So over the past few weeks, we’ve been beginning to look at this story that involves the Israelites, how they have been enslaved in Egypt, how the Pharaoh has went after them, so to speak. And all this really revolves around God’s elaborate plan to bring his people outta Egypt and, and it leads to a larger plan of salvation for all his people, which.

It really began in the Garden of Eden and continues even to this day. And so the past two weeks or so, we’ve been learning about Moses. We’ve beginning to follow his early journey, the man that God would eventually use to lead his people out of Egypt and into the Promised Land. And our idea, this story about Moses has given us a lot to to think about in our own lives.

I mean, this is far from a traditional tale about a national hero. Um, history often romanticizes, people like that anyway, so it’s good to look back at Moses and, and see exactly who he was and what he was doing in life and what he was about. And then we can use that to, to let it challenge us to reflect on our own stories and the assumptions that we have in our own lives about where we have been, where we’re at currently, and, and where God will place us tomorrow.

And one thing we’re gonna learn is that this all stands in a very stark contrast of what the world tells us to view as success in life and the various chapters that we encounter. So I invite you now if you have your Bibles with you, your devices, or you can follow along on the screen to turn with me to the second chapter of Exodus.

And we’re gonna pick up where we laughed off last week, right in verse 15, as Moses has. Murdered the Egyptian and uh, thinking he’s doing something right. And now the Pharaoh is after Moses, and Moses is going to become a fugitive from the law. So beginning in the second part of verse 15, in Exodus chapter two, Moses fled from Pharaoh and went to live in Midian, where he sat down by OL.

Now a priest of Midian had seven daughters. And they came to draw water and fill their troughs to water their father’s flock. Some shepherds came and drove them away, but Moses got up and came to their rescue and watered their flock. When the girls returned to ul, their father, he asked them, why have you returned so early today?

They answered, an Egyptian rescued us from the shepherds. He even drew water for us and watered the flock. And where is he? He asked his daughters, why did you leave him behind? Invite him to have something to eat? Moses agreed to stay with the man who gave him his daughter, Zipporah in marriage, and Zipporah gave birth to a son, and Moses named him Ham saying, I have been a become a foreigner in a foreign land.

This is the word of our Lord. Would you join me as we pray? Father in this season that we are looking at a time in Moses’ life when no doubt he was confused about where he was at and where he was going. I, I’m certain that we’ve all fallen into this part of our life at some point or time. So I pray as we encounter this scripture today, that you will use it to mold us, that we will not be hardened, but opened by the Spirit in a way that your word will.

Conform us into seeing how you are still there present, even when we’re in the desert, in Jesus’ name. Amen. Well, I don’t have to go far to convince you that we live in a culture of the success. Success stories, obsessed with success. Stories say that three times fast. We celebrate the victories, the breakthroughs, the moments when everything clicks into place.

And we’re taught to think bigger is better and we should work harder to find and plan our own way forward. After all, I spent many years driving a race car and they only give trophies for first place. They never gave trophies for 13th place. I should know. I never got any. But what about our failures?

What about those times when we hit detours or setbacks, or. Moments in life when things take an unexpected turn and it leaves us wondering if we completely missed out on God’s plan. Those things can look like, well, for me, running into a concrete wall when I was supposed to make the turn. Oh no, not that Literal, actual detours in life look more like things that we don’t expect to happen, whether it’s issues with friends and family members, maybe a divorce, a death of a child.

Loss of a job. There’s so many ways things in life can come at us and we can wonder where is God in this? Has God disqualified me from his kingdom or worse has he pulled his hand to protection back from me? As I encountered this setback, I promise you, by the end of his life, Moses would’ve understood these questions intimately and by all human standards at this point in time.

Moses’ life hardly looked like a success story. Look at the miscues, the missteps that have been, it’s a wonder the man’s even alive, let alone going from being a royal in the Egyptian household kingdom household to now being called in between two worlds of being a Hebrew slave on the run, a fugitive fleeing for his own life.

And if at this moment you could have stopped Moses and told him what God’s ultimate plan was for him and asked him, is it going well for you? I don’t think Moses would think so, would he, but this is an important transition period in Moses’ life. Something that reveals a profound truth for us all, and that is that God incorporates our failures into his purposes.

There’s an old saying that God has perfectly planned your mistakes and his success story because he knows we’re imperfect people. In fact, he planned his, his perfect plan to bring about Jesus Christ and our salvation always including the work of broken and imperfect people because that’s who we are.

And so God often works through what we perceive as failures in life. What we see is a misstep. God ceases part of the process, part of a, a walk on a path that we will never see clearly until after we’re done. So in this moment, Moses thinks he’s stumbling backward. He’s leaving the wealth of the Egyptian palace for the field submission, and in fact, he was failing, but he was failing forward.

His mistake wasn’t a detour. He hadn’t tragically upset the balance of God’s plan. No, I, I venture to say that God actually is positioning him right exactly where he needs him to be,

but dejected and in fear for his life. Moses plops down next to a well. Admition, this isn’t coincidence, it’s providence. This is a divine appointment. Where God is putting Moses in a place that he plans to use him, not only for Moses’ good, but for God’s divine glory. Now, it’s important as we talk about this part of Moses’ walk in life, that we understand how important wells were in the ancient world because they were, they were meeting places, they were centers for community life.

They were the backdrop for significant divine encounters. If we look back in Genesis, we find two places where God has used the encounter of someone at a well to change the course of history. In Genesis 24, Abraham’s servant finds a wife for Isaac at a well. In Genesis 29, Jacob meets Rachel at a well. If we look over in the New Testament, my favorite story out of all of scripture, when Jesus meets the Samaritan woman at a well.

In the middle of the day, shunned by everybody she knew. Yet Christ came to her in that moment, in the middle of brokenness and failure in a place in life where she was certain she was not winning. Jesus met her there. And for Moses, this became an eventual integration into the community. So I, I encourage you that when you find yourself in unfamiliar places or what feels like an a, a failure in life, consider how God might be using this.

How he may be orchestrating plans and purposes and encounters just for his purpose. A purpose you may not even be aware of yet, but yet a purpose that is God led. Now, Peter, himself, he, he knew something about. Being humbled by God in a path forward. We all remember how Peter famously told Jesus he would never leave his sight or never forsake him.

And Jesus said, Peter, you’re gonna deny me three times before the night’s over with. Of course you’re gonna forsake me. And then fast forward to post-resurrection, Peter meets Jesus on the, on the beach, and he’s completely humbled and embarrassed because he know He, he has fallen short of what God has expected.

This would later teach Peter to write this. In, uh, one Peter five, six, he says, humble yourselves, therefore, under God’s mighty hand that he might lift you up in due time. Cast all your anxiety on him ’cause he cares for you. You see, Moses is learning this lesson in real time. ’cause flight to Midian not only is about survival, but it’s about God humbling you, Moses.

Not only is God going to use this to to work in Moses’ life, but it’s gonna work for him to discover how God is still faithful and that his plans cannot be fulfilled through human strength or royal privilege. It’s the same lesson we can take when we understand the promise we have of salvation in Jesus Christ.

Paul writes about this in Ephesians two, eight and nine when he says that our salvation is not something that we can work for. List we might boast. You see, God has a problem when we become boastful, when we start taking credit for the work that God is doing or we try to get in front of God.

Christ has paid the price for you and he has given your salvation. Regardless of what we think we have done or have not done, this is a core foundational truth. About the relationship we have with God, but we don’t get to dictate the events that God has planned. We don’t get to bend God’s path forward to meet our will.

We don’t get to dictate to others what God is doing in their life. No, God has a plan and he’s going to carry it out. And when we get ahead of God or when we try to, to say that this is God’s plan, when it’s not really much like Moses had tried to do when he killed the Egyptian, we find out that God might actually just humble us as well,

but that might not be a bad thing because that means that God is still teaching us. God is still providing providence and lessons for us. Because God is seeking to have a deeper relationship with us, so he might just humble us just so we seek him before all other things so that we find every bit of our fulfillment and life comes through a trust and faith in him, so that we resist the urge to get ahead of God and to dictate the path, but yet we find ourself submissive to him.

Or we might wind up like Moses where he finds out that God’s wilderness is his classroom. And for us that might mean something different. But it, for Moses, it meant something very interesting because God took Moses on a 40 year, his a 40 year graduate course in leadership preparation as to be a shepherd.

I mean, talk about going from the penthouse to the outhouse. This man was an Egyptian royal. He literally had servants feeding him every day. Now he’s went to carrying a crook around, chasing sheep up and down hills, but a profound change in his life.

But yet, when we think about it, this was a unique education for Moses, something God designed literally to make Moses better for God’s plan. A curriculum that would be essential for Moses to lead 2 million people through the wilderness. ’cause. Think about this, what would Moses need to know to be a shepherd, a minan?

Well, he’d have to learn how to find trails. He’d have to learn how to find water sources. He would have to learn how to provide safe passage through the wilderness for the sheep. And then when, when the passages become blocked, he would have to find new ways around. And when there was drought seasons, Moses would have to find water.

He’d have to learn how to navigate by the stars. They didn’t have GPS, then he would have to learn how to find the signs of approaching storms. What I’m getting at is Moses no longer could depend on others. He’d have to learn to depend on God.

This is the same avenue we should take when we come to God’s Word, we cannot come to his word trying to dictate what it’s going to tell us. When we approach God’s text, we approach an encounter with God and where he’s going to conform us to His image that he’s going to bring about a transition in our life to where we are more formed to be more trustworthy to him.

And then he will use us for his purposes and for our good molded perfectly for the world that we step into. This is gonna become a very practical point later on because Moses is gonna stand before the Pharaoh. He’s going to demand that his people be released from Israel. Amen. And he’s gonna do so not because he was an Egyptian royal, but because God has transformed him into a person who has experienced walking in faith, trusting in God.

Understanding how to trust in God in the most pivotal moments of our life is something we should all be praying for, even if it means that we gotta spend a wilderness in God’s classroom. The Psalmist captures this perfectly in Psalm 1, 19 71, where the Psalmist writes, it is good for me to be afflicted so that I might learn your decrees.

Moses is learning that in his affliction, in his failure, in his exile, that God is actually teaching him valuable lessons, lessons that will prepare him for the monumental tasks that Moses doesn’t even know about at this point. But it teaches us this, and this is our third point. God’s timing transforms our setbacks into comebacks.

At a time when Moses felt like a monumental failure, a time when he had completely left his people and was on the run scared for his life, God’s faithfulness shined through the most. Not only is God preparing Moses, but he also provides for him. As Moses no doubt, plops down next to that, well probably to sulk and to imagine that he’s away from his family, his friends on the run, lonely and abandoned here.

God provides a family for him, a wife, a child. Even in his setback, God is being providential in providing.

Peter writes about this in one Peter five when he says, the God of all grace, who called you to his eternal glory in Christ after you have suffered a little while, will himself restore you and make you strong, steadfast, and firm. Moses is living this promise. He’s suffering in exile, but his suffering isn’t punishment, it’s preparation.

God is restoring him, making him strong in ways that the palace life never could. And this is important for us to understand as Christians because we too have been called into that life of everlasting life through Jesus Christ. And yet though we will find ourselves in moments when we’re in exile, where we’re running from God or we’re running from our problems, and we’re trying to figure out exactly what that next step is, being encouraged that the God who is of all grace.

Will restore you, and that this moment is important, although you might not know why. Let’s go back to Moses for just a moment. Think about the first 40 years of his life. Moses was learning the Egyptian ways. He was learning about Egyptian power structures. He was learning about Egyptian politics. Now he’s spending the next 40 years of his life.

Learning the ways of the wilderness, the past through the desert, the art of shepherding sheep, and at the very young age of 80 years old, he will be ready to lead 2 million people outta Egypt. Now, I know nobody here today is 80 years old, but think about are you prepared to lead 2 million people outta Egypt?

Do you think your age matters to God at all? Not in his plan, not in his process, not in his providence, because God’s plan is simply to bring you about to a full trusting and faith and a relationship of God that you can walk faithfully next to him in your life. That’s what God is seeking. You may never lead 2 million people outta Egypt, but his preparation in your life is all about transforming you into the likeness of Jesus Christ.

Had Moses tried to deliver Israel at 40, he would’ve failed because Moses method at that time was force. His strength was human. His knowledge was incomplete. At 80, his method would be faith. His strength would now be in God, and his knowledge would be perfected for the task.

A 40 year delay wasn’t God’s rejection of Moses. It wasn’t punishment for failure. It was part of God’s preparation to provide a path forward for his people to bring about salvation for his people and his people. Include all of those who follow Jesus Christ. So that includes you today. Which means that you today still have a purpose in your life.

You know how I know you still have a purpose in your life? Because I’m not preaching one of your funerals right now. I’m preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ to you. And as long as you’re alive, the gospel of Jesus Christ will lead you forward. Think about this, the promise that God made to Abraham. Was still in effect.

Just because the Israelites were in slavery in Egypt didn’t mean the world was over. It didn’t mean salvation had been completed. It didn’t mean Satan had won, and Moses’ failure did not cancel God’s faithfulness to his promise. Just as your failures in life has not canceled his faithfulness to you, you might feel like you’re far from God right now.

You might feel like you’re in a desert season walking, trying to figure out how badly things were to get you to where you’re at. You might be next to a well waiting on God to show up regardless, rest assured that his faithfulness has not abandoned you, because what looks like failure to us is simply preparation to God every apparent mistake.

Is a step towards your divine purpose. Every stepback is a step up for a comeback in your life, and every loss is preparation for his greatest victory, and that is your eternal life in Jesus.

So remember Moses, remember that God’s providence is at work in your most unlikely place, and your failures have never disqualified you, dare I say. That our failures qualify us most to be children of God in Jesus Christ. The God who turned Moses failure into preparation and transformed and exile into education has used his weaknesses to develop his strength.

That’s the same God that is at work in your life today. You’re not failing backward. You might be failing, but it’s forward and it’s always a step towards. His ultimate plan for you. So trust in his providence, trust in his process, and remember the same God that met Moses at that well that day meet you right where you are even today, and especially tomorrow.

It’s all just beginning to unfold in his perfect plan. Let us pray.

Father, you are perfect in your plans for us, even when we don’t see it, even when we feel abandoned, even in the missteps that we make on our own. Your plan is perfect and you’re always faithful to your word, to your promise to bring about perfect salvation and eternal life. Father, maybe we never lose sight of that, even in the medan day-to-day task.

Help us to remain faithful and even when it hurts, Lord, bring us closer to you and teach us to trust more fully in you so that we might walk faithfully in your promises. That’s in Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.