The Call of Moses
Exodus chapter 3
Introduction
This morning we come into the presence of God with the hope that He will speak to us and get personal with us in our lives. At least that is what you should be praying as we come together in His Word.
Each one of us is on a journey and we are at different levels and we have had different things happen to us to get us where we are at.
What you do with what has happened to you will determine your destiny.
If you learn from your mistakes and you allow God excess to your life, you ask Him to be Lord of your life, it will not be easy but it will be satisfying and it will be eternally rewarding.
You will have God’s strength and you will have God’s peace provided by a God that says for a believer He will not leave you nor forsake you.
If you learn everything the hard way, if you do not give God excess to your life, you will not have peace, because true peace comes directly from God, and you will be limited to your own strength and there will be no eternal reward.
By your own choice of not wanting God, He (God) will not force you to be with Him if you do not want too. By rejecting Him in this life, you reject Him for eternity.
I want to look into the life of Moses for a moment. We remember that he did great things for God but we seem to forget that he was human and did a lot of bonehead things that God had to deal with him about and that he had to learn from his life’s mistakes.
Background
Exodus 2, we are introduced to the birth of Moses, at a time where Hebrew babies were not safe, a Hebrew born boy that would have died had his mother not made a sacrifice that any mother would have dread to make. To save her sons life was to send him down a river to pharaoh in the hopes that the daughter of the king would have mercy on him and raise him as her own.
It was a God thing when it happen because the birth mother was selected by the kings daughter to nurse this child and be paid for it. But at some point she let go of her son and the Egyptians now were raising Moses.
Moses had grown to be a man and we hear nothing of the birth mother and see Moses defend his Hebrew blood line by killing an Egyptian that was beating a Hebrew man. He thought that no one had seen him do it… but he was wrong.
Two Hebrew men get into a fight, Moses tries to break it up and finds that they saw him kill that Egyptian man and accused him of doing it. The secret Moses thought was safe was now exposed and Moses knew that he could no longer stay there. He left Pharaoh and that life and went to the place of Midian to escape his past.
There he befriends a girl and her family, takes special care of their flock. He is taken back to meet the father. In the culture of the day, he is given the hand of his daughter and they begin a family, have a child and he is years later the son in law with the family business.
Moses, with his wife Zipporah, their son Gershom, standing in a land that he was not born in saying… “I have become a foreigner in a foreign land.”
Exodus chapter 2:23-
“During that long period, the king of Egypt died. The Israelites groaned in their slavery and cried out, and their cry for help because of their slavery went up to God. God heard their groaning and he remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob. So God looked on the Israelites and was concerned about them.”
Moses has a past- not very good.
Moses was on the run from God and not yet doing what he was supposed to be doing.
Moses had un-dealt with guilt.
Moses had responsibilities to his family.
We pick up the text for this morning- Moses living his life, dealing as he can.
Exodus chapter 3:1- 3:10
Moses is In the desert, he sees a bush that will not burn up, he goes to check it out.
Moses is called by name from the burning bush.
Yeah, here I am.
Moses, must have been in shock! I think if I could paraphrase that conversation, and Moses would have been able to talk- Moses would have ended it by saying…Come again? You have got to be kidding me! You did not just put all that on me!
Instead all he could do was listen- read again verses 5-10.
I am sending you… to bring my people out of Egypt.
What an awesome task to be put on the back of any one human being. He did what most everyone of us would have done.
All of a sudden excuses come flying out of the mouth of Moses
Who I am to do that?
What will I tell them?
What if they do not listen to me?
How will I do it?
God responds to Moses and says that “I am.”
For Almighty God that is a complete sentence. He is able to stand alone with that statement.
For the rest of us, we need at least a third word. We will see that I am finishes our sentences with…
I am all you will need
I am your strength
Using the statement God uses….
Let’s see what we can learn and apply this morning;
I. God uses Broken People
Aren’t you glad that God loves us enough to not give up on us and desires to use the broken pieces of our lives to allow us wholeness and satisfaction and to accomplish great things for God..
Moses flees to the desert and seems to be living a normal life. If being broken and running from God and country is your normal. The great thing about God is that He uses broken people. He actually encourages us to come broken and He will mend us. Truth is if you don’t come broken, He will have to break you first before He can use you. True isn’t it? Hurt people hurt people, that is the word from Dr. Sandra Wilson who specializes in hurt people. She goes on to say that because we have been hurt by others, that we hurt others. The resulting wounds are physical, sexual, emotional, verbal, and spiritual. We have many ways to do it but God by His great mercy and grace still wants to use us for His honor and glory.
Moses is about to find out what each one of us needs to discover this morning- God will use and desires to use each one of us if we will let Him.
Psalm 51:17-
“My sacrifice O God is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart you, God, will not despise.”
Broken spirit willing to be used of God, and a contrite heart not a concrete heart.
There is a big difference. One is a heart repentant and remorseful and one is heavy, hard to move material that is made of stone and is made hard and unmovable.
Which one do you think God wants to use?
Nobody really talks about it but Moses had a rough childhood beginning, but was raised in royalty of the palace of the Egyptians. He must have had split feelings about people of Israel and the people of Egypt. He is a way must of loved them both. He was Guilty that the Egyptian abused the Hebrew and guilty when he killed the Egyptian after stepping in. Running from God because he did not know what the right answer was.
For Moses this was another normal day, but to God, He was going to do something extra-ordinary. God works by stepping into the ordinary. When he does, it becomes extra-ordinary because of God Himself doing something. Normal changes, routine becomes different, and the box comes off of limits. With God there is no limits of what he can do inside the guidelines of His word. He cannot do things outside of his word.
God does not have to warn us that He is showing up because we are told to be expecting and anticipating God to show up in our lives. God wants to use us, wants to show up in our routine world and make it extra-ordinary just by Him showing up.
II. God uses our weakness and His strength to accomplish much
Moses wasn’t perfect. God does not use perfect people. God did not die for perfect people. God makes no apologies that He is looking for broken people that will admit their weaknesses and will allow God to do something in their lives.
I believe a lot of Christians do not hear from God because they are too busy. They do not see the burning bushes that God puts in front of them. Moses life did not change until he stopped what he was doing (normal stuff) and noticed that a bush was on fire but was not burning (not normal) the reason that God called Moses by name twice was not selective hearing as some women might think but was a way of showing that he loved and cared for Moses. A runaway rebellious man was the very man that God wanted to talk to that day about how his life could be changed in an instant. He comes over and God let him know who is addressing him, that it was a holy place and he should take off his shoes, and even though he had failed before, the God of mercy was ready to speak to him if he was willing. He would take all of Moses weaknesses and use them for good if he would allow God to give him His strength and abilities to accomplish the tasks at hand.
He calls us in our weaknesses
III. God uses Burning Bushes to get our attention.
God used the burning bush to get Moses attention. He had to stop what he was doing and go over and see and hear what God was doing and saying. Today, we live in a society where everybody is talking and nobody is listening. I read a statement by one of our own college age kids and he said that we need to come to the table and be listening to each other, even those that we disagree with so that each one is heard and we can come to an agreement of the change that is needed. That was profound.
I think God would tell us sometimes to just shut up! Stop talking! Come into my presence and just listen!
Holy ground is holy ground, separate ground where God is and where He tells us what we need to hear and gives us our marching orders as believers to build kingdom works.
Closing,
The one thing that I am 100% sure of is you are unqualified to do kingdom work in your own strength and talents. You have great skills and gifts that need to be used, but you are not God. You need His strength to accomplish God things. If you can do it in your own strength, it is not a God thing.
What does God have to do to get your attention? Has He sent you some burning bushes and you have just dismissed them?
Are you going to let your past keep you from receiving what the Lord has for you now?
In his book, One minute after you die, Erwin Lutzer says;
“One minute after you slip behind the parted curtain, you will either be enjoying a personal welcome from Christ or catching a first glimpse of gloom as you have never known it. Either way, your future will be irrevocably fixed and eternally unchangeable.”
Now is the time to take care of eternity and now is the time to allow God to help you and use you
God uses broken people- we are all broken in some way and in need of God’s help. Don’t let your brokenness keep you from being used of God. Allow God to use your brokenness to help someone else and put you where you need to be.
God takes our weaknesses and our limits because we have no right to boast how great we are apart from God. He takes those weakness and adds his strengths so they we can do impossible things and we must give God the credit and the glory.
What does God have to do to get your attention? nobody else- what does He see in you this morning? That can build a kingdom? That will help someone else? That will give you self worth? That can change your life forever! Are you willing to go over to that burning bush and check it out?
Amen.
