Moses: A Man of Selfless Dedication

by Charles R. Swindoll

I am reminded of those times many years ago when our youngest son Chuck would bring me one of his shoes with a knot in the lace. He must have been four, maybe five at the time, and nobody but nobody could get a knot in a shoestring like our little guy. He had this strange approach to dealing with the knot: He pulled on the strings with all his might. He tugged and strained and cinched that knot until it was a hard little ball. You couldn’t tell where one string ended and the other began. Rather than bringing the problem to me earlier, he would bring it to me later . . . after he’d tried to fix it, after the knot was so tiny and tight it would take an act of God to untie it. I had told him time and again, “Son, when you pull the strings and it won’t open like it’s supposed to, don’t jerk harder. Come get me, and I’ll help you.” And he would usually reply, “Well, I keep thinking I can get it out. That’s why I pull harder.” What an appropriate picture of our life with God. We get ourselves into a tangled mess and refuse to admit it’s a self-made knot. So we pull harder and harder, until it takes (literally) an act of God to get us out of it. Some time ago, I came across this apt bit of verse: With thoughtlessness and impatient hands, We tangle up the plans the Lord hath wrought. And when we cry in pain, He says, “Be quiet, My child, while I untie the knot.”1 That’s what God wanted to do with Moses. His life had been one great knot of self-effort—hard, sincere labor in the ene...