“God has been faithful to me, and while I have so much to say about this, let me just tell you a few quick stories and testify to his steadfast love in my life. In the days when my mother became pregnant with me, Pharaoh was the king of Egypt and the most powerful man on the face of the earth. For a number of reasons, he became very angry with the Hebrew people and therefore issued a decree that all male, Hebrew babies, when born, should be killed. This decree was a real tragedy but some of the midwives in Egypt refused to obey this order and for that God showed them favor. These courageous women literally took their lives into their hands to save the lives of others but God was faithful to them because God is faithful! However, when Pharaoh found out what they were doing he was very upset and commanded every person in the country to participate in murdering all male, Hebrew babies. Believe it or not, he commanded that they be cast into the Nile River and drowned. The situation was horrible.
“Thanks be to God, my parents feared God more than the king and they hid me for three months at the risk of their lives. These precious saints looked back in time and remembered God’s faithfulness to Abraham and Sarah and so many others, and they chose to trust that God would be faithful to them. Thus, they hid me by faith, but eventually the day came when they couldn’t do so anymore and therefore they fashioned a little basket, made sure it wouldn’t sink, and in accordance with the king’s command—sort of—they set me adrift on the Nile River. While my big sister stood there and watched me float downstream, praying and trusting in God, she saw one of Pharaoh’s daughters come down by the river and take me out of the river. As she watched and wondered what would become of me, she was surprised to see that instead of killing me, Pharaoh’s daughter actually brought me into the king’s palace!
“Beloved, this doesn’t happen to everyone, but please let me tell you what the Lord did for me by the faith of my parents: he saved me from infanticide and made me part of the most powerful family on the face of the earth! Can you believe that? I was a slave boy but I grew up like the son of a king. What’s more, they decided to name me Moses which means ‘Draws Out’ because I had been drawn out of the Nile. Little did they know that God would one day use me to draw out his people from Egypt and from under their great power! The point I really want to make here is that God is faithful to those who trust him and fear him alone, and that’s exactly what my parents did.
“Some years later, when I had grown up, I had a very serious decision to make. You’ve read about this in Exodus and Hebrews, and while you can understand the words that are there, you can’t imagine the pressure I felt in those days. For all practical purposes, I was the grandson of the most powerful man on the face of the earth and day by day I could stand and look at the treasuries of Egypt, knowing that I had access to them all. The vast wealth of Egypt was mine. If I wanted money, it was mine. If I wanted precious metals and jewels, they were mine. If I wanted the best food and drink the world, it was mine. If I wanted the best live music in the world, it was mine. If I wanted beautiful women, they were mine. If I wanted power and prestige, it was mine. Anything and everything I wanted was mine because the treasuries of Egypt were mine.
“However, the man and woman who brought me into this world had told me who I really was. They told me that I was a Hebrew and not an Egyptian; that I was a descendant of Abraham and not of Pharaoh; that I was a child of faith and not of power. As I pondered these things the Spirit of Christ began to stir in me. I wouldn’t have put it this way at the time, but that’s exactly what was happening; the very Spirit of Christ was stirring in me and laying a choice before me. He said, ‘Moses, you can either identify yourself with Pharaoh and enjoy all the treasuries of Egypt and the fleeting pleasures of sin, or you can identify yourself with the Hebrews, your own slave people, and choose to be mistreated along with them.’ Beloved, I’m here to tell you that by the Spirit of Christ, I chose the second option. I chose to suffer with him for a short time rather than to reject him for eternity in favor of the fleeting pleasures of this life. This was a very hard decision but I made it by faith in the God who is faithful. He spoke, I believed his words, and he fulfilled every word that came out of his mouth.
“Now, please understand, I suffered for this decision. I ended up being expelled from the land of Egypt for standing with my people and I lived out in the desert for some forty years among a people who were strangers to me. But I must say that God was faithful to me there as well, for those people became my family and they provided for all my needs and along the way God used them and various circumstances to shape my character so that I could come into the fullness of my name, ‘Draws Out.’ When the time was right and I was in my middle-age, God appeared to me and called me to go back to Egypt, but this time, he said, I was not to rejoin Pharaoh’s family, rather, I was to challenge Pharaoh. Can you imagine receiving a call like this? God asked me to get in the face of the most powerful man on earth and tell him to let the Hebrew people go from Egypt, to let them be released from under his great power.
“I’m not going to lie and tell you that I wasn’t profoundly scared of this calling at times. God had made me to be a man of faith but this calling was hard for me and I struggled with him. You can read about some of my struggles in the books I wrote, but you just can’t imagine the intensity of the feelings I felt. At times, I was so afraid that I couldn’t even speak and I would say to the Lord, ‘There’s no way I can do what you’ve called me to do when all I can do is babble.’ But at the end of the day, the Spirit of Jesus continued stirring in me and I chose to fear the Lord more than I feared the king or the people or my own inadequacies. I didn’t make this choice because I was some great or courageous man; I made this choice because Jesus himself showed me that it’s better to fear the Lord than to fear any other. He showed me that it’s better to trust in the Lord than to be paralyzed by self-doubt. And I will tell you the way I endured so many trials in my life and ministry: I sought the face of God every day and by his grace he gave me eyes to see what can’t be seen. He gave me eyes to see him who is invisible.
“Except for that one brief moment on the mountain, I never again saw the Lord in a literal way. I saw him do many things and perform many great signs, yes, but like you I had to live by faith. I had to trust the Lord for things I could not see with my eyes or touch with my hands. But all along the way the Lord was with me, and this is what sustained me. Please hear me, Beloved, it wasn’t courage that led me on. It wasn’t social or religious pressure or support. I was in a relationship with God and he helped me to believe in him and in his words, and over time he showed me that he is faithful, always faithful.
“So if I can jump ahead in the story, I’m now in the land of Egypt and confronting Pharaoh by faith in God on a regular basis, and one day the Lord instructed me to do a crazy thing and I just did it by faith. I didn’t understand what he was up to but by this time I trusted him, and so I obeyed by faith. The Lord had recently struck Egypt nine times with powerful signs that were designed to challenge Egypt’s so-called gods and loosen Pharaoh’s grip on God’s people. And now the Lord told me that he would strike Egypt one more time, and that just before we left the land I was to command everyone to slaughter a lamb at twilight and then to sprinkle some of the blood on the doorposts of their homes.
“Reason being, the Lord was going to strike Pharaoh and crush his pride by taking the lives of every firstborn male in Egypt, human and non-human alike. Are you hearing what the Lord was doing? Pharaoh once commanded that the Lord’s male babies should be killed and now the Lord is commanding that all of Pharaoh’s firstborn should be killed, from the least of them to the greatest. The blood that was to be placed on the doorposts was to be a sign to the angel of the Lord that he should pass over every home where it was found and not touch the firstborn males who lived there. So again, this command was strange to me just like the command to build a boat was strange to Noah, but I trusted the Lord and later understood what he was up to.
“Now, most of you know this story so you know how it ends, but you have to understand, we didn’t know how it was going to end. So we had to kill the lamb and sprinkle the blood and trust that what God said was true. And it was true, God did everything just as he said he would do. Though it was unknown to me at the time, God also used this circumstance to prophesy of the coming of Jesus Christ because now, for those of you who are down there on that battlefield and are covered by the blood of the true Lamb of God, you will not be destroyed by the wrath of God when it comes to vindicate God’s holy name and punish all who have refused to believe in him. Isn’t it amazing just how faithful the Lord is to his people? He speaks, we obey, we come to understand some of the things he was doing, but later we’re surprised by the fullness of what he was doing.
“After we left Egypt the Lord did so many things and I have so many stories to tell, but let me just tell you one. Shortly after leaving that land with about one-and-one-half million Hebrews, we found ourselves caught between a rock and a hard-place. Pharaoh had let us go but then he changed his mind and sent his army after us which just happened to be the most powerful army on the face of the earth! We had no chance against them, at least not on our own, because we were just a little slave people who had no weapons and no training and no experience in war. To make matters worse, we had traveled for quite a while and we were located on the shores of the Red Sea with mountains all around us. The only path out of where we were was the path on which Pharaoh’s army was marching toward us—not good! And again, I know that most of you have read the story but you can’t imagine the terror we felt at that time. We didn’t know the end of the story, and from a human perspective there seemed to be no hope for us.
“But then God commanded me to do another very strange thing. He said, ‘Moses, go up to the sea and hold out the staff that I gave to you, and as you do I’m going to drive back the sea. Just trust me.’ I will say that it felt a little strange to do what God commanded me to do. I will say that it didn’t exactly please the other leaders of Israel to do what God commanded me to do. But in faith I stood on the shore and lifted up that stick and, what do you know, God did exactly what he said he would do! Over the course of that night, God used the wind to blow back the waters of the Sea so that all of his people eventually passed through on dry ground, and this not because we were brave or smart but because we simply believed the words of God and lived by faith in what he said.
“When the Egyptian army tried to follow us to the other side, not by faith but in arrogance, God poured his wrath upon them and drown them in the sea. We saw this with our own eyes and we didn’t rejoice in their death but we did rejoice in the power and faithfulness of God. I actually wrote a song about this day that you can see in the book of Exodus because the mighty acts of God always give rise to the praises of God, and we simply had to praise him for what he had done.
“Beloved, I wish I had more time to exalt the faithfulness of God before you today but that’s all the time I have. When you come here to be with us we’ll have forever, and then I’ll tell you everything. But for now please hear me say this—oh please hear me say this! God is faithful and you can trust him. You can trust his heart and you can trust all his words. Sometimes the things he speaks to you and demands of you will seem strange and backwards, but I urge you to trust him because he knows exactly what he’s doing. He’s building a story in your lives that will glorify his great name and magnify your joy in him forever! So again, I urge you, trust in the faithfulness of God by clinging to the words of God.”
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