What do you think of when you hear the word ‘mountains’? If you’ve been through Vermont, or out to Lake Louise, you probably think of majestic beauty. The image I used for the slide you see on the screen right now was taken just down the road from where we stayed in Quartzsite AZ. The mountains in this part of Arizona are rugged. They are skeletal, with no vegetation on them to hide their bare-bone beauty. But mountains aren’t always beautiful. For example, if you’re flying a plane, and it’s snowing, and your instruments just went out, mountains are nasty.
For some, mountains are objects to climb and conquer. To others, they are obstacles that cut us off from where we want to go. If you’re in a valley surrounded by them, mountains can make you feel claustrophobic. If you’ve just climbed to the summit, they can make you feel alive and free.
Well, if you look in God’s Word, you will find that God likes mountains. In fact, a lot of God's dealings with people happen on, or beside, or near mountains. For example, Abraham learned about God’s provision on a mountain when he interrupted Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac. Moses met God, for the first time, on a mountain. God’s covenant with Israel was established at the base of a mountain. Both Aaron and Moses were buried on mountains. Jesus’ most famous teaching happened on a mountain and His transfiguration happened on a mountain. I could keep going, but you get the idea.
So today we are going to begin a series of sermons based on some of those mountain moments found in Scripture. As we look at these moments, I want you to consider the mountains you’ve faced, or you will face, or perhaps are even presently facing right now.
But before we begin, perhaps we should define what we mean by mountains. What is a mountain? A mountain is anything that is between you and your goals, your dreams, your hopes, your calling, or even your faith. Everyone faces mountains. Some mountains are challenges that are obviously good. Some mountains are difficulties that isolate us and seem too daunting to climb.
When Conley Holbrook called out "Momma" on the morning of February 25, 1991, it was a sound his family had long been waiting and praying to hear. Eight years had come and gone. Eight Christmases, eight birthdays had slipped away while Conley had been lying in a semi comatose state, unable to speak or interact with anyone.
Doctors were stumped. They couldn’t say with any certainty what caused Holbrook's startling return to the land of the living. Holbrook, then 26, was in Lexington Memorial Hospital, having been admitted for a minor case of pneumonia he had unexpectedly slipped into a coma. Just as unexpectedly, he returned to consciousness. His mother Effie said that nothing unusual happened to wake him that Monday morning. "I guess it was just Jesus," she said.
Amazingly, during those eight years, Effie Holbrook had remained convinced that her son would wake up one day. But, the long years of waiting took their toll on the family. Still, the family said the hardships and the waiting seem insignificant now that Conley was awake. "It's just a different world," John Holbrook, Conley’s father said. "It's just amazing. It's hard to believe."
“It’s just a different world!” What a wonderful way to describe Conley’s walk out of an eight-year-long journey through the wilderness! “It’s just a different world,” that’s how you feel when you’ve scaled the summit of your mountain and you first see the vistas on the other side.
Imagine what it was like waiting, expecting, anticipating, the day when Conley would wake up. How would it have felt, after 3 months, after 6 months, after a year, after three years, after seven? When is it time to give up? When is it time to stop praying? When is it time to stop waiting? Is there a time to stop waiting?
How many people enjoy waiting? No one enjoys waiting! I’ve been known to leave a store without buying what I went in for because I wasn’t willing to enduring the wait. Unfortunately waiting is a big part of life! We wait to grow up. We wait to get that first licence, that first date, we wait to finish school. We wait for that job, that promotion, that raise. We wait for holidays, and trips, and then some of us get married and spend the rest of our lives waiting for our wives and our children!
We wait for good news. We wait for doctor’s results. We wait to retire. Just think about all the waiting we do. How much of our lives seem like wasted time because we are unable to enjoy the “now” because we’re waiting for the “then”? Who likes to spin their wheels when there are needs to be met, things to get done, places we want to go? Who wants to feel like life is passing them by while they wait for that one thing to happen? Who likes to wait for this incredibly long introduction to be done so we can get on with the sermon?
Waiting is bad enough when things are good. Imagine how hard is it to wait for a bad situation to end?
Maybe you don’t have to imagine? Maybe that is exactly the situation you are stuck in right now? You’ve been praying for your season of pain, or loneliness, or illness, or joblessness, or depression to end.
Well, as most of you have probably gathered by now, the first mountain we are going to climb is the “Mountain of Waiting.” And, as we climb to the summit of this mountain, let’s see if we can gain God’s perspective on waiting.
In Exodus 3:1 we read: “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 desert and came to Horeb, the mountain of God.”
Most of you know what is about to happen next in this account of Moses’ climbing to the top of Mount Horeb. In the next verse Moses will come upon the burning bush and stand in the very presence of God. Soon the waiting would be over. Soon the silence will end. Soon his marching orders would come. But, in this moment, on this approach to the mountain, Moses is waiting–waiting alone in the wilderness.
Moses came to Horeb, which means "desolate wasteland," and he probably felt quite comfortable there because a desolate wasteland was an apt picture for his life. What looked to be a promising life, ending up being a faded legacy of failure, at least that is probably how he saw it. Egypt was a lifetime ago and now? Now, his life was about wasting time in the wilderness.
Nothing seemed to be happening in his life and it had been this way, day in, day out for the last forty years! Imagine waiting for something to happen, something to change for forty years? True he had a wife and family now. True he had learned to live in the wilderness and tend the sheep, but he had never done the one thing he felt called to do! He had never fulfilled his dream. He had run away from the future he thought he was born to live and now life seemed more like treading water then climbing mountains.
Most of us can understand, at least a bit of, what Moses is going through at this point in his life. If we were to look through the scrapbook of our lives, many of us have a few pictures of dry, barren, empty landscapes. Every life has times of waiting in the desolate wasteland called Horeb— a place where we feel all alone.
Then again, maybe we only think we're alone. Maybe we're not alone at all. True ‘Horeb,’ means "desolate wasteland," but it is also called "the Mountain of God." Interesting! What’s "the mountain of God" doing way out here? The last place Moses expected to meet God was at Horeb. The last place we'd expect to meet God is waiting in the dry, barren, lonely places in our lives. Yet that’s where God shows up! He meets us in our desolate places. Still the question is: Why do we have to wait for Him there? Well, why did Moses have to wait?
Moses left Egypt at the age of forty and stayed in the wilderness for forty years. Now at the age of eighty, his waiting is almost over. Seems like a waste of a life doesn’t it? Sure, Moses will live to be one hundred and twenty-years-old, but still a full two-thirds of Moses’ life went by before God meets with him at Horeb. That doesn’t seem to be the most effective time management, does it?
From our perspective, maybe not, but from God’s perspective the timing was just right! What do I mean by that? I mean that (1) Moses’ waiting was tied up in God’s preparation of the circumstances.
In Genesis 15:16, God speaks to Abraham while he is in the Promised Land, and He tells Abraham, “In the fourth generation your descendants will come back here, for the sin of the Amorites has not yet reached its full measure."
God told Abraham that his descendants wouldn’t enter their promised inheritance until the Amorites had been given every opportunity to turn to Him. So part of Moses’ waiting was tied up in God’s mercy toward the Amorites.
Now think of the Israelites. God had to also prepare the Israelites before they would follow Moses. Why?—because people don’t want to move if they’re happy where they are. People don’t even want to move if they can put up with where they are, even if they are slaves. It is amazing how much we settle for in our lives instead of finding the motivation to move forward in faith.
The Israelites would have never followed Moses without first being prepared by the harshness of their circumstances. As it was, they often grumbled and complained and wanted Moses to leave them alone. Later on, in the wilderness they would moan about their rescue and look back to the “good old days” of slavery in Egypt. God had to, therefore, prepare the people so that they would be ready to listen and follow Moses’ leadership.
So far we’ve learned that part of Moses’ waiting took place because the circumstances weren’t right. Forty years prior to our account, Moses had tried to lead the people out of Egypt, but failed. Why? One reason was that God hadn’t finished preparing the Hebrews, and another reason was that He was still trying to reach out to the Amorites, with the hopes that they would turn from their sin.
I find this very encouraging because, clearly, what we sometimes perceive to be the silence of God, or the absence of God, is really God working overtime behind the scenes making our prayers a reality! Sometimes we have to wait for God to prepare a way.
In James 5:7 we read, “Be patient, then, brothers, until the Lord's coming. See how the farmer waits for the land to yield its valuable crop and how patient he is for the autumn and spring rains.”
Now the context of this passage in James is James call for the persecuted church to be patient. Ultimately the message is that justice will come and God will answer their prayers, but they may have to wait until Jesus returns. Depending on what we are waiting for, this kind of waiting might be true for us as well. As Christians, sometimes our waiting goes beyond the total number of our breaths, but that doesn’t make God’s promises any less true or sure.
But the image that James is using has a more general context as well. James points out to us that you could be the best farmer in the world, farming the best land, using the best seed, working the land with more diligence that anyone else, but none of your activities are going to change the fact that you would still have to wait for God to do His part before a harvest happens. Without God’s preparations, the harvest isn’t going to happen.
I love this image of patience because I think we sometimes mistake waiting with doing nothing. We sometimes think that waiting for God means that we just sit and wait until God does His thing, but you will never find that image of waiting anywhere in Scripture. To wait on God isn’t passive. It isn’t a resignation to just sit on the bench until the coach calls you into the game. Biblical waiting is active. It is seeking God. It is working hard to make sure that we are doing all we can to ensure that we are ready and willing and able to receive and run with that for which we are waiting. A farmer would be silly to think that God can bring for the harvest, if they haven’t planted or tilled, or tended the fields. Biblical patience is not passive. Waiting and faith go together. We actively seek that which we are waiting for by doing our part.
Now obviously, our waiting isn’t just about God preparing a way for us. (2) Often it is also about God preparing us! God is waiting for us—while we’re waiting on Him! Or to put it another way, what we perceive to be our time of waiting is really our time of preparation.
At first glance, eighty years of preparation, two thirds of a lifetime, seems like a life with lot of wasted time. But, there’s no such thing as wasted time with God—if we are living for Him.
One of the ironies of following Christ is that we may be waiting for God to do something and overlook the fact that He already is! He’s preparing us for the very thing we’ve asked for.
Moses felt prepared to lead the Hebrew people out of Egypt forty years before we meet him at the Mountain of Waiting, and with good reason. After all, he was raised in Pharaoh’s household. He led a privileged life: a life of learning, of nurturing, and of training. He had opportunities to study from the best teachers Egypt had to offer. He was given opportunities to refine and develop his leadership skills. He was a forty-year-old mature product of one of the best educational system available in the world at that time. With such experience, such knowledge, such skill, who wouldn’t consider themselves ready?
But the fact of the matter was that he wasn’t ready. Moses would be leading upwards of two million people throughout a desert wilderness for forty years! There were things he had to learn about leading God’s people. There were things he had to learn about in the wilderness. So for forty years he lived in the wilderness, learning the skills necessary to live in such a harsh environment.
He was also learning how to shepherd sheep, which was a necessity since he would be shepherding God’s people. He also learned humbleness. Every day he lived out in that wilderness, doing things that he thought were meaningless, but in reality, he was earning his second degree — this time from God, not the University of Egypt.
So none of this time in the wilderness was wasted at all. It was necessary to gain experience and build character. After all, leading two million stubborn, grumpy Israelites for forty years wasn’t your average job. God needed an above average leader. It took eighty years of time and experience—with forty years in Egypt and forty years in the wilderness—to get Moses ready.
So if we are following God, our time is never wasted. And, more to the point, our waiting in the wilderness is often used by God as a finishing school for our faith, so that we are properly prepared to handle that for which we’ve been praying and waiting.
Sometimes we have to wait because God is working behind the scenes, preparing the way for success. Sometimes we have to wait because He’s preparing us, because we’re not ready. There are things we need to learn, thing the Lord needs to change in us before our waiting will end.
Then, most important of all, sometimes we have to wait, because we haven’t learned the first lesson of faith, which is to (3) trust in God’s strength—not our own. That was the mistake that Moses had made forty years prior to his calling.
In Acts 7:23-25, we have Stephen speaking just before he was martyred, and he said about Moses, "When Moses was forty years old, he decided to visit his fellow Israelites. 24 He saw one of them being mistreated by an Egyptian, so he went to his defence and avenged him by killing the Egyptian. 25Moses thought that his own people would realize that God was using him to rescue them, but they did not.”
Did you catch what Stephen telling us here? He gives us an insight into Moses’ intentions. Moses saw the injustice and cruelty of the Egyptian beating one of his fellow Israelites, and he went to his defence and avenged him. Why did he do it? Was it just that he wanted to step into the middle of this one fight and bring justice? Partly, but there was something more going on, something bigger.
Verse 25 tells us that Moses thought that his own people would realize that God was using him to rescue them. He thought that the time for him to be their deliverer had arrived. He was off by forty years! As a result, the Israelites didn’t see Moses as God’s instrument. They didn’t recognize him as God’s rescuer.
What Stephen’s inspired insight tells us is that Moses, at the age of forty, made a conscience decision based on his faith and his love for his people. He left the household of Pharaoh and went to his people to serve as deliverer. He responded to a calling that God had given Him. But, he wasn’t ready, and as we said before, neither were the Israelites. So in his zeal, he committed manslaughter and was reject by the people he wanted to help save. Such are the fruits, however exaggerated in this case, of trying to serve, or please God in our own strength!
What’s my point? My point is that it takes more than a desire, to serve God successfully. It takes more than our will to please God. In fact, Hebrews tells us that it is impossible to please God unless we do it by faith. We have to earnestly seek Him (Hebrews 11:6).
You might think “How could Moses have thought that manslaughter was acting on behalf of God.” Well, all he was trying to do was stop the abuse of the Egyptian and his efforts went terribly wrong. Many Christians today try to serve with the right intentions, and the right desire, but end up with disastrous results. Why? Because they think they’re acting in God’s interest, but they’re really standing alone. Others are doing good things for the right reasons, but with little effect for the same reason. They are being faithful, but not acting in faith. They are working in their own strength—not God’s.
Moses had to learn to lean on God. Just like we have to learn to lean on God whether we’re talking about serving Him or following Him, we can’t do it in our own strength. Moses still needed to learn that. And where did he learn it? He learned it while waiting in the wilderness. His arrogance, his shear will to make things happen, without regard for God’s timing, without waiting for God’s empowering, led him into failure and a crisis of faith. But it also led him into the wilderness where waiting would begin to teach him the true nature of living in God’s Kingdom. You see, nothing is more fruitful than living in the wilderness to teach us that we have to rely on God’s strength. When we are facing a mountain we can’t climb, when we are alone and weak—that’s when we can truly meet God in a more profound, life-changing way.
So what do we learn from our view of the mountain of waiting today?
1. God Cares—first, just because we are waiting in a dry, lonely, wilderness doesn’t mean God has left us, or that He doesn’t care. There right in the midst of the wilderness is Mount Horeb, the mountain of God. And, from our perspective it may seem like God isn’t listening, or working, but He is. He’s preparing a way for you to leave the wilderness. He is preparing a way for you to wake from your sleep, just like Conley. And sometime soon, when the time is right, and you are ready, a different world will emerge, an amazing world.
2. Waiting is never wasted—second, waiting is never wasted. God is using it to bring us to maturity. He is using it to teach us how to survive and grow and lead others through the wilderness. Each step we take in the wilderness of waiting is never wasted if we are living for God.
3. The wilderness is worth it--Finally, our time in the wilderness is more than worth it. Why, because it is where we best learn to live by grace in the power and mercy of His strength. “My grace is sufficient” “My power is made perfect in weakness,” the Lord told Paul (2 Cor. 12:9). This is a hard lesson for us to learn, and it is learned in my opinion, on the most profound level, when we discover the mountain of God in the midst of our wilderness of failure and loneliness because that is where we learn to trust God.
Not long before his death, Henri Nouwen wrote a book called Sabbatical Journeys. He writes about some friends of his who were trapeze artists, called the Flying Roudellas.
They told Nouwen there's a special relationship between flyer and catcher on the trapeze. The flyer is the one that lets go, and the catcher is the one that catches. As the flyer swings high above the crowd on the trapeze, the moment comes when he must let go. He arcs out into the air. His job is to remain as still as possible and wait for the strong hands of the catcher to pluck him from the air.
One of the Flying Roudellas told Nouwen, "The flyer must never try to catch the catcher. The flyer must wait in absolute trust.” The catcher will catch him, but he must wait.
How do you learn to wait in such a dangerous situation? There is only one way, by waiting and being caught over and over and over again. We can only wait, if we trust. If we don’t trust, we won’t wait. We’ll start grabbing for anything we can find. So it is in the wilderness that we learn to trust, because we must wait.
If God is workings in the circumstances around our wilderness times, if God is using our wilderness times to bring us to faithful maturity, if the worst times of our lives become lessons of the greatest significance, then what learn is that it is in those times when God feels most absent that He is, in fact, most present! So we must live by faith, and not by sight. We must trust that, even though we don’t see the hand of the One who must catch us, we must still wait for His touch, because He is there and He can be trusted.
Let me leave you with these words from my main man George-Louis Leclerc de Buffon. He wrote: “Never think that God's delays are God's denials. Hold on; hold fast; hold out. Patience is genius.”
