Sermon Manuscript
Topic: Trusting God in Tough Times
Text: Exodus 2 (NIV)
Good Morning Brothers and Sister,
What a joy it is to worship the Lord together this morning!
Illustration – the story of Holocaust
By the mid 1930’s Hitler’s Germany began a campaign to persecute, imprison, and kill the Jews. Hitler blamed the Jews for many of Germany’s problems. He used Darwin’s evolutionary theory to justify what he claimed was the destruction of an inferior race. As a result, many Jews experienced the looting of their homes. They were driven away and confined to ghettos. And many were hauled off to concentration camps. At times thousands of Jews were lined up and shot, and buried in mass graves. Others were gassed. Up to 1.5 million Jewish children were killed in the Holocaust.
But, some Christians, like Corrie Ten Boom and her family decided to save the lives of Jewish people. So, they hid many Jews in their home in Holland from Hitler’s troops. Eventually, her family was caught and sent to a concentration camp. They went through very tough times, but they survived. Later, God used her as a public speaker to reach millions of people for Christ.
Brothers and sisters, we live in an evil world. So, we constantly experience tough times as we go through life. But, a lot of times, we don’t really know what to do when we are faced with tough situations. Well, our passage this morning tells us that, we should trust in God when we go through tough times. So, turn with me to Exodus 2:1-25 which gives us 3 reasons why we should trust God in tough times. First… because, God Rescues His People!
1. God Rescues His People (Vs. 1-10)
In the first 10 verses, we read about the birth and miraculous rescue of Moses. He was born of Amram and Jochebed who were both Levites. When Jochebed gave birth to Moses, ‘she saw that he was a fine child.’ So, right from the first moment of his birth, it became apparent that he was an extraordinary child. So she hid him for three months. Btw, why did Jochebed hide Moses, her own son?
Because of Pharaoh’s order: “Every Hebrew boy that is born, you must throw into the Nile, but let every girl live” (Exodus. 1:22). He thought that Hebrews would grow in number and eventually overpower him! So he came up with this evil plan to limit the growth of the Hebrew population in Egypt.
Now, Jochebed had a tough time hiding Moses for three months. Can you imagine trying to hide a newborn baby and keep him quiet? After 3 months, she realized that she wouldn’t be able to hide him any longer. So, “She got a papyrus basket for him and coated it with tar and pitch. Then she placed the child in it and put it among the reeds along the bank of the Nile. And Miriam, probably twelve years of age at the time, stood on the riverbank to “see what would happen to her baby brother.”
Can you imagine what it would be like to give away your 3-month-old baby? As a mother, it would have been emotionally very tough for Jochebed. It was heartbreaking for her to let go of her 3 months old son float in Nile River. Now, lets try to consider the risks: Would the basket float? Would it survive the currents of the Nile River? Would the child escape the danger of the crocodiles? Would he be safe in the hands of the Egyptians? Jochebed released her son by faith.
“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. 6 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. Now, the princess recognized what was going on there. She remembered her father’s order to throw every Hebrew boy into the Nile. What her father, the Pharaoh, had commanded was not only unthinkable; it was undoable. So, she was pondering what she would do with the child.
Since Miriam was watching all of this from a distance, she saw this as an opportunity. So she asked Pharaoh’s daughter, “Shall I go and get one of the Hebrew women to nurse the baby for you?” In response to Miriam’s request, she was willing to get a Hebrew woman to nurse the baby. So, Moses was raised by his own mother. And after few years, she took him to Pharaoh’s daughter and he became her son.
Brothers and sisters, Pharaoh’s daughter took a great risk in adopting Moses. Somehow she convinced her father to raise the child. Moses could have become either another Hebrew slave or could have been killed as he floated down the Nile. But, God had other plans for him. So, in the midst of all these tough situations, God rescued Moses out of Nile. God orchestrated this miraculous journey of Moses from the basket to the palace. Indeed God rescues His people!
Application
Brothers and sisters, what are some areas of your life you need to stop holding on to, and start trusting God? Has God brought something to your mind that you’ve been holding on to, and need to let go? Maybe you need to let go of a dream. Maybe it’s something material, a possession you have? I know, even the idea of letting it go seems too painful for us. But, God is saying ‘Let it go and trust Me with it.’
Brothers and sisters, even when God seems silent, He is always working for the good of His children. There is no such thing as, fate or luck or ‘it just happened,’ it is really God’s providential care. So, Sometimes we need to slow down, and learn to see God and His presence in our circumstances. And we need to thank Him for His care.
God has a purpose for each and every one of us. As He rescued Moses out of Nile River, He can rescue us from the tough situations we are going through today. So, let us trust God in our tough times because He rescues His people.
The second reason why we should trust God in tough times, is because, God gives refuge to His people.
2. God Gives Refuge to His People (Vs. 11-22)
Suddenly the story jumps forty years. So in verse 11 we find Moses as a grown up man. At the age of forty, Moses left the luxury of the palace to visit his countrymen. He wanted to understand what they were really going through. And he also wanted to see if he could help in any way.
Though Moses grew up in the palace and learned the ways of the Egyptians, he also learned the history of his own people. He was fed up with the inhumane treatment that his fellow Hebrews were receiving from the Egyptians. That’s why; he became so angry when he saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew. He looked ‘this way and that’, and seeing no one, he killed the Egyptian and hid him in the sand.
The next day Moses returned to his people probably thinking that they would praise him for defending them. And, this time, he saw two Hebrews fighting with each other. So he tried to reconcile them. But, he got shocked when one of them asked, “Who made you ruler and judge over us? Do you mean to kill me as you killed the Egyptian?” Then, Moses realized that people knew about what he did. And he was afraid that Pharaoh will know about it. Moses felt deep concern about the tough condition of his people, but his action in killing the Egyptian was definitively impulsive. Brothers and sisters, this is what happens when we try to do the work of God in the flesh. Moses tried to do God’s work in man’s way. He operated by sight instead of faith. And he operated in his time instead of God’s time.
When Pharaoh heard about it, he tried to kill Moses. So, being discouraged and afraid, Moses fled to Midian. Midian was the desert region south of Canaan. It must have been very hot in Midian, that's why Moses sat down by a well. As he was sitting there by the well, the seven unmarried daughters of Reuel came to water their father’s flock. But, some shepherds drove them away. Moses became angry seeing that injustice right in front of his eyes. So, he rescued the daughters of Reuel from those shepherds and even watered their flock.
Btw, Reuel was a priest of Midian, who was also known as Jethro. When he heard about what Moses did for his daughters at the well, he was impressed. So he asked them to go and invite Moses to eat with them. Moses agreed to eat with Reuel and his family. While they were eating, Reuel invited Moses to live with him and manage his flocks. Moses agreed! So he lived there in Midian as a sheepherder for Reuel.
Moses got married to Ruel’s daughter Zipporah and had a son.
He named his son, Gershom, saying, ‘I have become a foreigner in a foreign land.’ What Moses is saying here is that, he has been a refugee, but he belongs to somewhere else. He lived there in Midian for the next 40 years. And it was God Who provided refuge for Moses in Midian to protect him from Pharaoh’s fury.
Brothers and sisters, God gave Him refuge there to teach him a new style of leadership through shepherding. Moses needed to learn that, it would be God, not him who would deliver Israel. He had to be humble enough for God to use him. So, God, not only gave him refuge, but also used that time to prepare him for the future. Moses trusted God through those tough forty years in Midian because he was under God’s protection.
Application
Now, forty years is a long time for us, but not for God. He had been working on this agenda for 400 years. God knows how to deliver his people from their tough times. Moses thought that he could deliver his people in his own strength and at his own time. But, he had to learn to become a mere instrument of God, and he had to wait for God’s time.
Brothers and sisters, God’s work is to be done in God’s way and in God’s power. He may use a harsh long lesson to teach us as He did with Moses. But here’s the thing, if we humble ourselves, God will exalt us; but, if we exalt ourselves, God will humble us. Like Moses, we must learn to find refuge in God. So, let us humble ourselves to trust God and seek refuge in Him during tough times in life.
And the third reason why we should trust God in tough times, is because, God remembers His covenant to His people.
3. God Remembers His Covenant to His People (Vs. 23-25)
This is the true beginning of the Exodus story. Because, it is the crying out of Israel that triggers the Exodus event. In the next chapters, we see that God is acting because He has heard the cry of His people. All the time that Moses was gone to Midian, the people of God were groaning in their slavery in Egypt.
And in verse 24, we read that ‘God heard their groaning. Upon hearing their groaning, God ‘remembered His covenant’. Btw, it doesn't mean that God forgot His covenant. Rather, the fullness of His plan has come together. The covenant He had made to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.
What is a covenant?
A covenant is a formal bond that ties two people, two nations, or two parties together. Perhaps the best illustration of a covenant is a marriage union. Two people fall in love and want to spend their lives with each other. There is a deep, personal attachment between them. But it is important to guard the personal relationship with a formal, binding commitment. And that is what marriage is all about. The marriage commitment is there simply to allow the personal love to grow and develop.
In the same way, God has bound Himself in a covenant to His people. He loves His people. He has a personal attachment to them. God has pledged Himself to be the God of His people. And He has formalized that attachment by making a public pledge to them. This is how He describes the covenant to Abraham in Genesis 17:7-8:
“7 I will establish my covenant as an everlasting covenant between me and you and your descendants after you for the generations to come, to be your God and the God of your descendants after you. 8 The whole land of Canaan, where you now reside as a foreigner, I will give as an everlasting possession to you and your descendants after you; and I will be their God.”
Application
Brothers and sisters, God’s covenant was that, He would bring His people back to Canaan, the Promise Land. They were captives to the strongest nation in the world, Egypt for 400 years. And when they cried out to God. He heard them. He saw their tough situation. And He remembered His covenant to Abraham. And God remembers His covenant to us. He is concerned about us because He cares, loves and remembers us. He listens to our prayer, cry and groaning. He does not only listen, He does something about it. When you face tough situations in your life, the first thing you must always realize is that God cares. God is true to His promises. Therefore, let us trust God when we face tough times in life because God remembers His covenant to His people.
Summary
Brothers and sisters, today we have learned three reasons why we should trust God in tough times. It is because:
1. God Rescues His People.
2. God Gives Refuge to His People.
3. God Remembers His Covenant to His People.
