Lessons From Failure Series

Several years ago, Chicago Cubs relief pitcher Bob Patterson described one of his pitches, which the Cincinnati Reds' Barry Larkin hit for a game-winning home run: “It was a cross between a screwball and a change-up. It was a screw-up” (Wall Street Journal, 7/9/96; Leadership, Vol. 17, no.3; www.PreachingToday.com)

That describes life sometimes, so what do you do when you screw-up? What do you do when you fail? What do you do when life doesn’t go as you planned? Well, if you have your Bibles, I invite you to turn with me to Exodus 2, Exodus 2, where we see what Moses did after he failed miserably.

Exodus 2:1-10 Now a man from the house of Levi went and took as his wife a Levite woman. The woman conceived and bore a son, and when she saw that he was a fine child, she hid him three months. When she could hide him no longer, she took for him a basket made of bulrushes and daubed it with bitumen and pitch. She put the child in it and placed it among the reeds by the river bank. And his sister stood at a distance to know what would be done to him. Now the daughter of Pharaoh came down to bathe at the river, while her young women walked beside the river. She saw the basket among the reeds and sent her servant woman, and she took it. When she opened it, she saw the child, and behold, the baby was crying. She took pity on him and said, “This is one of the Hebrews’ children.” Then his sister said to Pharaoh’s daughter, “Shall I go and call you a nurse from the Hebrew women to nurse the child for you?” And Pharaoh’s daughter said to her, “Go.” So the girl went and called the child’s mother. And Pharaoh’s daughter said to her, “Take this child away and nurse him for me, and I will give you your wages.” So the woman took the child and nursed him. When the child grew older, she brought him to Pharaoh’s daughter, and he became her son. She named him Moses, “Because,” she said, “I drew him out of the water” (ESV).

Moses grew up a very privileged individual. Certainly, these were difficult days for the Hebrews, but Moses had a birth mother who had a strong faith in God.

Hebrews 11:23 says, “By faith Moses’ parents hid him for three months after he was born, because they saw he was no ordinary child, and they were not afraid of the king’s edict.” (NIV)

Then, when they could hide him no more, they put him in a basket and placed it in the Nile River.

I agree with Warren Wiersbe who said, “It took real faith to put the child in the river, the very place where the young boys were being destroyed!” (Warren Wiersbe, Expository Outlines on the Old Testament)

To be sure, Moses’ mother was not stupid in her faith. She obeyed the letter of the law which demanded that every Hebrew boy be thrown into the Nile River (Exodus 1:22), but she did everything she could do to insure the child’s safety. She lined the basket with tar and pitch so it would float. She put it among the reeds so it wouldn’t be carried away by the current, and she put it in a place where she knew Pharaoh’s daughter would discover it.

You see, not everybody bathed in the Nile River. That’s because the Nile was worshipped as a god itself, considered a sacred river by the Egyptians, so only the very privileged could bathe in the Nile.

I’m sure Moses’ mother knew the exact spot where Pharaoh’s daughter came to bathe on a regular basis, so she had her daughter put Moses’ basket right near that spot. But Moses’ mother had no idea what Pharaoh’s daughter would do with that Hebrew baby boy. She could have thrown the boy in the river as her father had ordered, but instead God touched her heart with the baby’s tears, and she adopted Moses as her own.

Imagine what went through Moses’ mother’s heart when she turned her just weaned child over to Pharaoh’s daughter. Pharaoh’s daughter was a stranger, a foreigner, living in an anti-Semitic home, whose father was pursuing genocide, trying to wipe out the Hebrew race.

Moses’ mother had to feel like Tracinda Foxe when she dropped her one-month-old baby, Eric, from a third story window to save him from a fire in their apartment. Several years ago (December 2005), Foxe's apartment building in the Bronx caught on fire. With flames quickly engulfing her third floor bedroom, Tracinda leaned out the window with her baby. A group of onlookers had gathered some 30 feet below her open window and watched with growing concern as smoke billowed around the mother and her baby.