9/19/10 "Have you encountered a burning bush lately?

Sermons and sermon topics are often generated out of the flow of happenings in the church and relationship dynamics that are formative for the life of the church. As a Pastor I have a pretty good feel for the spiritual temperature in my church. My great passion is for the people of God to be in partnership with our Lord and our God. With this in mind, I am greatly blessed when I see my fellow brothers and sisters passionately seeking to please our Heavenly Father. So how does this come about? My generation (I am 74 as I write this) spoke often about the need to be on fire for God-to be full of faith and the Holy Spirit like Stephen (see Acts 6:5,8; 7:55). I think it begins when the Lord really gets our attention. There comes a moment when we are called away from the frenzied pace that so many of us are engrossed in and we are drawn to a place of quietness and retreat. At least this is what happened to Moses, the great emancipator and law giver who casts a giant shadow throughout the Old Testament and beyond until the coming of the Great Redeemer, Jesus Christ. Although Moses was well placed in the highest echelons of Egyptian society, he could not overlook the suffering of his own Jewish people. He may have grown impatient with God’s “indifference” and so decided to take matters into his own hands. In effect, Moses tried to do God’s work in his own strength. All the details are not given but we know from Exodus 2 that he killed one Egyptian who was beating up on an Israelite slave and he tried to settle a heated dispute involving two of his Jewish brethren. One of the “combatants” told Moses to bug off and shocked Moses with his knowledge that Moses had taken an Egyptian’s life. It dawned on him that he had been found out and if Pharaoh had gotten wind that Moses was taking up common cause with his Jewish brethren against their Egyptian oppressors, then Moses would be hunted down and arrested for treason. So Moses’ experiment with doing “God’s work” for God came to a crashing halt as he skipped out of town. He ended up in the no mans land of the Arabian Peninsula and hung out with the Midianites until he married into a Midianite family and settled down. 40 years later he was still “in retreat” and any thought of being his people’s champion were far removed from his mind. Then one day, Moses, the shepherd, is on one of his dull excursions with his sheep to the far side of the desert, and arrives at Mount Horeb (also called Mount Sinai where Moses later received the tablets containing the Ten Commandments). It was there that he saw this strange but startling sight of a burning bush that was not being consumed by the fire. Moses decided to move in close to better see this amazing spectacle. It was then that he was stopped dead in his tracks by the Angel of the Lord who called out his name and ordered him to take off his “shoes” because he was standing on Holy Ground, designated as such by the abiding presence of the Lord and God of Moses’ fathers. The rest is history as Moses reluctantly accepts God’s call to be the agent of Israel’s emancipation from the clutches of their Egyptian oppressors (see Exodus 3 especially verses 1-7 which is my immediate focus here). We learn much from this segment of the saga of Moses the now reluctant champion of his people. For starters, there is the long period of retreat. Forty years sounds like an awful long time, but in God’s judgment it took that long to get Egypt out of Moses’ system so he could be the instrument for bringing Israel out of Egypt. We get so bogged down with mundane and pedestrian concerns, even legitimate ones, that we lose perspective and even a sense of mission in our lives. It’s important that we make a strategic retreat from the noise and hysteria of modern life and for a season (OK, maybe not 40 years) spend time alone with God. Have you ever felt the inner desire to just get away and be uninvolved and unavailable for a while? By all means listen to that yearning and do something about it. You may be amazed by what God reveals to you about yourself and his plans for you especially if you consider God’s plans more desirable than your own. Second, when God gets our attention ( hopefully, not through acute adversity which often happens to those who can’t get off life’s merry-go-round), we need to move from “mere” curiosity about His inner workings in our lives to a place of humble submission and worship. Our pagan culture has such a dulling effect on our sensitivity to God’s holiness and awesome presence. Needless to say, without reverence there is no revelation. In short, we are in danger of reducing God to our own level and treating him like any other person competing for our time and affection. That is a very dangerous trend in contemporary church life. Fifteen minutes here and there just won’t get it done. We literally have to plan for a season of earnestly seeking his face with no distractions and no excuses. People of my generation and before often used such times of extended retreat to seek the Baptism in the Holy Spirit along with a commission to do something new and awesome for God. Third, we need to constantly remember that God transforms the ordinary into the extraordinary. The burning bush which Moses encountered was typical of the kind of common plant life that dotted the desert environment of Moses but it contained the kind of wood (acadian wood) that was later used to build the ark of the covenant with its two golden cherubs and sacred mercy seat on which the High Priest spilled the blood of atonement. As I finish typing this piece our Jewish neighbors are beginning to observe “Yom Kipper” or the very sacred Day of Atonement. Is there a burning bush waiting to startle you?