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Stephen Ministry

Today is the second in our series on "Life in Exodus." At the heart of this series is the truth of these words from Michael Walzer, quoted last week on our bulletin cover: "What the Exodus taught…first, that wherever you live, it’s probably Egypt. Second, that there is a better place, a world more attractive, a promised land. And third, that the way to the land is through the wilderness." In other words, all of us experience Life in Exodus at some level. Therefore, what can we learn from the original Exodus story to help us in our journeys? Last week, the topic of "Forgotten." Today, in response, the topic of "Remembered." Our Scripture passage is Exodus 2:23-3:15. (Read)

The good news, when we come to realize that we will experience moments of being forgotten in life in Exodus, the good news is…God remembers. Did you hear it in the Scripture reading this morning? "God heard their groaning and remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac and with Jacob." Even as the king, or Pharaoh, who "didn’t know about Joseph" dies, the rise of a new Pharaoh fails to bring relief to the Israelites. They continue to groan in their difficult labor as slaves in Egypt, abandoned and forgotten. Yet…God remembers. And He begins to set into motion the events that will lead to their release from Egypt and their return to the Promised Land. A long journey lies ahead for them. But God remembers them and puts their deliverance into motion. God does that through a man named Moses.

We skipped over the familiar stories of the early life of Moses: Pharaoh, desperate to limit the growth and power of the Israelites, orders all male Hebrew children born to be killed. Moses escapes this fate through his mother placing him in a basket and setting him floating down the river…under his sister’s watchful eye. He is discovered by the Pharaoh’s daughter and is raised in the palace. However, later as a grown man Moses is forced to flee from this privileged position because he angrily kills an Egyptian who is beating a Hebrew. Moses’ personal exodus lands him in the Sinai and a very different life from what he once knew in Egypt. Raised in the palace of the Pharaoh, Moses now tends sheep in the inhospitable climate of the Sinai. Egypt seems a long forgotten past. But God remembers.

One day, Moses is doing his regular routine, out tending the sheep. He didn’t start the day expecting a divine meeting. He didn’t have on his Day-timer, "2:15, meet with God at burning bush." Life transforming events with God often take place in unexpected, unanticipated places. Moses didn’t have this encounter with God in his plans when he woke up that day. Not only did his meeting with God happen on the most ordinary of days, it also happened in an ordinary place among the "things" of creation—a bush, perhaps even one that Moses had routinely walked past before, and "Horeb," a place that later will be known as "the mountain of God," but before that day, before that time meant "desolate," or "wasteland." A nondescript place that becomes "holy" because of God’s presence there and Moses’ experience with God there. It becomes holy ground and Moses is instructed to remove his sandals. We’ll return to that in a moment. But in that meeting, God calls Moses to be His agent for bringing Israel out of Egypt. God remembers the forgotten Israelites and Moses is key to His responding to their plight.

The encounter has some humor to it. The Ron Holmes paraphrase of the encounter goes something like this:

In God’s response to that, we get the name for God. It’s the perfect name for God. I AM WHO I AM. Or, I WILL BE WHO I WILL BE. The perfect name for God. Human beings couldn’t come up with something that perfect. We’d come up with something like, "The God who brings fire from the sky," or "The God who turns night into day." Something like that. And God is certainly that, but it is not enough. I AM WHO I AM. The perfect name for the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, now the God of Moses, soon to be the God of Joshua and Gideon, the God of David and Jeremiah, the God of Peter and Paul, our God, the God who is to be remembered from generation to generation and the God who remembers His people. I AM WHO I AM. Critical to life in Exodus is that God remembers His people, and we who are on our own personal Exodus must remember this God.

One way we remember I AM WHO I AM is to remove our sandals. No, perhaps not literally, but figuratively. Let me suggest a hidden meaning to Moses’ removal of his sandals, something I heard several years ago at a conference and wrote it down in my Bible. I’m reminded of it every time I come to this story in Exodus. Moses sandals represented (1) his own resources, (2) the stain of his past, and (3) the pace of his own wisdom.

In being told to remove his sandals, Moses is being told that what he is about to do cannot be done dependent solely (no pun intended!) on his own resources. Now certainly Moses already has some understanding of that. Given the assignment of going back to Egypt and confronting Pharaoh for the release of the Israelites leads Moses to say, "Who am I to do this? It’s too much for me to do Lord!" It’s such a daunting task that Moses is skeptical that God’s presence with him will be enough. And, indeed, eventually Moses needs reassurance that his brother, Aaron, will also be a help to him in this task. The task is too much for Moses alone. Certainly, he has gifts and skills that will be useful to him, but his resources alone are not enough. "Step out of your sandals, Moses, for you cannot rely on your resources alone to accomplish this task." Life in Exodus requires we remember that. Our resources alone are not enough. We need the God who remembers us, I AM WHO I AM, in order to make the journey.

In removing our sandals we’re also removing the stains of our past. I’m not totally sure all that the soles of Moses’ sandals would reveal about where he had walked in his past, but it certainly would reveal some things. I wonder what a team of Crime Scene Investigators could determine in close scrutiny of Moses’ sandals! His sandals represent where he has walked in his past—some good journeys (the quality of his own resources lived out) and some bad. Journeys where sin has entered in—perhaps related to his anger issues that caused him to leave Egypt and will surface again later in the Exodus. We must remove our sandals and the stain of our past in our journey with this remembering God because He will wipe the slate clean. He will choose to remember our sins no more as we come to Him and humbly walk with Him. Life in Exodus requires that we remember that—to remove our sandals regularly in the presence of God so that we might be cleansed from the stains of our past.

And finally we must remember to remove our sandals and their representation of the pace of our own wisdom. Left to our own resources, we will fall short. Burdened down by the stain of our past, we will fail. And left to our own wisdom, our own plans, we will not succeed. Our vision is too short-sighted. Our pace is sometimes too hurried, sometimes too slow. We must trust our pace in our Exodus to God, to I AM WHO I AM.

Whenever I think of God’s timing, God’s plan versus our own timing and plans, I’m reminded of the testimony I once heard of a missionary to the Orient. I may have shared this story with you before. This man was a missionary with the Orient Missionary Society. It was formerly known as the Korean Missionary Society and his work with them had begun there, in Korea, when he was a young man in the 1940’s. But the society began to expand its outreach to include the entire Orient and this man developed a heart for China and began training to become a missionary to China. For two years, he devoted his time and energy to studying the Chinese culture and language—a very difficult language to learn. After two years of study, if it was possible his heart yearned even more for the people of China to hear the good news of the gospel. Just as he was about to leave for China, the Communist revolution began in China and all missionaries were either expelled or killed. China closed its borders and this man could not go to China. He returned for missionary work in Korea, but all the time—even through the Korean War—his heart ached for the people of China. And he became angry at God. "How could you allow this to happen" he cried out in his prayers. "How could you abandon the people of China" he cried. For years he was angry at God for what had happened to China. Then, as he related in his story, in the early 70’s the borders of China began to open up just a little bit. He could not go to China as a missionary, but he was able to go to China as a tourist. And so, as soon as he could, he went to China—as a "tourist" yet with the eyes of a missionary. And what he discovered there astounded…and humbled him. He discovered the underground church in China and came to learn what we’ve all learned over the past few decades of history—that the oppression of communism created a fertile soil for the good news of the gospel. The gospel spread like wildfire during those years of isolation and oppression in communist China and at some point, as this became evident to this missionary, he fell on his knees and wept tears of repentance before God…because he now realized that more had been accomplished in spreading the gospel under the closed and oppressive system of communism than would have been accomplished had missionaries been allowed to freely work in China. There, in the country for which his heart had ached, he asked God to forgive him for his anger—for the stains of his past and for his trust in the pace of his own wisdom and not in God’s. Life in Exodus requires us to remove our sandals and trust in God’s timing, and God’s plan and not in our own.

We must remember that in our Exodus journey. First of all, that no matter the circumstances, no matter the severity of our sense that we have been forgotten, God remembers and is faithful to His covenant promises to us. And second, we remember God—I AM WHO I AM, the great God who will be who he will be…and remove our sandals as we stand in His presence.