Nothing More, Nothing Less

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!