Well, for this last several weeks, we have been walking along with the story of the Israelite people as they were enslaved in Egypt, and we’re looking at this part of the story where God has working his plan, his mission to bring the people of Egypt or the people of Israel, out of the people, out of the land of Egypt.
And this is part of a larger plan of salvation for his people that he began even in the first to Genesis and continues even to this day. And as part of this story, we’ve been looking at Moses and the story of his early life, and we’ve encountered already Moses a little bit, that we would see an imperfect man whom God would use to lead his people outta Egypt.
And, and this story of Moses in the haphazard way that God has worked in this man’s life has already given us a lot to think about. This story of Moses is far from a traditional tale of what one would imagine a perfect leader of a nation would be. After all, history has a way of romanticizing so many people in so many places, but this will challenge us to reflect our own stories.
And the assumptions we may have about where God has placed us in our own lives about experiences we’ve encountered, where God has put us now, where we’ve been and where we’re going, and this is of course, stands in a stark contrast to how the world tells us to view our life. What the world says is success is challenged by Moses’ life itself.
So I wanna invite you now to turn with me to Exodus chapter two, and we’re gonna pick up the story of Moses where we left off last week. If you remember, he had just committed a terrible sin and that he killed a man in defense of his countrymen. And because he’s killed an Egyptian, Moses now finds himself on the run from the Pharaohs.
He turned with me to Exodus chapter two, beginning in the second half of verse 15. But Moses fled from Pharaoh and went to live in Midian, where he sat down by a, well. Now a priest of Midian had seven daughters, and they came to draw water and feel the 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 rule their father, he asked them. Why have you returned so early today? Well, 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? 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 his son. And Moses named him Ham saying, I have become a foreigner in a foreign land. This is the word of our Lord. Join me as we pray. Father, we come to your word today in an encounter that is something we probably don’t consider much.
This part of the story of Moses’ life as he’s exiled and on the run. So I pray, father, that we, as we encounter your word, that you will use it to conform us, to reveal something new, something that we may not be aware of in our own lives. May the power of the Holy Spirit open our hearts and our minds and challenge us in the way that you have set before us.
In Jesus’ name, amen. Well, we do live in a culture that is obsessed with success stories. We celebrate the victories, the breakthroughs, the moments when everything clicks into place. I lived the first half of my life celebrating victories. I promise you. There wasn’t a race I ever entered where I celebrated a 13th place finish.
They don’t give trophies for that, but we’re told to think bigger is better, and to get there, we must forge a pa pla path. And a plan in order to move forward. But what about the failures? What about the, the walls we hit in life? I’ve hit a few walls in my own life. I’m here to tell you concrete’s not a soft, um, uh, wall to hit.
And those are literal walls, but we often hit little walls that are more figurative setbacks in our life. Moments when things in life don’t turn out the way we expected and. It leaves us wondering if we’ve completely missed God’s plan in life, or worse yet, we think that it’s disqualified us from God’s plan in our life, or even worse.
Yet, we get convinced that somehow because we’ve hit a setback that God has completely removed his hand from us, or even make us question our salvation. By the end of his life, Moses would’ve understood these questions completely. Because by this point in his life, Moses’ life looked like a complete failure, a series of miscues and missteps.
His mom put him in a basket and sent him down the river. An Egyptian princess gets him and winds up nurses in nursing him, all to the point where he becomes a foreigner in a pharaoh’s court. Not part of the tribe. He was part of watching his countrymen be enslaved and beaten. When he stepped out to try to take control of the situation, he becomes a fugitive and has to flee for his own life into the wilderness of Midian.
Dare I say, Moses’ life was not looking spectacularly great at this point. I, I think if you were able to tell Moses at this point in his life that God had a plan for him. And his plan was to be spectacular, and you were to say, Moses, how’s this plan working out for you? Moses would’ve laughed hysterically, or maybe he would’ve cried and ran away.
Regardless, I doubt Moses saw his life as success. Yet this step in Moses’ life reveals a profound truth for us all to learn that God’s perfect plan involves imperfect people. And God’s perfect plan for salvation for you and me involves working through broken plans and broken promises that we make never that God makes you.
See, our first point for us this morning to understand is that God incorporates our failures into his purposes. It’s true. The saying goes that God factored into his plan, your imperfectness, when he set forth you on his path. But we often see our failures as missteps, and God sees them as just part of the plan, part of the process, part of a path he has sent us to walk forward that we don’t clearly see until after the fact.
But in this moment, Moses was not failing backwards. He was failing forward. He was still failing, but he was going down the path that God had already set forth for him. His mistake wasn’t a detour, but a strategic step. This mistake that Moses made was actually positioning him exactly where God needed him to be, for things to happen the way God had planned.
After all, Moses thought he was doing the right thing here. He stood up for his countrymen. He stood up for his family. He was setting forth a way to. To bring an answer to prayers, the Hebrews were desperate to be rescued from their slavery,
and as Moses thought he was doing the right thing, he winds up a nobody and a foreign land. He trades in a palace for a pasture, a royal position for the role of a shepherd by every earthly measure. Moses’ life was a complete failure. And dejected and in fear for his life. Moses plops down next to a well in Midian, but even this was not coincidence.
This was not a time when God had completely removed himself from Moses’ life. No, this is actually a divine appointment because God is placing Moses geographically, relationally, and circumstantially right where he needs him to be, to fulfill God’s calling.
For us to understand the significance of Moses landing at a wells in, in a, in Midian, we have to understand the importance of wells in ancient society. We can look just back to Genesis to find two important aspects of an encounter at a well. And Genesis 24 11, we see the, the servant for Abraham finds Isaac, a wife at the well.
That would be an important part of God’s process. If we look in Genesis 29, we’re gonna find that Jacob met Rachel at a well. And if those two don’t strike a chord for you. My favorite personal favorite Bible story is when Jesus met the woman at the well. She had an encounter with Jesus that was life changing, a divine appointment that completely altered her life.
So here Moses finds this divine appointment.
So when you find yourself in an unfamiliar place, or you find yourself finding time and time again that things just look like to be an utter failure, consider how God might be orchestrating this meeting and this failure to just be part of his purpose. A purpose you may not be aware of yet. This, this plan of God might involve something we’re not normally comfortable with, and that’s a humbling process.
The Apostle Peter knew something about being a failure himself. Remember Peter swore to Jesus. He would never leave him. He would never forsake him. Jesus didn’t even make it to the cross, and Peter had already turned his back on him. So when Peter met Jesus on the beach later on, he was utter failure. Or so we thought, but it would lead Peter to later write this, humble yourselves.
Therefore, under God’s mighty hand that he might lift you up in due time, cast all your anxiety on him because he cares for you. Failure in this world can be deceptive because this world teaches us that failure is bad. That failure has separated us from a purpose that we need to be traveling in our life.
That failure is a setback. That, that we are worthless because of it. Yet God’s world teaches us something completely different. That failure is part of a process that ultimately bring us closer to God and bring about his divine plan because Peter is not talking about failure as an exercise, but rather failure as a way that we are brought closer to God.
A way that we are removed from ourselves long enough that we can step closer into God’s divine purpose, A process that involves us letting go and letting God lead the way. Now for Moses, he’s learning this in real time. His flight to Midian is in one sense, an absolute humbling under the God’s mighty hand.
Yes, Moses had made a mistake. He had killed a man. And yet God is gonna use that mistake in a miraculous way because what Moses is beginning to learn, and he’s gonna learn even bigger lesson going forward, but he’s discovering that God’s plans cannot be fulfilled through him. Human strength or royal privilege, God’s path forward and God’s plan is one that only he can orchestrate.
Much like our salvation is something that we do not orchestrate ourself. Paul would later write in Ephesians two, eight and nine, that salvation is not something that we work our way towards. It’s not something we can go out and achieve for ourself, lest any man may boast. Paul says, you see, God has this thing about us boasting in his works.
He wants us to be humbled not to be less than, but so that we can see how we can depend on God. How Christ pays the price for our salvation and gives us this salvation regardless of what we think we have done or have not done. This becomes a core foundational part of our relationship with God. You see, we don’t get to dictate the events.
That God has set forth. We don’t get to bend God to meet our will. We don’t get to set forward a path and then try to convince everybody else that it’s God’s way. Because when we try to do that, God will step in and humble us.
That might not be a bad thing. It might not be an easy lesson to learn, but God is never going to give up on us. He wants us to humble ourselves so that we seek him first in all things, and that we find every bit of our fulfillment and strength through him, because when we resist that, God often steps in and humbles us for us, and we might find ourselves embarking on a journey like Moses, where God’s wilderness becomes our classroom.
We might not learn the same lessons, but this is an important lesson for us to learn from Moses, and that is that in God’s wilderness, we will learn things. Look at Moses’ time in Midian. He becomes a graduate of a 40 year program in leadership preparation as a shepherd, I mean, talk about going from the penthouse to the outhouse.
No one who knew Moses would’ve said, this is a good thing. He was a royal in the palace. Now he’s a shepherd guardian sheep. Imagine what those family reunions would’ve been like. Moses, what are you up to today? Well, I had to live off the land for 40 years. What happened to your servants? But this is a profound curriculum that God designs literally to make Moses into the person he needs him to be.
To bring about salvation for you and me.
’cause as a shepherd in Midian, Moses would’ve needed to learn how to take the sheep through the trails to find water in place to find safe passage through the wilderness. He would have discovered that when passages were impassable. To find a new path forward. He would’ve discovered how to find water in drought seasons, how to navigate by the stars.
But all these things would’ve taught Moses the greatest lesson of all, and that is to depend first on God, not on ourselves. And in the same aspect, we learn the same lesson when we come to God’s Word. That we cannot come to God’s word or God’s way in our life. Trying to set forth the path forward and then ask God to come in behind us and make it so when we come to God’s Word and we come to God’s path for our life, we have to come to an understanding that he’s gonna mold us and he’s gonna mold the encounter to be the best thing for us and for His glory.
We see this from a practical standpoint later on, as Moses would stand before the Pharaoh. Demanding the freedom of his people. Moses doesn’t do this because he’s been in that royal court before. Moses stands there in this strength because he’s learned to trust God in faith. His experience as a shepherd was not about being a shepherd.
It was about trusting in God. The psalmist captures this beautifully in Psalm 1, 19 71. When he says It was good for me to be afflicted so that I might learn your decrees. Moses is actively learning that in affliction, in his failure and in his exile, he’s actually on a education on how to learn to trust God.
Every skill he’s acquiring, every lesson he’s learning, every challenge that he faces is preparing him for the monumental task that lies ahead so that we see our third point this morning, that is God’s timing transforms our setbacks into comebacks at a time when Moses had to feel like a monumental failure.
God remained faithful. He did that by providing a family for Moses. Now, Moses obviously still felt that there was a place for him to go, that he wasn’t quite where he needed to be because he names a son a foreigner in a foreign land. Moses knows there’s more yet to his story, yet God is still faithful in providing everything he needed for him.
God has not removed his hand to protection. Simply brought his mighty hand into humble him. Peter writes this in one Peter five 10, the God of all grace who called you to his eternal glory in Christ after you have suffered a little while will restore you and make you strong and firm steadfast. Moses is living into this promise.
His suffering and exile isn’t punishment as preparation. God is restoring him, making him strong in ways that the palace life never could. I guarantee if you were to stop Moses right now and say, what’s going on in your life, that’s gonna be good. He probably couldn’t articulate that, but I guarantee later on in his life, he could look back and say, you know what?
I could have never done what God asked me to do. I could have never been strong in this trial of life. If he hadn’t taught me how to be strong,
let’s take a step back for just a moment and consider the entirety of Moses’ life. He had spent first 40 years learning to be an Egyptian, a Royal Egyptian. He had to learn the politics and the policies he had to learn the power structures and the systems at play. Now he’s spending 40 years learning the ways of the wilderness, the path through the deserts, the art of shepherding.
And at the very young tender age of 80, Moses is gonna lead 2 million people out of the desert. Now I know nobody in here is 80 yet, but imagine if God said your life up to this point in time has simply been a process. To prepare you for the next season, and here you were thinking that your seasons were almost done, that you were in a season of rest and retirement, which you’ve all earned.
Yet God is showing us that even in Moses’ life and in your life, that the path forward is part of his plan and his process. Because like Moses, there’s lessons that you’ve learned that are gonna prepare you for tomorrow, and tomorrow’s lessons are gonna prepare you. For the next day. Think about this for a moment.
If Moses had went at the time he was 40, when he struck down that Egyptian and tried to lead his people outta Egypt, he would’ve failed because Moses’ method at that point in time was force. His strength was human, his knowledge incomplete by 80. He had learned this, that by method, we walk by faith. That his strength comes only from God and that his knowledge was perfected for the task ahead.
The 40 year delay wasn’t God’s rejection of Moses. It wasn’t punishment for failure. It was God’s preparation for Moses. God’s promise to Abraham was still in effect. He still had a plan to deliver his people. Never. Has there been a step in the history of human beings that have altered God’s plan in any way, shape, or form?
Just like never has there been a step in your life that has altered God’s path or plan for you or removed his faithfulness from you. God’s story reminds us that his providences, I mean, Moses’ story reminds us that God’s providence. Operates on a scale so much bigger than we understand
what looks like failure. It’s just preparation. What feels like a detour may very well be the very path God has chosen to put in front of us. Moses thought he was failing backward, but he was actually failing forward. Yes, he was still failing, but it was in a path that God had planned. Every apparent mistake was simply a step in the direction of his divine purpose.
Every setback was a step up for a comeback, and every loss was preparation for the greatest victory. The same holds true for you each individually in your unique way. When God called you into his world, into his life as a child of his through baptism and the word of God, and you became faithful follower of Christ.
He has set forth a path that is not done yet. You know why? I know it’s not done yet? Because I’m not preaching your funeral,
while you still have breath. God has a path and a program and a procedure for you to move forward. You’re not in a season of failure, even if it feels like it is simply a season of learning. You haven’t missed out on God’s plan. You’re, you might feel like you’re sitting at a well and Midian wondering what went wrong, but I want to encourage you to remember Moses that in the most unlikely place, and in the UN most unlikely way, God has never disqualified you.
He might simply be teaching you
these detours, whatever they are in your life, they’re not mistakes or missteps. They’re divine appointments for the God who turned Moses failure into preparation, who transformed his exile into education and used his weaknesses as strengths. This is the same God that has called you forward. You’re not failing backward.
You’re not setting idly by next to the, well you’re, you’re failing forward into the very purpose which God has created you for. Trust his providence, embrace his process, and remember the same God who met Moses at that well that day as the same Jesus Christ that met the woman at the well. It’s the same Christ who on that cross said to the thief, today you’ll be with me in paradise.
And is the same one that made a promise to you in your baptism that you are his child and he made a promise to bring you to eternity. Your story’s not over. It’s simply just unfolding in his perfect plan. Let us pray. Father, as we take our steps forward from this place today, I pray that it is you that is directing our steps, that you are open in our eyes to see the path forward, and that even when it is blind to us, Lord, that you were encouraging and growing our faith to trust you in the process.
Father, teach us as we go to trust you. Draw us closer to you and all that we do. Father, forgive us in our missteps and teach us the path forward. In Jesus’ name, amen.
