WHEN THE PURPOSE IS REVEALED (2014)
Text: Exodus 17:1-7
"One of the greatest sins we commit against God is not reaching the potential he has placed in us." (Raymond McHenry. ed. McHenry’s Quips, Quotes And Other Notes. [author’s files: John Maxwell]. Third Printing. Peabody: Hendrickson Publishers, 2004, p. 193). To put it another way, there is where we are and where it is that God wants us to be and it is only when we follow God and His guidance that we are able to close the gap between where we are and where it is that God would like for us to be.
A statement such as the “sinfulness of not reaching the potential that God has placed in us” helps us to understand that God has our growing plans in mind. Yet, perhaps one of the biggest barriers to unlocking our potential is from wondering what our purpose in life is. We might find ourselves wrestling between complacency and the anxiety of taking the risks to explore new and uncharted territory in our lives.
God summoned Moses through a burning bush (Exodus 3:1-7) to be His leader for a very important task. When God summoned Moses to be His leader for the purpose of liberating the children of Israel who were Egyptian slaves, Moses had some reservations about his own qualifications. He was not sure that he was the man for the job. Moses insisted that he was not sure that he was eloquent in speech (Exodus 4:10). In fact Moses even goes so far as to ask God to send someone else for the task. God then tells Moses that He will use Aaron to help him. God had given Moses potential that He wanted to unlock and develop. It seems obvious that Moses’ uncertainty was based on his anxiety and the uncharted territory of the task to which God had for him. Up till now, Moses thought that his purpose was to be a shepherd. He was a fugitive who was evading the consequences of having killed an Egyptian who happened to have been beating one of Moses’ fellow countrymen---a Hebrew. It was now some forty years later that God was revealing to Moses that He had big plans for Moses. There was a purpose, but there was also a journey----an uncharted journey.
JOURNEY
It seems, that one of the things that is a potential for us that we like to know where we are going to go in our future before we get there. We like to know where we are going to go because we like to calculate the risks and foresee the obstacles. We do not like bumps in the road and we want to avoid them because of the setbacks that they can cause to progress that we have made or hoped to make.
Consider the relevance of the following story. “The following conversation occurred between a canary in a cage and a lark on the window sill. The lark looked in at the canary and asked, "What is you Purpose?"
"My purpose is to eat seed."
"What for?"
"So I can be strong."
"What for?"
"So I can sing," answered the canary.
"What for?" continued the lark.
"Because when I sing I get more seed."
"So you eat in order to be strong so you can sing so you can get more seed so you can eat?"
"Yes."
"There is more to you than that," the lark offered. "If you'll follow me I'll help you find it, but you must leave your cage."
It's tough to find meaning in a caged world. But that doesn't keep us from trying. Mine deep enough in every heart and you'll find it: a longing for meaning, a quest for purpose. As surely as a child breathes, he will someday wonder, "What is the purpose of my life?"
(Steve May. compiler. The Stry File. [Max Lucado, In the Grip of Grace] Third Printing. Peabody: Hendrickson Publishers, 2000, pp. 263-64).
As long as we stay in the bounds of the cage---the cage of the comfortable and familiar we cannot discover what our purpose in life might be. Like Moses we have to trust God, take risks and begin our journey. And like Moses, we will often find that the purpose of our lives unfolds over the course of time.
THE UNFOLDING PURPOSE
Not only did God have a purpose for Moses, but He also had a purpose for those that He called Moses to lead. The lives of God’s chosen people were being dominated and dictated by the Egyptians who enslaved them. They had been crying out for deliverance. They wanted deliverance and a future. God wanted to deliver them from slavery and mold them to be His people. God delivered them and liberated them. God used Moses to be a key leader in that process. As someone (Bruce Larson) has said their freedom had two parts to it. God delivered and gave them freedom from oppression and slavery. God also freed them from oppression and slavery to allow them to have the freedom to become the people He wanted to them to be. (Bruce Larson. The Presence. New York: Harper and Row, 1988, p. 64).
Later, it must have dawned on Moses how God had been grooming him for the purpose for which he called him. Moses probably began to put the pieces of the puzzle together when he began to realize what was special about his youth in Pharaoh’s court.
1.Unlike all the other male children, Moses had been spared from being killed as were the young Hebrew male toddlers (Exodus 1:22) who were thrown to their deaths in the Nile river.
2.Pharaoh wanted to oppress the Hebrews into slave labor and control their population (Exodus 1:9-11).
3. Pharaoh’s reasoning behind all of this was that he feared the Hebrews would become too numerous and maybe join the side of an Egyptian enemy in the event of a war (Exodus 1:10).
4. The mother of Moses kept him hidden for three months until she could not hide him any more. So then she placed him in a basket and placed it in the Nile River.
5.Very shortly after that, baby Moses was discovered by Pharaoh’s daughter (Exodus 2:7) who raised him (Moses).
6.Moses’ sister had been watching from a distance and as she saw baby Moses being discovered by Pharaoh’s daughter.
7. So she made the suggestion to Pharaoh’s daughter that she could get a Hebrew woman to nurse this baby Moses (Exodus 1:7, 8).
8. So Moses’ sister went and got Moses’ natural mother to be his nurse (Exodus 1:9).
9.As a grown man, Moses was probably beginning to understand that God had spared him as a baby because of the purpose for which he now called him.
Being raised in Pharaoh’s court gave Moses a working knowledge about Egyptian culture that seems to have been by Divine design. This knowledge was something that Moses would later use to address the purpose for which God had called him.
THE PROMISE
Moses questioned God about his qualifications for the task to which God had called him to do. For every reason Moses could think of to decline what God was calling him to do, God had an answer. Moses would always think of the impossible factors and God was reminding Moses that nothing was impossible to Him. God seemed to be promising Moses’ success in the task to which he was calling him. Despite the obstacles that Moses would encounter in his ongoing confrontation with Pharaoh, God ultimately promised Moses everything would come out according to His will. God promised Moses’ success!
God always makes good on His promises! God’s promise of Moses’ success is linked to the promises that God made to Abraham before him. God promised Abraham a son and He delivered His promise (Genesis17:19, 21:1-3). God promised Abraham that through his promised son he would be the father of many nations. God promised Abraham that his descendents would be as numerous as the stars.
So how is it that God’s call of Moses’ is linked to His promises of Abraham before him? God had promised Abraham that his descendents would have a “promised land” (Genesis 15:18). God also foretold Abraham that his descendents would be oppressed as strangers in a strange land which seems to point the time frame of when God called Moses (Genesis 15:13,14). Their oppression was to last for 400 years. That promise of the “promised land” was not going to be a possibility as long as Abraham’s descendents were in captivity as slaves of Egypt. This is where God’s call of Moses comes in. God had observed the oppression of His people (Exodus 3:7-8) and had decided it was time for their deliverance.
Following their deliverance, they complained to Moses about how good they had had it back in Egypt as slaves. That generation and their ancestors before them had been in captivity for 400 years. They had seen the effects of the plagues. They had seen that the Red Sea had parted by Divine intervention that allowed them to escape on dry ground. They had seen how God caused the sea to close in on Pharaoh’s army after he changed his mind about letting them go. Now, they complained to Moses and tested God. Then they sarcastically asked Moses why did he bring them out here to die when they had it so much better in Egypt? They had seen all these miracles God had done and worried about being thirsty. God had used Moses’ leadership to get His people delivered from Egypt.
Now, that they were delivered, God’s item on the agenda was to take the Egypt out of them. In Egypt they were lacking a foundation. God delivered them to give them a foundation, to motivate them to continue to grow in faith and to give them direction. Before they were delivered, they were lacking the ability to reach their potential. God liberated them from Egyptian captivity so that they could begin to unlock their potential and discover their purpose as His people. Jesus Christ paid for the price of our sins on the cross so that we could be delivered from the slavery of sin. Jesus gives us the foundation of our faith, the motivation to serve and the direction that we need to stay on course by following Him.
