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In recent years, members of Redeemer Community Church from across north Jefferson County began praying and dreaming together about seeing a similar church planted in their community. This had already happened once before in Homewood when Grace Fellowship was planted in 2017 and they wondered whether it could happen where they lived. The more they prayed and discussed this with the leadership of these two churches, the more it became clear that God was leading them to partner together to plant Trinity Fellowship.
The long-term aim is for Trinity to be an independent church that continues to partner with the Redeemer family of churches in celebrating and declaring the gospel across the region.
Good morning. I'm going to read Exodus 2, 11 through 25.
Moses flees to Midian. One day when Moses had grown up, he went out to his people and looked on their burdens, and he saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, one of his people.
He looked this way and that, and seeing no one, he struck down the Egyptian and hid him in the sand.
When he went out the next day, behold, two Hebrews were struggling together, and he said to the man in the wrong, Why do you strike your companion?
He answered, Who made you a prince and a judge over us? Do you mean to kill me as you killed the Egyptian?
Then Moses was afraid and thought, Surely the thing is known.
When Pharaoh heard of it, he sought to kill Moses, but Moses fled from Pharaoh and stayed in the land of Midian, and he sat down by a well.
Now the priests of Midian had seven daughters, and they came and drew water and filled the troughs to water their father's flock.
The shepherds came and drove them away, but Moses stood up and saved them and watered their flock.
When they came home to their father Uel, he said, How is it that you have come home so soon today?
They said, An Egyptian delivered us out of the hand of the shepherds, and even drew water for us and watered the flock.
He said to his daughters, Then where is he? Why have you left the man? Call him that he may eat bread.
And Moses was content to dwell with the man, and he gave Moses his daughter Zipporah.
She gave birth to a son, and he called his name Gershom, for he said, I have been a sojourner in a foreign land.
God hears Israel's groaning.
During those many days the king of Egypt died, and the people of Israel groaned because of their slavery and cried out for help.
Their cry for rescue from slavery came up to God, and God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob.
God saw the people of Israel, and God knew.
This is the word of the Lord.
Well, thanks, John, for reading. If you would, pray with me.
Father, we thank you for this morning already the opportunity to worship through theologically rich songs of worship to you.
Thank you for a worship team that diligently studies and prepares.
And then thank you again for the opportunity to worship you as we look at your fingerprints through the life of Julia and her story.
And we see and we hear about your faithfulness time and time again.
And now we ask, Lord, that you would use this broken vessel to speak your truth.
Lord, open our eyes and our hearts that we may behold wondrous things from your law.
It's in your name and for the glory of Jesus, we pray.
Amen.
So one of my favorite Christmas presents that I got this year was a book that my son Isaac gave me called The Hiding Place.
If you hadn't heard of it or hadn't read it, I highly recommend it.
It's a great picture of what a life of faith looks like.
It's about the life of Corey Ten Boom and her family who were part of an underground network of folks in the Netherlands providing shelter and safety for countless Jews during World War II.
But the story opens with these very descriptive pictures of the house that Corey grew up in.
The house, I guess I should say one of the houses, part of the house, was originally built in 1600.
But the house that she grew up in was formed by merging two originally completely separate houses into a single property because these houses were very close.
And so they merged these two houses into a single property.
And that happened around the late 1890s.
And they used this space to house guests and family.
I mean, the house was always full, never empty.
They were very hospitable.
But this combination of the two houses resulted in it was really kind of jacked up.
Uneven floors, mismatched rooms, hallways and doorways that didn't match, you know, a hallway one way, a staircase another way.
It was just quirky and irregular because they had different layouts.
Their heights were different.
It just didn't flow.
But it was just told kind of indescriptive.
They never really complained about it.
They just talked about how weird not it was.
And they went on with their normal life until around 1943.
During the Nazi occupation, the Ten Boom started housing and providing shelter for all these Jews.
And it came to a point where they had to construct a secret room, a secret hiding place in order to hide the Jews.
They didn't know what to do.
So fortunately, part of this underground network, there was an old architect, a guy that was just renowned for doing phenomenal architecture.
And he came to inspect the house.
And so the family's taken him through the different rooms.
You know, here's the kitchen and a cupboard.
And every answer was like, no, no, that's going to be the first place they look.
No, that's too obvious.
No, until he goes upstairs and he sees this jacked upness of the two combined houses and he lit up with glee.
I mean, his eyes just lit up and he said, this is perfect.
Because of all those imperfections, he was able to create the perfect hiding place behind a false wall.
They matched it and made it look as if this room, this space, this wall had always been there.
And that space was used to hide and provide shelter for countless Jews during that time.
But it was over 50 years later when the reason for that jacked up house finally made sense.
That's the economy of time.
God operates on a perfect, all-wise timeline.
But we, at least I, am not always patient.
I tend to view waiting as bad, whether I'm waiting on a job, a move, maybe a spouse, maybe a pregnancy, whatever it is.
I tend to view that waiting as something bad.
I view mundane life.
As Julia shared with her story, just growing up in this town and how it was, just mundane is mundane.
That's how I view it.
Or maybe sometimes I view the hard and the challenging as God's displeasure.
Well, what we're going to see this morning through our passage and through the entire book of Exodus
is God is the unseen controller of all history and all circumstances.
We see the hand of God in every circumstance of life.
Not just merely those high moments or those big acts that we consider miracles, but every circumstance of life.
And that's why it's important for us to remember.
As Dr. Brandon mentioned this last week, this book is about God.
This is His story.
This is not the story of Moses.
This is not for us to read ourselves into the story.
This is about God and His character.
So when we look at our text, we left off last week at verse 10, where Pharaoh's daughter named Moses.
And then this morning we pick up in verse 11.
One day when Moses had grown up, he went out to his people and looked on their burdens,
and he saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, one of his people.
That's quite a jump there.
A lot happened between those two verses.
So for context, I'm going to ask you to flip over to Acts chapter 7.
We're going to start in verse 20.
Acts 7, verse 20.
This is Stephen's speech before the high priest.
And this is going to give us a little bit of context of what's happening here.
So starting in verse 20, it says,
Now look at verse 22.
And he was mighty in words and deeds.
Instructed in all the wisdom of the Egyptians and mighty in words and deeds.
So as the adopted son of Pharaoh's daughter, Moses received an elite education.
I mean, this was unparalleled in the ancient world.
In fact, some historical writers would suggest that his fields of study included arithmetic, geometry,
astronomy, medicine, hieroglyphics.
He received extensive leadership training.
His curriculum likely included military strategy, civil administration.
He essentially, in that education, was being groomed for high-level leadership.
It also says he was mighty in words, very confident in how he expressed himself, and then mighty in deeds.
Again, some historical writers talk about Moses leading an Egyptian army to great victory.
He obviously would have had extensive physical training.
So, I mean, he was in shape, highlighted by the fact that he single-handedly killed this Egyptian.
And then we saw later in the text how he defended the daughters of the Midian priest from a band of shepherds.
So he was in good shape. He was trained.
He knew what he was doing.
He was mighty and confident and had every worldly reason to be so.
So all of this training, all of this experience happened between verses 10 and 11 of our text this morning.
And, of course, we know that more would have happened.
More would have gone on.
I mean, it's just normal life.
But these are the things that God wanted us to know.
These are the things that are pointed out that are in Scripture.
These are what he's revealed to us.
And again, Stephen gives us, in his speech before the high priest, gives us a little more detail.
Look at Acts 7 verse 23.
When he was 40 years old, it came into his heart to visit his brothers, the children of Israel.
So he was 40 years old.
That was a long time.
He had 40 years of training, leading, becoming mighty in words and deeds.
And what was God doing with him during that time, during that mundane life of just living as Pharaoh's daughters, adopted son, all of that training?
What was God doing?
It appears to just be mundane.
There were no mighty acts, at least not revealed, no mighty acts, just life.
But God was preparing him.
And then now we are beginning to see God's call on Moses beginning to be revealed.
Stephen, in Acts, tells us it came into Moses' heart to visit his brothers.
Something was put on his heart.
Our passage in Exodus says Moses looked on his brothers' burdens.
But surely this wasn't the first time in all of those 40 years that Moses had observed the Hebrews being treated that way.
But something was happening now.
God was moving in his heart.
God was working.
He was forming Moses.
God was calling him out into the work that he had created him for.
God placed that compassion, the care, the sense of justice in his heart, and he had a plan to use it.
God had used the past 40 years to develop this heart of compassion, to develop that care.
And now, 40 years later, I believe Scripture makes it clear that Moses even knows God was working in him and planning to use him.
How do I know that?
Well, look, again, he sees an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, and in verse 12 in Exodus it shows us,
He looked this way and that, and seeing no one, he struck down the Egyptian and hid him in the sand.
So why do I believe that Moses knew God was working in him and planning to use him?
Why do I believe Moses felt like God was calling him, stepping out into his calling?
Let's look one more time at verse 25 of Acts 7.
Talking about Moses, it says,
It was God rescuing him. It was God giving him salvation.
I believe Moses sensed God's calling him to be a rescuer for his people.
I believe that's kind of the beginning of Moses' formation to be that Redeemer of Israel.
God was going to use all of the wisdom of the Egyptians Moses was instructed in.
Surely he would use all of Moses' mighty words and deeds to finally rescue his people.
Moses was ready to be the hero, but Moses blew it.
He took his God-given heart of compassion, his good and right sense of justice, and he took the matters into his own hands.
He got ahead of God in his timeline.
He was operating on his timeline, not God's.
There's a bug crawling on my ear.
He knew it was wrong to kill the Egyptian.
I mean, who looks this way and that to make sure nobody's looking before doing something righteous?
I believe he knew it was wrong, and yet he felt like it was his time to jump out and be the hero.
Have you ever been there where maybe you're in a state where you've taken matters into your own hands?
Maybe you've tried to escalate God's timeline?
Maybe become a little impatient?
How does that typically work out?
One of the things that Scripture shows us is every day, every minute of every day, we are either trusting God or we're trying to be God.
We're either saying, your kingdom come, your will be done, your timeline, or we're saying my kingdom and my will and my timeline.
We're either trusting God or we're trying to become God by taking things into our own hands.
And as I've been preparing for this, I've had to look deeply in my own heart to ask, where am I trying to be God?
Where am I trying to take matters into my own hands?
And that's a good and right question to ask.
So, Moses blows it, he kills a man, and now he's alienated from his kinsmen, the Hebrews.
Look at verses 14 and 15 of our text this morning.
It says, he comes to break up an argument, and one of them says, who made you a prince and judge over us?
Do you mean to kill me as you killed the Egyptian?
Then Moses was afraid and thought, surely this thing is known.
And when Pharaoh heard of it, he sought to kill Moses.
But Moses fled from Pharaoh and stayed in the land of Midian, and he sat down by a well.
So, Pharaoh's angry and trying to kill Moses, so he's alienated from his upbringing.
He's a man without a home, he's afraid, and he fled.
And likely, and this is my conjecture, but likely, now he's thinking, okay, I've lost my opportunity to redeem the Hebrews.
I've lost my position, I've lost my influence, I have no status, and I'm on Pharaoh's hit list.
So, he camps out in Midian, and he's sitting by a well, likely thinking, okay, God's done with me.
I guess now I'm put up on a shelf.
And then the priests' daughters come to water their flock, and this band of shepherds start to harass them.
But once again, we see Moses' heart of compassion and redemption and protection stepping in,
and he single-handedly handles this band of shepherds.
And these shepherds are not like the cute little artistic ones.
These are brawly, brawny guys, even considered dangerous.
These were rough guys, and Moses single-handedly rescues, protects, and saves these women.
And so the girls go home, and they tell their father about the guy who just rescued, protected, and saved them.
And Raul, the priest, their father says, are you crazy?
Where is he? Bring him home so you can marry him.
And that's what happens, as we see in the text.
Moses gets married, he has a son, and he names him Gershom because he's been a sojourner in a foreign land.
That is now how Moses identifies himself.
He is a sojourner in a foreign land.
And the scripture tells us he's content to dwell there.
And so he does. He dwells there for another 40 years.
We don't know that from Exodus, but Acts tells us it's another 40 years between now and when God appears to Moses in the burning bush,
which is where we're going to get to next in our text.
But the final verses of our text gives us a peek behind the curtain of what's going on behind the scenes.
Look at verse 23.
During those many days, the king of Egypt died, and the people of Israel groaned because of their slavery and cried out for help.
Their cry for rescue from slavery came up to God, and God heard their groaning.
And God remembered His covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob.
God saw the people of Israel, and God knew.
So all the while, during all of this time, when Moses has blown it, and he fled, and he's a sojourner in a foreign land, and he's content to dwell there,
all that time, God hears, He remembers, He sees, and He knows.
God's preparing His people for redemption, but He's also preparing His Redeemer at the same time.
He hears their cry. He remembers His covenant.
And that word, remember, that's not just, oh yeah, I remember that. It's an active word.
It's remembering, but with an act of God to follow.
He sees them. That seeing is Him having compassion on them, and He knows.
That word, knows, really, it's a hard word, but packed in it is He was concerned for them.
So it's not just that He knows about them. It's not just He knows who they are.
This is an active concern for them.
And we all know now how the story of Moses ends.
Spoiler alert, we're going to get there. We're going to spend, you know, quite a while going through Exodus.
But we know how that story ends, and so did God, but beforehand.
While Moses was floating in the river, God knew.
The entire time he was being raised in Pharaoh's household, he was being educated,
he was becoming mighty in words and deeds, even when he took matters into his own hands.
As he sojourned into this foreign land and felt like I'm a man without a home,
God was forming, developing, and refining.
He was refining Moses for his own purposes.
That is our good God. He hears us.
He has an active remembrance of us.
He sees us and has compassion on us, and He knows. He cares.
We see in this text and the entire book of Exodus,
we can trust God even when we don't see Him physically or presently.
But do we?
Do we trust God and believe He is good?
Or are we trying to be God?
Jennifer and I wrestled with the whole idea of trusting God
or trying to be God throughout our entire adoption journey
after several years of dealing with infertility.
And even some well-meaning friends telling Jennifer,
hey, this may be a matter of faith.
If you had more faith, maybe things would work out.
But the reality is her body and the circumstances gave the answer over and over again,
and the answer was no.
And so as we began to pursue adoption, we put some guardrails in place to control things,
to try to prevent not hearing no again.
And God, hearing, remembering, seeing, and knowing,
did some major hard work during that season.
It didn't feel awesome at all during some of those times.
It felt like a wilderness.
There were times that we did not see Him.
And as the question kept coming up throughout that season,
we felt like God was asking over and over again,
do you trust me and do you believe I'm good?
And so we stepped out in faith saying, yes, Lord, we trust you and we believe you're good.
And we just removed those guardrails that we had put up to control the situation.
And then we waited.
And time after time, over and over again throughout the entire adoption journey,
God showed us that He heard, He saw, He remembered, and He knew
in just the smallest, most intricate ways that only He could orchestrate.
He has shown His goodness and trustworthiness.
And then highlighted throughout the entire process over and over again
that since the foundation of the world, God's plan was for Isaac to be our son.
And through that, we've been able to experience the true meaning
when we see throughout Scripture the Bible telling us that we've been adopted as sons of God.
We now know the true meaning of that.
And yet I still blow it at times.
I still try to take matters into my own hands and try to be God.
And my question is, what about you?
Have you blown it?
Is there an area where you're like, I'm taking that into my own hands?
Is there an area in your life where you feel like you're trying to be God
and maybe having a hard time trusting Him?
I think back to the story of Abram and Sarai.
She took matters into her own hands.
And yet God was still faithful.
He didn't condemn her.
He didn't come down harsh on her.
He was still faithful and gave them their son Isaac.
But what about those instances where maybe you haven't blown it?
Well, I think about Job, who was righteous and yet still had all these difficulties.
And God was faithful to him.
Even as Job struggled, what was God's response to him?
It wasn't condemnation, but it was reminding him of his bigness,
God's bigness.
Where were you when I laid the foundations of the world?
Who's the one that provides food for the raven?
Who tells the eagle where to nest?
That's God.
And that's His response to us when we're wrestling with trusting Him,
when we're maybe in that desert.
He doesn't come down harsh on us.
He reminds us of His bigness and His goodness.
So if this is you, you're in good company.
All you have to do is look to Moses or Sarai and Abram or Job.
But more importantly, look to God, the one who hears, sees, remembers, and knows.
Circling back to the Ten Boom family, after everything she and her family went through,
hardship, prison, concentration camps, deaths, horrific circumstances,
as she looked back and recounts the story, she said this,
every experience God gives us, every person He puts in our lives,
is the perfect preparation for a future that only God can see.
So as we close, let me ask this.
Where in your life is God asking you, do you trust Me, and do you believe I'm good?
Are there circumstances you're trying to control that you need to surrender?
Are there areas where you feel like a sojourner in a foreign land?
I want to compare these two verses.
In Acts 7, 22, we already read it.
It says, And Moses was instructed in all the wisdom of the Egyptians,
and he was mighty in words and deeds.
And now we're going to fast forward.
We're going to skip ahead to Exodus 4, just real quick, Chapter 4, Verse 10.
But Moses said to the Lord, Oh, my Lord, I am not eloquent,
either in the past or since you have spoken to your servant,
but I am slow of speech and of tongue.
That verse in Acts describes a 40-year-old prince in Egypt.
Exodus 4 describes an 80-year-old shepherd whose confidence has been stripped
after 40 years in the wilderness.
And that's what Moses needed.
That's what God was going to use.
God used the wilderness time, Moses' own personal Exodus,
to strip him of that self-confidence
and get him where God needed him to be truly to use him.
Do you trust him, and do you believe he's good?
Let's pray.
Father, we do thank you that you are a good, good God, that you are big.
You're the one that causes the sun to rise.
You're the one that gave us the breath in our lungs this morning.
And most importantly, you're the one that while we were yet sinners,
you sent your Son Jesus to die for us.
And so now as we pray quietly, I just want to ask again
that you would engage in this.
Where are you struggling to trust?
Is there an area there that as we're quietly praying
that you just need to say, Lord, I'm opening my hands.
I trust you. I believe you're good.
Where are you trying to take matters into your own hands?
Where do you feel like you're in a wilderness?
Is there an area right now that you know, okay, I've blown it?
And you need the hope to say, God is bigger than that.
He is shaping you and forming you and refining you.
Maybe you've been faithful, and you're waiting and waiting,
but you just need that gentle hope from the Lord that says,
I am controlling every circumstance.
For you, right now, what is that simple act of faith
that the Lord is leading you to, to where you say,
I trust you and I believe you're good?
So Father, I do ask that you would just,
by the power of your Holy Spirit, illuminate eyes and hearts
and provide hope that only you can provide,
not by looking at ourself, not by looking at our circumstances,
but by looking at you intently at our big, good God
who sees and hears and remembers and knows.
It's in your name and for your glory we pray.