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Moses - Exodus 4 and 5
Sermons from Commons Church. Intellectually honest. Spiritually passionate. Jesus at the centre. Since 2014.
We are halfway through our series in the life of Moses, or at least we will be by the end of the day. And so we want to do a couple things this weekend. First, we want to begin to make our way towards the confrontation between Moses and Pharaoh. We've been in this series for a few weeks now, but we are finally starting to hit the movie moments in Moses' life in the next couple weeks. The big showdown with Pharaoh, the scene at the Red Sea, all of that stuff is coming up in the next little bit here.
Speaker 1:So that's where we're gonna start tonight. But then secondly, we wanna do this. We wanna open some space at the end for some question and response so that we can interact with where we've been the last few weeks. And so keep that in mind if you have any questions or comments from anything that we've touched on in this series so far. We'll do our best to interact with that at the end of the night.
Speaker 1:And so because of that, lots going on. No major recap this weekend, but you can find all of our teaching, YouTube channel for video, or podcast through iTunes, both of which are linked on our website commonschurch.org. Now, no recap, but just so you remember what we did last week quickly, we found Moses speaking to a burning bush. And there, God reveals his name as I am who I am, or as we talked about last week in the translation of Genten Davies, I am who you will discover me to be. Because this is key for me in really understanding what God is trying to do, what he's interested in throughout the scriptures.
Speaker 1:Scriptures are not simply about God telling us who he is. They're not simply about giving us the right words or phrases to access God. They're not even just about religion or worship or liturgy or practice. It is all of the scriptures at their heart about an invitation to discover God in our lives. I am who you will discover me to be.
Speaker 1:And so God says to Moses, I am not a title. I'm not a name. I am someone to know. And so that's where we left Moses last week. In Midian, standing on holy ground, speaking to God, and hearing him say, I want you to go back to Egypt and bring your people out of slavery.
Speaker 1:And so in Exodus chapter four verse one, we read this. Moses answered, what if they do not believe me or listen to me and they say, the Lord did not appear to you? And then the Lord said to him, what's in your hand? A staff, he replied. The Lord said, throw it on the ground.
Speaker 1:Moses threw it on the ground and it became a snake, and he ran from it. But the Lord said to him, reach out your hand and take it by the tail. So Moses reached out and took hold of the snake and it turned back into a staff in his hand. This, said the Lord, is so that they may believe that the Lord, the God of their fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob has appeared to you. Exodus chapter four verses one to five.
Speaker 1:Let's pray. God, we come this weekend, realizing that you have called each of us here in this room to something, to some kind of participation in your story, some kind of contribution to your kingdom. And some of us here know exactly what that is. We have stepped onto that path. We're doing our best to follow it, and so we pray tonight for the energy, for the motivation, for the encouragement from you to keep going.
Speaker 1:To know that you are guiding us and leading us and cheering us on through your spirit. Perhaps though, some of us have heard from you, but we're still scared about that. We're unsure of exactly what it would take to follow that call. And we know somewhere deep inside exactly what it is that you're asking of us, but we have yet to move on it. And so we ask for your grace in our fear and our hesitation.
Speaker 1:We ask for your courage in our response, and we ask for your spirit in our hearts as we seek to follow you as best we can. And then, God, some of us here are still completely unsure. Perhaps, unsure of your voice in our life. Maybe unsure of you in general. Maybe unsure of our place in the story or whether we even have a place in your story.
Speaker 1:And so we would ask that you would speak meaning and purpose tonight. That you would tell us of the true depth of value that we have to you. Help us to know that we are not only loved tonight, but that we are seen as full of potential and purpose. And so if we have been told that we are incomplete in any way, we ask that you would speak wholeness to us. If we have been told that we are too weak to play a part, we ask that you would speak strength to us.
Speaker 1:If we have been told that we are superfluous, we are unnecessary in any way, we ask that you would remind us just how deeply important we are to you and your son. And so as we watch Moses grow, as we see his call, as we watch him step into that role, help us to imagine where it is that you are leading each of us. In the strong name of the risen Christ, we pray. Amen. Okay.
Speaker 1:Tonight, here we are. In the verses that we've read already, just a couple of them, there are a couple things that I wanna talk about here before we keep moving on. And we are gonna get to Moses and Pharaoh, but just pause here for a moment with me. Because first of all, this passage that starts at the start of chapter four is only one of several objections that Moses will make to God's request to go back to Pharaoh. Now, it actually started last week in our story we read with this question, who should I say sent me?
Speaker 1:Sure, Moses says, you're a god. I get that. You speak out of burning bushes. I see that. But what god are you?
Speaker 1:And so God reveals his personal name in the story we looked at last week. Now Moses says, okay. Well, now I know your name, but what if they don't listen anyway? What if I tell them your name and they shrug? Then what?
Speaker 1:Did you even think of that, you silly burning bush? And so God gives him a bunch of miracles here. At first, it's a staff into a snake. Then God has him put his hand into his coke, and when he pulls it out, his hand is leprous. It's covered in this skin disease.
Speaker 1:God says, put it back in your cloak. He puts it in, and when he pulls it out, this time it's healed. Then finally, God says, even if those things don't impress them, then go and take some water from the Nile River, bring it out to the Israelites, pour it onto the sand in front of them, and it will become blood. That's a good one that always wins them over. People love blood tricks.
Speaker 1:Trust me, God says, just do it. To which Moses says in verse 10, pardon your servant, Lord. This is all great stuff, but I have never been eloquent. Neither in the past nor since you have spoken to your servant, I am slow with speech and tongue. And ironically, that sounds like quite a loquacious way to say I don't speak good.
Speaker 1:And I mean, if you're going to try to tell God that you're not eloquent, you might want to bring down the vocabulary a little bit here, Moses. Because even in Hebrew, this is just a very well constructed passage. I think actually the author wants us to pick up on that. He starts here by calling God Lord. But what's interesting is that he doesn't use the personal name Yahweh that God gave him in our story last week.
Speaker 1:That would be l o r d, all caps in English. Instead here, he uses the phrase, my Lord's plural. Now this is a very formal way of showing deference and reverence in Semitic languages. My lords, you can almost imagine him curtsying when he says this. Then he says this, I've never been eloquent, which in Hebrew is the phrase, lo ish devarim.
Speaker 1:I am not a man of words. And he ends with this, I am slow of speech. And what he actually says in Hebrew is I am heavy of tongue, which is actually just a quite beautiful way of expressing his inability to speechify. But God is not buying it. And so the Lord said to him, well, who gave human beings their mouths?
Speaker 1:Who makes them deaf or mute? Who gives them sight or makes them blind? Is it not I, the Lord? Now go. I will help you speak.
Speaker 1:I will teach you what to say. But Moses said, pardon your servant, Lord. Please send someone else. Now we do wanna get to Moses and Pharaoh, and we will. But let's pause here for a second.
Speaker 1:Because I think that anyone who has ever truly felt God or called by God to do anything, no matter how insignificant it seemed, if you truly felt called by God, you can identify with Moses in this moment. And I don't care what it was. You felt God calling you to go to Africa and serve. You felt called by God to volunteer at an after school program around the corner from your house. You felt called to start a business.
Speaker 1:You felt called to be a good parent. You felt called to be a good friend to someone in a difficult time, all of a sudden, once a good idea has the weight of God's voice and calling behind it, it gets heavy. In fact, the word that Moses uses to describe his tongue and why he can't do this for God is that word in Hebrew. It's heavy. It's actually the same root as the Hebrew word which is used for the glory of God in the scriptures.
Speaker 1:I see Hebrew is this very visual concrete language. They like very concrete visual metaphors when they speak. And so heaviness, significance, weight, when you feel something and it's heavy, this is the same thing as the glory of God in Hebrew. And so the calling of God, the glory of God, his voice in our lives, it weighs on us and we feel it and it's heavy. Because all of a sudden, a good idea now takes on the weight of something that God wants to do.
Speaker 1:That's not bad. It's not a weight that's that's terrible. It's a weight of significance. It means it's meaningful or it's important. And so when this good idea moves from something you could do if you have time at the end of the day to something you know you are meant to do, that can be a really heavy thing.
Speaker 1:And Moses feels it here. But weight isn't always something to run from. Sometimes, it's actually something to run toward. There are small things in your life that you do. Things that from the outside, probably no one notices, but they mean something very special.
Speaker 1:They mean everything to you. Maybe it's letters you send. You're one of those three people in the world that still puts pen to paper, and you send letters to friends. And maybe it's places you volunteer. People that you go out of your way to see how they're doing, you reach out to them.
Speaker 1:That small amount that you give to support someone or something outside of yourself, and it seems small and insignificant, and from the outside, somebody would glance past it quickly, but to you, there's weight to it. It's meaningful. It's important. You do it for a reason. These moments are important because this is part of how God speaks to us.
Speaker 1:So it's actually important that we learn to notice the moments where we feel the heaviness of God's spirit. Why is this moment significant? What is God saying to me here? The problem is not falling into the trap of feeling like that heaviness is something we have to carry on our own. Verse 11, the Lord said to him, who gave human beings their mouths?
Speaker 1:Who makes them deaf or mute? Who gives them sight or makes them blind? Is it not I, the Lord? I will help you speak. I will teach you what to say.
Speaker 1:So there's a very big difference between noticing the moments or the opportunities that God places on our heart and feeling the heaviness of it, and then feeling like we need to carry that through to completion on our own. Those are different things. That's the difference between the heaviness of God that invites us to, participate with him in really significant ways, and the heaviness of trying to live up to unrealistic expectations all the time and being crushed by it. I think it's possible to hear that Moses has just confused the two. God is not asking him to save the Israelites on his own.
Speaker 1:That that's a heaviness that Moses can't carry. There's a significance that God wants him to play and he's running from that and he shouldn't though. And so it's important that we figure out this idea that there is significance for each of us. God wants us to do something. Let's not run from that.
Speaker 1:Weight and heaviness means purpose and meaning, and it means that God has something in mind for you, vitality and life, and that's good. Here's the thing though. That significance is predicated on what you have and who you are, not on who you're not and what you don't have. Now, we've already seen that Moses can actually be quite eloquent here. As we watch through his life, he grows, he steps into the role of a leader, he ends up becoming a very good orator, he delivers the 10 commandments, he also even writes poetry in the book of Deuteronomy.
Speaker 1:And maybe he knows that. Maybe he knows he actually speaks well, and he's just trying to weasel out of the request that God has for him. But I wonder if maybe what's going on is he just legitimately doesn't see that in himself right now. Probably all of us have moments in our lives where we had gifts or talents or latent abilities that we just thought we didn't have and they emerged later in life. And we're like, I'm good at this.
Speaker 1:I love this. Why haven't I been doing this all of my life? On the retreat last week, I got to go out and I brought one of my guitars with me. And, I have played guitar since I was a kid. I have a large collection of instruments that I've collected over the years, which is embarrassing because these days with a new church and house and baby and dog, I hardly ever play guitar.
Speaker 1:So it was nice to go out to their treat and sit by the campfire and play for a bit. And so Jay Brazeau and I took our guitars out there and we played the first thirty, forty seconds of about 20 songs because that's all we could remember. It was kind of embarrassing actually. Like the chorus, maybe a verse of a bunch of nineties hits because that's how old we are. Fine.
Speaker 1:Really sad, but also a lot of fun. Sometime in the next year, we have each promised to learn one song all the way through, so we can sit at the campfire next year and at least do two songs. Here's the thing though. I can play guitar. I'm actually not terrible at it either.
Speaker 1:But I cannot sing to save my life. Do you know what the only thing worse than being tone deaf is? Not being tone deaf and still not being able to sing. That's worse. Because if I could not sing and not tell the difference, then I would just sing in my car or the shower and live in beautiful, terrible musical bliss.
Speaker 1:I would love it. But here's the thing. I know I can't sing. I listen to myself. I'm like, that doesn't sound right.
Speaker 1:That's that's not pleasing to my ears, let alone anyone else's. It's it's like screeching and squealing punctuated by prepubescent mid word tone changes. I'm like the auditory equivalent of Elaine dancing on Seinfeld. It's all just, you know, it's terrible. Point is, I'm never going to be a singer.
Speaker 1:It's not going to happen for me. Okay? I know that. Thirty six years into this life, I'm giving up. Let the preachers preach and the singers sing.
Speaker 1:Right? But, I was talking to someone after church last week. And they told me that when they were growing up, they were told they weren't a good singer. And that just stuck with them. And they just believed it.
Speaker 1:And it wasn't until years later, someone heard them singing. They're like, you are really good. And sometimes I think the weight of God that we feel at his calling in our lives is actually simply mispaced personal limitations. God calls you to do something. You're like, I can't do that because someone told you ten years ago you're not good at it.
Speaker 1:It stuck with you. And all of sudden, God calls you, you're like, this is way too heavy for me. I can't do it. I could never do that. Even God couldn't use me that way.
Speaker 1:Now, maybe not. If you're 40 and white and short and Canadian and your name is not Steve Nash, chances are you're not going to the NBA. I'm sorry. But is it really about can't in your life or is it more about courage to try? Now, I'm not gonna stand here and tell you you can do anything.
Speaker 1:You can't. I'm sorry. But you can do something, and God is acutely aware of that something. And he has a unique place, a unique call for that something in his story. If you feel the weight of God and his call in your life, then take that seriously.
Speaker 1:When Moses objects to God, the first thing that God says to him in response is this, what's in your hand? And maybe to get to where God wants you to go, it will take you all kinds of places, and you will have to learn all kinds of new things, and that can be intimidating. It can be scary. It's hard to get that started, but the call of God starts exactly where you are with exactly what you have right now. And so when you feel God call you to be a more generous person, That will not happen after you win the lottery.
Speaker 1:It will happen when you're more generous with what you have right now in your hand. If you kill God, calling you to make a difference somewhere in the world, in India, in Africa, that may not happen when you're ready to quit your job and move your life there and uproot and settle in. But perhaps it will happen when you're ready to give up your vacation and go somewhere and let the idea of Africa become people with names and faces. Now maybe you have history and you have story and you feel like God is calling you to offer something of your story, your experience to someone else. To mentor someone who is younger in the faith, Well, that might not happen when someone chases you down and begs you to mentor them.
Speaker 1:Although that would be nice. But maybe what you need to do is stop waiting for that perfect moment that's not in front of you yet, and just join a house church and offer what you have to those who are sitting near you. Calling starts right where you are with whatever you have in your hand. But Moses objects, and he objects. I'm not ready.
Speaker 1:They won't listen. I don't have the skills, and yet God persists. The Lord's anger burned against Moses, and he said, what about your brother Aaron the Levite? I know that he can speak well. And so Aaron and Moses are paired off and they're sent off to Pharaoh.
Speaker 1:Just quickly here. Remember I said this, that Hebrew is a very concrete visual language? Well, the phrase, the Lord's anger burned against Moses here, and pretty much anytime you read that in the Old Testament, literally what it says is this, that Yahweh's nose got hot at Moses. So there you go. Just imagine God with big red flaming nostrils, and you will get an idea of what a Hebrew reader is seeing here.
Speaker 1:But quickly, notice this, that God's anger burns against Moses. His nose gets hot at Moses, and yet all it inspires him to do is help Moses. Perhaps you worry about frustrating God. He's called you to do something and you hesitate and you stutter step and you worry if he's frustrated with you. He might be, but this will not turn him against you.
Speaker 1:Because God is for you. That is God's fundamental posture towards his children. And so, yes, even when you're difficult like Moses, even when you push back and God gets frustrated with you like he did with Moses, yes, even when his nose burns against you, God is for you. And so Moses and Aaron go off to Pharaoh, and we read in chapter five. That when they got to Pharaoh they said, this is what the Lord, the God of Israel says, let my people go, so that they may hold a vestibule to me in the wilderness.
Speaker 1:But Pharaoh said, who is the Lord that I shall obey him and let Israel go? I don't know the Lord and I will not let Israel go. Now remember last week, we talked about, divine names in the ancient Near East. How every god had some glorious name, but here the Hebrew god chooses to go by the name Yahweh. I am, or as we talked about last week, I am who you will discover me to be.
Speaker 1:Well, Pharaoh says, don't know this god. I don't know that name. Why would I ever listen to him? That name isn't even all that intimidating. You wanna know about divine names?
Speaker 1:Let me tell you about the Egyptian God, Ahmet, or as we call him, the devourer of the dead. Now, that's a divine name that you're gonna take seriously. Yahweh, I don't know this God. And so they said to him, the God of the Hebrews has met with us. Now, this is an attempt to back things up a little bit.
Speaker 1:Right? We tried using the personal name that God gave us for him, but that didn't get us anywhere. We tried demanding that freedom to go and worship. This time, maybe we could just ask for a couple days. Let us take a three day journey into the wilderness.
Speaker 1:Okay. You're a busy man. We get that. We can be reasonable here. Three days off, that's all we want.
Speaker 1:We just wanna go offer sacrifices to the Lord our God, or he may strike us with plagues and the sword. What is this all about? They come on and they're like, okay, he won't let us go. Well, let's appeal to pharaoh's desire to keep things moving. If you don't let us go, our God might kill us and then you'll have no slaves and nobody wants that.
Speaker 1:So let's just call it a few days. We'll go out there in the wilderness. We'll make some sacrifices, then we'll be back. We'll make some bricks for you. You're happy.
Speaker 1:We're happy. Everybody wins. Am I right? Now, where they are getting this idea that pharaoh or that God is going to strike the Israelites dead if pharaoh doesn't let them go, I have no idea. But what's happening is they're very clearly intimidated by pharaoh.
Speaker 1:Have you ever been in a job interview and you didn't know what to say? And you were nervous, so you just kept talking? And you hear things coming out of your mouth, and you're like, I don't even know what's going on right now. Why am I saying these things? That's not true.
Speaker 1:I've never heard that before. That's what's happening here in Exodus. They come in, God is on our side, let my people go. They get one. No.
Speaker 1:And now it's all like, oh, well, maybe we could just have a couple days because really that'll be better for you. And I mean, that's what we all want. Right, Pharaoh? We just want you to be happy. Is that okay?
Speaker 1:But the king of Egypt said, Moses and Aaron, why are you taking the people away from their labor? Get back to work. In fact, what Pharaoh does here is he actually decrees that the Israelites will now have to look after gathering their own straw to make their bricks. And yet they still have to maintain the same quotas. They still have to make just as many bricks as they did before.
Speaker 1:And so not only does he deny their vacation request, he ups the workload. And this is where we're gonna stop today. Now next week, we're gonna move very quickly to the plagues and get to the point at the Red Sea. But there's a couple pieces here that I think we need to reflect on before we leave because this is important. And the first is this, that just because everyone you meet is not on your side does not mean that God is not on your side.
Speaker 1:Now, there are people who know you, and they know your story, they know your giftedness, they know your passion, they know your personality. And when these people tell you no, when these people say to you, actually, maybe it's time to redirect. I'm not sure if that's what God's saying. I know that you think you've heard from God, but here's what I see as someone who cares about you from the outside, someone who loves you. This is what I see.
Speaker 1:That you should take very, very seriously. None of us hear God in isolation. And so this church does not make decisions because God and I had a powwow in my office and came down side and said we're going left. We hear, we listen, we speak, and we lead together in community. That's the brilliance of the church that God has given us.
Speaker 1:That together, we hear better than we do on our own. So there are times to listen when someone says no. But when someone says to you, I don't know you. I don't care to know your history, I'm not interested in your story or your God, I'm not it's not important to me what makes you tick as a person, then this is not someone whose critique should be of primary importance to you. If you feel called by God to do something and someone wants to lob grenades from over the fence, then let them.
Speaker 1:Don't allow yourself to be derailed by the fact that not everyone will see what you see. Now, if you've ever sat with me before, and you pitched some idea that was in your heart me, and you opened some piece of your imagination to me, and I was not suitably enthusiastic. If I didn't support you in the way that you felt that you needed in that moment, I'm sorry for that. I'm truly, deeply sorry for that because I want very much to cheerlead for every dream here in this room. But at the end of the day, I'm not the one who formed you and shaped you and called you and the one who empowers you to play a role in God's story.
Speaker 1:And so the fact that not everyone you meet is with you and behind you does not mean that God is not with you and behind you. Now at the same time, if I think you're wrong, I think you're crazy, and I will tell you that because that's what we do when we love each other. But if and when that time comes, you can weigh my opinion against how I have shown myself to be trustworthy and invested in you. And if you can see God speaking through that, then great. But opinions are opinions, and everyone has one.
Speaker 1:The call of God, however, is the call of God, and only God can speak that to you. So it's okay to dream big even though not everyone will see what you see. It's okay. Second thing is this, things that are worth doing tend to be hard. If all it took to free Israel was someone to walk into Pharaoh's office and say, listen, this is lame.
Speaker 1:We're out. Peace. Drop the mic and leave. Then God wouldn't have needed to look for Moses on the far side of the wilderness. And God wouldn't have needed to find someone who would notice something like a burning bush.
Speaker 1:He wouldn't have needed someone who had given up his comfort to go find and save those who were in distress. If it was going to be easy from the beginning, then he could have pulled any random Hebrew off the bench and put him in the gang. But things worth doing tend to be hard. So don't confuse. Struggle with God's disinterest in you.
Speaker 1:A status quo has enormous gravity to it, and it wants to pull everything back into line. So starting something new is gonna be hard. Changing something that already exists is going to be even harder. Turning the trajectory of something that is heading one way toward another way is almost impossible, But that does not mean it is not worth doing if God has called you to do it. And you can see that here in this story.
Speaker 1:Moses comes along and he says, listen, this system is corrupt. You're building an empire on the backs of slaves, and we should move from a system of oppression and slavery to one of freedom and choice, and pharaoh laughs at him. Get back to work. Not only that, he drives harder in the direction that things are already going. He makes the oppression heavier.
Speaker 1:He makes the slavery worse. Why? Is it just because Pharaoh was a jerk? Well, probably partly, yes. But also, it's because it's always easier for a story to keep going in the direction that it's going than it is to jump on to a new path.
Speaker 1:So oppression leads to more oppression. That's how it works. And injustice leads to more injustice. That's how it works. The status quo keeps us going wherever it is that we're pointing.
Speaker 1:The thing about God is that God is all about changing the story. That's what the scriptures are all filled with. So when something is broken in your world, and God has put some kind of weight, some heaviness on you to to be a part of that, of fixing it. A relationship is damaged. Well, you can see that that a story has become corrupted.
Speaker 1:There's a pattern and you notice it. It's unhealthy. It's damaging. It's hurtful. It will take a lot of work to break out of that and into something new.
Speaker 1:The thing is it's not impossible because that's what God is all about. Taking relationships, and systems, and structures, and lifestyles, and thought patterns, and pain, and brokenness, and bringing something beautiful, and freeing out of those dark spaces. This is what the God of resurrection specializes in. Taking what looks like death and turning it into life. And so if you find yourself this weekend in a space where your marriage or your relationship or friendship in your life has turned unhealthy, then it will take an extraordinary amount of work to repair that.
Speaker 1:And it'll be hard. And if your work culture is toxic and it's become competitive and confrontational, then it will take a lot of work to turn that around and build something better. Now, if your imagination or experience of neighborhood or maybe even church has been angry and insular and irrelevant, then it will take a ton of courage to renew that and point towards something better. But if God has put something on your heart, and you feel the weight and the significance of doing it, then the pain and the hurt and the brokenness and the injustice and you sense God wants you to play a part, then I promise you in the long run, the courage it takes to act against the status quo, against when people tell you no, against the struggle of turning something around will cost you less than staying silent on the sidelines of God's story for the rest of your life. Because ultimately, as intimidating as significance is, and I get it, it is.
Speaker 1:I get along with Moses. He's like, it's easier if I just stayed here in Midian with this little life that I've built on the edges of the story. I don't want to be significant. But as scary as that is, this is what we were created for. You and I, we are here to play a role in God's renewal of everything.
Speaker 1:And that will happen in a million different ways as unique and as small as every single one of us here. Because that's what calling is all about. It's not about special people who make special things happen. It's about the creation of God and the children of God taking their place in his larger story. And so God's voice in your personal story, as crazy as it might sound, as in weighty as it might feel, means that God has something in mind for you.
Speaker 1:Let's pray. God, help us as we engage with the story of Moses again To hear, even in this moment, your spirit speaking meaning and purpose and calling into our lives. And we know that probably no one in this room is going to be a Moses. We're not gonna lead nations. We're certainly not going to part large bodies of water.
Speaker 1:But there is something, there's a role, there's a place that you have for every single one of us in your story. And so we ask that you would help us to hear it, that you would give us the tools to discern it well, and then you would give us the courage to follow through on that no matter how scary it might be. Because we trust that there is a place for each of us in your story. In the strong name of the risen Christ we pray. Amen.
Speaker 1:Okay. Took a little bit longer again tonight, but I wanna open up for a quick q and r. And so I wanna give space maybe just for we'll open up. If if you've got a question, raise your hand, and we'll try our best to interact with that. If there's not one, what I'd love to do is grab the question for this morning, because I think that was really helpful in terms of wrapping up the conversation tonight.
Speaker 1:So if there's a hand, Devin's upstairs with the mic, Joel's down here. Throw it up, we'll give you a couple seconds. No. Then let's grab the question from this morning, and we'll take that, and then I'll try and respond to the other ones this week. Okay.
Speaker 1:Question was, how can we better discern God's call in our lives in more practical terms? Yeah. And I've already had a crack at this message or at this answer, but here we go. What I went to this morning is this. There's something we call the Wesleyan quadrilateral.
Speaker 1:And so, somebody's a Methodist here. So Wesley talked about this. Came out of the Anglican tradition that said we hear God through reason, scripture, and tradition. And Wesley came along and he added experience to that. Now in our tradition, in the covenant church, we would probably use the word community instead of tradition.
Speaker 1:Because when Wesley talked about that, he did not mean tradition in the sense of the way things have always been done. What he meant was the tradition of the church community, how the community speaks to us. And so that is what we're actually seeing in the story right now. We talk about calling, we go to the scriptures. What do we see in the scriptures?
Speaker 1:We see that Moses is called by God. Well, how do we relate to that story? How does it speak to us? What do the scriptures say about who we are in God's story? Then we talked about our personal subjective experience of the spirit.
Speaker 1:Where are those moments, those situations where you feel the weight and the heaviness of God speaking to you? And that's something that's very subjective. Nobody else can tell you where that voice is. But you feel it and you know it. Okay.
Speaker 1:So what do you do with that? The scriptures are giving you boundaries. You feel God speaking to you in your heart. Well, then we go to what we call community and, communion reason. Reason would be this, like this thing about Steve Nash.
Speaker 1:If you're 40 and you're white and you're short and you're Canadian, you're probably not going to the NBA no matter death desperately you think God told you that. So it's okay to be reasonable about these things. If you hear God calling you to do something, do you have the skills legitimately to do it? Maybe you don't, but maybe you can get them. You can go, you can take a course, you can study, you can find a mentor.
Speaker 1:That's great. That's using your reason to move forward. So if you have all those things, the next thing is tradition or community. And that's when we go to people around us who know us and who care about us, and we say, this is what I'm hearing from God. This is how it lines up with scriptures.
Speaker 1:This is how I've thought it through. This is what I feel like God is saying to me in my in my innermost soul. What do you hear? And the people around you who care about you will either say, we're behind you, let's go. And if that happens, then the people who say no, you block them out, and the struggle that comes along, you push through that.
Speaker 1:Because of reason, and community, and scripture, and spirit, and experience are telling you go, then go. But if somebody cares about you and they know you and they're invested in you, they say, actually, you know what? I don't think that's what God has in mind for you. And then it's important to take that seriously. And maybe it's not just one person.
Speaker 1:You go around to a few people, you gather some wisdom from them, but that's how we feel like we have a really robust understanding of what God's call is in our lives. And I don't care if you are talking about that in terms of career. What do you wanna do? Are you talking about it in terms of, ministry or spirituality? How do you wanna play a role in God's kingdom?
Speaker 1:Those are good exercises. What do the scriptures say about the bounds of what it means to be a human being? What does reason tell you about your ability to play within those bounds? What is the spirit speaking specifically and uniquely to you in your heart? And where's the community around you that gives you, yes, go, we're behind you?
Speaker 1:And if those things line up, there's a pretty good chance you're hearing God well. And that's how we discern God's voice and calling in our lives. We do it together. Is that fair? K.
Speaker 1:Let me end with this. Love God, love people, tell the story. Have a great week, and We'll see you back here next Sunday.
Speaker 2:This is a podcast of Kensington Commons Church. We believe that God is invested in the renewal of all things. Therefore, we want to live the good news by being part of the rhythms of our city as neighbors, good friends, and good citizens in our common life. Join us on Sunday or visit us online at commonschurch.org.