Faith Baptist Church
4258 Botetourt Road
Fincastle, Virginia 24090
(540) 473-2325
Acts 7:29-34 and Exodus 2:15-3:6
As we said last week, the first forty years of Moses’ life was quite easy. He was always taken care of by someone else, if not by his mother or Pharaoh’s daughter; it came by favor of the Pharaoh and his court.
But after Moses killed an Egyptian task master and it was told to him that he had been seen in the act, he fled to Midian and spent the next forty years of his life in exile. Moses lived in rugged isolated conditions wherein he learned to be a care giver through keeping sheep and raising a family. Things change so quickly when you become the caregiver, rather than the care receiver. Selfish expectations must give way to selfless realizations. When this transformation takes place life becomes more about providing for others and the strange phenomena that overtakes the mind and heart of the provider is the sense of self worth that we have a purpose in life that is satisfying. The reason that sense of satisfaction takes over the heart is that you are now doing the will of God. God expects believers to put others first, Eph.4:1-3; 5:20-21.
This reminds me of a young married couple before children come along. They can go many places and do many things because they have the time and the money to do it, but when the first child comes along everything changes. The focus now is on providing for this child. They go from being me first to child first and this goes on until that child is raised. They listen to the needs of the child before they do anything. They’re being transformed from personal comfort to a level of productive conformity as they mature.
Moses learned as he was being productively conformed by God to listen to the needs of his family. He learned the responsibility of raising his sons and loving and caring for his wife. He learned the benefits of routine; the duty of getting up and going to work at a monotonous job he probably didn’t like every day, but he did it anyway. He learned that the universe did not revolve around him. It would be a liberating experience to realize he didn’t have to perform to meet so many people’s expectations. He could be himself.
He grew up during his forty years in exile. As a matter of fact Moses named his first son, Gershom, which means sojourner. Moses said in Ex.2:22 why he named his first son Gershom...“for he said I have been a stranger in a strange land.”
When God takes you out of your comfort zone to his place of conformity you often feel like a stranger in a strange place. No one seems to understand your thoughts, or care what you have to say when you are in a strange place. This is not their fault; this is the plan of God. We must always remember that as God’s children we are his and his alone. He not only can turn the heart of the king, he can also turn the heart of his children.
We wrestle to maintain our independence in this world and this is not all bad. But we will loose out if we try of keep our independence from God. If God is ever going to wean you from this noisy busy world so you can hear him speak his promises and purposes unto you, he will have to take you out of your comfort zone. God the Father wants to be closely involved with your life. He does this through the establishment of an edification complex, a biblical tutorial learned through doctrinal teaching and applied through obedience in your Christian experience.
Do you hold back on God’s involvement in your life? We all do this when we scrap his word for something else.
We tell God we don’t want his guidance, or we don’t want but so much of his guidance. We all do this and we shouldn’t. Every child of God has a level of toleration when it comes to God’s molding process. Humility and submission does not come easy at some times in our lives and here is where our love and obedience to God is tested.
While Moses was in the desert he kept his father-in-law’s sheep.
Ex.3:1 says Moses kept these sheep on the backside of the desert. The Hebrew word for desert is da-bar.
Da-bar is used in thirty different Hebrew words and every usage has something to do with some sense of thought process, or communication. The Greek Septuagint renders this word, eremon, a solitary, desolate place.
3:2-6
On an ordinary day, in the middle of nowhere Moses heard the Lord. Moses must have felt his life was over. His accomplishments could have been amazing if he had not blown it by killing the Egyptian slave master years earlier. I wonder how many times he thought to himself, If I had just not messed up I could have been a big success and maybe I could have helped by fellow Hebrew people. But now I am isolated in this desert. All I hear is the sound of sheep, the wind, the jackals and the thoughts’ echoing in my mind that I am a nobody, no body knows. But we are never an unknown to God.
Are you waiting for your burning bush experience with God? Are you waiting for God to shake you up and let you know he is with you? If you have the willingness and humility to let God take you from your place of comfort and convenience to his place of conformity you will have your burning bush experience. You will have a light come on in your soul that puts out all of your self made lights of greatness and when you do you will never be the same. Programs and music and activity will never turn your attention from the word of God. They may be icing on the cake, but they are not the cake. They may be seasonings on the steak, but they are not the steak. When you come to church you should be so caught up with the word of the Lord that He has all of your undivided attention, I Cor.7:35b ... “and that ye may attend upon the Lord without distraction.” When we come to church we are to “Cast down imaginations, and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God, and bring into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ.”
II Cor.10:5
God is the life changing Principle for all of us, and he is in the life changing business. In the silence of our thoughts upon God he speaks to us and confirms our worth.
And even at that time when God does get through to us it still takes time for Him to deprogram us out of our humanistic ways of thinking and our poor spiritual self-esteem. We can become humbled by our circumstances so much so that we lack the motivation to move forward for the Lord. And here is where the N.T believer must acknowledge his or her need to grow up in Christ; to dig into the treasures of his word.