It is a good morning to be in the house of the Lord. Isn’t it just, okay, I’m gonna get y’all Baptist, your Lutherans into your Baptist where you say Amen when I say things like that. Okay. So let’s try it again. It’s a good day to be. Yeah. There we go. All right. All right, all right. All right. So what a wonderful morning to be here. It’s a, it’s an interesting time to be looking into the words from Exodus, and specifically this passage that we’re gonna look at this morning because it brings to this. It brings to mind this question that have you ever felt like God couldn’t possibly use you because of some limitation you have? For me, it was always public speaking. I can remember when I first gave my first sermon, the first time I stood behind a pulpit. It was some 13 years ago. And it was so bad that the worship pastor had to get up after me and remind the people that it was my first time and they should be kind to me. Amen. There’s some weeks I feel like somebody should still do that, but anyways, I mean, I was red faced sweating, you know? And that was just three weeks ago. Anyways. But seriously, maybe you feel like there’s limitations in your life that that completely limit you from God working in and through your life. Maybe you feel like you’re too young or you’re too old. Maybe you battle anxiety or you carry the weight of your past failures and you say, there’s no way God could possibly use me. Maybe you just feel inferior to the ability that God may have given you. If so, I have good news for you. This morning, you’re in good company because there’s one of the greatest biblical leaders of all time by the name of Moses, and he had the same problem. Now, remember last week if you were with us, we, we heard from Pastor Todd how God approached Moses through a burning bush that did not burn up. And Moses heard from God. He heard God speak him. It was, it was hollow ground. He required Moses to take his shoes off and. He gave Moses this incredible message. God says, I want you to march into Pharaoh’s palace and demand the release of my people, 2 million Hebrew slaves. It’s the opportunity of a lifetime, a chance to be part of the greatest rescue mission in history, and a brazen attempt to liberate a nation. And Moses, his response was so excited, he said, no, I’m good. I can’t do this. I don’t speak well. Now our text, well, it kind of suggests that Moses may have had a speech impediment. Some scholars debate why he responded in this way, whether it was that he stuttered, maybe he had a limited vocabulary. Maybe he had a difficulty with pro pronunciation. Maybe he had a thick southern accent that affected how he said some words. One Bible scholar even goes to for as claim that Moses didn’t have a problem speaking at all. He was just trying to be polite to God and refuse his request. Whatever the specific issue. Moses felt that he had a weakness that had disqualified him from the request. God was making sound familiar. Today, I hope we can discover together that our weaknesses do not disqualify us from God’s service. In fact, they become the very vehicle in which God’s strength is on display. Most clearly. I invite you to turn with me in your Bibles or follow along with me on the screen as we look at Exodus chapter four verses 10 through 17. Moses said to the Lord, oh my Lord. I am not eloquent either in the past or since you have spoken to your servant, but I am so of speech and of tongue. And the Lord said to him, who is made man’s mouth? Who makes him mute or deaf or seen or blind? Is it not? I the Lord? Now therefore, go. And I will be with your mouth and I will teach you what to speak. But he said, oh my Lord, please send somebody else. Then the anger of the Lord was kindled against Moses and he said, is there not Aaron, your brother, the Levite? I know that he can speak well. Behold, he is coming out to meet you when he sees you. He will be glad in his heart. You shall speak to him and put the words in his mouth. And I will be with your mouth. And with his mouth. And I will teach you both what to do. He shall speak for you to the people and he shall be your mouth and you shall be as God to him. And take now in your hand this staff with which you shall do these signs. This is the word of the Lord. Thank God. Let us pray. Holy Father, we give you thanks this day that. You come to us in so many different ways from Moses. It was the burning bush for us. It is your word. It is your time spent in worship together.

It is the way that which you call us, even in the most unusual or what we think are limiting circumstances. But Father, you do call us. Call us to be obedient to your calling. And Lord, I pray now that you, we will find comfort as we see this story of Moses. As a way that we can find faith to move forward together in your name to glorify Jesus, in whose name we pray.Amen. Well, the first point I want us to look at this morning is that God calls the weak. This is what he’s doing when he calls Moses because he sees our weaknesses differently than what we see them. Moses, you see, saw his speech difficulty as a disqualification. Yes, God saw it as an opportunity. Notice now how God responds.He doesn’t dismiss Moses’ concern. He doesn’t minimize Moses’ concern or his struggle. Instead, God turns back to Moses and he reminds him of one fundamental truth with a single question who gave human beings their mouth. This isn’t God being insensitive to Moses’ disability. Instead, this is God declaring his sovereignty over the every aspect of our lives, including what we think are limitations. God is essentially saying, Moses, I know exactly who you are. I know all your limitations. I know all your weaknesses. I know your strengths, and I’m calling you anyway. So think about it for a moment. If God wanted the most elegant speaker. To go into Egypt to approach the palace and talk to the Pharaoh. He could have chosen anyone, but he chose Moses Pete’s speech impediment and all. But why? Why choose a man who apparently didn’t speak well? Well, it’s simple, really because God’s power is displayed most clearly through our weaknesses, not in our strengths. But God’s calling includes our limitations. You see, the Apostle Paul knew this principle well in First Corinthians chapter two verse one, he writes, when I came to you brothers, I came, not proclaiming to you the testimony of God with lofty speech or wisdom. Now if we look at Paul for a minute, I wanna remind us about Paul. Paul was brilliant. Self-proclaimed the Pharisee of Pharisees. He held dual citizenship. He was well educated and he had an articulate way of speaking and writing. Yeah, don’t believe me. Look at Romans and try to read that book one time and figure out everything it says Paul was gifted, but even Paul says, this is not how God has called me to approach this. Even Paul himself protested against God against his own issues, and God taught him this in two Corinthians 12, nine, God’s response to Paul when Paul said, uh, I’ve got this, this thorn in my side. We really don’t know what it was, but Paul says, I’ve got this thorn in my side. God, you need to remove it so I can move, so I can do your work. And God says, my grace is sufficient for you because my power is made perfect in weakness. So all this tells us one thing that we have to stop waiting for our weaknesses to, to, to disappear before we serve God. He wants to use you as you are, not as you think you should be. And we also need to recognize that these limitations that we perceive might be the exact thing that God wants to use.

Your struggle with anxiety might be the exact thing that God uses you to reach another person who also struggles with anxiety. Your financial difficulties might just give you the credibility to reach out to someone who is facing poverty. Your divorce. It’s sad and as heartbreaking as it is to God and to many people. Might not be an embarrassment that you think it is. It might be the life experience that’ll help you relate to someone else for the sheer purpose of showing the reconciling power of Jesus Christ. Remember that God’s calling always comes with his equipping. He promises to teach you what to speak and how to say it. Because God always provides everything we need. And with this point, I wanna, I want to bring us down to, to about verse 13 here in our passage, and remind you that something interesting happens here. This is one of the only times in scripture that God gets angry at a chosen servant, right? Moses says, no, sir. God sends somebody else and God gets angry with him. Why? Well, it wasn’t because Moses had a speech impediment. It was because Moses was letting his fear override his faith in God’s provision. You see, Moses had moved from an honest concern of, I struggle with speaking, which is good. He admitted his issue. That’s right. But then he moved to an outright refusal. No, God, send someone else. The problem wasn’t that Moses wasn’t perfect, the problem was that Moses was refusing to do what God was calling him to do. See, there’s a difference between acknowledging our weaknesses and using them as excuses to avoid God’s work. And I want you to really notice here how God responds because he has some really creative solutions when we, when we step out in faith, because God doesn’t replace Moses. He doesn’t use all his power and reach out and fix his vocabulary or his speech impediment or whatever Moses was dealing with. He didn’t fix my anxiety. No, sir. I still shake every time I get up here to speak to you, including this morning. No, God provided Aaron a partner for Moses, right? He didn’t remove the weakness. He provided what Moses needed to succeed this. This is how God works. He rarely removes our thorns, yet he seeks those weaknesses, those thorns, those deficits, those limitations as a way to show off his strength and his power. He doesn’t always remove the disease. He might provide physicians and nurses a caring community. I agree. I am so glad he came into my life. Several years ago, I had a member of my church who, well, it was the first church I got to serve in the Lutheran church. This was about five, six years ago. I had a member of my church who was facing cancer. Any of you who have faced cancer or have a loved one that has faced this terrible disease, you know what chemotherapy can be like? It’s horrible, right? This gentleman had needed a ride to his therapy session, his chemotherapy session there one day. And I, uh, I jumped in and was willing to give him a ride. We get to the, the doctor’s office and I notice he’s going around talking to everybody. He’s talking to the nurses, he’s talking to other patients.

He’s bragging about his church family and his pastor who happened to be there. And I, you know, I’m, I kind of write it off at, people act different around pastors for some reason. I don’t know why, but they do. So I kind of write it off as he’s just kind of showing off for me. Egotistic. I know, right? But uh, so I turned to the nurse and I said, is he always like this? And she goes, no. Normally he’s far worse. You see, God doesn’t always remove the thing that’s in the way. He doesn’t always remove the limitation. He might give us an opportunity to show off his strength. He doesn’t remove the weakness. He gives us the skills we lack, and sometimes he just straight out gives us teammates to accomplish his goals. I love this passage from Paul. In one Corinthians chapter 12, Paul says, the, I cannot say to the hand, I have no need of you, nor again the head to the feet. I have no need of you. On the contrary, the parts of the body that seem to be weaker. Are indispensable. Every Christian, every person called into the body of Christ has a calling from God. Not a limitation set forth by the world’s standards. So don’t let your fear of masquerade as humility. Sometimes we get hidden behind this, what we call the reality of our scriptural limitations, right? And we’ll say, oh, I’m just not knowledgeable about scripture enough, or, I don’t have the right personality or whatever.And we think that we’re gonna be a stumbling block to God if we try to step out and help by telling someone else about our faith. And actually, that’s just our fear dressed up in scriptural language. What we’re really doing is giving Satan a foothold where we should be taking a step forward in faith. So instead, I encourage you to look for God’s creative provisions. He might not give you what you think you need. IIE Moses wanting his speech fixed, but he might give you exactly what you need and that he gave Moses Aaron, who would go on to become part of the Levi tree, the head of the Levi tree. That would be the priesthood for the Israelites for generations. So we need to be willing to work in partnership. God accomplishes his purposes through teams. Never through Lone Rangers. Lemme ask you a question. Who remembers The Lone Ranger TV show? Anybody? Oh yeah, right. Even Lone Ranger had Tonto. It was the 12 Apostles guys. It wasn’t the one apostle. God always works in concert with his children together, where two or three are gathered, so shall they know my name. Your weakness might be the exact thing that drives you towards the community that God wants you to have. And all of this, all of this is so that God gets the glory. God tells Moses in verse 17, he says, taking your hand, this staff with which you shall do the signs. The staff is interesting because it’s a simple tool, really. You think about what we carry in our pockets or our pocketbooks today, a cell phone that has more computing power to send people to the moon, right? Moses had a wooden stick, and through it God would turn water into blood. He would part of sea. He would cause water to gush forth from rocks, all from this ordinary piece of wood in the hands of a man who said, I can’t talk. Right?

So why? Why this approach? Well, that was So when people witnessed these events, these incredible, incredible times that they would not marvel at Moses and begin to follow Moses. No. They would know that God was at work. So when God calls us to action, it’s never to call us into a path or an action that we can accomplish on our own. God gets no glory from that. When God calls us to his work, to his faith, it is to go into a world that is. Completely against the Christian mindset, but he does it so that he gets the glory, not so we get the glory. He always calls us into a path that we cannot accomplish on our own. Paul understood the same principle and he deliberately avoided using impressive rhetoric, although he had the ability to do it when he preached the gospel because he wanted the people’s faith to rest in the power of God. Not in human wisdom, as he said to the people in Corinth, I didn’t come to you speaking in words of wisdom or elegance simply for the power of the Holy Spirit so that you would have faith in God, not Amen, which is the entire point of any message that we share with others. The entire reason that God calls us into action to begin with the point of God, his mission, and because it’s his mission, that means this is the only message we have to share, and that is the salvation of Jesus Christ. Because even the act of salvation reveals the heart of the gospel message. God didn’t send Jesus Christ as a conquering king or an impressive philosopher. Jesus didn’t come to teach us how to become the best nation in the world. He didn’t teach us how to live the best life. Now, Jesus came as a humble carpenter from Nazareth who died on the cross, the complete worst way, the most shameful form of execution known to man. Why? Because salvation comes not through human strength or wisdom, but through God’s power working in and through apparent weakness, the cross looked like defeat, but it was truly the greatest victory God ever had gave. It was victory of her sin and death. When we have faith, when we trust in Jesus Christ for our salvation, when we hold onto the promise that you are saved through Jesus Christ, that is admitting that we are need him to be our conquering savior, and we’re acknowledging through ourselves that we do not have the ability through good works or moral efforts, but we require God’s strength. Working through what the world sees as weakness, faith in a crucified savior. Paul writes in one Corinthians 1 25, foolishness of God as wiser than men in the edness of God is stronger than any man. I think about what God can do through a. Church here in the East Valley Church of Victory Lutheran Church, a church whose average age, I’m not ashamed to say is 78 years old.Not ashamed of that because imagine what God can through through 78-year-old people and show the world how strong his message is, that we don’t need to be what the world expects us to be in order to share the salvation of Jesus Christ. So embrace your role as a vessel. You’re not the source. We are just the clay pot. We’re not the pot maker because God works through our weaknesses and that reminds people that it is him at work, not us. And our limitations are very, very helpful because they remind us and they keep us from falling into the trap of taking credit for what only God can do. When we trust in the power of the message of the gospel message itself, you don’t need to be perfect or impressive for God to use your testimony to reach others. I think about all you sitting here this morning, those of you listening online, every one of you have a unique individual story of salvation. A way in which your faith has been cultivated and groomed and grown over and throughout your life, and I know there’s somebody around you that you may not have met yet or you may already know that could use your encouragement from your faith walk. That’s awesome to think about God getting glory from that. Who would imagined some guy from South Car or North Carolina here? I’d done put my own location in the wrong place. Some guy from North Carolina who used to run around racetracks all the time. Could stand here and talk about a God so great that he would bring salvation even to me. Which brings me back to the beautiful part of Moses’ story. The man who said he couldn’t speak well, ended up speaking in Pharaoh’s palace. It would be the equivalent of me walking into Putin and saying, you’re gonna stop this war with with Ukraine, and you’re gonna release all your prisoners. It’s unbelievable. Moses, the man with the speech impediment, who would teach a nation 2 million plus people, the 10 Commandments, and he would go on from there to teach the entirety of God’s law to a nation with his speech impediment. It didn’t cancel his calling. It became fabric of God’s plan. Because when Moses spoke, the people knew they weren’t following a leader.

They were hearing from God himself when, when Moses used that wooden stick to separate the sea, they knew those miracles were not from some magician but from the Almighty himself. And the same is true for you, your perceived limitations, whether they’re physical or emotional, or circumstantial. Those aren’t barriers to God’s continued use in your life. In fact, they’re probably exactly where God wants you to begin as you display his strength through your weaknesses. Think about this for a moment. Maybe you struggle with anxiety, but God wants to use your empathy to comfort others who are anxious. Maybe you’ve failed in business. But God wants you to use that experience to help others navigate their financial difficulties. Maybe you feel too old to make a difference, but God wants you to use your wisdom to empower others, your prayers to fuel the revival, your wisdom given to the next generation. Whatever your weakness, God’s invitation remains the same, go. I will help you speak and I will teach you exactly what to say. As the old preacher said to me some years ago, A boat does no one any good on a dry dock. Now there’s a chance. There’s a chance you’re here today and you feel like your sins and your failures have disqualified you completely from God’s love. Well, you might feel like this doesn’t really matter because you’re not even sure God even cares that you exist. Or considers you as part of his people. But that’s, that’s exactly backwards because the gospel message is that God loves you despite your weakness and failures, that Jesus came to save sinners not perfect people if you were perfect. Jesus is out of a job, and his crucifixion and resurrection were in vain. To be part of God’s family is simply to know. That Jesus died for you. And because God doesn’t wait for you to get your life together before he uses you, believe me, I know He begins working immediately in your life through your weaknesses and all because his power has made perfect in your weakness. So maybe you’ve been walking with Jesus a long time. Maybe it’s time for you to stop waiting on your weaknesses to disappear before you serve God. I got a question for you as I finish up here today. Who in your, who in here reminds? Remembers? See, I don’t speak well either. Who in here remembers Bob Newhart? Anybody? Yeah. Okay. Bob Newhart has this sketch. I need to show you all sometime, but this is, this is wonderful. I love this sketch. Bob Newhart plays a psychiatrist. And he has a simple way of doing this. He says, I’ll give you one minute for $5. It doesn’t matter how much of the minute you use, it’s $5. I don’t make change. His first patient comes in, she walks in, she pays him the $5, and she starts telling him her problem. She says, I’m afraid I’m gonna get stuck in a box. He says, Uhhuh, Uhhuh, I hear you. I hear you. She goes, well, what do I do about it? He says, okay, I got just the thing for you. She gets out a pad and her, her paper, and she goes to write it down. He goes, it’s just two words. She goes, you don’t think I need to write it down? He says, no, no, no. I think you’ll remember it. She said, okay. She puts your stuff away. She says, all right, hit me. He said, you ready for this? She said, yeah. I said, okay. Here it goes. Stop it. Stop waiting. Stop waiting for the perfect moment. Stop waiting for the next opportunity or the right time. God wants you to use your limitations now. He wants you to use you now. Your speech impediment, your anxiety, your past failures, your lack of education, none of these disqualify you from being used by God because God is that powerful. Take the staff he’s given you. Whether it’s your story, your gifts, your circumstances, even your struggles, and trust him to work mighty miracles from it. See, the only, the only limitation that God sees is a lack of faith.

Remember, God doesn’t call the qualified. He qualifies the called and often our greatest weaknesses. Become the very means through which his strength is displayed most clearly. Let us pray. Good and gracious. Father, you are so wonderful and mighty as your works. You delight in the way that we faithfully share your message to others, Lord, because it brings glory to you. And just as Moses, we are so often to step back in fear and say, no, God, there’s no way you can use me. But you want us to embrace that. And so Father, I pray that you help us to see our weaknesses, not as disqualifications, but as opportunities that you give us courage to step forward in faith, trusting that you’ll provide what we need to accomplish what you’ve called us to do. In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.