Accepting Your Divine Assignment

(KJV 1900) — 13 And he said, O my Lord, send, I pray thee, by the hand of him whom thou wilt send.

In this passage, we have the story of Moses’ call to ministry. The images are powerful. Moses, engrossed as he is in tending sheep for his father-in-law Jethro, is not too busy to catch a glimpse of the miraculous in the very midst of what appears mundane. A bush burns but isn’t consumed. It’s really an appropriate and powerful image of how God’s grace has the power to sustain you and me in our zeal for ministry.

God’s message to Moses is a simple one: I heard your prayers and I am sending you to be the answer to your own prayers. God answers prayers – we all people of faith agree on that. What we struggle with is the matrix God uses to choose individuals for these critical missions. In a strange way, pardon my impenitent speech, it feels as if God missed the leadership class that dealt with how to choose qualified individuals for critical mission. To put it plainly, the way God chooses to answer our prayers aren’t always the ways we would choose to answer our own prayers. In so many ways, Scripture seems to show that the only qualification for service for God is a will that is greater than our won’t. The old folks used to say, all God wants is a yes!

Now this isn’t necessarily good news because it implies that often times, God’s will is to use us to answer our own prayers such that our prayer concerns might as well be signatures, pledges if you please, detailing our commitment to participate in our own deliverance. God calls Moses in answer to Moses’ prayers expressed in the name he gave to his son. I am sure Moses, like us rejoiced when God declared God heard Israel’s cry (3:7a), was concerned with Israel’s suffering (3:7b), and was pledged to rescue Israel from Egypt and to secure for Israel a home of their own (3:8). It took long enough but knowing our prayers finally registered in heaven is good news. We say hallelujah to God’s intervention, but we struggle to accept God’s instruments especially when God says, “I am sending you” (3:10).

Moses had questions back then, and we still have questions today about God’s choice – Why should God choose to send us? If God can do anything, why not do this? What good could come from God asking me, asking you, asking us to go and deal with situations so great that we cried out to him for deliverance? Is it because we are alone in this chaotic cosmos and that though concerned, the rules and laws bar God from getting involved? When His children fight, does God cover himself in a cloak of neutrality and hope that we will work it out ourselves absent his intervention?

Even as I say it, I know this can’t be true about the God of Scripture who is forever touched with the feelings of our infirmities. God does not enlist our participation in our own prayers because He isn’t concerned. So, what good could come from an all-powerful God asking puny people to participate in answering their own prayers?

The secret maybe learning about God’s process. We have been taught about God’s power, but have wee been taught about God’s process? When asked to participate, check the emotions flashing across the instrument panels of your own heart. Can you identify the emotions? Was it anxiety or simply naked fear? Maybe it was more nebulous, a gnawing dread of the type that leaves us paralyzed in front of our problems. You see, God could do it for us – God could rescue us from any and all of our problems – but it is only when God does it through us that we experience a fullness of deliverance that frees our minds as well as our bodies. Like a parent, God escorts us to our bullies and has us poking what once paralyzed us so that we won’t be afraid no more. God has power to deliver but God also has a process to deliver.

And so God calls Moses but Moses is human. Like us, Moses would rather argue than accept God’s assignment. Don’t get me wrong – Moses is in favor of God delivering, but Moses had gone up against Egypt’s power once before and gotten burnt. He had no inclination of doing that again. God could deliver – just find another deliverer.

If we listen to ourselves, every one of us have a “You Remember The Last Time” story that blocks us from accepting God’s assignment. The last time you tried and you failed. It was embarrassing. You learned not to trust yourself. You let down folks who were counting on you. On the other hand, people who said they would help, never showed up and today, you’re still paying for that last mistake. Now God shows up and is asking you to revisit the place of your greatest failure. Our humanity would rather pass – but God has a purpose for having us try again. God knows how much you toiled and how little you caught the last time. God knows how your anger derailed your last revolutionary thought. God knows how the conversation ended the last time you tried on the deliverer role. God knows how you were rejected the last time.

If God knows all of this, why would God call Moses to go back? God asks you to try once again because God recognizes that sometimes the place of our greatest failure is where we bury the treasure chest of our prayers. Even when living far away from Egypt, far away from his failure, Moses had never forgotten that though he failed, Israel still needed a deliverer. Beyond that, God calls us to go back again because the call reveals God’s affinity towards using broken people. God uses broken people to reassure other broken people that God’s Grace is strong enough to deliver their bodies but gentle enough to heal their souls.

It is with this spirit then that we approach the sacredness of this, Moses’ call. We will not shame him for doubting God because we run the risk of condemning ourselves and in the process, short-circuiting the deliverance God would work in us. From the contours of Moses’ reverse interview spread over & 4, we begin to understand the work God does in us as God is working through us for the salvation of others. Really, Moses is struggling with the critical question of this passage and of our experience, Why would God choose to send me?

What qualifies me to either confront Pharaoh or to care for Israel? Maybe when you ask it like that, the impossibility of the task rises to consciousness. The assertiveness necessary to confront Pharaoh may be incompatible with the tenderness that Israel craves. Who among us has the qualifications or personality to do both well? Deliverers make poor domestics. Yet to answer Moses’ concern, God makes no reference to Moses’ past, makes no mention of Moses’ training, makes no appeal to Moses’ experience because what qualifies Moses to be deliverer and comforter is that God is present at all times with Moses. If God be for us, then who can be against us? But if God’s presence leaves, then our waking, our laboring, our striving is in vain. , references faith’s greatest fear. In this passage, David dreads that his sin would be so heinous as to force God to banish David from God’s presence. Maybe worse yet was the fear that David committing this sin and compounding sin with sin itself was irrefutable evidence that God’s Spirit had already departed, leaving David a shallow husk of himself.

This truly is a nightmare scenario I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemies – the feeling that God’s Spirit has departed. This is a fear so deep as to break the heart of divinity. Jesus hung from the Cross, dying convinced that God had forsaken him. If God’s presence, God’s indwelling is divinity’s greatest gift, then the Spirit’s withdrawal is humanity’s darkest dread.

My power, your power, Moses’ power to deliver isn’t wrapped up in resources. Resources ebb and flow, come and go, appreciate and depreciate. Resources are fickle and finite but God is the source of our strength and the strength of our lives. That’s why when we accept the call, God doesn’t give us an expense account, a line of credit, or blank checks to accomplish the mission – He gives us Himself. He say’s I am sending you, but I will be with you. When you have the source, you have all the resources you will ever need.

I believe that this is the key that unifies the flow of this passage – in order to overcome Moses’ reluctance to accept this his divine assignment, God has to ground Moses’ convictions on a theology of God as Source and not simply another resource. God has to ground us in the same theology to get us working in His vineyard as well.

It’s amazing to see how much of & 4 are saturated with a theology of God as Source. God reveals the Self-Sufficiency of Divinity especially by the Divine I AM THAT I AM but practically, by the signs that assure Moses of God’s Presence on this mission.

God’s presence is the fuel that keeps the flame of zeal ablaze without consuming us. God’s fire comes with its own fuel such that when zeal is God sustained, the human is ablaze but not burnt.

God’s presence animates inanimate things. In God’s presence, a shriveled up staff becomes a fiery serpent for God’s presence gives life to the lifeless.

God’s presence gives health to diseased situations. In God’s presence, people of faith experience an abundant spring of eternal youth. In God’s presence, there is heath and hope renewed.

But God’s presence is a dagger of bloody fear against those who would block Israel’s release. God’s presence is a terror to those who terrorize God’s children.

When we begin to acknowledge that it isn’t our power but God’s presence that makes the difference, then we are ready to go back and to work deliverance for others. Think about it: if Moses was operating based on his own power, this wasn’t the time to try to deliver Israel gain when now Moses’ resources were depleted. The first time, Moses had connections. The first time, Moses had charisma. The first time, Moses had a fiery conviction. The first time, Moses had the energy of youth. The first time Moses had everything but even with everything, he failed to deliver.

Now, at his lowest, God calls Moses to try again. Don’t you know that God sometimes waits until we are at our lowest to ask us to try again? Just like Jesus, God asks Moses to go fishing where he had fished all night without catching anything. Which means, God will ask us to try again in times of limited resources what we failed to accomplish using limitless resources. We count it a tragedy when all our resources are exhausted. Yet a greater tragedy is to be so blessed that the mountain of our resources eclipses and obscures our view of God as our Source. If when our resources are at zero, we get introduced to God as Source, Praise God.

The good news is, God has an affinity for calling broken people to do great things –

(KJV 1900) — 26 For ye see your calling, brethren, how that not many wise men after the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble, are called: 27 But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty; 28 And base things of the world, and things which are despised, hath God chosen, yea, and things which are not, to bring to nought things that are: 29 That no flesh should glory in his presence. 30 But of him are ye in Christ Jesus, who of God is made unto us wisdom, and righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption: 31 That, according as it is written, He that glorieth, let him glory in the Lord.

We fail when we take our eyes off the Source and begin counting on our resources. Failure focusing me on who I am, but faith rests on who God is. I thank God that the God we serve searches the craggy cliffs, the marl pits, the graveyards, and the scrap heaps for broken humanity that can give glory to his Divinity. The challenge for today is, when God assures you of His Presence, will you accept His Assignment?

“Now, therefore, go, and I will be with thy mouth, and teach thee what thou shalt say. And he said, O, my Lord, send, I pray thee, by the hand of him whom thou wilt send.” He entreated the Lord to select a more proper person. The backwardness of Moses at first proceeded from humility, a modest diffidence. But after God promised to remove his difficulties, and be with his mouth, and teach him what to say, and to give him success finally, in his mission, then for him to still manifest reluctance was displeasing to God. His unwillingness to execute the mission God had preserved his life to fill, and had qualified him to perform, after the assurance that God would be with him, showed unbelief and criminal despondency, and distrust of God himself. The Lord rebuked him for this distrust. The deliverance of Israel out of Egypt, in the manner God proposed to do the work, looked hopeless to him of the mission ever being successful. - Spiritual Gifts, vol. 3 (Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association, 1858), 193.