Have you ever been impatient with God? I mean you’re ready to get on with it! You’re ready to go and do what God made you to do. And yet He, for some unknown reason, doesn’t appear to be in any hurry. It’s enough to drive you crazy!

I think anyone who has ever lived life, anyone who has ever wanted to get out there and do something, achieve something, fulfil their destiny knows the frustration of meeting stubborn resistance and delays. I think in particular when we’re young and idealistic and ready to take on the world, the fact that the rest of the world doesn’t seem to want to revolve around our plans and our hopes and our dreams is incredibly frustrating.

And as we get older the realisation perhaps that things aren’t quite going to pan out the way we’d envisaged, at some point, for many, leads to the classic mid-life crisis. The whole thing between our expectations of life and the reality, the mismatch, the yawning gap between the two is a bigger deal than we might realise.

Many people are living lives of frustration and disappointment because things aren’t panning out the way they’d hoped. Their careers, their finances, their dreams for marriage and family and where they’d live and what impact they were going to have in this world. And so what many end up doing is settling for second best, always dissatisfied quietly with their lot in life.

I wonder if any of that sounds just a little bit too familiar. I wonder if you’re sitting there thinking ‘that’s just a bit close to the bone’. Well today, as I said, we’re kicking off a new series of messages called ‘Becoming An Overnight Success’ to see what God has to say into this whole situation and I’m believing that just a few people are going to have one or two of those ‘ah ha’ moments as you discover what God’s really up to in your life.

Overnight success seems to have such a great ring to it, the whole get rich quick and then retire in luxury is a secret seductive thought that many of us harbour. But the truth is that really there’s no such thing as an overnight success or at the very least they’re very rare. Yeah, there seems to be these internet sensations that rocket to stardom seemingly overnight.

I remember this guy called Psy first burst on the scene with his Gangnam style dance and music video, remember that. A slightly cubby Korean guy in a white suit dancing around the stage in that odd, somehow intoxicating Gangnam style and for some reason that just took off, in fact he became the very first You Tube video in all of history to reach a billion views.

Imagine something as crazy as that, that doesn’t happen very often and even when it does the overnight thing is usually an illusion. I have no doubt that even Psy put in an enormous amount of work and effort to do what he did and yet so many people harbour this secret dream of overnight success.

The problem begins in our hearts because invariably God has made us to be a certain person to do certain things and naturally we have a heart to be that person, to do those things and to become who God made us to be. Problem is we approach this central issue of life with a ‘McDonald’s two all beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame seed bun’ kind of mentality, a fast food mentality, instant success when in reality often our first few attempts at becoming the person who God made us to be can end up being something of a disaster.

In truth this series of messages is really about learning to play the long game because life is a marathon not a sprint and I don’t know anyone who is better equipped to teach us about the long game than Moses in the Old Testament. Now the reason I choose Moses is that after Jesus he is the next most talked about character in the Bible. Certainly he is the most talked about Old Testament character in the New Testament.

And when you read some of the pithy summaries of his life and successes in the New Testament you could get the impression that Moses was somehow an overnight success. That’s always the way, the further we are away from the reality of someone’s life the more it seems to us that their success happened overnight somehow but it just wasn’t like that.

Moses lived for a hundred and twenty years, now that’s a very long game and he had three very distinct phases in his life. We’re going to look at each one of those in this series to see what we can learn for our own lives, our own long game kicking off with his first phase, living effectively as Pharaoh’s son in Egypt. So here’s how it happened.

The Israelites had been exiled as slaves in Egypt for over four hundred years. Pharaoh makes a decree about when Moses is born that all Israelite male children are to be killed but Moses’ parents in faith, instead put him in a floating basket on the Nile and Pharaoh’s daughter finds him.

As a result Moses ends up growing up as the prince of Egypt in Pharaoh’s house always knowing though that he was a Hebrew. He lives this life of amazing power and privilege and luxury but here’s the problem, it’s a problem if I can call it that, that each one of us faces at some point.

God had put something in Moses heart, call it a dream, call it a deep motivation, perhaps it was a calling, whatever it was Moses was given a heart for his people, the Hebrews and just as well because God’s plan, unbeknown to anyone at that point was that Moses was to become the man who would lead God’s chosen people out of Egypt, out of slavery, to freedom and towards the land and the life that God had promised their ancestor Abraham all those centuries before.

As Moses grew up, more and more, he saw the oppression and the brutality that Pharaoh inflicted over his people, his kinsmen, the Israelites. Until one day it boiled over, things came to a head, Exodus chapter 2 verses 11 to 15.

One day after Moses had grown up he went out to his people and saw their forced labour. He saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, one of his kinsfolk. He looked this way and that and seeing no one he killed the Egyptian and hid him in the sand. When he went out the next day he saw two Hebrews fighting and he said to the one who was in the wrong, ‘why do you strike your fellow Hebrew?’ He answered, ‘who made you a ruler and 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.

So the heart that God had put into Moses, a heart for God’s chosen people, ends up completely disrupting the life of privilege that Moses had lived for the first forty years. The heart that God had put in him ended up turning everything on its head.

Tomorrow on the program we’ll see how Moses ended up out in the wilderness tending sheep. What a spectacular disruption but right now can I say this is exactly what I see happening in people’s lives over and over again and they don’t realise it. God’s given them a heart, a dream, a motivation, a calling to become who He’s made them to be and to do what He set out for them to do and when you don’t quite know yet what that is that heart that God has put inside you disrupts your life.

I wish God would set it out nice and neat in front of us so that we can see the big picture, so that we can see where our lives are headed, so that we know what’s coming next and why and what it all means and where it’s headed, wouldn’t that be nice? Sure! But that’s not how God works because He wants you and me living by faith not by sight, He wants you and me trusting in Him.

We expect to live lives that are always on the up, onwards, upwards, every post a winner but sometimes life is one step forward and three steps back as it was here for Moses who was ultimately seen as one of the most successful leaders of all time. But when you’re down in the trenches it’s easy to lose sight of the big picture.

So my point is this – sometimes who you are, how God made you, what he made you to do is going to seem to work against you and bring failure upon your head. But don’t lose heart, God has a plan, it’s just that His plan rarely involves overnight success.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve often thought to myself, wouldn’t it be nice to become an overnight success. All this hard work, all the grind, if only we could bypass that bit and just arrive and success. Problem is, that life often heads in the other direction. Just when we think things are bad … they go from bad … to worse.

The idea of becoming an overnight success is incredibly alluring, it’s seductive. As an American colleague of mine once said ‘it has cerebral curve appeal’. You just want to pull up next to it and stay there for a while. In this success driven, success focused, success orientated world in which we live, man … it would be so nice to dispense with all the hard work of getting there and just get there. Arrive – success, woo hoo! If only.

I’m now on the other side of fifty, well and truly and whilst yet I’ve had some successes in my life, nothing spectacular mind you, just the odd success here and there, I have never, not once had an overnight success. They’ve always involved twists and turns, surprises and setbacks and hard work and sheer grind over the long haul.

Now that can mean one of two things, either I’m not very smart or overnight successes are as rare as hen’s teeth. I’m going to go out on a limb here and go for the second of those two options, hopefully. I’m not a gambling man but lots of people put money on lotto or the pools or they buy a lottery ticket or worse still they go to a casino all with a dream of winning the big one, striking the mother load. How many of them ever do? Answer: almost none.

As a percentage the big winners are close to zero per cent of all the players, after all they don’t build casinos on winners do they? But as we journey through life with a dream or a calling or whatever it is in our hearts, sometimes instead of getting closer to that success we’re hoping for things go, as I said at the top of the program, from bad to worse and that’s what I want to look at right now, from bad to worse on your road chasing after your dream, following your calling.

Because it happens, it happens way more often than we’d like to think and if we don’t know what’s going on, if we don’t realise what God’s up to here it’s actually rather devastating.

Moses was a man who had a dream, a calling to help his fellow Hebrews. Even though through God’s mighty hand he ended up not as a slave like all his fellow Israelites but as an adopted son of Pharaoh living in privilege and comfort with wealth and power, deep in his heart he ached to see how his people were being mistreated and abused until one day he comes across an Egyptian guard beating one of the slaves so he rises up and kills the guard, whoops, bad move. Now the heart that he had for his people completely disrupts his life.

His first forty years he spends in privilege and then this one event means that the next forty years he’s going to spend in poverty. Let’s pick up the story, Exodus chapter 2 verse 15 to chapter 3 verse 1:

When Pharaoh heard of it he sought to kill Moses but Moses fled from Pharaoh, he settled in the land of Midian and sat down by a well. The priest of Midian has seven daughters, they came to draw water and filled the troughs to water their father’s flock but some shepherds came and drove them away. Moses got up and came to their defence and watered their flock.

When they returned to their father Reuel he said, “how is it that you have come back so soon today?” They said, “an Egyptian helped us against the shepherds, he even drew water for us and watered the flock”. He said to his daughters “where is he? Why did you leave the man? Invite him here to break bread”. Moses agreed to stay with the man and he gave Moses his daughter Zipporah in marriage. She bore a son and he named him Gershom for he said, “I have been an alien residing in a foreign land”.

After a long time the king of Egypt died. The Israelites groaned under their slavery and cried out. Out of their slavery their cry for help rose up to God. God heard their groaning and God remembered His covenant with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. God looked upon the Israelites and God took notice of them.

Moses was keeping the flock of his father in law Jethro, the priest of Midian. He led his flock beyond the wilderness and came to Horeb, the mountain of God.

Now I want to stop there and think about this. Put yourself in Moses shoes for a minute, for the first forty years of your life you live in a palace as Pharaoh’s adopted son. Pharaoh in Egypt has all wealth and all power and all privilege and all comfort, life just doesn’t get any better than this BUT God puts this heart in you, a heart for your own people, a heart for God’s chosen people and through this one act of taking out a guard who was beating a defenceless slave now you’re not only booted out of home you have to flee for your life and go and live in the wilderness.

In fact we’re told in the last verse there, Exodus chapter 3 verse 1 that when God finally came to find Moses another forty years later he found him out beyond the wilderness, out the back of nowhere. The contrast between the first forty years and the next forty years couldn’t be more stark. From privilege to poverty, from significance to insignificance. We’re told not a lot about his forty years in the wilderness but you can imagine what Moses was thinking, right? Can you imagine how he felt? Can you just imagine?

So by age eighty Moses is a burnt out old wreck, a has-been, a nobody out in the back of the wilderness tending sheep. Dream over, right? Regret filling your heart. He would have been through all the stages, denial, anger, fear, regret, bitterness, finally just giving up and tending these wretched sheep and then, then God comes to him with a crazy plan.

We’ll talk about that another time but for forty years in the wilderness, beyond the wilderness he had no idea that God even had a plan, that God even cared about him, that God even remembered him. I’m guessing you’ve been in that place too, dream over, calling dead, you can’t possibly resurrect this mess from the ashes right?

Yet mark this, God had Moses cooling his heels for forty years in the very same wilderness through which He would later lead the nation of Israel on the Exodus. So by the time God comes back to him in the burning bush Moses knows this land like the back of his hand and what was he doing? Shepherding a flock of sheep.

So in fact God was getting Moses ready in this forty years of lonely wilderness experience to take on the mantle of leadership of Israel and guide them for another forty years, a million or so people, shepherd them through the very same wilderness that he already knew.

And listen, when setbacks come into your life, in my life that’s exactly what God’s doing for us, getting us ready, preparing us, teaching us, moulding us, shaping our characters for the next thing He already has planned, already has prepared for us to do.

I remember the exact moment on the exact day when God called me to preach the Gospel to the nations. It was so clear even a dummy like me couldn’t miss it. I’d been a Christian for, oooh, I don’t know, five minutes but I was raring to go. Problem was that at first God had an eight year wilderness experience for me to travel through; He needed to prepare me, to shape my character, to get me ready.

The call came in 1996 but God didn’t release me until 2004 to do what I’m doing right now. Fortunately right at the beginning a guy called Mark Brett, I’ll never forget this, it was during a worship time at theological college where I was studying. Mark sidles up to me after one song in the worship time and he says, “Berni, look I don’t know if this means anything to you but I think God wants you to know that He’s not in a hurry”.

That word from God gave me the patience to wait on God in the wilderness while He did the things He needed to do. And can I give you that same word today? If you’re in a wilderness, if you’re wondering where the dream went, wondering ‘what happened to the calling?’ Wondering where the passion in your heart has disappeared to, don’t worry, God is still in control, He hasn’t forgotten about you, He hasn’t lost sight of His plans, He’s just getting you ready for the next thing.

It’s one thing to have a dream in our heart. It’s one thing to have a sense of God’s calling on our lives. But if we truly believe that God is calling us to something, then at some point, we need to stop dreaming and start doing. And that, let me tell you, is one of the most difficult times of all.

In my experience having a dream to do something, to get out there and be who God made you to be and do what God made you to do, that dreaming bit is the easy bit. It’s easy to sit on the sofa and dream but dreams don’t come to fruition until you go and do something about them.

There’s a powerful spiritual principle that you discover in the Book of Acts chapter 12 where an angel comes to release the Apostle Peter from prison. Have a listen to this, Acts chapter 12 verses 7 to 9:

Suddenly an angel of the Lord appeared and a light shone in the cell. He tapped Peter on the side and woke him up saying, “get up quickly” and the chains fell off his wrists and the angel said to him, “fasten your belt and put on your sandals”, he did so. Then he said to him, “wrap your cloak around you and follow me”. Peter went out and followed him.

The spiritual principle is this – God expects us to do the things that we can do and He expects to do the things that we can’t do. There are two parts to that principle, get either part wrong and things just don’t happen. If you expect God to do the things that you’re capable of doing, hey, nothing is going to happen. If you think you’re going to do the things that only God is capable of doing still nothing is going to happen.

The angel told Peter to get up quickly and then God caused the chains to fall off his wrists. The angel told Peter to get dressed and follow him and then God ended up doing the rest by causing the prison gates to swing open. The problem often is that when God taps us on the shoulder and says, “it’s time to go”, we just don’t want to get up that quickly and that’s exactly the problem Moses had.

You’ll remember if you’ve been able to join me over the last few days that we’ve been looking at the life and the times of Moses, possibly after Jesus the most prominent and successful character in the Bible. And when you read some of the pithy accounts of Moses in the New Testament he is after all the most spoken about Old Testament character in the New Testament, you can easily get the idea that he was an overnight success.

But that’s not true, after forty years of living in privilege as Pharaoh’s adopted son he kills an Egyptian guard who was abusing one of his fellow Hebrews and as a result has to flee into the wilderness where he lives for the next forty years. A place and a time, as we saw, where God was getting him ready to lead the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt towards the Promised Land.

We’re going to pick up the story of Moses ‘overnight success’ at this moment of transition, after forty years as a burnt out old wreck in the wilderness, when God finally comes to him to call him to get up and go and do what God had always made him to do, to lead God’s people out of Egypt.

Now you might think at this point that Moses would get up and dust himself off and say, well you know it’s about time God, do you realise I’ve been rotting out here in the wilderness forgotten by you after all those years of privilege in Pharaoh’s house? That wasn’t exactly how Moses responded to God, Exodus chapter 3 verses 1 to 12:

So Moses was out there keeping the flock of his father in law of Jethro, the priest of Midian. He led his flock beyond the wilderness and came to Horab the mountain of God. There the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flaming fire out of a bush. He looked and the bush was blazing yet it wasn’t consumed.

Then Moses said, “I must turn aside and look at this great sight to see why the bush has not burned up”. When the Lord saw that he had turned aside to see God called him out of the bush, “Moses, Moses” and he said, “here I am”. Then he said, “come no closer, remove the sandals from your feet for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.

And God said further, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob” and Moses hid his face for he was afraid to look at God. Then the Lord said, “I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt, I have heard their cry on account of their task masters, indeed I know their sufferings and I have come down to deliver them from the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land.

A land flowing with milk and honey, to the country of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites. The cry of the Israelites has come to me, I have also seen how the Egyptians oppress them. So come, I will send you to Pharaoh to bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt.”

But Moses said to God, “who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?” And God said, “I’ll be with you and this shall be the sign for you that it is I who sent you. When you have brought the people out of Egypt you shall worship God on this mountain.”

Now the last thing that Moses wanted to do was to go and confront Pharaoh, in fact he had another four excuses on top of that one and eventually God gets so angry with him and shows him a couple of miracles to get him going. See, we all want overnight success but after forty years of rotting in the wilderness, after forty years of self-pity, after forty years of being the victim, well you know you can get comfortable with being a victim.

Get up and go, are you serious God? Do you see the paradox? What I love about Gods Word is that it’s as fresh and alive and relevant today as it was thousands of years ago when it was written. And I know that there are just a few people today who need to hear this. Gods call on your life has seriously disrupted your status quo, you’ve experienced some time cooling your heels in the wilderness, you’ve got used to it but all of a sudden God comes along and says, quickly, get up, lets go.

If Moses hadn’t gone Israel would have perished in slavery. If Peter the Apostle thousands of years later hadn’t gone he would have died in prison. What about you, are you ready to go when God calls you? Well, are you?

I remember when I first received the call to proclaim the good news of Jesus Christ from God, it was as clear as a bell and then as I’ve already mentioned in this series, God let me stew in my juices, a bit like Moses but thankfully only for eight years not for forty years. I wanted to go, I wanted to go and follow the calling from day one but when eight years later God was ready I got scared.

See I had a great well paying career as an IT consultant, I worked hard but it was a really comfortable life and then God called me into this ministry which was all but dead. It had been going, Christianityworks, for over half a century but had been so run into the ground that it almost had no supporters, it wasn’t producing any radio programs which was and remains our core business. It was at the point of, well you know, ‘last one out turn out the lights’.

It was at that point that God clearly called me to leave my IT consulting career and it’s income behind and step into this leaky boat that was steadily sinking, the ministry called Christianityworks. See that step is never easy, it wasn’t for Moses, I have to tell you it certainly wasn’t for me and if you’ve been in that place I know it wasn’t for you either.

But I also know that there are some people tuned in today who are at this very point in their lives, the starting line, the stepping off point. It’s that big decision to step out of your comfort zone because let me tell you, God’s purposes for you always lie outside your comfort zone and get on with it.

So I’ll ask you again, are you ready to go when God calls you? Are you ready to step out of your comfort zone? Are you ready to place your life, your future completely in the hands of God? Well, are you?

The thing about the dreams that God puts on our hearts is that their execution is much, much, much more difficult than their conception. It’s easy to sit on the sofa and dream about something great that God is going to do through us, but getting out there and actually living the dream, well, that’s another thing altogether.

Dreams, ideas, hopes, plans, they’re all wonderful things. The thing that makes them so exciting is that they don’t have a downside. I can sit on a sofa all day, day after day, dreaming about the great things I’m going to do, the great things that God could do through me and you know the best thing about those dreams, they never face any opposition.

There are no obstacles when you’re dreaming because your dreams can go wherever you want them to go although I know that when I was dreaming about doing what I’m doing now, those dreams were a bit scary because they were so ridiculously big. I mean if I told anybody what I felt God was calling me to, to share this good news of Jesus with millions of people, given who I was then and the mess my life was in back then they’d all of thought I was delusional.

Once you actually step out of the dream and you start living the dream or calling or motivation or whatever label you’d like to put on it, the first thing that happens is that you run into opposition and opposition it seems comes at you from every direction, all at once, the moment you step over the starting line.

We all want to become an overnight success, we do, it’s always part of the dream to fly first class from A to B by the most direct quickest possible route without any turbulence along the way. Hmm, but God isn’t so much into overnight success, God wants to grow your faith, my faith by teaching us to play the long game by taking us on a circuitous wilderness journey along the way.

That’s how He grows our character, that’s how He knocks the rough edges off, that’s how He breathes humility and gentleness into our heart, that’s how He builds courage into our DNA as we experience first-hand God’s faithfulness day after day after day.

As we’ve joined Moses on this journey this past week we’ve seen how God gave him a heart for the misery of his fellow Hebrews, how that heart disrupted his life and popped him alone in the wilderness for forty years and how difficult it was for him finally, after all that time, to follow God’s call to confront Pharaoh and lead the chosen people out of Egypt back to the Promised Land.

None of those stages is easy. Following God’s call on our lives, living out the dreams that He’s placed on our hearts, those things are never easy but once you get going, once you’re on the road surely though things must get easier right? Well, not for Moses, let’s pick up the story, he’s been to Pharaoh and he’s given him God’s message “let my people go”.

Nine times Pharaoh said no and nine times God sent plagues upon Egypt until finally after God struck down the firstborn of all in Egypt Pharaoh relented and the Israelites fled. But no sooner were they on the road than Pharaoh decided to chase them and destroy them – perfect, just perfect God! Exodus chapter 14 verses 10 to 12:

And as Pharaoh drew nearer the Israelites looked back and there were the Egyptians advancing on them. In great fear the Israelites cried out to the Lord, they said to Moses ‘was it because there were no graves in Egypt that you have taken us away to die in the wilderness? What have you done to us bringing us out of Egypt? Is this not the very thing we told you in Egypt, leave us alone and let us serve the Egyptian’s for it would have been better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the wilderness.

Remember I said to you that the opposition seems to come from all directions, poor old Moses, eighty years old. Now he has Pharaoh’s great army pursuing him from behind and in front of him he has a grumbling, complaining rabble. Some call from God, some road to success. Excuse me God but could we just call it all off at this point, please?

That’s what most of us end up saying to God isn’t it? And yet God stepped in because Moses had done what he could do so God now did what only He could do, Exodus chapter 14 verses 19 and 20:

The angel of God who is going before the Israelite army moved and went behind them and the pillar of cloud moved from in front of them and took its place behind them. It became between the army of Egypt and the army of Israel and so the cloud was there with the darkness and it lit up the night. One did not come near to the other all night.

See there it is, that spiritual principle again, God expects us to do the things we can do and He expects us to leave to Him the things that only He can do. That’s exactly what happened here in the wilderness at the beginning of the Exodus. God showed up, God was faithful, God guided them, God intervened and then God put Himself between Israel and her enemies.

And listen, that’s always what God does. He takes us to the edge, He puts us deliberately between a rock and a hard place so that unless He shows up we’ll fail and then He shows up. It’s happened so many times in my life and you see it so many times over the next forty years as Moses leads this grumbling, complaining, faithless nation of Israel through the wilderness towards the Promised Land.

God always shows up to deliver, God always shows up to guide, to feed, to protect and to deal with the grumblers and complainers. The one thing you and I do not want to be on our exodus is a faithless grumbler and complainer, remember it was only an eleven day journey from Egypt to the outskirts of the Promised Land but because of their lack of faith and their complaining it took them forty years and then because of their lack of faith all but two of the million or so Israelites who originally left Egypt under the staff of Moses, perished in the wilderness. Only two of the originals, Joshua and Caleb as well as the next generation ended up crossing over into the Promised Land.

There’s a lesson in that I have to tell you, as you read the rest of the Book of Exodus you see how many times the Israelites turned their backs on God, worshipping idols, not believing Gods promises, turning on Moses, in fact so much so that God was going to wipe them all out until Moses fell on his face and intervened for them.

Do you really want to follow God’s call on your life? Do you really want to live the dream that He wove into your DNA before time began? Then forget the idea of overnight success and get ready for your exodus. It wasn’t easy, it was a long, long, long road for Moses and yet God worked mightily in him and through him to achieve His purposes, God’s purposes, not Moses’ purposes.

Do you think that Moses would have planned it this way? No way. Forty years? Another forty years in the wilderness this time with a grumbling, complaining, ungrateful people under his charge. Overnight success? Forget it, it’s hard work, it’s about difficult times in the wilderness, it’s about opposition from all directions, from inside your own camp and from the enemy outside your camp, it’s always how God works, He achieves His perfect will through imperfect people in imperfect places.

I don’t know how you imagine your life will turn out, whether you’ll achieve your life’s purpose or not, but often times, and you see this very much of people in the Bible, God puts dreams in their hearts, He puts a call on their lives, but they don’t get to see end game. That, to some, can be somewhat disconcerting.

If we approach life on the basis that it’s all about us, that we are at the centre of the universe and everything else has to revolve around us then it’s a disappointing notion to think that we may not get to see all that God has planned to do and to achieve through us. And there are plenty of people who have that perspective; the world is full of ‘I’m at the centre of the universe’ kind of people. Sadly Churches are also full of those sorts of people.

I’m on Facebook as you may know and I saw something the other day that really, REALLY annoyed me. A prominent Christian posted a graphic that said this, “Lord I thank you in advance for my financial overflow”. Really? So I posted this as a response, “Lord I thank you that you died for me even without the clothes on your back and Lord I thank you in advance you have called me to take up my cross and follow you no matter where you should lead or how much it may cost me even if it should cost me my all”.

Two entirely different perspectives on our faith. One says that it’s all about me, the other says it’s all about Jesus. Now I’m not here to tell you that I live my perspective out every day, I, like you, are a sinner and I, like you, make plenty of mistakes but the question is “what’s your fundamental perspective, how do you look at this world, with you at the centre or with Jesus at the centre?”

Because if it’s you at the centre you are going to be horrified to find out that you won’t get to see all the plans that Gods purpose to work out involving you. But if you see your world with Christ at the centre then the fact that you won’t get to see it all, be involved in it all, get the kudos for it all will be an absolute delight.

Overnight success. As we’ve seen in this series so far in the story of Moses there’s pretty much no such thing. Moses spent forty years in privilege in Pharaoh’s house, forty years alone in the wilderness tending sheep and then another forty years leading God’s grumbling, complaining, faithless people through the wilderness.

And if you read the pithy account recorded many years later in the Book of Hebrews you could easily, easily come to the conclusion that Moses was an overnight success. A bit like Mary Poppins – practically perfect in every way. Let’s have a look, Hebrews chapter 11 verses 24 to 29:

By faith Moses, when he was grown up, refused to be called a son of Pharaoh’s daughter choosing rather to share ill treatment with the people of God than to enjoy the fleeting pleasures of sin. He considered abuse suffered for the Christ to be greater wealth than the treasures of Egypt for he was looking ahead to the reward.

By faith he left Egypt unafraid of the king’s anger for he persevered as though he saw Him who was invisible. By faith he kept the Passover and the sprinkling of the blood so that the destroyer of the first born would not touch the firstborn of Israel and by faith the people passed through the Red Sea as if it were dry land but when the Egyptians attempted to do so they were drowned.

Not half bad. When you stand back at a distance like that it seems that Moses was a great success and yet Moses failed God and so he never did get to enter the Promised Land, he didn’t get to complete the mission and lead the people across the Jordon into the Promised Land, he didn’t get to see the promise of God fulfilled in his life. Have a listen, Numbers chapter 20 verses 1 to 13:

The Israelites, the whole congregation came to the wilderness of Zin in the first month and people stayed in Kadesh. Miriam died there and was buried there. There was no water for the congregation so they gathered together against Moses, against Aaron. The people quarrelled with Moses and said, “would that we had died when our kindred died before the Lord. Why have you brought the assembly of the Lord into this wilderness for us and our livestock to die here?

Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to bring us to this wretched place? It is no place for grain or figs or vines or pomegranates and there is no water to drink”. Then Moses and Aaron went away from the assembly to the entrance of the tent of the meeting. They fell on their faces and the glory of the Lord appeared to them.

The Lord spoke to Moses saying, “Take the staff and assemble the congregation, you and your brother Aaron and command the rock before their eyes to yield its water. Thus shall you bring water out of the rock for them, thus shall you provide drink for the congregation and their livestock.”

So Moses took the staff from before the Lord as He had commanded him to do, Moses and Aaron gathered the assembly together before the rock and he said to them, “listen you rebels, shall we bring water for you out of this rock?” Then Moses lifted up his hand and struck the rock twice with his staff and water came out abundantly and the congregation and their livestock drank.

But the Lord said to Moses and Aaron “because you did not trust in me to show my holiness before the eyes of the Israelites therefore you shall not bring this assembly into the land that I’ve given them.” These are the waters of Meribah where the people of Israel quarrelled with the Lord and by which he showed his holiness.

It’s pretty harsh! I mean you read the account in the Book of Hebrews and Moses was this amazing man of faith really yet because of this one small failure, a lapse in his faith, God kills him off before entering the Promised Land. But listen up, it wasn’t about Moses, it was about God.

Imagine if Moses had been the one to both lead Israel out of Egypt and then forty years later lead them into the Promised Land. The people, God’s people would have ended up worshipping Moses instead of God and God doesn’t share His glory with any man. Moses, as great a leader as he was, as much faith and courage as he had, it wasn’t about Moses, it was always about Gods plan which went way beyond the wilderness, way beyond the Promised Land through the cross of Christ down to you and me.

Moses, like everyone else, just had a small part to play in a much bigger plan. God is playing the long game – get it? So what does that mean for you and me as we set about laying aside our dreams of becoming an overnight success and step out and start to follow God? What does that actually mean?

Well, simply this. Our part, the part that God’s given us to play is going to be challenging, it’s going to have setbacks, there will be times when we have failures, there’ll be times when we experience triumphs but no matter how well suited we are to the part that God’s given us to play the point is that we are ‘bit’ players with our bit to do and that’s it.

And when you think about it that’s exciting. The ripple effect of what Moses did, well it’s reached several thousand years down through history and across the globe today into your life and my life. It’s the ripple effect that’s exciting.

I had someone ask me ‘how do you know what the impact of your radio programs are? What quantitative measure do you have to tell me what you’re doing is worthwhile?’ The answer is there is no quantitative measure. Do I know that millions of people are listening around the world? Yes I do and I hear the odd story of the terrorist who stopped killing people, the woman who was pulled back from the brink of suicide, the eleven year old boy whose parents were going through a painful divorce and who met Jesus through these programs.

And I thank God for giving me a small part to play in people’s lives and I pray, I pray for the ripple effect through them in the lives of others. I pray that the former terrorist will lead many more people to Christ, that the woman who was pulled back from suicide will bless her daughter with her love, that the young boy who met Jesus through these programs will be given a powerful part to play in God’s plan. That’s the ripple effect.

God’s playing a long game and if you’re on team Jesus then the joy, the delight is to play your part in that long game for His glory. A