We’re talking about being backyard missionaries - people who are touching others with the love of God in our every day lives. Last week we talked about this being incarnational mission, and if you missed that you can listen to it on the web, just visit our church website for directions.
A few months ago I car-pooled into Morley with a bunch of friends. All the way there and all the way back I had a captive audience, and I don’t think I talked about God once! I was so frustrated with myself.
Do you ever have experiences like that? There’s a danger in doing mission incarnationally, that we’ll become so ’every day’ that, as far as our faith goes, we’re invisible! What are the sorts of things that can make us reluctant to share our faith?
[Prompt for responses - timidity, don’t want to offend, don’t know what to say]
A lot of us struggle with this, but I think we all realise how important it is for people to hear the message of God’s love and life. So how do we make sure we’re effective and intentional as incarnational backyard missionaries?
This morning I want to look at the way God prepared Moses for his mission and see what we can learn from this story.
You’ll find the story of Moses in Exodus chapter 2. We’re not going to read the whole lot, but keep you finger stuck around there and we’ll flip through it as we go.
PREPARATION
The story of Moses begins with a pretty tragic event. The Hebrews had settled in Egypt some 400 years earlier when Jacob and his family moved there during a famine. You probably know the story of Joseph and how he became prime minister of Egypt. So the Hebrews started off in a very privileged position. But as time went on God blessed them and the population of Hebrews grew until the Egyptians felt they’d become a threat. So Pharaoh hatched a plan to control their population by killing all the boys in the Nile river.
But the Bible says that Moses’ mum saw he was a ’fine child.’ She takes the risk of hiding Moses until he’s just getting to noisy and boisterous, when she gets his sister to take him down to the river in a water proof basket in the hope that God will intervene.
And God intervenes big time! Let’s pick up the story in Ex 2.5
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. And 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.”
How cool is that? God organises for Moses to be found by a princess, no-less, and he gets to spend those first couple of formative years with his own mum and among his own people!
Can you imagine what a privileged life Moses must have led in the palace? He had access to all the wisdom and education of the superpower of that day. He would have been groomed for leadership.
Moses access to the royal court was no accident. God was preparing him for the mammoth task of leading the Israelites out of Egypt and to the promised land.
Preparation is vital for any endeavour, isn’t it? When did you last go on a holiday without preparing for it? Or your job - how much preparation did that take? Even if you’re at the checkout in Woollies it still takes some training.
When we think of preparation for spiritual endeavour, especially mission, we often think of spiritual preparation. Going to Bible college or something like that. But that’s not where Moses’ preparation began. It was in the pagan palaces of Egypt. It was the equivalent of our secular education.
DESERT FORMATION
Growing up in a royal household would have taught Moses a lot about leading a nation, but it wasn’t enough for the man who was going to lead God’s nation. As events transpired Moses took matters into his own hands a little bit. He killed an Egyptian slave driver who had been beating an Israelite. Ex 2.15 picks up the story of what happened next.
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. 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?” he 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.”
Moses flees for his life. OK, he finds a wife and family. But this man who may have been groomed for some sort of government position, and was certainly used to people listening to him, spends the next 40 years in the desert herding sheep!
What must that have been like? This prince of Egypt stuck in the backside of the desert with nothing but sand and sheep for company? He must have thought his life was over.
But even here, where for long hours and days and weeks it’s Moses and the sheep and the sand, God’s preparing him. Breaking him. Forming his soul in the blistering heat and freezing cold and stillness of the desert.
Have you ever felt like you’re stuck in the backside of the desert? You feel like there’s something more for you but God has you in this really dry and barren place? I’m not talking about the deserts we often make for ourselves from our lack of faith and misplaced worldly ambition. I’m talking about being in a place of wanting more of God but it’s like he’s got you in a holding pattern.
Maybe God’s got you there for a purpose. You know Moses had all the best Egypt had to offer him, but he had to learn all that God had to offer him. And that meant he had to be emptied of himself. He still had the skills he learned in Egypt so long ago, but God broke the ambition and wilfulness of his pride.
If God’s going to use us, he’s got to prepare us. He’ll prepare us in the palace, and in the desert until we’re at the place where we’re empty enough to be filled up and done something really useful with.
But I think there’s something in us that sometimes needs to cooperate with God here. You and I have an advantage that Moses didn’t - we’ve got the cross. Jesus calls us to pick up our cross and carry it every day. The Christian life is one of constantly putting ourselves to death so that we can be filled with the life of God.
God uses the magnificent and the mundane, the sacred and the secular to prepare us.
CALL
So Moses is in the desert, and specifically the backside of the desert, when something breaks through the daily monotony that has been his life for the last 40 years. Exodus 3.1 is a major turning point.
Now Moses was tending the flock of Jethro his father-in-law, the priest of Midian, and he led the flock to the far side of the wilderness and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. There the angel of the LORD appeared to him in flames of fire from within a bush. Moses saw that though the bush was on fire it did not burn up. So Moses thought, “I will go over and see this strange sight—why the bush does not burn up.”
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.”
…Let’s skip down to verse 7…
The LORD said, “I have indeed seen the misery of my people in Egypt. I have heard them crying out 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 that 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.”
How often do you struggle with hearing God’s voice? We can really get tied up in knots sometimes wondering if it’s God telling us to do something or just our own imagination. Probably, more often than not, it’s God, but anyway…
Moses didn’t have that problem. Moses problem is that the call was all too clear! Last time Moses was in Egypt there was a price on his head. OK, that was 40 years ago, but you go back to a place like that! And in any case, he’s spent 40 years herding sheep and listening to the wind. Now he’s thoroughly broken. So broken, in fact, that when he finally runs out of excuses not to go back, Moses begs God in 4.13, "Please send someone else."
You know, as backyard missionaries, there are times God’s going to call us to do something pretty uncomfortable. Something way out of our comfort zone. In fact, sometimes he’ll do things that are going to freak us out!
Why? Because people in this world are slaves in Egypt and God wants to use you to rescue them! The question isn’t whether God has called us - the Bible is clear on that - the question is whether we’re going to obey, or make excuses.
Imagine if Moses had disobeyed God and done a Jonah. Maybe God would have caught up with him. Or maybe he would have used someone else - Aaron maybe. Moses wouldn’t have been part of the story. How many opportunities to be a part of the story do we miss because we’re chicken.
God’s calling you - say yes!
TEAM
But there’s one more thing God does to prepare Moses before we leave this part of the story. We find it in 4.14.
Then the LORD’s anger burned against Moses [- whoops - ] 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 his heart will be glad when he sees you. You shall speak to him and put words in his mouth; I will help both of you speak and 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.
God was gracious to Moses, kind of. Evidently Moses had some speech impediment. Or maybe he just didn’t like public speaking. Either way God gives Moses a team. He sends his brother to help him out.
As we go along in the story we find numerous occasions when Moses relies on a team. Most notable is 17.10 where, not long after the Israelites had left Egypt they were attacked.
So Joshua fought the Amalekites as Moses had ordered, and Moses, Aaron and Hur went to the top of the hill. As long as Moses held up his hands, the Israelites were winning, but whenever he lowered his hands, the Amalekites were winning. When Moses’ hands grew tired, they took a stone and put it under him and he sat on it. Aaron and Hur held his hands up—one on one side, one on the other—so that his hands remained steady till sunset. So Joshua overcame the Amalekite army with the sword.
I don’t know why Moses had to keep his arms raised - maybe it was in prayer, because that’s how they did in those days, with hands upraised. In any case he couldn’t command the battle and pray - he couldn’t even pray by himself. He needed help. Joshua led the battle, Aaron and Hur supported Moses.
We all need to be part of a team, don’t we? No one else can do what you’re called to do. No one else go into your workplace or family or community group or neighbourhood and be the witness you’re meant to be. But we can stand with each other. We can support and pray and even hold each other accountable.
It’s really tough being a faithful follower of Jesus today, let alone one that’s effectively making disciples. But with the right support around us we’ve got a lot better chance than if we’re doing it alone. After all, the call to follow Jesus is a call to community as well.
CONCLUSION
Moses wanted to stay invisible! But God had his hand on him, preparing him for the mammoth task ahead.
God’s got his hand on you too, preparing you for the mission he’s assigned you to. Through good times and bad, through the secular and the sacred, he’s using it all to shape you and prepare you. The question is, will we cooperate? Will we persevere? Will we rise to the call?
