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Furthermore, it will help you relate to a man who lived in your kind of world, faced your kinds of struggles and didn’t always handle them correctly, but who, in spite of his sins and shortcomings, became useful in God’s hands for God’s sovereign purposes, in keeping with God’s perfect timing and plan.
If he is wise, he will remember that you are a product of your time. All of us are.
The dislike of the Egyptians to shepherds arose from the fact that the more completely the foundations of Egypt rested upon agriculture, the more did the Egyptians associate the idea of rudeness and barbarism with the very name of a shepherd.
Roll back the rock of brutality, and fear crawls out from underneath.
Scripture does not teach blanket submission. The fact is, there is a time to submit and a time to resist.
“God rewarded them for their piety, not their deceit.”
The same is true for Rahab.
Hard times don’t erase God’s promises.
Harsh treatment doesn’t escape God’s notice.
His deliverance may not arrive on your timetable or in the manner you expect it, but it will arrive at the best time, the right time. He will not abandon His own.
Heavy tests don’t eclipse God’s concern.
In your rare moments of quiet, you may wonder, Where is God? He’s right there at your side, my friend. He has never left. He has never removed His eye from you, nor has His attention wandered to other matters. Not even for a heartbeat. He has never ceased caring for you, thinking about you, considering your situation, and loving you with a passion and intensity beyond comprehension.
Among all the biblical heroes, only Daniel (and possibly Joseph and Joshua) makes it to the pages of holy writ without recorded lapses and failures.
Dwight L. Moody gave his own spin on this remarkable biography. “Moses,” Moody observed, “spent his first forty years thinking he was somebody. He spent his second forty years learning he was a nobody. He spent his third forty years discovering what God can do with a nobody.”1
Wow! That’s terrific, isn’t it? You not only get your child back from the edge of the grave, you not only get the official sanction and protection of Pharaoh’s daughter, but you get paid to raise him! That, my friend, is no coincidence. That is the hand of God.
Wisdom says, do all you can within your strength, then trust Him to do what you cannot do, to accomplish what you cannot accomplish. Faith and careful planning go hand-in-hand. They always have.
Would that mothers of our own era treasured those years with their little ones to the same degree.
And fathers
“The mother’s heart must have suffered bitterly as she let her boy go into the unknown world within the great palace gate; and very lonely must the little household have felt when the last kisses had been exchanged, the last instruction given, and the last prayer offered. What a crowd of tender thoughts, curious speculations, and eager yearnings must have followed the little nursling of the Hebrew home, as his mother took him and brought him to Pharaoh’s daughter, and he became her son!”
It is one thing to do the will of God. It is another thing entirely to do it God’s way in God’s time.
You see how that works? You say you want the will of God, but through manipulation, compromise, matchmaking, and game-playing, you get the one of your choice. Only then do you suddenly rediscover God and pray, “O Lord, please bless this union. Make it strong and great because, as You have led me, I am getting married today.”
Pharaoh had no son and heir, Moses was being nurtured for the throne.
It taxes the imagination to identify a similar, contemporary situation. We might think, for instance, of an abandoned child from the gutters of Calcutta suddenly whisked by military aircraft to the White House to be adopted by the President and First Lady. But even that doesn’t do justice to the contrast. What happened, according to the account in the Book of Exodus simply astonishes and can only be attributed to the hand of a sovereign God.
By the time he reached thirty, extrabiblical historians tell us, he had already led the Egyptian army to a smashing victory over the Ethiopians.
Though I don’t have a specific verse to back up my position, I believe Scripture strongly implies Moses had begun to understand his destiny while still a young man being educated in the Egyptian court. Before he reached the age of forty, I am convinced God had already put it into Moses’ mind that he would one day, through some as-yet-unrevealed manner, lead his people out of bondage.
The trouble is, when you know the ultimate will of God for your life and things aren’t happening fast enough to suit you, you become anxious.
Or when you think you know.
He dedicated himself to the will of God, but not to the God whose will it was.
Moses looked this way, and he looked that way. Isn’t it interesting? He didn’t look up, did he? He looked in both directions horizontally, but left the vertical completely out of it.
You find yourself moved by a sense of need. You utter a foolish vow, like Jepthah, and live to keenly regret it for the rest of your days. You hurry the process along, as Abram and Sarai did, and later find yourself with an Ishmael on your hands, mocking the child of promise.
“I suppose if you really want to know who is a spiritual leader, you ought to look around and see how many who are spiritual are following him.”1
I try, I fail. I trust, He succeeds!
You see, our impressive resumé is part of the problem.
You are thirstier than you realize.
While there is nothing wrong with good marketing techniques or teaching principles of authentic success, there is something wrong if we neglect to mention the process, which must inevitably include times of defeat and failure.
“I used to wander off until you punished me; now I closely follow all you say. . . . The punishment you gave me was the best thing that could have happened to me, for it taught me to pay attention to your laws. They are more valuable to me than millions in silver and gold!”
“Success is moving from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.”
The fact is, you cannot sow a fleshly seed and reap a spiritual plant.
When God’s in it . . . it flows. When the flesh is in it . . . it’s forced.
Knowledge tells me what to do; wisdom tells me when to do it and how to carry it out.
“One blow struck when the time is right is worth a thousand struck in premature eagerness.”
Do you know how I know Moses learned this lesson in humility? Because forty years later, at the burning bush, when God said, “You’re the man to deliver the people from Egypt,” Moses responded, in effect, “You’ve got to be kidding, Lord. Not me. Wrong guy, wrong address.
Wherever the Providence of God casts us, we should desire and endeavor to be useful; and, when we cannot do the good we would, we must be ready to do the good we can. And he that is faithful in a little shall be entrusted with more.”
Is it really the teaching that draws your heart, or is it the prestige that goes along with the position?
Failure, you see, teaches us a servant’s attitude. And what does a servant do? He does “the next task.”
God will use failure in your life to break down that strong desire in your heart to see your name in lights. And when he finally breaks you of that lust for recognition, He may place you before the lights like you’ve never imagined. But then it won’t matter. You won’t care if you’re prime time or small time, center stage or backstage, leading the charge or packing the baggage. You’re just part of the King’s army. People of selfless dedication are mainly . . . available. That’s plenty!
God knows all about it. When He’s ready, He will work. I must leave it at that.
God put Moses through forty years in a desert, then had him turn around and lead the children of Israel for forty more years, right back in the desert.
Why does God lead us through desert places? Let’s get the answer from Moses, who had advanced degrees from God’s School of the Wilderness. It is so that He might humble us, that He might test us, and that the true condition of our heart might be revealed. Not that God might come to know you (He already does), but that you might come to know you.
A Ph.D. is no help at all when you’re trying to corral a couple of high-spirited lads bent on mischief.
God seems to prefer using people with broken piñions.
That is the way God works. Without even a hint of warning, He speaks to ordinary people, on ordinary days.
In other words, it will happen on an ordinary day.
