Exodus 4:1-17

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This morning's reading is taken from Exodus.

What did they do not believe? And said, the Lord did not believe. Then the Lord said to him, what is that in your house?

The Lord said, throw it on the ground. Moses threw it on the ground and he ran. Then the Lord said to him, reach out your hand and take it. And Moses found into a staff in his hand, the God of Abraham.

Then the Lord said, put your hands by the clothes. Now put it back into your bed.

Then the Lord's answer, he is already, and he will be glad to see you. You shall speak to him and put words in his hand. I will help you speak.

Thank you so, so much for your word, father. I pray that now, father, just like you spoke to Moses through that early book, will you speak to us today through occasions of your word? Just like that. Reshape our lives? Just exactly.

Freedom to many can we bring freedom to us? And through us to many we come without ourselves.

Amen. Good to get out of wham in this talk, because we live there in a world that is obsessed with self, a successful self. When I was in London, I was off to a really posh private school, and outside it had this written up, the name of the school, and then underneath it, aiming to develop self confidence and self esteem in order to enjoy a feeling of success in life. And what feeling of success in life it comes through self confidence and self esteem went on. We live in a world of success with self, self actualisation, self realisation, self education, self help, self identification, self, self, self.

And I'm not saying all these things are bad things, but I'm saying it's interesting how much the world focuses on self. And especially when we come to the massage like this, what we're going to see today is that our self focus and God's glory alive.

Let me catch up with our royalty. If you're with us in the meantime, or you've just forgotten where we're at, we have seen God's people and they are enslaved by the egyptian race at the time, who set down system of racial cleansing to try and get rid of the IsraElites. And in the midst of all that, you've got this Guy from moSes, now he escapes this kind of society that's going on through some incredibly godly people, incredibly godly women. Probably one of the trooper motherhood was Pharaoh DAugHTer. The daughter of this megalomania is an Egyptian by education and by adoption.

And he's one of God's people by birth. As he grows up, he amazes it, identifies the gods people, Israelites rather than the Egyptians. In fact, he sees himself as a saviour to sets himself up.

He spent the last 40 years out in the desert. Turned into weeks ago. We saw that when he's out there, he has an Encounter with God. There's this bush burning, and yet not burning. And Moses speaks with God and God says, I want to send you to go back to EgyPt to lead my people out of EgyPt.

That's what I want you to do. Go speak to the pharaoh. Go speak to my people. I'm going to send.

Who am I to do that? And God says, don't worry about it. And then if I look at you and God says, I am Yahweh. I am who I am. Yahweh.

Well, that's the common name that God gives a special name against the people. I am Yahweh. In fact, whenever you see in our bibles, the word lord translated in capital l and then capital orbital, that's the word yahweh. And actually brings us up to this point. And then we start chapter four.

And in chapter four we see rose reframing solitude. The verse is, self reliance denies what promises, so reliance on him. You see, the very first day, ninety nine cents of our own man is in our first verse. That is, what if they don't believe me or listen to me when I say Yahweh?

Let me read that correctly and say, yahweh did not appear to you.

That's a really good question, isn't it? But I noticed this as they came back. He said, okay, I've been sent back to my people. Last time I was there, they said to me, and they kicked me out. The last time I was there, I killed somebody and I fled for my life to travel.

I rocked up and said, hey, guys, haven't seen you in 40 odd years. I know. I kind of grew up as one of the enemy in their Princeton palace. Was a bit of. A bit of excursion.

And, hey, I saw this.

We should go to the metromaniac dictator and asking, this is a really good question that Bezos asked. It's a really good question. If he's thinking about how he's going to do it, it's a really bad question. If only in verse four, in chapter three and verse 18, the God who spoke out of the burning book said, the elders of Israel will listen to you. Then you and the elders of the gate of the king of Egypt and say to him, yahweh, the God of the Hebrews has met with us.

God has already promised. He said, look, they're going to listen to you no matter what's more, they're going to take your testimony about what's going on here and they're going to say, you see God's promise, they're going to listen. And this question here is, what if they don't? In other words, what if you just like to be God? Or what if that's just wishful thinking?

God, what if your promises aren't really true?

And so God gives them these three signs and they are designed specifically to show that this is completely out of Moses ability. This is all God and not of him. That's what that first one, he takes his stand and he's told. He always says, just throw it on the ground. Throws it on the ground and Moses runs from it.

Okay? This is a staff that he's had for 40 odd years, running around, looking after, spent.

He runs from it. Let me give you a bit of a clue here. If you run from your status to become a saint, you're not expecting it to become a saint. It doesn't normally do that. It's something outside of your expectation.

It's something outside of the what you're comfortable with. God tells him to pick up the snake at the most regional grasp of the snake, and it scratches in its tail and it becomes a stick again.

Take a hand at the blitz in your cloak because it comes out, it's white in those days, is seen as death from the inside out. It was something that Moses would have pulled out and would have been shocked at. It would have meant a life sentence of loneliness and deterioration. No physician in the world would have been able to help him. This is not just outside of Moses abilities, it's outside of anybody's ability.

But to put your hand back in and he does. And it's. This is, this is outside of Moses doctor zone.

They don't believe those designs that take some water from the Nile pouring on the ground. And I'm going to do what doctors later tell me on the top, as far as I can find in research, we still can't do to this day, which is take water and turn it into blood. I don't think we could do that correctly later. Certainly at that point, that's outside.

All of these things turn to the outside of thought process. But this isn't about you. You can't do this in your own strength. You've got to reveal what God is doing as you do this. People are going to go, well, there's something.

There's something divine going on. In fact, this is actually more than just going down. And these things are hints as you can hold the rest of the battle. Sorry for the spoilers that come in here, but it was too good to miss. So the first thing is, lads, what do you notice about these pharaohs here on the screen?

Anybody notice them with their congregation? Participation? What have they all got?

They've got this snake on their forehead. Can you see me in a bit, Grace? They've all got snakes on their forehead. Why? That's called the humans.

It was meant to be a sign of their power and protection over Egypt, who was tied in with one of their gods. And so this man, whilst showing Moses, this is beyond your ability, something that Yahweh is going to do. As one person put it, the serpent of sign one is a picture of tail. You might be whitemated, but when the Moses takes hold of him by the tail, he will be pardoned and ultimately turned into a rod, through which Yahweh, that's some of that sign, too. God's power to afflict spiritual hearts, doesn't it?

As thumbs, the leprosy, but also to restore and to make a life. That's a pattern that we see again and again and again through place on that third time. Sounds very similar, doesn't it, to when God does it, turning it into. You see, what Yahweh is doing here is he's showing, this is my work, my work now and my work. And this is really important, because for us, our partnerships on this, we think about the different things that we might be involved in, and we look at ourselves, if there's any partners, that says, hey, Dior, I've got this, I can do this.

I've had practise before, that sort of thing before. I can do it in my intro, where we are, we need to be really careful to start the lives. We need to deny God's promises.

You say that it's going to change people's lives. Not in my experience. It's not going to happen. No, no. This is Yahweh's work.

It was there and it is that. It's not in our spouse when we do partnership, not our strategy, certainly not in my scrap, see this. But secondly, self pity skews reality and forgets that God is in control. There's Moses, who's given these signs. And what did he say to God?

He says, Moses said to me, I pardon your servant, Lord, but I've never been in love with. Neither him asked, nor since he spoke with his own. I am so speech in tongue now.

I'm not. You die. I'm not.

And that self pity, what do I mean by that? I'm not saying he didn't have a stutter or something else. No, I'm not saying that at all. But in this passage we just have a chapter and a half of this man debating with God turning up in a burning bush right in front of something completely out of reality. And yet here, see, sometimes we self pity, self denial, self pity.

There's no way that I could help out with the tips. I'm just not gifted in that way.

Awful. There's no way that I could help set up an actor.

Sometimes reality.

Nor since you have spoken to your servant. In other words, I wasn't born very elaborate. And in the chapter and a half that we were speaking on, you still haven't done anything about elders.

How can you possibly send these value that when you rain like this and all of a sudden actually that rains, breathes through the world.

How can you possibly call me to do this when you enable me like that? This is a something I really, really struggled with in my life. How is it that a God who gives me a foot like that and tells me this is where you are going to encounter me, this is where I am going to speak to you? He says, I am going to call you into ministry and I am going to give you all sorts of books. I am going to send you to study ancient Greek.

I struggle to read these things. I've slower than ever. How can you possibly employ me to read my life every day? Really about the bottom of mind to do this? Most of the time?

Maybe you find out all sorts of how could God possibly call you to forgive that person?

How could God possibly let all need to live for him in this area where I could search amazingly hard to be? The Yahweh said to him, who gave you and who gives? Is it your time and teach you what to say?

That mindset.

Oh no. In other words, you can't blame me for making me like this.

If God has made me, then God understands me and understands exactly what he's doing. God made me and understood exactly what he was calling him. To Moses self reliance led self, which forgets that God's gone to the God.

It gets worse.

His self cleansing provokes God's anger. Verse 13, Moses said, a partly servant, Lord, please come to someone else. Then you always hang up against Moses.

At this point you run out of excuses for Moses. He looks at this choice, he goes, I've got everything to lose and I think if I go back to Egypt, I leave my life.

In fact, most of God is summed up by his very first words in chapter three, his very last word, his very first words. Ill. I am sentimental.

And because he is a God of love, when he sees his people hurting one another or he sees people doing things that hurt themselves, that he's angry about it. I love my kids to thesis. When they do something that hurts themselves or hurts others on purpose, it makes me angry with them. Why? Because I love them.

If God looks at Moses and Moses is doing two things, firstly, he's not quite involved. Why would I go around, send somebody else, let the. Let somebody else feel that.

And the second thing he's doing is he's saying God. He just told me to do something and actually I'm not going to do it literally. God calls himself Yahweh all the way through the fascination. But what does Moses call him? Little or he Lord, more like certain.

God said, we need to realise the dog, although he is loving, is a dog, right? He's angry. He's slow to anger, but he is angry and yet his anger seems to disappear. He goes on and he kind of. It's almost like he kind of finishes the talk very quickly as he goes through the rest of the paragraph.

I'll summarise it for you. Your bro's on his way, he's going to help you and off you go. Don't forget your sack. That's basically what's going on now. Instead of a giant flaming hand kind of comes out of the burning bush and just drops the microphone and goes that game.

But how does it happen that you always anger him?

If I'm hurting of people, does he say very, very briefly, no, because of what's being signified here in the past, people. But he points forward even though the altars will point forward to Newton's going to crush the head of Satan even as his heel is bitten, defeats Satan there on the cross as Jesus takes the kind of leprosy, the death from the inside out, there is Jesus takes all of that and undites it in my place and in yours. When he three days later he stormed. There is Jesus signed here, Sarah, on the cross.

Water and blood. The whole came into man. Let the water and blood move inside. The double cure, save him from God.

Just as Yahweh stepped in, not trusting him move himself confidently, doing all himself, not trusting us to do it ourselves, but in Jesus to provide us a great.

He is your rock of alien after.

I'm sorry for seeing myself. I'm not in you to forget your promises, forgetting you are in control. Forgetting that those who are in the prayers up. Yet you pray. I pray that as we're about to sing, we will hide ourselves in Christ by welcoming.

I pray that from the blood that you shed, we might know you will not suffer. Saddle your unto restoration.