Oh, we’ve been at those times in our life, haven’t we, we’re we are asking where is God? And he’s throwing signs up in front of us and we don’t realize it until after the fact that he actually was present and at work right there in those moments. Last week we started talking about the first chapter of Exodus and how the Pharaoh was a little unhappy with the Hebrew people and their rise in his kingdom. He was worried that the slaves would overtake him and. Overtake his, his kingdom. So he set about a plan to have all the Hebrew boys born killed. Of course, we learned there that the midwives were working in fact, in faith of God, and decided not to comply. And in total, a little bit of a fib saying that the Hebrew women were vigorous in their childbirth and thus had given birth before they could get there. Well, this week we’re gonna read about the story. Of Moses as a baby, and with the benefit of hindsight, we’re going to reflect how God was very much present, although very much hidden from view and working through those people who were courageous enough to live and act in faith over fear through these people. God hides the baby Moses. He hides him from the Pharaohs. Soldiers who are prowling the neighborhoods, looking for infants to destroy. And we find that God hides this baby and the reeds of the Nile River tucked away in a waterproof basket, and they’re hidden in the compassion and embrace of an Egyptian pre princess who chose compassion and mercy of adherence to law. And these are the arms that would seem powerless against the machinery of oppression yet. The hidden arms of God working through faithful people, cradled the future deliverer of Israel. Now today as we open up Exodus, we’re gonna be looking in chapter two, but we’re gonna discover that God’s most profound work often happens through these hidden arms of ordinary people doing extraordinary things in simple acts of faith, that these hidden arms offer unexpected protection. Despite some of life’s worst circumstances and that these hidden arms reveal a divine providence that is at work and operating behind the scenes when life seems most uncertain. Turn with me in your Bibles, if you will, to Exodus. We’re gonna begin with the very last verse in the first chapter, so we will begin in Exodus one, verse 22. We’re gonna read the first 10 verses of chapter two, or you can. Follow along with me on the screens. Then Pharaoh commanded all his people, every son that is born to the Hebrews, you shall cast into the Nile, but you shall let every daughter live. Now, a man from the house of Levi went and took as his wife, a Levi woman, and this woman conceived and bore a son. And when she saw that he was a fine child, she hit him three months. When she could no longer hide him, she took for him a basket, made a bull rushes and dobbed it with bitumen and pitch. She put it the child in it and placed it among the reeds by the riverbank, and his sister stood at a distance to know what would be done to him. Now, the daughter of Pharaoh came down to bathe at the river while her young women walked beside her on the riverbank. She saw the basket among the reeds and sent her servant woman, and she took it and when she had opened it, she saw the child and behold the baby was crying. She took pity on him and said, this is one of the Hebrew’s children. Then his sister said to Pharaoh’s daughter, shall I go and call you a nurse from the Hebrew women to nurse the child for you? And Pharaoh’s daughter said to her, go. So the girl went and called the child’s mother, and Pharaoh’s daughter said to her, take this child away and nurse him from me, and I will give you your wages. So the woman took the child and nursed him. When the child grew older, she brought him to Pharaoh’s daughter and he became her son. She named the child Moses because she said I drew him out of the water.

Let us pray. Father, as we encounter your word today, I pray that you will reveal through the power of the Holy Spirit, your word in our lives today. Reveal to us how you’re always at work. Even when we can’t see or we can’t find, or we think that you’re hidden from you, that you’re right here with us walking amongst us even as we are lost among the reeds of the river. Lord, you were there directing our way. Help us see that as we encounter this today. In Jesus’ name. Amen. Well, the Hebrew people found their time in Egypt growing quite more difficult. What had begun as Joseph’s family finding refuge from famine had deteriorated into a brutal slavery. And as we learned last week, the Pharaoh was growing more and more concerned about this group of people that was growing right under his nose. But what the Pharaoh hadn’t considered was the faithfulness of God’s people to walk and act in faith. And so, as I mentioned earlier, the midwives thwarted the plan of Pharaoh. So now he devises a new plan to, to have his people throw the firstborn or to throw all, I’m sorry, to throw all Hebrew babies, boys, into the Nile. A certain death sentence for all Hebrew male children, and in essence, he was saying it’s open season on the children enacting every Egyptian that encountered a Hebrew boy to throw him in the Nile. Can you imagine living in that kind of uncertainty in your life? Think for a moment that you’ve got a newborn child or maybe even a child that’s a couple years older. Your constant worry and fear is that somebody walking along the street might pick up this boy and take him from you. Would tomorrow be the day that your family’s life was changed forever? Would tomorrow be the day that your family loses a loved one? Would you know a family near you that could have their entire life changed in an instant? Friends of yours affected through the action of some. One following the Egyptian’s orders, their future was not only uncertainty, it was hopeless. And in times of uncertainty, we have to trust God’s faithfulness because in this passage we see and we get to witness something remarkable. And though it’s remarkable as it is, it is often repeatable throughout scripture. And we find time and time again that God’s faithfulness to his promise is at work precisely. When the circumstances in our life seem most dire, think about this for a moment. The very river that was meant to be the instrument of death became the pathway of deliverance. The very palace that housed Israel’s oppressor would be the nursery that would raise the child, that would deliver the Hebrew people. What looked like a disaster was actually the first chapter in God’s plan of rescue. Now I know for a fact because we’re all human. We’ve all lived at times of uncertainty in our own lives. At every stage in life, we face uncertainty. Whether it’s the birth of a child moving across the country for a job, or even the current political and cultural climate that we find ourself in. Lord knows we’ve all seen the news in the past couple days of everything that’s happening in the world. More often than not in this life, we find ourselves living in more times of uncertainty than we do times of certainty. So we must search for something to hold onto, but that security itself has found solely in the new life that we have in Jesus Christ. For through this, we find the courage to step out in faith. Only through the power of the Holy Spirit working within us to be born again in Christ means that we have the courage to walk in faith even when the future makes no sense, and the world’s circumstances seem to favor the evil Pharaoh in his plan. Yet this freedom is given freely in Christ to all who believe. And as the years passed, I don’t have to tell you this yourself, but you know, the retirement age brings along with it. Questions that younger people don’t often think about. Will your health hold up? How long will your resources last? How will you navigate the change in family dynamics?

These are questions that my wife and I have started asking recently because we found out we’re gonna be grandparents later this year. You know, I’m excited about it too. Asked me that a year ago, and I still say I’m too young to do this, but God is good. But it brought up questions my wife and I had never thought about. How much money do we need for retirement? How long will we live? How will we need to commute to see our children and our grandchildren? And then that brought up bigger questions from there is how will we live without one another? At some point in time, we must face the issue that one of us will die and one of us will still be alive. And then how many close friends will we have? Will one of us be like My dear beloved grandparents who lived well into their late nineties, or will they be more like the men in my family who passed before they reached 70? But all these things bring up more uncertainty in our life. And I think the older we get, the more we face uncertain questions and more, we begin to question the world, not because things are more confusing to us, but because we’ve seen more in life and we’ve learned to question things. And these are real concerns that we all face. And yet Jesus doesn’t leave us in these questions. He doesn’t leave us to ponder what he’s planning. You see, God’s care and protection does not retire when we retire. God doesn’t look upon past us and say, well, you’re no longer part of my plan. Go retire and be good. His promise to you doesn’t punch a time clock or submit retirement papers. There is not a time in your life when God says, you are no longer essential to me or my plan the same God. Whose hidden arms were directing, the Hebrew boy who was floating down a basket in the Nio River are still directing you and the waters that you navigate today. He’s actively at work behind the scenes in ways that we hardly ever see. Probably don’t want to see if truth be told about it, but he’s back there weaving together circumstances and relationships that bring about his glory and your good. When we look at Moses’ mother, there’s no way she could have known when she placed that baby in that basket that the Pharaoh’s daughter would be bathing just the right time at just the right place. There’s no way that she could have orchestrated the princess heart to feel compassion for the child rather than honoring her own father’s wishes to kill the child. And she certainly couldn’t have arranged for Miriam, her older daughter, to be there and to be courageous enough to walk up to the Royal Princess and offer a solution. There’s no way that Moses’ mother could have known those things, but God does and he still does today. Because in God’s faithfulness to keep his promises to us, he works through ordinary people, ordinary faithful people who do not remain frozen in fear, but willingly step out in faith doing what they can with what he has given them. So in times of uncertainty, ordinary people have extraordinary faith. You see Moses’ mother, she was nobody important. She was just a slave woman. She wasn’t a theologian, she wasn’t a political leader. She had no hierarchy in the House of Israel, and she had no idea what God was going to accomplish through her actions. She simply followed the leading of the Holy Spirit in her life to step out in faith. She was simply a mother who willingly refused to accept that her child was expendable. She refused to believe that God who made a promise to his people would only stand by and watch an evil man destroy what God was building. She didn’t devise an elaborate plan. She didn’t go and try to take down the Pharaoh or storm the gates of the castle. No, she simply took what was available to her in her everyday life. And in this situation it was Papyrus and Tara and pitch, and she crafted this little arc of safety. And Miriam Moses’ sister, who probably was about the age of Mary, maybe a little younger at the time, think about that. 10, 12, 13 years old had the courage to walk up to the Pharaoh’s daughter, the princess. And offer a solution that would’ve been good for everybody. Now, I don’t know Miriam. Maybe one day I’ll get to ask her this question, but I doubt she was as smart as Einstein. I only have to believe that the Holy Spirit was active in her giving her this idea.

Her part in it was simply stepping forward in faith. You see, because courage and wisdom are both marks of a spirit-filled, faithful disciple in the kingdom of God. None of these women did anything that would make headlines. In fact, that’s not the way of Jesus Christ at all. Right? You guys, yourself know, one of the most significant things Jesus did the last week he was alive was kneel at his disciples feet to wash their feet. The way of Christ is never about making hi headlines or big splashes. The way of Christ is about service and stepping forward in faith and doing the thing that you are able to do in the moment that God presents it to you shortly, they were simply being faithful and the small sphere of influence that was available to them, yet their combined ordinary faithfulness became the very vehicle that God used in an extraordinary way. This, this, this is where we often underestimate our current circumstances and our current significance. I know many of you probably feel like your best years are behind you. The retirement means you’ve been moved to the sidelines of God’s work, that you feel like it’s time for you to set aside your position and let others do their jobs, that you’ve been busy with life and it’s time to enjoy this part, right? But I challenge you with this. Moses’ Stories suggest otherwise because there’s still a very active part of your life. The prayers that you can offer for your children and grandchildren, the wisdom that you share when asked, the encouragement that you can give to someone going through difficulty. These are not small things in God’s economy. These are building blocks for the kingdom of God. Your faithfulness to step forward in what seems like an ordinary moment. Is the very thing God uses to do. The extraordinary, the conversation you have with a neighbor, the friendly wave and the offer of a bottle of water on a hot day to a postal worker. The patient example you set when you face your own challenges in your life. God uses these simple acts of faithfulness to ripple through generations. I think of the grandmother that I ministered to late in her life several years ago. She prayed faithfully, day in and day out that her grandson would come to the saving faith of Jesus Christ. Sadly, she passed before that happened, but it did happen two years after her death. I was able to baptize this young man. He credits and I didn’t need it, his, his credit to to know this is what happened, but it was her prayers and his constant reminder of her praying for him that finally woke him up one day to the realization that he needed Christ in his life. She never knew that those prayers were creating cracks in his heart and heart that would eventually break open and surrender his life. Or the story of the retired businessman who finally took on mentoring a young entrepreneur, not knowing that one day this young man would start a company that would employ hundreds of people, and in fact that they would use their prophets to support many churches in many Christian ministries. Or the widow who sent encouraging cards to missionaries not knowing that her words of encouragement would be. The things that would arrive at the right moment to encourage those missionaries. Your ordinary faithfulness is not ordinary to God. It is the raw material in which he builds his kingdom. One small act of obedience at a time because God isn’t finished with you. In fact, I have to tell this story. I’ve told it in my other two services, but I’ll tell it this one as well. I know another pastor by the name of Greg Fike. He has this, um, program he shares called Joining Jesus, and we’re gonna get to go through it later this year.

It’s gonna be fun. But he’s got this phrase in there. He talks about all the time how we need to be aware and that that God isn’t finished with us in our lives. That every day Jesus is moving about us through people in situations. But he has this phrase, he describes it as He says, Jesus is messing with you. So he ask his people, he said, how is Jesus messing with you today? And that’s what it is because God is at play and at work in our life. Even right now as we talk about things, he’s at work and he’s messing with us because you know right in the right moment at the right time, he’s gonna put the right person in the right situation together and it’s gonna be waiting for you to step out in faith to say, hello. Can I pray with you? Can I offer a kind word of encouragement? I would like to invite you to my church, these small acts of obedience and faithfulness he will work through, because this is one of the most important things we’re gonna learn about the story of Moses as we delve into it, as we continue through this sermon series is this is just the beginning. Everything that we’ve read and talked about today, the dramatic rescue, the providential protection, the courage of ordinary people. They’re just the prologue to the main story. Moses is 40 years away from doing actually anything at all for God. He hasn’t even killed the Egyptian yet. He hasn’t uttered one word in our text, and yet God is already work. So sometimes we fall into the trap of thinking that our most productive years are behind us, or maybe we fall into the trap of the ordinary day in and day out, and we think, well, God’s not doing anything special in my life. And we begin to see ourselves as people whose story is winding down rather than a people whose story are just entering a new chapter in which God is a work. Because I guarantee you this, if you’re still breathing, which I pray to God, all of you still are. I think I heard somebody snoring, so God is not done with you. The very fact that you’re here, that you’ve lived through everything that you’ve lived through in your life and you still have faith, means that God has a purpose and a plan that involves you. Now, it may be a different purpose and a plan than he had 20 or 30 years apart from you in your life before. Now I know if I think back to 20 years ago, I was still racing cops down the road, so. Certainly not doing that now, but he even had a purpose from my point in my life 20 years ago that is different than it is now because right now we’re living in the light of hidden arms. So I want to ask you a question this morning. What does it mean to live in the confidence of being in God’s hidden arms? Well, first it means that we trust in his providence even. When we can’t see his hands. Moses’s mother couldn’t see the end from the beginning. She had no idea what was gonna happen when she put Moses in this basket as she stitched it together and painted it with tar. She had no idea whether her crazy plan was gonna work out, but she was acting in faith in that moment with what she could see. You don’t need to understand all of God’s plan to trust his heart. Second. It means taking small acts of faithfulness seriously. ’cause God does use ordinary obedience extraordinarily ways.

The kindness you show today, the prayer you offer tonight, the encouragement you give tomorrow, these are far more significant than what you realize. And finally, it means living with the expect. I promise I’m gonna get this word out. It means living with expectancy rather than resignation. God is not finished with your story. He may be preparing you right this moment for something amazing, something that will bring him glory and you into a deeper faith. Walk with him something far greater than you’ve ever imagined. I know many of you have come to a place in your life where you’ve earned the right to take a moment and rest and retire. But I want to challenge you with this, with just this thought this morning. What if God hasn’t called you to this moment in your life to rest, but to rise with a renewed faith? What if this season in life is not about winding down, but about being positioned for a new kind of impact? What if your part in life right now is, is the prayers that will start the revival of tomorrow in this neighborhood or in this campus or in this place? Moses began his life hidden in arms. Arms that seem powerless to the situation they were in, but they were actually holding the future of a nation. You’re still held in those same arms today. The arms of God that directed the flow of the basket down the NIO are still holding you today. And they, though they may seem invisible, they are still fulfilling his purposes. Your current season is not a closing chapter, but a meaningful act in God’s ongoing story. His story of rescue, of legacy and purpose. You see, God doesn’t have a mission. God is on a mission. The mission of Jesus Christ didn’t begin in the New Testament. It began at the creation of the world. Everything we do is part of his divine plan, and he is still active in many ways. To bring that about, keep listening for his voice, keep trusting his heart, and keep moving forward in faith, the same God that turns a di divine, a death sentence into a divine rescue mission. Who transformed a princess’s bath time into a divine appointment and used a young girl’s courage to reunite a family? Well, that same God is here with us today writing your story and his arms, the arms that hold you today. They never tire. They never grow weak, and they’re never uncertain about what comes next.

It’s a rest in the truth of his faithfulness to you, but rise in the confidence. Of his arms that are holding you tight and trust that your best chapters are still ahead of you. Let us pray. Holy Father, we give you all glory and everything that you do in our lives. I pray that as we go about our daily lives, that you will continue to interfere with our ordinary, that you’ll continue to inspire us, to give us courage to walk in acts of faithfulness. And to step out in those courage courageous moments and be faithful to your calling father. Help all your people see how you’re at work in their lives, how Jesus is indeed still messing with us today. And yet your arms still hold us tightly. And Jesus name. Amen man.