Preached · March 23, 2014
Series · Living in the Gap
Living in the Gap
So we are in a series called Living in the Gap—living in the gap between expectation and reality, hope and fulfillment, the now and the not yet. We've been going through the book of Genesis, through the story of Abraham so far, and we'll get even past that. But we want to skip ahead in the story just a little bit to the next book, the book of Exodus in your Bibles. And we're living in the gap today between calling and the mundane.
Now, speaking of living in the gap, how many people slid their cars into the gap between the road and someone's yard this year? How many people slid into a ditch and are willing to admit it? Well, this year I did it for the first time. I was driving down a road and, you know, you just lose control. I grew up in Indiana. I learned to drive in snowy and icy weather. I knew the things that you're supposed to do—jerk the wheel as hard as you can, right? And so I'm going this way and, without even realizing it, I find myself in—well, a ditch is too big of a word. It's an embankment facing the opposite direction, in just a couple seconds' time. And there is no feeling like that. You just feel powerless to do anything. And then you're in this little embankment and you're spinning your wheels and you're spinning your wheels, and you're going from reverse to one to two to drive. And you just—you're stuck.
Now, how many of us have ever felt that kind of powerlessness, not just in our cars, but in our lives? How many of us have been given a task that we felt powerless to accomplish? Feeling powerless is scary. But for many of us, it's become kind of our status quo. We feel powerless against our schedules, our routines, our careers, or our lack of careers. We feel powerless in our relationships. Many of us have admitted defeat and said, "I guess I can't change a thing. I'm stuck in this ditch forever."
But what if you were empowered to do whatever it is that you wanted to do? Many of us have dreams. Many of us have these grand visions of what our life could be like. Maybe a business that we want to start—I keep on trying to convince Emily that I want to start a Mexican-Italian restaurant. I think it'd be awesome. Maybe we have these dreams of starting a family, or of having grandchildren, or of going on vacations or trips—all these different kinds of dreams that we might have. And we feel right now powerless to make those dreams happen. But if we were suddenly empowered to make those things come true, how would our lives be different?
So I want to give you thirty seconds to turn to somebody next to you and just explore: what if you were suddenly empowered to do that which you always wanted to do? How would your life look different?
Hopefully no plans for world domination came up. Hopefully it was all good, happy, life-producing kinds of things. And there's a certain joy when we think like that, right? I think we've all played the mind game of "what would I do if I won the lottery today?" And then when you step back from that question, there's also just that hint of—but it's not that way. We live in the gap between our hopes and our dreams and the way it is. And that powerlessness can be kind of scary. And sometimes even more scary is: what if you were suddenly empowered to do that which you've always dreamt of doing? Could you actually do it? Sometimes being empowered is just as terrifying, because being stuck can become being comfortable. But God never calls us to be stuck.
The Call of Moses
I invite you to turn in your Bibles, if you have them—your iPads, your Androids, your iPhone devices too—to the book of Exodus chapter 3. We're skipping ahead to a well-known story in Scripture about the call of Moses. And you may recall a certain burning bush that Moses came across.
Now let me give you a little bit of background. The people of Israel—the people that Abraham, who we've been talking about for the past few months, will give birth to, and that his children will give birth to—this people of Israel is now in Egypt. And they've been in Egypt for 400 years, and recently they have been enslaved. The Pharaoh has become fearful of their population, of their size, and so he decides to make them his laborers in a harsh and cruel way. And Moses is born during this time of slavery. And now Pharaoh is getting so desperate that he's actually shooting himself in his own foot. By now he's telling his slave labor to start killing their male children. Basically he wants Israel to die off. Now Moses is rescued out of this infanticide, out of this baby killing. And he's raised by Egyptians, by Pharaoh's daughter. So now he is an enslaved people group being raised by the enslavers. As an adult he sees his people being oppressed, and so he kills an Egyptian slave master. And now he fears the wrath of Pharaoh, his adopted brother. And he exiles himself to the desert and marries a Midianite and lives like this for 40 years. So this is a guy who really doesn't belong anywhere. He was born enslaved. He was rescued by the enslavers. But then he ticks them off. And now he's a people without a family, without a home, an exile. So then we come to Exodus chapter 3. Moses has been living this way for 40 years. And this is what the Word of God says:
Now Moses was tending the flock of Jethro, his father-in-law, the priest of Midian. And he led the flock to the far side of the wilderness and came to Horeb, sometimes known as Sinai, the mountain of God. And there the angel of the Lord appeared to him in flames of fire from within a bush. Moses saw that though the bush was on fire, it did not burn up. So Moses thought, "I will go over and see this strange sight—why the bush does not burn up." When the Lord saw that Moses had gone over to look, God called to him from within the bush, "Moses! Moses!" And Moses said, "Here I am." "Do not come any closer," God said. "Take off your sandals"—the common sign of respect in those days—"for the place where you are standing is holy ground." And then the Lord said, "I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob." At this Moses hid his face, because he was afraid to look at God. 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 with honey—the home of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the 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." But Moses said to God, "Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?" And God said, "I will be with you. And this will be the sign to you that it is I who have sent you: when you have brought the people out of Egypt, you will worship God on this mountain."
The word of the Lord.
Revelation Elicits Response
Now let's go back to the beginning of this passage.
Now Moses was tending the flock of Jethro, his father-in-law, the priest of Midian. And he led the flock to the far side of the wilderness and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. And there the angel of the Lord appeared to him in flames of fire from within a bush.
Now we, as the reader, as the congregation, as the people who maybe have heard this story before—we know what's coming. We have the advantage of knowing what's actually happening: that God is speaking. But imagine that you don't know any of that. Imagine that it's happening to you. Imagine that you're on a work trip like Moses was. You're tired. You're physically exhausted. And you see something strange on the road. What do you do?
A long, long time ago when I was a teenager, me and my mom were taking a road trip. We were driving down some country roads and we saw this barn with smoke just pouring out of it. And we thought, "Hmm, that doesn't seem right. What should we do?" And so, the naive city folk that we were, we went up to the farmhouse and we knocked on the door and said—as if they didn't know—"Hey, by the way, there's smoke pouring out of your barn. Maybe you were inside and never ever saw this. Thought you'd like to know." And they kind of laughed and chuckled and said, "Oh, we're curing tobacco. We're smoking tobacco to cure it, and that's why all that smoke is coming out of the barn." To which we felt kind of silly and thought, "Oh, okay. Well, better safe than sorry. Have a nice day. Enjoy your tobacco."
Now, many of us—that's the rare occasion, right? We see something strange on the road. How many times do we pass by something bizarre and think, "Eh, somebody else will take care of it"? We do this all the time with hitchhikers. We do this all the time with accidents. Now, with the advent of cell phones, we may call 911. But a lot of times—and I know I'm guilty of this—we figure, "I'm sure somebody else has. It's okay." Now, do you ever think we might do the same thing with God?
Here is Moses on his work trip. He's a shepherd of sheep in a desert—not a great place to raise sheep. So you have to go traveling, finding water and pastures and grass. So Moses has wandered and wandered and wandered, and comes to this mountain and sees a bush on fire. Now, it takes observational skills to not just pass this by. Lots of bushes have burned down. But Moses notices something else.
Do you ever think that we do this with God? That we so separate the holy and the mundane that we miss out on the holy mundane? This is something that ancient Jewish rabbis brought up: that this bush is just a bush. It's not that the whole mountain was engulfed in flames. It was just a shrub. In fact, it was a thorny shrub—a shrub that you wouldn't want to cuddle with, or naturally get close to, or pick berries from. This is a pretty boring shrub. And to any passerby, it just looks like it's on fire. "Ah, poor shrub. What will you do?"
There are places in our lives where we feel resistance or boredom or the mundanity of life. Is it possible that that's where God is speaking to you? The day-to-day job? Your marriage? Your motherhood? Your fatherhood? Your retirement? Your college? Hopefully that's not too boring. But in that routine, in that mundanity, in the thorny bushes of life that look like they're about to burn down—is it possible that God is there?
Now, what does this require? It requires paying attention. Moses paid attention.
Moses saw that though the bush was on fire, it did not burn up. So Moses thought, "I will go over and see this strange sight—why the bush doesn't burn up."
Moses observed, and then his curiosity got the best of him and he reacted. Observation led to investigation. We must not only have eyes open to God's presence in our lives, but we also have to have faith to respond, to move towards God.
Mission Means Calling
Now we continue in our scripture. 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. I am concerned about their suffering. So I have come down to rescue them from the hand of the Egyptians, to bring them up out of that land into a good and spacious land, a land flowing with milk and honey.
God reveals himself to Moses. Moses pays attention to God and moves closer. And then God speaks and is about to reveal his character. Listen to the verbs that God uses: "I have seen the misery. I have heard their crying. I know their suffering. I have come down to rescue. I will bring them out to a good land."
This is not a static God. This is not a God who is far away, a distant God who never intervenes. This is not a God who does not care, who just lets people go about their merry or miserable ways. This is a God who acts, who feels, who senses, who comes down and rescues. This is a God whose purpose is redemption. This is a God on mission. This is a God who feels and senses and knows and acts for you.
And this isn't just the way that God used to be a long time ago. This is still the way God is. And we know this because of Jesus. When God says he knows our suffering, he doesn't mean it in just some weak intellectual way—like the way I know someone on some distant continent somewhere is hungry, or doesn't have access to clean water. No, Jesus is the embodiment of this text. He knows our suffering because he is the suffering God. He literally came down as a human, felt our pain, cried our tears, battled our temptations, and died our death.
And the story goes on. Moses hears the voice of God speaking out of the holy mundane, out of the thorny shrub on fire. And he hears the good news that this is a God—unlike all the other gods of his world—not distant or capricious or arbitrary or far off. He feels and he hears and he sees and he knows. This is a God who comes down and brings out. And how will this God do it?
So now, go. I am sending you, Moses, to Pharaoh, to bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt.
This would be the part of the movie where you'd hear that record-screeching sound and Moses going, "What?!" Because what did Moses just hear? This is something that Moses didn't see coming. It was a big enough deal that God has revealed himself to Moses, that he's declared his character to Moses, that he's announced his intentions to deliver the Israelite people out of slavery and out of bondage. But what Moses did not bargain for was that God was going to use a human being to accomplish God's will.
But this is our God. This is a God who sees and hears and knows and acts. And the way that God does this is through his people. Remember that our God is a community within himself. He is a triune God. In fact, God was the first missional community. And this community is not closed. It's not sealed off. It's not exclusive or cliquey. It's one that invites, calls, beckons, and woos—woos us to join in to what the ancients called perichoresis, the divine dance.
This means that we are called to participate in the divine nature, to partake of the love, acceptance, and fellowship that only a loving God could offer. And this also means that God's mission, God's intentions, God's redemptive purposes for the world became our mission, our intentions, and our redemptive purposes. No one is excluded from this. No one needs to miss out. If we know the love and the fellowship of God through Christ and the Holy Spirit, then you are invited to participate in that mission.
This is what God says to Moses: I see. I hear. I know. I am coming down. And I am bringing out. And therefore, go—because I'm sending you.
Identity Defined in Christ
So, we've talked about God's revelation, bringing about our response to move towards. We've talked about God's mission, bringing about our calling to therefore go. But now, Moses has a question of identity. His response to this call takes up the next chapter and a half—28 verses of Moses expressing his doubt to God, and God responding to Moses' doubt. And this is Moses' first question:
Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?
What did Moses ask? He asked the question that we all ask: Who am I? Because isn't that our primary question? Isn't that the number one question we ask in our lives? It's not always so obvious or blunt or clear, but this is the first and the last thing that we want to know. We are defined by our identity, but we don't always know what makes up our identity. Am I defined by family—the ones that spoil me or drive me crazy? Am I defined by my past mistakes—the failures that I tell no one? Am I defined by my success? By what I achieve? By whom I impress? Am I defined by what others think of me? Am I defined by what I make, or what I do?
Remember who's asking this question. This is Moses. And remember Moses' past: born a slave, but raised by slave masters. A murderer. An exile. Estranged from every family he's ever had. And now he has a dead-end job—a shepherd in a desert. If anyone had a reason to ask God, "Who am I?" it would be Moses. This guy was, by all standard definitions, an outcast and a loser.
And this is square one of human existence. We all have had moments of doubt and despair and heartache and pain. And the burning existential question that we ask at night: "Am I worth it? Am I capable? Am I loved?"
But here's the good news: No one is worthy. And so everyone is. I know, right? No one's worthy, so everyone is. Not a single one of us is worthy to do God's job for him, because, you know, God is God and we are not. That also means that when God calls you to mission, it means you have no excuse—because God can't wait for anybody more qualified than you. There's no one else. You have no grounds to say, "I'm not worthy of God's call. I'm not smart enough or trained enough or charismatic enough, or have enough time or money." Because he's called each and every single one of us. You and me and the guy next to you and the gal behind you.
Because God doesn't need you. He could clearly do a better job without you. He is God, after all. But God's top priority isn't efficiency, or the fastest possible solution, or the most clear-cut answer. God doesn't need you. He wants you. God's point is relationship with you—now and forever.
I honestly think that the reason God's will takes so long to see come to pass—it's not always because God is slow to act. It's because God has decided to work through someone slow and stupid and clumsy like me. When we complain about God's will being so slow, I don't think we're so much complaining about God's will, but about God's people being disobedient, God's people being slow to do God's will. But God would much rather be in a relationship with a person than a robot. He would much rather equip and empower you for mission than ignore you just to get things done faster.
And so when Moses asks the question, "Who am I?" he's asking the right question. Because Moses is at a point in his life when he recognizes how far he has fallen, and he has no clue where his identity comes from anymore. And God, in his faithfulness and his love, and out of his infinite desire for relationship with his creation, gives the best possible answer: I am with you.
Now again, if we were having this conversation with God ourselves, we might give a gigantic "Huh?" It's a non sequitur. It doesn't seem to follow from the question. "Who am I?" Moses says. "I am with you," says the Lord. "That's not what I asked." "That's the answer that you need."
We spend our lives seeking out the answer to "Who am I?" What is our identity found in? What defines us? All sorts of other things clamor for our attention to define us. But here's the truth. The abusive relationship that you're in with a parent or a partner or a boss—don't let them define you. Your money troubles, your joblessness, your homelessness—don't let them define you. Your crimes, your offenses, your court dates—don't let them define you. Your affairs, your addictions, your abuses—don't let them define you. Every one of those is whispering in your ear, "I am with you." They want to hold themselves over you, weigh you down, enslave you, and bring you to bondage.
Moses asks, "Who am I?" And God gives the ultimate answer: I am with you. God through Jesus is our identity. We are not what we do. We are not what we make. And we are not what others think of us. Scripture makes it clear: we are God's beloved, his treasured possession, his chosen and his elect. Hebrews 2 says that we are part of the family of God, that Jesus calls us his brothers and his sisters. Ephesians 2 says that God has seated us with Christ in the heavenly realms and adopted us into his name. Colossians 3 says that our lives are hidden in Christ with God. We are called saints—God's holy ones, God's reconciled, perfected by Jesus' sacrifice.
Don't miss this. In other words, what can be said of Christ can be said of you. Let me say that again: what can be said of Christ—the Son of God, holy and perfected—can be said of you. This enormous, earth-shattering truth transforms the very idea of mission and calling. Because remember where we've been thus far. God reveals himself to his people. God declares his loving, compassionate character to his people. God calls his people to accomplish God's redemptive purposes. And God empowers his people to mission by giving them their identity in Christ.
Listen to the way Paul explains it to the Corinthians:
From now on, we regard no one from a worldly point of view. If anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come. The old has gone. The new is here. All of this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation.
And what is this ministry of reconciliation?
That God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people's sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. We are therefore Christ's ambassadors, as though God himself were making his appeal through us.
So when we hear this call to mission that applies to each and every single one of us here, many of us feel powerless to act. "How could we possibly? I don't have the time. I don't have the resources. I don't have the training. I don't have the ability." And yet God in Christ has declared you righteous—his beloved, his son, his daughter. And so there is no greater empowerment than this.
Four Applications
So what does this mean for our lives? Four things I want you to consider.
Number one: you must choose to pay attention to God. What is something that you can quit this week that is making you skip over the thorny, burning bushes in your lives? Is it the most recent sports craze, the news, your smartphone, your children's 26 nightly commitments? Make this decision today to quit cluttering up your life and blocking out God's voice. Because there's a thorny bush on fire, hidden in a mountain somewhere, and God is waiting to speak.
Number two: recognize that God's call to mission includes you. Yes, even you. Yes, even despite that sin, that mistake, that past, that childhood—God is calling you to be his ambassador to a world enslaved, a world that does not know God's fire and God's light.
Number three: filter all of your life's activities through this question: Does this help accomplish God's redemptive purposes for the world? Not just, "Well, as long as it doesn't hurt anybody," but instead, "As long as it's God himself speaking through me."
Number four: live out the fact that, out of God's enormous love and mercy for you, he has reconciled you with himself. You are a new creation, a child of the Most High God, a brother and sister of Jesus, the temple of the Holy Spirit. You are empowered—not by your accomplishments, your charisma, or your charm, but by the very power of God himself.
You remember my car stuck in a ditch? You know what I had to do? I had to call a tow truck. Once that truck latched onto my car, I still wasn't done. I had to make a choice to put my car in neutral—to let go of control and let something else empower me to move forward.
Let's stand and pray together. Our great and awesome God, you are the God who calls, rescues, redeems, and sends us. And we confess, God, that we are sometimes a fearful people—fearful of our mistakes and our past, fearful of what it would mean to actually obey your call. But we thank you, God, that there is not one who is worthy, and yet you call every one of us, you redeem every one of us. So, by your Holy Spirit, God, may we know your power. May we know the truth of redemption. May we know the fact that your love supersedes any doubts, fears, or sins we might have. Help us to be people who walk in redemption, and help us to be people who recognize the truth: that if we are in Christ, what can be said of Christ can be said of us. By your power and in your name, we pray these things. Amen.
This is a transcript of the sermon as preached, lightly edited for readability.
