How Important Is God's Name?

How important is God’s name to you? Names are very important. Whether you realize it or not, people love to hear their own name. When you meet up with someone and call them by their name you can almost see their eyes light up. Names are very important. Names tell a story, and they really do matter. But there's no name that matters more than the name of God. God's name reflects His character and draws us to trust Him.

For those who have heard the messages that I've preached over the years, you probably have noticed that I love to take a familiar passage of Scripture and dig deeper to see how it applies to us. My thought on that is that God gave us His word and wants us to apply it to our lives. So, I dig deeper and ask the question, "What does this mean to me?" Today I'm going to go back to a familiar OT passage in Exodus 3 as we ask the question, "How important is God's name to me? Prayer.

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If we back up in Scripture just a little bit, we remember that Moses had had been raised since a baby in the house of Pharaoh. When he had grown, he realized how he was related to the Hebrew people. He went out one day and saw an Egyptian beating one of his fellow Hebrews. He ended up killing the Egyptian and hiding his body in the sand. Word got back to Pharaoh about the incident and Pharaoh tried to kill Moses. So, Moses fled from Egypt and ended up in the land of Midian. He became a shepherd for a man by the name of Jethro. He ended up marrying Jethro's daughter and stayed in the land of Midian. It is now 40 years later. We pick up our story in Exodus 3.

Exodus 3:1 – “Meanwhile, Moses was shepherding the flock of his father-in-law Jethro, the priest of Midian. He led the flock to the far side of the wilderness and came to Horeb, the mountain of God.”

One thing that stands out to me from this one verse is that God can call us exactly from where we are. Moses was more or less in exile in Midian. Yet God's plan was to use him in a mighty way. So, the story begins with the call of Moses.

40 years earlier, Moses had fled Egypt after he killed the Egyptian while defending a Hebrew. Now he was shepherding his father-in-law's flock. By the way, the Midian territory is now modern Saudi Arabia. The Midianites are descendants of Abraham, who was also the father of the Jewish people.

Keep in mind that Moses was raised from a little baby until his adult years in the palace of the Pharaoh. He had now traded his royal clothes for the clothes of a shepherd. Now Moses is serving as a shepherd, a position that the Egyptians would have considered very low. He was in quite a different position than he had been when he was raised in the home of Pharaoh, king of Egypt. For him to think that God would call him to lead the Hebrews out of Egypt was probably the last thing on his mind if it was on his mind at all.

The passage locates the calling of Moses at Mount Horeb. Even though we're not positive where the mountain was, most scholars identify it as Mount Sinai, where the Hebrews would receive the Ten Commandments. Either way, it was known as the mountain of God. So there, while Moses was doing the menial work of a shepherd, God called him to a different role. God wanted him to go from leading sheep to leading the people of God out of Egypt.

So I asked the question, what can we learn from this one verse? We can learn that God knows exactly where we currently are and precisely where He intends for us to be. Sometimes God unexpectedly grabs our attention while we're living out one task, and He calls us to a new role in serving Him. Our responsibility is to walk with God so closely that we recognize when He's wanting to get our attention.

Exodus 3:2-4 – “Then the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire within a bush. As Moses looked, he saw that the bush was on fire but was not consumed. 3 So Moses thought, “I must go over and look at this remarkable sight. Why isn’t the bush burning up?” 4 When the Lord saw that he had gone over to look, God called out to him from the bush, “Moses, Moses!” “Here I am,” he answered.”

This was quite an event in Moses’ life. The angel of the Lord identified himself as God and appeared to Moses in a burning bush. We aren't given much of an explanation of how all this happened, but it does assure us that something supernatural took place.