Freedom From My Misperception

Exodus 3:12-4:20

If Moses was going to free his people from Egypt, he was going to need to be free himself, free from a small view of God and free from misperceptions about himself.  Coming into this passage, Moses has received the call to go and free Israel, but he has questions.

The change in Moses is subtle though profound.  We don’t actually see it in him, but we see it in him through his staff, his shepherd’s rod that he carries with him to shepherd the sheep.  God knew that Moses needed 

more than just answers to questions, for Moses needed to experience God and to understand himself differently.  At the beginning of the passage, the staff was known as Moses’ staff, a staff that he used to do his work as a shepherd and marked him out in his identity as a wanderer, away from his home.   Then God changes the staff to a snake and Moses needs to trust God’s words enough to pick it up by its tail.  The act of obedience in faith increases Moses ability to trust God, for he experienced God when the snake turned back into a staff.  Something happe

ned to the staff also.  At the end of the passage we read (4:20), it is no longer Moses’ staff, but rather “the staff of God.”

Moses would take this new tool to shepherd people, not sheep.  It represented a change in Moses identity.  Answers to his questions weren’t enough.  He needed to step out and faith and trust God.  Once he did, he saw life, himself, and his calling differently.  He moved forward becoming a man of freedom who could lead others there as well.

Your ability to experience freedom is directly related to your ability to trust God in obedience and in so doing, experience Him.  The more you experience Him through this trust, the deeper your well of faith gets.  None of us will ever arrive at perfect trust in God—Moses sure didn’t, but we can practice it.  The more we practice this trustful obedience, the more it becomes second nature, and the more we become, well a person who trusts God.  

We can never give up and think we do not have anything to learn here.  Until we go and be with Him, we should count on God meeting us and challenging us to deeper steps of trust.

A Strange Calling

Exodus 2:23-3:12

There is a strangeness to our calling.  We cannot approach God because of his holiness, but we can’t accomplish anything without His presence with us.  As we consider our calling, it is good to look at Moses’ calling.  The most dominant aspect of the story of Moses calling is that the story has very little to do with Moses.  The person in discussion in this story is God himself.

Our freedom is a calling.  We are called out of the darkness and into His light.  We are called out of our old lives marked by the flesh and its desires and into new lives marked by the freedom of the Spirit.  We live our lives learning to leave behind the flesh and its desires for the new way of the Spirit.  Yet, none us should go for too long without wondering about the specifics of what God wants us to do with our time, what is my ‘calling’?  Or, to draw off the Latin root of the word, ‘vox,’ what does the voice of God say to me regarding my task?

With Moses, as with us, our calling comes from knowing clearly who God is.  He is holy to the point of danger (‘take off your shoes”).  He is compassionate to the point of sharing in our sufferings (‘I will be with you’).  It is a paradox almost too deep to plummet.  Yet it is God’s own character that He draws us to.  Are there things about ourselves that are helpful to learn as we discern our calling?  Yes. Yet here Moses needs to learn about God and the more he understands God, the better he will understand himself, his world, and yes, his calling.

How has understanding God better shaped your understanding of your calling? Click on the title above to take you to the blog and leave a comment.

posted by Marc

A Failed Attempt at Freedom

Exodus 2:11-22

There was Moses way and then there was God’s way.  We see both Moses (v.11) and God (v. 25) looking upon the mise

ry of their people.  They were both concerned.  Moses acted rashly to deliver the Hebrews in his own strength and with his own wisdom and found the respective results of that equation, needless death, deception and despair.  So Moses has to run and, in a sense, goes into his own exile from his own people.

While in exile, Moses is going to go to school on the art of delivering people--God’s way.  He couldn’t deliver all of Israel, but he does deliver seven women from some scoundrel shepherds.  Moses was hoping to deliver Israel from the hand of Egypt, but instead he delivered some women from some shepherds.  Then Moses became a shepherd himself.  This new life of tending sheep, patiently nurturing them, leading them to food water and protection would be an internship for Moses on

 what it means to be a leader.  As Moses learns to lead sheep, he will begin to learn to lead people.

We should listen well to the consequences of our mistakes.  They are often our greatest teachers.  We should expect to continue learning as long as we live on this earth.  If we stop learning, we stop believing that God has more for us.  Stopping the learning process suggests that God is done with us, maybe done with this world.  

That is not the God we have witnessed in these two chapters.  Behind these past two chapters rests the gaze of God, listening to the cries of his people, hearing their groaning, remembering his promises and preparing history and this world—for freedom.

The Making of a Deliverer

Read Exodus 2:1-10

The problem with slavery is that it steals your memory of freedom.  When slavery passes down a generation, it becomes a way of life.  Slavery is akin to captivity in that they preclude freedom to be an inside-out endeavor.  Each needs help from the outside.  Prisoners need someone from the outside to open the gates.  Slaves need a non-slave to purchase them.  Who will set the Hebrews free if they are all entirely subject to slavery?

But what if there was a Hebrew who experienced freedom for himself? Then there would be an insider who would know a life outside of slavery.  That is exactly what is going here.  The oppression and dishonor against God’s people was only growing, and so God took action to shape Moses' life from birth to become the very one who could deliver God’s people.  He was an insider who knew life on the outside, what it meant to be free.  We know that Jesus himself was prepared

 in the same way.  He sets us free spiritually because He knew the complete freedom of life outside of this broken world before He came to live in it to deliver us from this world.  He was a free man, who lived as a slave in order to lead all of us slaves to freedom.

We have, and will continue to speak about, how God delivers us for our freedom; but it is important here to notice a fundamental principle of ministry.  Paul speaks to those who have found freedom in Christ in Galatia saying, 

“You, my brothers, were called to be free. But do not use your freedom to indulge the sinful nature; rather, serve one another in love.”  Galatians 5:13

As freed people we have a special opportunity to reach and to serve others in love.  What makes Moses and Jesus unique in their ability to bring freedom to others is:

• They were people who were stewards of their own freedom.  They had experienced freedom for themselves.  As believers our authority and ability to help people with their sin is established by our own experience of freedom from sin.
  
• Though they could have stayed as outsiders, they made themselves insiders.  Though our authority is shaped by the freedom of our moral integrity, our impact is shaped by how close we get to slavery.  One friend of mine said, “if you want to help someone, their problem will become your problem.  If they struggle with anger, they will get angry with you.  If they struggle with manipulating, they will manipulate you.”  But that is ministry.  There is no way around getting our hands dirty.

Moses is going to have learn this the hard way.  We’ll save that for tomorrow though.  How have you seen people get their hands dirty in your life?

Posted by Marc

Are You Breaking Stones?

50 Days to Freedom: Day Seven

Exodus 1

Notes on this chapter for Bible Reading

In the opening words of the Bible’s second book, observe that God is fulfilling His promise to bless Israel’s children; growing their number exceedingly over 400 years, bringing brings a sense of threat and a violent reaction from Pharaoh. This is an important chapter for it lays the ground work for the entire book as well as Numbers and Deuteronomy. To understand its importance, we need to go back to the key verses of the Old Testament found in Genesis 12.

“And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing.  

I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and through you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” (ESV)

The promise laid out here Genesis 12 is the driving theme of the Old Testament and is as follows:

1. God will Bless Abraham and his family
   
2. God will make Abraham’s family into a great nation—Israel
   
3. God will give Abraham and his family Israel a promised land—Palestine
   
4. Those who bless this family will be blessed and those who dishonor it will be cursed
   
5. Through this family (ultimately Christ) the entire world will be blessed.
   

These promises are being fulfilled as God is making Israel into a great nation, adding to their numbers.  The promise is being fulfilled as God blesses the midwives who bless the Hebrews.  Yet, the promise is being threatened.  Even a reader who is marginally familiar with the protagonist (Moses) of Exodus recognizes that the small time genocide attempt of the Hebrew male infants could very well be the hand of Satan opposing the rise of a deliverer for God’s people, for in this chapter Moses was yet to be born.  God was preparing to move and Satan was making a counter move.  For a parallel, remember the birth of Christ (Matthew 2).  This lays the groundwork for a curse to those who dishonor God’s family.  The coming plagues as a result of this curse looms in the coming pages like debris that has fallen onto train tracks around a bend.  Nothing will get in the way of God blessing the world through Israel.  

Application

Some of the problems we face are from our own hands; some we inherit.  What is seen from the beginning is that sin and brokenness build on each other.  Sin breaks things, leaving people in its wake broken and prone to sin more, and break more.  The people of Israel were in slavery and had been so for a very long time.  Their king is attempting to wipe out a generation of their children. Their lives, at least on paper, are quite miserable, yet God is on the move, keeping His promises, aligning the nations, using Egypt as a womb to mature a family into a nation that will burst upon the world with the promise of nothing short of salvation for all nations.  

Tell that to the guy breaking stones for Pharoah.

You may be breaking stones and you may feel spiritual threats on your family, yet we get to see that God is always at work to bring salvation and to work in and through even the most broken of situations in order to bring freedom, salvation and hope to you and this world.  Believe it.

Let us know if you can see this.  We would love to hear your stories of how God is at work in ways we not always see.

Posted by Marc

God meant it for good

50 Days to Freedom: Day Six

Genesis 37, 39-45, 50:20

 

The book of Genesis should break us from all of preconceived notions that Christian spirituality is about stuffy people pretending they're perfect and looking down on others.  Genesis is about how the fall breaks creation in every way and the amazing potential people have for good and for bad (add Gen 4 and 38 to your reading to get more potential of the bad). Genesis is also about how God is going to work through the bad and the broken to see His purposes prevail.

 

Joseph’s story is the perfect story.  Here is a kid who was the favored child in a hugely dysfunctional home.  His brothers hate him, mock him and sell him to traders where he spends his life alternately achieving and spending time in prison.  Imagine being a counselor and trying to deal with his broken family—from Rachel to Leah, to his twelve brother and Jacob as a father, what a mess.  Yet, Joseph sees it all come together and makes that point clear when he says to his brothers:

 

“As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring about that many people should be kept alive as they are today.”

 

This was Joseph’s story, but it wasn’t just his story—it was Jesus' story.  Jesus took the evil perpetrated against Him and God used it for good.  But it is not just Joseph’s and Jesus’ story, it is our as well.  God teaches us that none of our sufferings go without His notice and involvement.  He is at work in our prisons and our betrayals. 

 

The thing is, we are used to suffering being able to be redeemed in 105-145 minutes.  Most movies redeem suffering in under two hours.  Joseph sat in a stinking jail for two years.  It is so easy to just turn the page and see the redemption on the next page.  That wasn’t how it was for Joseph and that wasn’t how it will be for us.  You may be 18 months into your imprisonment, you may be three months.  What you can count on is that God is at work to redeem all things and take all the things that are evil and use them for good.

 

What do you think?  Have you seen this?   Are there other obstacles to believing this?  How do you remind yourselves of God’s purposes in the midst of painful experiences?  Click on the title of this blog to comment.

Posted by Marc

Wrestling with God

50 Days to Freedom: Day Five

Genesis 32-33

Jacob has a problem.  He is a scoundrel.  He sins.  Not only does he sin, but he pays the price of his sin.  He sins and then things break, like his relationship with Esau; Jacob, and everyone around him, are experiencing both sin and brokenness.  But regardless, because of His promise, God still chooses to bless Jacob and make him wealthy in the foreign land before God calls him back to the land of promise. 

 

Just like God met Jacob on his way out of the Promised Land, so he also meets him on the way back into the Promised Land.  We can learn a few things about how God meets us in our lives:

1.       God meets us through our vulnerability and brokenness—Jacob’s clear demonstration of fear of Esau and submission to Esau reflects 14+ years of apprehension, guilt and pain over this broken relationship.  He expects Esau to be looking for justice.  The  night before this meeting is the night when God comes to wrestle with Jacob.  We are often tempted to get ourselves together so that we can hear from God.  God wants to speak to us when we are humbly dependent; not prideful, independent and sufficient.

2.       God stoops—the man/angel/theophany that Jacob wrestles with is said to not be able to overcome Jacob, and yet Jacob knew He was God.  Clearly, this is akin to a father wrestling with his children, allowing them the mastery over him.  God meets us in a way that we can handle and gives us enough information for us move forward.  When a child asks the parent, “when will we get there?” the parent does not discuss the map, the traffic and the weather, but simply gives enough information to answer the question in the child’s mind.  God sees a much bigger picture and gives us enough information for us to wrestle with.

3.       God does not leave us the same—Jacob takes a new name—“Israel.”  Jacob knew himself to be a scoundrel, but now he is known as one who “strives and prevails.”  He has a new identity to build himself, his life and his family around.  For the rest of our lives, God will be continually at work to rebuild our identities as His children.

4.       God wounds—Though Jacob was able to strive with God and prevail, God clearly demonstrated His power by touching Jacob’s hip and leaving it wounded.  We often look at our wounds as solely evidence of the fall, but we do not receive a wound without the touch of God involved.  Some of these are quite painful and no explanation short of heaven will suffice.  Regardless, we can trust God, who allowed his son to be “wounded for our transgressions”, to wound us in such a way to draw us to Himself and to be used for His purposes. 

These are painful truths about God.  I like this God, who is close, involved and has Hs hands dirty in this world and my life than the distant, aloof God I am prone to believe.  He is real, He is true and He is there.

 

Posted by Marc