Spread Your Roots and Fly

Moses. Now there’s a guy I can relate to. Every time I read about him I feel like I’ve found a kindred spirit.

He hardly ever had a home. A constant sojourner, his roots were in Heaven. Psalm 90 is accredited to him and it starts out, “Lord, You have been our dwelling place in all generations.” He seemed to have his eyes and his heart fixed on the Lord, and not on building for himself a comfortable life here on earth.

His life was marked with a sense of calling, not because of him being anything special, but because he was God’s chosen man for the moment. When God tells him what He’s going to have him do, he thinks of every possible reason why he is not qualified, capable, or even willing.

My favorite encounter in this season of his life is when he asks God, “What if they will not believe me or listen to what I say? For they may say, ‘The Lord has not appeared to you.’” God’s response to Moses’ doubt is that He tells him to take his  shepherd’s staff and throw it to the ground. When Moses did this, God turned it into a snake. God used what He had already put in Moses’ hands, the very thing that Moses used on a daily basis as he led the sheep around the desert of Midian…but He required that Moses throw it to the ground, let it go. When Moses relinquished it God inhabited it and turned it into something that would be a testimony of God’s presence with him. This is the miracle of being used by God, all you do is throw what you have at His feet, and He comes into it and uses it to draw people to Himself. God was reassuring Moses that people would recognize God’s annointing, and they would know it was about God and not about Moses. 

Another thing I love about Moses is that sometimes he seemed like a failure. He seemed to do what he was supposed to do, and yet things only got worse. He is obedient in telling Pharoh to let the Israelites go, and yet Pharoh’s response is exactly what Moses feared it would be, and he treated them even worse instead. I’m sure Moses was a little confused, he’d stepped out into the ministry God had called him to do, and yet it didn’t seem like God was really coming through with His end of the deal. But God was working on a bigger plan than Moses could see, and it involved getting him to realize just how desparately he needed God… Moses needed his failures to learn some valuable lessons. God’s bigger and better plan seemed like failure for awhile, but it was so that He could, “multiply His signs and wonders (Ex. 7:3).” He knew how He was going to display His power with the most impact, and Moses had to let go of how he thought it should happen, and let God do it His way.

Moses’ failures are incredibly encouraging to me. For it is often that things don’t look how I think they should look and circumstances aren’t as I think they should be, but God’s working on a level that I can’t even see, playing out His plan to bring the most glory to Himself. And I am learning to submit more of myself to Him, letting Him use me however He pleases, and surrendering my near-sighted definition of success. 

This barely scratches the surface of Moses’ life and his role in God’s story, but these are the specific ways that I’ve been learning from his walk with God.