Exodus 3: 11 NIV
But Moses said to
God, “Who am I, that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the Israelites out of
Egypt?”
What Does God Want to Do With You?
I can remember only one time my dad took me and my
brother fishing. There may have been
other times but I can only recall one. I
cannot remember my dad ever fishing. I
don’t know of any times he went out with his buddies to fish. I can’t think of a time in all our family
camping trips my dad broke out fishing poles except this one time. He got us some nice backpacking fishing poles
and on a camping trip took us to a stream to fish for the first time. It was a beautiful location; the water was
brilliantly clear and sparkling with the mountain sunlight lathering it with
the effervescence of its white rainbow.
We could see trout passing in and out of the rocky caves and
crevices. My dad showed us how to push
the salmon eggs onto the hook, put the lead weights on the line on which we
each had a bob to keep track of where our hooks settled. I can’t remember much advice my dad gave us
on how to cast our lines; I am not sure how much he knew about it himself. I reared my pole back and got my hook caught
in a bush behind me. Then I tried again
and forgot to release the button on the reel to let out the line and the hook
came flying back at me. I gathered
myself, pitched back my pole and with all my strength sent the hook and weights
and bob out toward the middle of the stream but it got no further than the edge
of the shore. Eventually I just leaned
my pole out over the water and without casting, dropped the hook down into the
water. I caught a piece of wood, some
plants growing near the shore, a large rock at the bottom of the stream and
some very nice twigs. It was not a very
long fishing adventure. I think in about
an hour or so we all gave up on it.
Later I discovered my dad didn’t even like fish and probably not fishing
either. He took us though and we all did
pretty poorly at fishing. Looking back
after almost thirty years of parenting, I realize that fishing trip was never
about fishing. It was about my dad
wanting to be with us; to do something with us that we might find fun. Fish did not figure into the equation at
all. The fishing trip was about
family…nothing more, nothing less.
What for you is a nothing more, nothing less
deal? For Scrooge it was making
money. For Huck Finn, it was no controls
upon his life. For Ronald Reagan it was
the end of communist tyranny. For George
Washington it was the establishment of a new country. For Abraham Lincoln it was the preservation
of the Union. For Martin Luther King
Jr., it was the equality of all races. For
Captain “Sully”, it was the survival of his passengers. For Michael Jordan, it was complete
domination of the basketball world. For
many parents it is the success of their children. What is the bottom line for you? What is your “nothing more, nothing less”
determination? Is there an all-encompassing
goal for your life that if you don’t reach it, you will feel like you failed? Have you thought about what matters most for
you?
As a “great fisherman myself”, I have often thought
about the offer Jesus made to Peter and his brother Andrew to make them
“fishers of men”. "Come, follow me," Jesus said,
"and I will make you fishers of men." (Matthew 4:19 NIV) These
disciples and all the others often misunderstood Jesus’ intentions and perhaps
they didn’t grasp in this case what mattered to Jesus. The men already had a fishing business going
and perhaps they assumed that being “fishers of men” would be much the same as
being fishers of fish. They would
acquire some important skills from a mentor, practice what they learned and
then off they would go, “fishers of men.
Many Christian and non-Christian people make this mistake when they read
the passage too. God wants to teach us a
few things that will make our lives better and with our fresh insight we will
be good people. What is completely
overlooked by both those within the Christian faith and outside it is that God
is not a lecturer who provides the keys to success. We mistakenly think and perhaps the disciples
did too that our Lord’s call was about fishing.
It was not! It was about the
clause in the center of the call. “I
will make you…” This is the core of what
Christianity is. Christ will make
you. It does not really matter at all
what He might make you…a fisherman, a missionary, a leader, a musician, a
teacher, an astrophysicist. All of that
is subordinate to the purpose of God. He
will make you.
We have analyzed and reanalyzed Moses so many times
that it feels a bit redundant to look at him again but it seems important to
put his calling by God into its proper perspective. When God called to Moses from a bush supernaturally
on fire, Moses was stunned, not by the miracle of the bush in flames but not
being consumed or by the voice coming from seemingly nowhere, but by what the
Lord had to say to him. The Lord said, "I have indeed seen the
misery of my people in Egypt. I have heard them crying out because of their
slave drivers, and I am concerned about their suffering. So I have come down to rescue them from the
hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land into a good and
spacious land, a land flowing with milk and honey — the home of the Canaanites,
Hittites, Amorites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites. And now the cry of the Israelites has reached
me, and I have seen the way the Egyptians are oppressing them. So now, go. I am sending you to Pharaoh to
bring my people the Israelites out of Egypt."
(Exodus 3:7-10 NIV)
You and I cannot fault Moses for his reaction to the
pronouncement because we probably would have responded much like him. “Who am I to do such a thing?” How could I get this done? But Moses said to God, "Who am I, that
I should go to Pharaoh and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?" (Exodus
3:11 NIV) Nearly a chapter and a half is
given to Moses trying his best to get out of going down to Egypt and God
countering every one of Moses’s excuses.
It is almost comical, the exchange, and yet the drama of whether or not
Moses agrees to go with God takes a back seat to th revelation of how disconnected
Moses was from God. His immediate reaction
to discovering that it was the Creator of the universe who was talking to him was
to shrink back in fear but all too quickly Moses began to think of himself as
the Lord’s peer. If you read this the
first time and did not know just how God actually is, you might be waiting for
the Lord simply to strike Moses dead because of Moses’s cheekiness and move on
to someone else. It is all too easy for
us to miss what God is actually doing with His people if we misunderstand the personality
of God.
Moses really was a perfectly silly man. He thought he was responsible for getting the
Israelites free of the Egyptians and out of Egypt. It was as absurd as any of the disciples
thinking God’s challenge was for them to figure out how to be fishers of
men. Moses thought God somehow needed
him to get this monumental task done. If
you read again what God had to say about it, He kept reiterating over and over
what He was going to do to free the Israelites; what He was going to do through
Moses. When God was done with Sodom and
Gomorrah, He simply wiped them out with fire and brimstone. He could have done that with the Egyptian
problem. Even the ancient account of
Abraham and Abimelech reminds us of how easy it was for God all by Himself to
take out of Egypt the Israelites. When
Abraham acted like a child and pretended that his wife Sarah was merely his
sister so that the King Abimelech or any of the men of Gerar where he had moved
would not kill Abraham in order to steal his wife from him, Abraham succeeded. King Abimelech took took Sarah into his harem
without killing Abraham. Abraham though
lost is wife and the Lord was not happy.
The Lord immediately closed up all the wombs of the women of Gerar and
then in a dream Abimelech was warned by God that he and all his subjects would
be killed off if Abimelech did not quickly release Sarah back to her
husband. The Lord had the ability to
wipe out anyone He wished if it suited His purposes and the people of Gerar,
like the Egyptians enslaving the Israelites were not exceptions. God could easily separate out who He wanted
to keep and who He wanted to destroy without any help from Moses or anyone
else.
This is what God wanted. He was making an offer to Moses, just like He
did to the disciples to join Him and be a part of Him. It wasn’t about God needing someone to fish
for men or rescue Israelites from slavery.
The Lord was giving them the opportunity to be joined with Him, the
Lord’s life built into theirs and their lives built into His. If they refused, it would be tragic for them,
not for God’s cause or for those they could have helped. They would have lost the opportunity to have
God’s personality become a part of theirs, His life merged with them and then
together do all God wanted to do. Moses
would never have lifted his staff and seen the Red Sea part and John never
would have been held by the resurrected Jesus Christ and gained the power of
the Holy Spirit if they did not let God join Himself to them. We cannot know what God might do with us if
we let Him make us into His people but it will be certain that whatever it
might be will be far greater than what we might do just on our own. The words of Paul express perfectly what it
is like to have Christ joined with us. I am not saying this because I am in need,
for I have learned to be content whatever the circumstances. I know what it is to be in need, and I know
what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in any
and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in
want. I can do everything through him
who gives me strength. (Philippians 4:11-13 NIV)
What more could we want out of life than this? Some people would sell their souls to have
what Paul had! Rich and poor, successful
and failing…all alike would love nothing more than to be content in any and
every situation. And what is more, Paul
said anything he needed to do, he could through Christ who gave him strength. The best you can have in life is for Christ to
be a part of it, living through you in all you do. He chooses what comes your way and just think
of that. The same one who died to save
you decides for you what your life will become.
Contentment and the peace of knowing that a loving Savior has your days
ordered makes for what I would call a perfect life. Nothing more, nothing less!
No comments:
Post a Comment