"Beating Around The Bush"

“Beating Around the Bush”

Exodus 3:1-14

I remember clearly a time in my life when I had gotten to a point where God was speaking to me about making some major changes in my life and ministry. God was about to do something new in my life and the details were not very clear for me. Can anyone identify with that? This week I had a brief conversation with one of the young men in our church…he said Pastor, pray for me and then he said with a smile I’m about to make the next biggest mistake in my life. All of us can identify with that feeling. I think that perhaps the biggest struggle you and I have in the Christian life is in this area of knowing and then doing God’s will. And many times we are afraid that what we are about to do may be our next big mistake. All of this I believe is built around a myth that we have heard for years and we have built our lives around and it goes something like this.

God’s will is hard to know. God likes to make finding His will as difficult as possible. He wants us to struggle daily with knowing His will and He takes pleasure in making His will a secret.

So we believe that myth and because we believe it so strongly we struggle every single day. We have bought into this idea that the Christian life is supposed to be difficult; that it is hard and that God likes to keep secrets from His children.

Let’s be clear and let me give you a few scriptures that show us what the truth is in this area.

Romans 12:1-2. What does this passage tell us? Clearly it is not only possible to know God’s will; God in fact wants it to be crystal clear. God’s will can actually be proved and known.

Matthew 6:10. This is how we should pray…thy will be done….on earth as it is in heaven. No w we see it is not only possible to know God’s will, it is also possible to do God’s will. How do we know that? Jesus would not have told us to pray for His will to be done if it were not possible for us to actually do it.

We fast forward now and Moses enters on the scene again at the age of 40. He was perhaps one of the most unlikely candidates for leadership that we find in the OT. (1) Moses was what we commonly call a basket case. As a child of only a few months Moses was placed in a basket sealed with tar and placed in the Nile River. Anything could have happened. In reading an article this week about the dangers around the Nile River I was amazed at the number of different kinds of poisonous snakes, scorpions, crocodiles ands more that inhabit that area. When Moses was placed in the water his life was at risk. (2) Pharaoh determined that he would do everything possible to decrease the population of the Hebrew people. So he decided to kill all of the babies who were born that were male. So again Moses life was at risk. (3) We don’t know anything else about his childhood but the first event we read about is this….one day after Moses had grown up he saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew and it says that glancing this way and that and seeing no one, he killed the Egyptian and hid him in the sand. Then we read (v. 15) that when Pharaoh heard of this he tried to kill Moses. So again his life was at risk. Not only was it unlikely Moses would ever become a leader—it was actually a miracle he even survived.

Now this is the time when Moses learned an early lesson in leadership and here it is…..never dedicate yourself to God’s will until you have first dedicated yourself to God Himself. It is very possible that we can become so obsessed with knowing His will that we fail to spend time getting to know Him. It is the difference in knowing about God and in getting to know Him personally. And there is a huge difference. When we become more concerned with what God wants us to do than we are with who He wants us to be then we are in real trouble. I believe this is exactly what happened to Moses at this point.

Look at v. 23. And when he paid them a visit he entered a very dangerous time of his life. The question we have to stop and ask at this point is where did this thought come from? Who planted this thought in his mind? At this point I believe that Moses was already convinced that he was the one God would use to bring the Hebrews out of slavery. I believe that he became impatient…anxious…antsy about doing it and he jumped the gun.