were actually designed to change. That's how He made us. You know, we don't all look like a bunch of babies anymore, right? We change. We physically change as we grow up. Our brains change and develop. Our reasoning, our cognitive ability, and our decision-making skills develop as our brains develop. Our personalities change sometimes in various ways through various circumstances. Our beliefs can change. Our sanctification, the process of us becoming more like Jesus: we are spiritually changing. So God made us to change.

He put seasons into the world for a reason. There's a time for rest. There's a time for work. There's a time for production. There's a time for everything. But that only works when there is a constant, when there is an unchanging being who is the center of everything, who controls it all, who is sovereign over all the changing things.

In this study on His attributes, there's a story that I think illustrates this well, about how the Norwegian fishermen were trying to chart their trade courses. But with all the rocky waters or the kind of chaotic waters, they didn't want to chart it by the water; they wanted to chart it by the rocky shore. They felt like that was a safer bet to chart and make their maps based on the course of the shore.

Well, over the years, they realized that they were slowly drifting, that they weren't actually getting to their destination that had already been mapped out. And the problem was that, unbeknownst to them, the shore was changing. Even though it seemed okay, steady, and permanent, it seemed like a good constant thing to measure and chart by. It was slowly changing over time from wind and storms and the crashing waves. And it got them just enough off course that they ended up at the wrong destination.

We do this too. We think that we are putting our identity and our trust in things that seem good and right and true and sure. But the only constant is God. He is the only thing that is steady and immutable. He doesn't change like the seasons or our circumstances. He is the only constant that we can confidently put our faith in.

And because He is constant, we know that He keeps His promises. He's always faithful. He's been faithful in the past; He'll be faithful again. We can put our identities in this safe and sure place.

Let's read the last part of chapter 2, starting in verse 23. It says, "During that long period, the king of Egypt died. The Israelites groaned in their slavery and cried out, and their cry for help because of their slavery went up to God. God heard their groaning, and He remembered His covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob. So God looked on the Israelites and was concerned about them."

Now, just to be real clear, God did not actually forget about the Israelites. The word "remembered" here means He turned His full attention on them. Those of us who are parents in the room: we could be busy doing something else. We don't forget we have kids, right? Now, it's a limited analogy because, you know, we're fallible and human. But like that idea: you don't forget you have children just because you're focused on something else. But the idea of "He remembered them" means He put His full focus on them. He gave them His full attention.

Again, God's everywhere. He's omnipresent. We have a limited understanding of this—of how God operates—but He didn't forget them. He was just saying, "All right, now I'm going to enact our covenant. I made a covenant with you, and it's time to enact it." He hadn't abandoned them. God is immutable. We just established that. He doesn't change. So He did not forget the covenant that He had made, nor did He go back on it. But He heard their cry. He had compassion on them.

The same author who wrote the study I did says that, for Israel—the original hearers of Malachi, which declared that He does not change—this truth was not an abstract comfort; it was actual survival. God's immutability meant His covenant faithfulness would never falter, even when they did; His steadfast love would hold steady when their hearts wandered; His promises of mercy would outlast their rebellion. And for you and me, it means the same. Your assurance of God's faithfulness to you rests not in your ability to stay faithful, but in His unchanging nature.

It's not on us to keep the covenant. Now, we should do our best to follow God's word and do His law, but He knew that we as a human race were going to fail. We were going to mess up. We were going to choose rebellion and sin. And so He said, "I'm going to keep this covenant for both of us." And because He is unchanging, He can do that.

His immutability is what gave the Israelites confidence in His love and faithfulness. It's what allowed Moses, as we'll see, to eventually trust God and to put his identity in who God said he was. He was finally able to believe that because he was able to trust God.

His immutability gives us confidence too, that we can trust Him, that He will keep His promises. So we can find our identity in our unchanging God. We can find our identity in an unchanging God because no matter what comes, no matter what circumstances we face or changes that may come our way, He is constant. He is sure. He is steady.

Moses eventually got there because he knew that God was the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow. He is the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. He is the creator and sustainer of everything. He doesn't change like shifting shadows.

And so we can put our identity in Him. We can take off our old identities. We can feel safe to surrender those to Him because He's going to bestow on us a new identity, one that is rooted in Christ—the righteousness that has been bestowed on us by Christ. And we can trust in the God who made us and loves us because He doesn't change.

Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we thank You for this time. God, we thank You for the fact that You don't change. You are who You say You are. And we can trust that. We can put our faith in You. We can put our hope in You. And God, I just pray that You would help us to do that—to put off our old selves, to not hold on to old titles and words that were spoken over us, to not hold on to old lies that hold us back or that we created an identity around. God, I just pray that You would help us to put off our old selves so that we can put on the identity and receive that which You have given us, that we are sons and daughters of the Most High King. We love You, God. We thank You for the life of Moses and for the fact that we can learn from his experience as he grew in trust in You, even through the waiting period, even through the training period, God. You equipped him. You helped him. You didn't waste any of it, and You won't waste any of it with us. We love You, Jesus. We surrender it all to You. In Your name.

Moses: Part 1

Moses: Learning To Trust The God Who Leads - Part 1

Exodus 1:15-2:10

SERMON TRANSCRIPT

Morning, everybody. Morning, morning, morning. I'm excited. As Lauren said, as we've been announcing, we're starting a new series. We're going to be diving into the study of Moses, and not focusing just on him, but really on how God interacts with him throughout his life. Our series' tagline is, "Learn to trust the God who leads." Really, Exodus and the story of Israel coming together is a story of Israel learning to trust God. But it's led by this person, Moses. And as Moses learns how to trust God, then the people follow suit. So we're going to be taking our time focusing on Moses. The book of Exodus is one of my favorite Old Testament books because there are so many foundational moments here for the people of Israel and for our faith. So it is a story of God's people discovering who God is. But like I said, in the forefront is the character of Moses. We want to see him as a leader: how God forms him and makes him, and how God meets him out in the wilderness. He has to learn how to trust God to fulfill God's commands and this redemption plan that God has. So each week, we're going to learn how God forms and shapes and works with Moses, and we'll learn how God can do the same in us and all of humanity. Throughout these ten weeks, we're going to learn that Moses lived an extraordinary life. He had a unique position as the first leader of the people of Israel. He had top-of-the-world moments with the Creator God, while also having some devastatingly low moments, where his sin and pride still came to the surface and had an effect on his life. We've covered some of Exodus before in other series that we've had. But today, we've actually covered our passage from today before, but we're going to look at it from a different angle, like I said. So we're going to be covering in this series Exodus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy—all these stories of Moses—but from the specific angle of how God formed Moses, and these moments that helped him become who he was and how he learned to trust God. So let me go ahead and pray for us one more time, and then we'll dive into our passage.

God, thank you again for your word and for the opportunity to gather. God, I pray that through today and through this series, you would teach us more about who you are and show us more of your character. God, that we would come to trust you and love you and put our faith even more in you. And at the end of this series, God, that we would give you even more praise and that our faith would be strengthened as we live our lives day to day, that we could step in peace, knowing that you are in control and that you are sovereign over life. So we pray this in your holy name. Amen.

Now, I want to give some quick background as to where we're at in the Bible. What's going on before we enter into our series? How did we get here? If you are not already there, we're going to be in Exodus, the second book of the Bible. So far, the Hebrew people, what would become Israel, the nation of Israel, had come to Egypt through Joseph, son of Jacob, son of Isaac, son of Abraham. So this is kind of connecting Genesis to now, through the descendants. Joseph became the prince of Egypt. There's a whole other story, a whole other sermon series. But he was imprisoned and then proved to Pharaoh that he was a man of quality, and eventually became second in command over all of Egypt. And that was great. That moment brought all of his family into Egypt. But then, after Joseph, when he passed away, the relationship between Joseph's family, the Hebrews, and Pharaoh became strained. The leader of Egypt had forgotten what Joseph had done for all of Egypt. So this new Pharaoh feared what might happen if Joseph's descendants, the Hebrew people, the eventual Israelites, had an uprising. They were growing and growing and growing. And he just saw their numbers, and out of fear, he was like, "This could be a problem." In the future, they showed no signs of being a problem, but he just feared what could happen. So out of fear, he oppresses the Israelites. He enslaves them. But it doesn't work. His plan, hoping that the people would just wither and die off, doesn't work. Instead, they multiply. The people become even larger, even more. And this just grows and stokes Pharaoh's fear. So we come to verse 15 of Exodus chapter 1, and Pharaoh comes up with this terrible plan of infanticide to kill all the Hebrew baby boys. It's absolutely awful. It's, I mean, the epitome of evil. He's going to let the girls live. Why? Well, because the boys will eventually fight against Egypt, but the girls could marry into Egyptian life, be used for sexual exploitation or domestic service, but the boys would be the problem. So he reasoned, "If I get rid of all the boys, I'll get rid of my potential Israelite problem." Pharaoh had devised a plan to wipe out his foreseen enemy, the entire people of Israel for the future, because he viewed them as a threat. He viewed them as lesser than the Egyptians. He viewed them as a hurdle that could get in the way of his power, his goals. Let me tell you, the Bible gives us a very clear picture of how God feels toward those who view people in that way. Those people are portrayed as monsters, as agents of Satan. These types of people are the ones who view themselves as gods in a way, and often come toe to toe with God, and are eventually put in their right place. And that still happens today with rulers and leaders. For those who view any part of humanity as lesser, who put themselves above somebody, a people group, or who belittle or abuse someone made in the image of God, God will judge them accordingly. They serve as a warning, and Pharaoh serves as a reminder of who not to be.

But this is the background, right? So this is our picture of what's happening in the life of the Hebrew people, and this is the context for which Moses enters into the story. And this is why the people are crying out for help. They're crying out to Yahweh, saying, "God, help us. We're being oppressed. We're enslaved. We don't see any hope. God, please help us." Our passage's theme this morning is: God is always at work. Even when we can't see it, before we're even aware of his presence, even before we may arrive at the scene, God is always at work. And we'll see this in the plans that God has for Moses. Even before Moses is an active part of the story, God was at work. Exodus chapter 2 is the start of Moses coming into the Bible.

So who's on this scene? Before Moses arrives, who are we talking about? Well, we'll of course have Moses eventually, but we're talking about Pharaoh. We're talking about midwives. We're talking about a mother and a daughter. And we're talking about an Egyptian princess. With all these characters, the stage is set. So let's get into the very first moments. Read with me, chapter 2, verse 1.

Now a man of the tribe of Levi married a Levite woman, and she became pregnant and gave birth to a son. When she saw that he was a fine child, she hid him for three months. But when she could hide him no longer, she got a papyrus basket for him, coated it with tar and pitch. Then she placed him in it and put it among the reeds along the bank of the Nile. His sister stood at a distance to see what would happen to him. Then Pharaoh's daughter went down to the Nile to bathe, and her attendants were walking along the riverbank. She saw the basket among the reeds and sent her female slave to get it. She opened it and saw the baby. He was crying, and she felt sorry for him. "This is one of the Hebrew babies," she said. Then his sister asked Pharaoh's daughter, "Shall I go and get one of the Hebrew women to nurse the baby for you?" "Yes, go," she answered. So the girl went and got the baby's mother. Pharaoh's daughter said to her, "Take this baby and nurse him for me, and I will pay you." So the woman took the baby and nursed him. When the child grew older, she took him to Pharaoh's daughter, and he became her son. She named him Moses, saying, "I drew him out of the water."

And throughout Exodus, we see these recurring themes that build upon each other. And we have a couple of them in our passage this morning. The first is a miraculous birth, because the circumstances we're looking at mean that Moses shouldn't have been alive. But in God's upside-down kingdom, upside-down from how the world operates, God uses people to make sure that his plan comes out on top. And a part of that is how many women feature in this story. And in a patriarchal society, for this many women in ten verses to be the heroes just shows that God is at work. It sounds like a setup to a joke. What do two midwives, a mother, a daughter, and an Egyptian princess all have in common? Well, they all disobeyed and rebelled against a human leader's commands in order to save a life. And thereby they served God and helped set the stage for Moses to become the leader that God needed for his people.

And the first part of God moving in our story for the sake of Moses is through two Hebrew women, Puah and Shiphrah. This is back in chapter 1, verses 15 through 22. But these two women set the stage for how Hebrew boys got past Pharaoh's plan. It's quite an honor for Hebrew women to be named, and God names two of them here for helping to preserve the life of Moses and the lives of countless other Hebrew babies. Because Pharaoh had commanded, "Hey, whenever there is a Hebrew baby boy, you midwives are to take that baby boy and throw him into the river to drown." And when they heard Pharaoh, they went out and it did not happen. And Pharaoh gets this report that all these Hebrew baby boys are living. And he comes and calls the midwives back and says, "What's happening?" And they, which I love, they just said, "Well, these Hebrew women are not made like the Egyptian women. They just deliver too fast. We can't get there in time. Every time we get there, the baby boy is already alive. So sorry, we can't do it." And we can read between the lines there and know what they were doing and how intentional it was. And God honors that. God loves that. These midwives did not fear Pharaoh. They feared God, not a man. They feared God, not a dictator. They feared the Creator, not the snake in our story, Satan. Because in this story, Pharaoh is that evil presence, and they don't listen to him. Even though these midwives may have known that they were honoring God in their disobedience to Pharaoh, they did not know God's full plan. They didn't do this because they knew, well, one of these baby boys is going to become Moses and is going to become this leader of Israel. No, they just, in their circumstance, in their situation, chose to honor God and say, "No, we're not going to throw these baby boys in the river. We're going to honor life and honor these humans, these little babies that are made in the image of God." So God can use us in many ways. God is at work in ways we don't know. That's our first point: God is at work in ways we don't know.

Moses didn't know this. The Hebrew midwives didn't know this: how much of a plan they were part of, or how much they played a part in God's plan. But God is at work in ways we don't know. And sometimes I have this thought that we're going to get to heaven, and all the conversations that we get to have, and I think it goes two ways. We'll be able to share with other people, come up to them and say, "Hey, you never knew this, but when you did this, when you showed up for me, when you prayed for me, when you did that, it affected me. I never told you; you never knew on earth, but in heaven, now I get to tell you that you played a role in my life and me becoming closer to God. God used you." And hopefully we get the other conversations too, where people are coming up to us and saying the same thing, saying, "Hey, I never got to tell you. You never knew this, but God used you to benefit my life. God, you were a part of God's plan for me. And I just want to thank you for that." I think a lot of Hebrews are going to thank Puah and Shiphrah for what they did in honoring God.

So God is at work in ways we don't always know. The next characters set the stage for Moses being able to live; that's the first part. The next one is Moses' mother and sister, and they're faced with this mandate that has gone out over the land to throw baby boys into these waters of death. And Moses' mother does end up putting Moses into the water, but safely. Now, I cannot imagine being in this scenario. I know that there are those throughout history who have had to face some dire, just terrible circumstances regarding their children and protecting their children. And as a parent of two, imagining a mom making a basket to save her child, covering it with pitch, knowing that even then this is not a guaranteed scenario—"I'm just giving this baby a chance"—my heart breaks. In the text, they cover it so quickly, but you can just, if you take time to pause and put yourself in Moses' mother's shoes, and the time that it must have taken, and the time to develop this plan to say, "This is what I'm going to do. This is the best shot for Moses to be able to live." And then to have to bend over and put the baby in the basket and just push it out into the river.

This brings up another recurring theme throughout the Bible: a person going down into a pit or into waters that symbolize death, where God miraculously meets them and brings them through whatever death scenario into greater glory afterwards. In the Bible, this is, like I said, either a pit or chaotic waters, and the person usually miraculously survives and is brought about for God's plan. So we think of Noah and the flood, those chaotic death waters that meant death for the rest of the world, but God brought them through that scenario. If you're familiar with Joseph, he was thrown into a pit by his brothers, meant for death, but God brings him out of that pit. Think of the Israelites in the Red Sea: they're going to go through the waters that should have killed them, but God brings them through for glory on the other side. You think of Jonah being thrown into the waters, and God meets him where he's at and brings him through, sustains him. You also have Daniel and the lion's den, being thrown into a pit. It should have meant death, but God brings him through; Daniel is brought through, and he lives. And from all these images in the Old Testament, we get the idea of baptism, dying to self, being brought through water, being made new for God's purposes on the other side. The culmination of this theme is Jesus on the cross: going into hell, defeating death, and being raised to life in the resurrection. I know I just covered a lot right there, but I think it's helpful to step back and get the broader perspective of what that theme means and then to get back into our story.

And so we know that Moses is put into a basket. And the Hebrew word for basket here is the same word for ark. It's a little baby ark. And for the Hebrews who would read these stories, that would link them to, well, what's the only other story with an ark in it? Noah's ark. And how did that story end up? Amazing. God was there. And so already we know God is at work. This little baby ark: God is going to do something miraculous. He's going to rescue Moses. And Moses in this little ark is sustained by God in the midst of chaotic death waters. A theologian says, "As the ark in Genesis bears on the water, the saving remnant of humankind, the child born on the waters here will save God's imperiled people." There's a part of the way that God works in our lives that builds faith for the future. Often through trials and trauma, but as we see God work, that grows a deeper faith in us. And the next time we face anything, as we continue on in life, we have a deeper faith. We'll get to it later in our series, but when they get to the Red Sea, I just wonder, does Moses look out into the waters and think, "I think God's got us? Everyone else thinks this is death, but I've been through something similar before. I've faced death waters before, and God's sustained me." How often—this is the question I want to ask right now—how often is that true for us? And this is the slide: God's work in the past can serve as fuel for our faith for the future. As you look back on your life, do you have moments, maybe they're traumatic, maybe they're tragedies, do you see where God sustains you, where he brought you through? And hopefully that can give you faith. Say, "God, you got me through that. You didn't have me avoid it. You didn't have me circumvent that entire heart situation, but you got me through it, and now I have more faith in you because of that." God's work in the past serves as fuel for our faith for the future. We've got to store those things up. We've got to remember what God has done so that when we face hard times, we have fuel to get through it—what God has done in our lives.

The next person to enter into our story is the princess, someone completely unexpected in this story, someone who we may think initially may uphold the orders of her father: killing the Hebrew baby boys. But thankfully, like the midwives, like Moses' mother, she chooses life. And Moses survives these waters, the very waters that Pharaoh meant for his death and the death of all Hebrew boys. He's there floating among the reeds. And it's a way of foreshadowing the future triumph that Israel will have over Egypt. I want to draw our attention to verse 6. It says, "She opened it and saw the baby. He was crying, and she felt sorry for him." This baby was crying. And as I was preparing the sermon, this verse kept getting me choked up. I want you to put yourselves again in the shoes of this Egyptian princess. You've gone down to the river for your daily routine. Bathing is the beginning of the day. And you hear a baby crying. Without any conversation, any of us, when we hear a baby crying, can safely assume some things. One, the baby's in need; babies cry when they need something. Two, babies can't help themselves; this baby needs someone to address their needs. This baby keeps crying; the baby doesn't have anyone. And so, just in a split second, we hear—if we were there at that river—we would also know something's not right. And it just breaks my heart to know that there's a little baby boy in a basket. And the injustice, and how this encapsulates the vile hate that this decree has brought about. The result of Pharaoh's evil heart is heard in these babies' cries. A mother forced to abandon her child and a child in desperate need of a mother. And these cries, if you've ever had a kid or you've been around kids, I imagine it's the kind of cry that's not just a whimper. It's not just the cry like, "Oh, they're a little tired. Oh, they're a little hungry." It's that wailing. It's that crying that the baby is almost inconsolable, that level of crying. There's times as a parent when I'm mad or frustrated with my girls, even though when they're crying, I'm like, "Ah, they just—they didn't—they wanted dessert. They don't get dessert. And now they're crying about it." And that's, yeah, they can deal with it. But there's also different types of cries as a parent that you know that there's no room for my preferences—like, right. The immediate thing is they just need to be picked up. They need to be held. They need to be comforted. And I think that's the kind of cry that the princess hears. It's this dire situation of a baby crying its little heart out. And we know that this cry is different because this is the only time in the entire Bible that the word "weep" is used for a child. Every other time in the Bible, it's the word "cry" in Hebrew. But here, the Hebrew word is for weeping. And I can't help but wonder if Moses' cries symbolize Israel's cries to God: just, "We're weeping right here, God. This is... there is no other answer to our problems but God's divine intervention." And, like the princess, God will come to the rescue. This Egyptian princess—her heart breaks for this little baby. And the Egyptian princess models a savior in our story, rescuing the baby from death. And in verse 10, "When the child grew older, she took him to Pharaoh's daughter, and he became her son." The princess adopted Moses just as God does with us. And she named him Moses, which means, "I drew you out of the water." Moses, as we know, becomes this pivotal part of God's plan, and it's already being foreshadowed right here.

God is at work before we arrive on the scene. God is at work before we are a participant in what's going on. God is at work in ways we don't see in the moment. And sometimes we won't see until heaven. God is at work in a way that only God could have orchestrated. Miriam, Moses' sister, is there at the scene when the princess draws Moses out and offers, "Should I get a Hebrew woman to nurse this child?" And then Miriam was able to bring Moses' mother to the princess. And just again, God's at work here in a way that only God can. In her state of slavery, now she's getting paid to be Moses' mother. Only God can do something like that. Only God can bring about such a reality to heal the pain that she just went through of having to give her child away. I can imagine that scene too. Just, you're probably in mourning and in depression having just watched your baby go down the Nile, and then your daughter comes running back, out of breath. "Mom, you're not going to believe this. Pharaoh's daughter wants you to raise Moses." Can you just imagine the tears of pain to tears of joy that God had brought about? God took her situation, a slave having to give up her son, and flipped it upside down where now she's getting paid to raise her son.

This brings about our next point: God is at work in ways we don't expect. She would have never expected this to happen. We don't always understand what God is doing. We don't always know how he's going to do it. And sometimes God is at work in ways we don't expect. We would not have drawn it up that way. We would not have planned for it to happen that way. But God's plan, which is perfect, is something often unexpected. I just want to review this passage with you all. So in our passage this morning, it showed us that one, God has a purpose for Moses. Two, God worked in ways unknown to Moses. Moses is just an infant at this time. He has no idea of what's happening. But through the women, through the midwives, through his mother, through the princess, in this upside-down God way, God worked in ways unknown to Moses. God's plan for his people and Moses took time. Sometimes we come to know people in the Bible when they're adults, and God called them and they respond. We got to know Moses as he's a baby. And even if we were to draw it up, we would think, "Oh, for Moses to gain influence over Egypt and Israel, man, him becoming a prince, that's a pretty good way. If he becomes a prince, he's that much closer to being in a position of power." But as we'll go on in our series, we'll see that God had other plans. And from this moment to the moment that Moses becomes the leader of Israel is eighty years. Eighty years before he comes back to Egypt and says, "Pharaoh, you've got to let God's people go." God's plan for his people and Moses took time. We also see that God's plan for Moses meant enduring a life-threatening situation. Like I said, that theme that is true in the Bible is often true in our lives too. We might have to be thrown into the pit or enter into chaotic waters and see that God would bring us through them. Not out of it necessarily, not going to avoid all the pain and suffering in the world, but we might have to see that God brings us through something. Then we also see that God redeemed what was meant for evil for his good. God took this plan that Pharaoh had to kill all these Hebrew boys, and God intervened. And we're going to see throughout our series how God uses that, changes it for his good.

And church, what I want us to see this morning is that all those things are true for us today too. God has a purpose for you. God works in ways you cannot see. God's plan in working out your life may take time, longer than we often like. We want it now. We want God in the next day, preferably in the next hour. "God, could you just change this next thing, this thing that's happening?" And to look at Moses' life, and it took eighty years. God's plan for you may mean enduring near-death moments, maybe emotionally, physically, spiritually; you may endure some very low lows. God can redeem whatever you are facing for greater glory than you could ever imagine. Whether here on earth or in heaven, God can redeem whatever you are facing. And as you look at this list, let's keep this list up here for a little bit. Which one is speaking to you today? Maybe you're feeling a bit lost, doubting your self-worth. Maybe your life has been more wandering than intentional steps, and you feel less than. Be reminded that God has a purpose for you. Maybe you're wondering where God is, because you haven't seen his direct hand in your life recently. And maybe you're wondering if God's even real, or is this a matter of God having an issue with me? But let this be a reminder that God works in ways that we often cannot see. Maybe you're wondering why God hasn't answered your prayer yet. Maybe you're wondering if things are going to get any better for you, or if this is just this hardship that you face, that's just life. Life is never going to improve. God's plan and work for you may take time. It's so hard to be patient. But oftentimes it's in the waiting where God meets us. Maybe you've gone through what you feel like is hell and back, and maybe you've done it a few times. Maybe you've endured a loss. You have lost a spouse, a child. Maybe you've had your life flipped upside down and still haven't fully recovered yet. And you're wondering if this is just how life is going to be. May this be a reminder that God's plan for you may mean enduring near-death situations, going into the pit, being thrown into chaotic waters, but being sustained by God and God alone. Maybe you think your situation is too far gone and there is no hope. But may this passage remind you that God can redeem whatever you are facing for greater glory than you could ever imagine.

If this is you, then I want you to be encouraged. Look at Moses' birth story. See how God has worked. And know that the same God who delivered Moses from Pharaoh's plan of death, who delivered Moses from the Nile, these waters of death—the same God who provided miraculous means for an upbringing is the same God who is looking after you. It's the same God who loves you, who has a plan for you, has purpose for you, who is with you, who sustains you. That's the God we serve. That's the God we worship. And that's the God that we can expect, maybe in ways that we don't expect, but we can know that God is at work. He is always at work.

Let's go ahead and pray. Heavenly Father, thank you again for our time this morning. And I pray that wherever we are, Lord, whether we're facing a pit-like moment or chaotic waters in our life right now, when we are feeling hopeless and lost, or maybe we feel like we're just enduring a long stint of suffering, God, I pray that through your word, you would remind us of who you are and that we would put our full hope and trust in you. And as we see how in the past you have miraculously brought about Moses' life, enduring near death, circumventing and overcoming plans meant for evil, God, I pray that that would give us hope today, that you can do the same for us. And even when we don't see you in our lives, even when we think, "God, I mean, you just don't feel close. Are you even working in my life?" I pray that we'd be reminded that maybe it's in ways we can't see. That in the background, underneath the surface of the waters, God, you are working for your glory and for our good. So, God, I pray that you would encourage us this morning. Give us deeper faith to cling to you with everything that we have. And this week, each day, each moment, God, I pray that we would look to you as our Savior and trust that you are leading us. Give us wisdom. Give us faith. We pray this in your Son's holy name. Amen.