Are you demoralized because of some past failure? You can find yourself thinking, “God can’t use me anymore. I have failed Him.” Well, that’s what the devil would like you to think. And in case you don’t think of it, the devil will put those thoughts into your mind anyway. But listen, it is not true! And Moses is a great example to the contrary. He certainly failed, but it didn’t mean that God couldn’t use him. God came again and he used him greatly. God knows you. He knows you’re only dust. He made you. He’s not surprised that there is failure in you. He knows what you are like. But He also knows what He is able to do through you by Jesus Christ, and that makes the difference.
The last verses of Exodus 2 say, “The Israelites groaned in their slavery and cried out, and their cry for help because of their slavery went up to God. And God heard their groaning and he remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac and with Jacob. So God looked on the Israelites and was concerned about them” (vv. 23-25). The Bible startles us from time to time by these understatements. God was concerned about them. I’ll say He was! He was about to shake heaven and earth to get them out of Egypt and bring them into their own land.
We have a tendency, simply because we live in the world and are surrounded by the world’s ideas and ideals, to want to do God’s work in the world’s way, even as Christians. What is the world’s way? Well the world’s way is power, pressure, and money. And so we think that we need to do things that way, too. We need to collect a war chest in order to get our programs through, and we need to get our people elected and put them in positions of government so they can pass laws and force people to do what we think is right. Now there is a place for just laws and they flow from a citizenry who wants to do just things. But the Christian mode of operating is not by money or by power or by politics. Our way of operating is by the Word, teaching it to others, and also by prayer, asking God to bless it.
When Moses was forty years old, there came this momentous turning point in his life. We all have turning points in our lives, decisions we make that affect what happens afterward. But it is hard to imagine any turning point in anyone’s life more monumental than what happened with Moses when he threw in his lot with his people and turned his back on the pleasures of Egypt.
Moses’ educational background was important, and God gave that to prepare him for the work He had for Moses. Yet it was overshadowed by the education he received in his early years in his home from his slave mother. She taught him about God. We already saw that this was a godly family, and apparently for several generations.
