Heading The Wrong Way?

Since my talk last week on Exodus 2 one aspect has kept coming back to me – so much so I’m starting to feel it’s a real encouragement from God to us in our situation right now.

I think I touched on it briefly in my talk – that this must have been a really confusing time for Moses. He had faith that God was going to use him to set the Israelites free from slavery in Egypt. So he starts his “freedom movement” by killing the Egyptian slave driver, but instead of the great uprising and resulting liberation he must have imagined, everything seems to head in the opposite direction.

He flees Egypt, on his own and without the Israelites, heading off to a foreign country in the opposite direction to the Promised Land. He isn’t the great national leader, instead he becomes a humble shepherd looking after a bunch of sheep, an occupation his Egyptian upbringing would have made him disdain.

It must have been a dark time for Moses. His dreams of being used by God to free his people must have seemed more like an overactive imagination. All the miraculous events of his early life must have seen like lucky coincidences, certainly nothing miraculous to pin his faith in God on.

In fact I suspect he may have even given up hope on his dream – he gets married, settles down, forgets his Jewish upbringing (he doesn’t circumcise his son) and gets on with 40-years of the business of surviving.

But what Moses can’t see is that this is the very time God is using to prepare him. Moses undergoes a transformation there in the wilderness, letting his plans, his strength, his dreams die – and somehow, behind his back, God is resurrecting them into something far more powerful. God’s plans, God’s strength, God’s dreams!

What I keep coming back to is how similar the situation is for us at this time. Before the summer we seemed to be motoring forward. We had some brilliant times of reaching into the community, seeing people join us and move from our fringe to connect with our vision for a great church. I just presumed we would continue after the summer – bigger and better, onwards and upwards!

But somehow it hasn’t worked out that way… We were moved out of our Sunday venue and found ourselves in a hall quarter the size (not to mention losing our lovely filter coffee and going back to instant!) Instead of the great expansion I’d planned for our smallgroups, they’ve changed and in some ways shrunk.

Yet despite this I’m encouraged. I look at this period in Moses life and see the principle that God is more interested in our true character, our heart, than he is in any outward signs. Like Moses, I believe God wants to use this time of frustration and unsettledness to shape our character. It’s only through this, through us becoming more like Jesus, that God is able to use us in his most effective plans, and more than anything I want us to be a church that truely brings good news to our communities.

So let’s use this time to allow God to work on our heart – to understand what is important and what is just shallow outward signs. Let’s commit ourselves to our vision, living by faith, not by sight and trusting God is doing more behind our backs than he ever does in front of our faces.