We open the Word of God together to the book of Exodus again today, the third chapter,
where we'll begin our text with verse 11.
The theme today is excuses, excuses.
Before I come to that, I need to read a letter to you that was passed on to me.
Someone picked it up off of God's desk because it's entitled Dear God.
You see, God, it's like this.
We could attend church more faithfully if your day came at some other time.
You have chosen a day that comes at the end of a hard week when we're all tired out.
Not only that, but it's the day following Saturday night.
Often we go to the movies or have a party, and it's after midnight when we get in.
In fact, the children are often late for Sunday school because it is difficult for us to get up so early.
It is usually after nine o'clock before we get the breakfast dishes washed, and then it's time to think about Sunday dinner.
You have picked out the very day on which the morning paper takes the longest to read,
and also the day on which we have the biggest dinner of the week.
Then, too, we have to think of John. He's all cooped up in the office all week,
and Sunday morning is the only time to clean the car for doing all the odd jobs around the house.
God, you know how John enjoys fishing, and you really can't blame him for going when he can, can you?
The whole family enjoys a picnic, and Sunday is the only time the family can have some recreation together.
God, I'm telling you all these things because I want you to see our viewpoint,
and that it's not our fault that we're not able to go to church on Sunday morning.
We would like to go, but we know that we should go,
but the real reason we cannot go is that you have chosen the wrong day.
If you will select another day, we will be glad to give the matter further consideration.
Sincerely, I am delinquent.
Most of us have lots of personal experience with excuse-making.
It may have begun simply in childhood when we were youngsters,
but by the time we were teenagers we had developed it into a proven science.
It felt okay when you and I were doing it, but it doesn't feel so good when our teenagers do it to us.
It reminds me of the one teen who came rushing home from school late
and exclaimed to his mother, Mom, I'm sorry to be late.
We were making a science display, and I had to stay to finish the universe.
Well, if teens make excuse-making a science, adults have made it an art.
I heard a story about one motorist who parked his car in a no-parking space
and left this message on the windshield.
I have circled this block 25 times.
I have an appointment I must keep or lose my job.
Forgive me my trespasses.
When he returned he found attached to his windshield a ticket
with this note attached to the ticket.
If I don't give you a ticket, I will lose my job.
Lead us not into temptation.
Or did you hear about the chronic car thief who was brought before the judge
for stealing another car, and the judge said,
well, why did you take the car this time?
And he said, Your Honor, it was parked in front of the cemetery
and I thought the owner had died.
Well, if someone had said there aren't enough crutches in all the world
for all the lame excuses, God's people are not any less tempted
than anyone else to use them.
We laugh at them or we wince at them, but we allow them.
And truly we shouldn't, for someone has rightly defined an excuse
as the skin of a reason stuffed with a lie.
When God commissioned 80-year-old Moses to return to Egypt
to lead the Israelites out, Moses was reluctant to go.
And he began to offer excuses to God as to why he couldn't and shouldn't.
But God had an answer for every excuse that Moses tried.
No excuse, no excuse is worth missing out on God's best for our lives.
Please write that in your heart.
No excuse in all the world is worth missing out on God's very best for our lives.
I want you to trace with me this morning in the text we're looking at
the record of the conversation between Moses and God.
God's commission was very clear in verse 10.
Therefore come now, God said to Moses,
I will send you to Pharaoh so that you may bring my people,
the sons of Israel, out of Egypt.
That's what God wanted him to do.
That was his commission.
But immediately Moses responds with excuse number one, verse 11.
Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh
and that I should bring the sons of Israel out of Egypt?
Basically he is saying here, I am not able.
I cannot do it.
I wonder if Moses didn't misunderstand what God was saying.
Perhaps he thought that this whole project depended upon him.
In fact it didn't.
He was only the instrument that God was pleased to use.
What God was going to do depended upon God.
He was the deliverer.
Moses was merely the human vessel that God had chosen.
Nonetheless, he said, I can't do it.
I am not able.
In fact, a sense of personal insufficiency is not bad in itself.
Did you know that?
That can be actually a very healthy response.
I'd like for you to turn with me just briefly into the New Testament
to the book of 2 Corinthians.
And look with me at the second chapter and the fourteenth verse
where Paul exclaims,
But thanks be to God, who always leads us in his triumph in Christ,
and manifests through us the sweet aroma of the knowledge of him in every place.
For we are a fragrance of Christ to God.
Isn't that an amazing statement?
When God sees you and me, when we come before him,
we are to him the aroma, the incense, the fragrance of Christ to him.
And it's among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing.
We are the aroma of Christ.
To the one, we are the aroma from death to death,
and to the other, an aroma from life to life.
And who is adequate, says Paul, for these things.
He says, who is adequate to be able to walk out into the world
and to live such a life and to talk in such a way
and to communicate such a message
that to one group of people you are the fragrance of life
and to another who reject you in that message,
you are the fragrance of death.
To them, you make them more accountable for the truth that they've heard.
Who is sufficient? Who is adequate?
Well, Paul goes on to say a few more words,
and then he comes back to that thought in chapter 4 and verse 4.
He says, in such confidence we have through Christ toward God.
In other words, God makes us sufficient.
Not that we are adequate in ourselves
to consider anything as coming from ourselves,
but our adequacy is from God.
There is an appropriate sense of personal inability,
insufficiency, when it comes to this matter of representing God in this world.
We are not sufficient in ourselves,
but, beloved, we dare not fall into the danger
of hiding behind that sense of personal inadequacy
and thus not doing what God tells us to do.
It's fine to feel insufficient in oneself,
because that causes us to trust the sufficiency of God,
but we dare not hide behind our feelings of inadequacy
and fail to do what God wants us to do.
That's what Moses was attempting.
Moses had learned over a 40-year period
that his own ability was insufficient to do God's work.
God himself must be in it.
God himself must energize the ability of his servant
if the work would get done.
God gives answer to Moses in the next verse.
Certainly He says, I will be with you.
There's the promise.
He says to Moses, I will be with you.
God wasn't sending Moses off by himself to the court of Pharaoh.
God said, I will be with you.
Isn't that what Jesus said to us?
Does that ring a bell to you?
Jesus said, all power is given to me in heaven and earth.
Go therefore, make disciples,
baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit,
teaching them to observe all things that I have commanded you.
And lo, what?
I am with you.
Lord, I'm not sufficient to go.
I'm not sufficient to disciple.
Lo, I am with you.
Under the end of the age,
the very same promise is given to you and me as was given to Moses.
And God gave Moses a sign.
He says, this will be a sign to you that it is I who have sent you.
When you have brought the people out of Egypt,
you, that second you is plural.
You, you and the people of Israel,
shall worship God at this mountain,
that is Mount Horeb, or Mount Sinai, as it's also called.
And so God gave to Moses an assurance
that although he was not perhaps in himself able,
God would be with him,
and God would prove himself to Moses.
Has God been laying on your heart some commission?
Has God been talking to you about doing something,
about entering into special service for him perhaps,
maybe on the mission field, the ministry?
Has God been laying upon your heart teaching a children's class,
or volunteering for this area of service,
or going on a short-term assignment?
Yet you've been saying, oh wait, not me, I can't do it.
That's a wonderful place to begin, but don't end there.
Don't hide behind that first response,
because God says to you, I will be with you,
and I will prove myself to you.
But like many of us, Moses wasn't finished with just one excuse.
In verse 13 he basically says, I don't know what to say, Lord.
Moses said to God, behold, I'm going to the sons of Israel,
and I shall say to them, the God of your fathers has sent me to you.
Now they may, notice that, they may,
he's beginning now to think of possibilities.
He's hypothesizing.
They may say to me, what is his name?
What shall I say to them?
So Moses is now fearful.
He has this scenario built up in his mind.
I go back there, and I began to present to the sons of Israel this message.
And they will say to me, well, what is the name of the God of our fathers?
What will I say to them then?
You see, he feared embarrassment.
All these possibilities came up in his mind, negative possibilities,
and he was intimidated by them.
Have you ever been intimidated by your own thoughts,
your own fears of what might happen?
But what if this happens, or what if that happens?
Moses is saying, I don't know what to say.
So God answered him.
God says, you not only have my presence, I will go with you.
Moses, you have my person.
You tell them this, I am who I am.
You shall say to the sons of Israel, I am, has sent me to you.
What a name God gives for himself here.
That name, I am, is worthy of a whole lot of thought in meditation.
God's answer to Moses is this, you may not know what to say,
but you have my person.
I am is sending you.
Now remember that when God gives us a name,
He is giving us something that represents what He is.
Charles Swindoll says regarding this,
the name translated I am comes from the Hebrew verb to be.
Thus the name is a declaration of God's eternal and immutable self existence.
He is pure being.
Nothing has brought or could bring Him into existence,
nor could anything ever cause Him to cease to be.
He has always existed and will always exist because He is existence.
I am, says God to Moses.
Now this is not the first name by which God has revealed Himself in the Bible.
The first name was the name Elohim.
Elohim represents God in His relationship to the world at large
as creator, as provider, as ruler.
The mighty one is the thought in Elohim.
But then in Genesis chapter 2, and here more fully,
God reveals Himself by this name, I am.
It is often translated or I should say written in the English
as capital L, capital O, capital R, capital D, Lord, Jehovah,
or as some think it may be pronounced in the Hebrew, Yahweh.
It's uncertain of that pronouncement because the Hebrew has only consonants.
And so vowels are inserted according to certain rules.
The best guess is that this name is Yahweh.
YHWH is simply how it's written in the Hebrew.
This name Yahweh or Jehovah represents God in His special relationship
to His chosen people.
It is the Redeemer name of God.
I am signifies not only His eternal existence,
but His eternal self-sufficiency.
What God is really saying to Moses here is this,
I am all that is necessary as the occasion arises.
Moses, you may not know what to say, but I am all that you need.
You have my person, I am.
This is the name of the personal God in His historical manifestation
and in His work of salvation.
That's why I think the Lord Jesus took the essence of this name
and applied it to Himself so effectively as recorded in the Gospel of John.
And certainly the Jewish leaders of that day understood exactly what He was claiming
when He said before Abraham was, what?
I am talking about Himself.
And immediately they recognized from their perspective that He was blaspheming,
that He was claiming to be God.
And again several times in the Gospel of John He says something very similar.
And often ties an additional thought with it.
I am the bread of life.
I am the light of the world.
I am the way, the truth, and the life.
I am the true vine.
I am the resurrection and the life.
Our Savior as He came to accomplish the work of redemption
was literally claiming to be Yahweh.
Come in the flesh, for that's who He was.
Here He is saying to Moses,
you have all that I am, Moses, and that's all you need.
Have you ever been at that point where you said, God, I don't know what to say.
If I open my mouth I'll stick my foot in it.
I do that every time.
And there's fear that builds up in our hearts.
And we don't respond when God says, speak to this person.
Engage this person in conversation.
Or rebuke this individual even.
What He says to us as He said to Moses is this,
I am all you need.
I am for you.
We think of negative possibilities.
What if this? What if that?
And fear grips our heart.
And God says to us, I am all that is needed as the situation arises.
So don't be fearful, my friend.
If God has called you, if God is leading you, go for it.
And don't let fear keep you back.
But again, Moses didn't stop there.
He had another comment to make to God.
God in the rest of chapter 3 basically gives to Moses the game plan.
Tells him what's going to happen, what he's going to do.
He promises that he will stretch out his hand against the Egyptians.
That is a way of saying that God will deal with them Himself.
But then Moses says in chapter 4 and verse 1, in essence this,
I'm afraid they won't listen and I will fail.
What if they will not believe me or listen to what I say?
For they may say, notice again, they may say,
the Lord has not appeared to you.
Now frankly, this is a reasonable concern.
It's not a concern based on faith, but it is a reasonable concern.
You have to remember that it has been 430 years
since the last revelation, the last appearance of God to anybody.
Now let's just suppose this morning that you didn't have a Bible.
I hope you brought one to church. That's why we come to church.
Let's suppose you didn't have a Bible at all and you've never had a Bible.
Not only that, your parents didn't have a Bible or your parents' parents
because there has been no Bible written.
And then let's suppose that the last time God said anything to anybody
in the world was in 1550 AD, 430 years ago.
And then someone comes in and he says, hey, God has appeared to me.
What do you think your response would be?
Do you think that Moses is unreasonable and suspecting
that there may be this response? God hasn't appeared to you.
Come on. It's been over 400 years since God said anything to anybody.
To this concerned prophet, God gives three signs
that will serve to authenticate that indeed God has appeared to him.
The first sign is in verse 2. It's the sign of the rod.
The Lord said to him, what is that in your hand?
And he said, a staff. He said, throw it on the ground.
So he threw it on the ground and it became a serpent.
And Moses fled from it.
My, there have been all kinds of liberal explanations of what happened here.
Moses threw his rod down and scared a snake out of the grass.
But what it says is that he threw the rod down, the staff down the ground,
and it became a snake.
And it wasn't a little six-inch garter snake.
Whatever it was scared Moses to death.
Now listen, here's a shepherd. He's used to dealing with creatures in the wild.
But he's afraid. And the Lord said to Moses,
stretch out your hand and grasp it by its tail.
Oh, come on. I don't know about you.
But if I'm going to touch a snake, it's not going to be on the tail.
If you're smart, the only place to grab a snake is where?
Behind the head. And you better be quick.
If you grab it by the tail, the thing can turn around and strike at you.
It hits you.
That's what God told him to do.
And so he stretched out his hand and caught it, and it became a staff in his hand.
God said that they may believe that the Lord, the God of their fathers,
the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob has appeared to you.
That's the first sign.
By the way, the snake was a symbol of power and of life to the Egyptians.
And so God is saying here that Moses would be given power to overcome
that symbol of life and power to the Egyptians.
If God's power was greater, it could put an end to the snake of the Egyptians.
Then the sign of leprosy is given.
The Lord said, put your hand into your bosom.
So he put his hand into his bosom, and when he took it out,
behold, his hand was leprous like snow.
Then he said, put your hand into your bosom again.
And so he put his hand into his bosom again, and when he took it out of his bosom,
behold, it was restored like the rest of his flesh.
They shall come about that if they will not believe you or heed the witness
of the first sign, that they may believe the witness of the last sign.
So we have here the sign of leprosy.
Leprosy probably in that day was not exactly the same disease
that we call leprosy today.
Leprosy though was a very hideous disease, and it was certainly incurable.
Leprosy was prevalent among the Egyptians.
God is saying here that he had power to cleanse, power to heal,
the sign of leprosy.
Then there's a third sign.
If they will not believe, he says, even these two signs,
or heed what you say, you shall take some water from the Nile
and pour it on the dry ground.
And the water which you take from the Nile will become blood on the dry ground.
Remember the Nile was a source of life and fertility to the Egyptians.
And so God is saying you take some of the Nile River
and pour it out on the ground, and what is life and fertility
to the Egyptians will turn to blood and to death.
And so there's the sign of the water.
Moses is afraid here that the people won't listen to him,
that he will fail, but you know in the end,
success or failure is not the final issue.
It's not for us today either.
The real issue is obedience.
To this prophet who used a third excuse, God says,
you have my power, Moses, and these are the three signs that I give to you.
Beloved, today as God tells us to serve him,
as he tells us to be his witnesses to the uttermost part of the earth
beginning across the street and going to the furthest regions of the world,
he says that he gives to us the power of the Holy Spirit, Acts 1-8.
We have the power of God given to us as well.
It dwells in us in the person of the Holy Spirit.
But yet again the prophet speaks and he says in verse 10,
I am not qualified by my gifts.
He says, please Lord, I have never been eloquent.
Oh, Moses.
I have never been eloquent, neither recently nor in time past,
nor since thou hast spoken to thy servant,
for I am slow of speech and slow of tongue.
And so he says, God, I am not qualified.
I just don't have the ability, I don't have the gifts to do that.
Now this seems to be a strange statement from Moses,
especially in light of what the Holy Spirit says in Acts 7-22 through Stephen
when he calls Moses a man of power in words and deeds.
Why does Moses say what he does here?
Well, perhaps it is that he was referring to his slowness in reply.
Though he could use words persuasively,
perhaps because of his training in Egypt,
perhaps it was that Moses felt that he could not come back with a quick response
in a situation like he would face in the presence of Pharaoh.
Have you ever been tongue-tied around somebody who is well known?
This last week I was in a conference in Washington
and I was in a small group meeting where Leighton Ford walked in the room early.
He was a brother-in-law to Billy Graham,
an associate evangelist for many years with Billy Graham.
And I was sitting in the back row,
and would you believe he came straight to the back row and shook my hand
and started talking to me.
All of a sudden there were no words in my mouth.
I just went speechless.
I started almost babbling, I felt like.
Have you ever been in a situation like that?
Where all of a sudden the presence of somebody else that maybe you've known,
you've heard about, suddenly overwhelms you?
Well, what would you do if suddenly you were in the presence of the President of the United States?
Right?
Well, now Moses says, now if I go to Pharaoh and I stand in his presence
and he begins to talk with me and to argue,
I'm going to go toward him, I'm slow.
Have you ever gone away from a situation
and half an hour later said, boy, I wish I had thought to say that.
See, that's what Moses seems to be struggling with here.
Now, it may be that this is again a matter of self-image and it's not true at all.
Maybe this is only a feeling of inadequacy, but this is genuinely what he's saying.
I'm not qualified to do that.
I don't have the gifts to do it.
Well, God gives an answer.
First of all, he points him to his sovereign design of every person.
Who has made man's mouth or who makes him dumb or deaf or seeing or blind?
Is it not I, the Lord?
Very pointed question.
You know about each of us, there are things that we wish were different.
There's not a person in this room who could look at his life and say,
well, I wish I looked different, I wish I spoke differently, I wish, I wish, I wish.
And we have feelings of inadequacy that may be imaginary or real.
You and I need to remember that God has designed us too just the way we are.
And if there are weaknesses about us, if there are indeed inadequacies,
those are God designed and make us a special servant of His for a special purpose.
God makes us just the way that we are.
We need to learn to accept that.
And then God promised Moses that he would supplement for his weaknesses.
He says, now then go and I, even I, will be with your mouth and teach you what you are to say.
So he says to Moses, you have my promise.
You have my presence, Moses.
You have my person.
You have my power.
You have my promise.
I'll be with your mouth.
I'll show you what to say.
I will be your strength.
I will be your enablement.
Don't worry about being disqualified because of some inability that you imagine.
And then we come to the bottom line in verse 13 when Moses says,
please Lord, now send the message by whomever thou wilt.
Or in other words, Lord, please send somebody else.
God is patient with fear, but God is not patient with disobedience.
And that is the bottom line.
Moses did not want to return to Egypt.
His heart was obstinate.
Actually this fifth response is not an excuse.
It's an expose.
It shows what's really in the bottom of Moses' heart.
All of the excuses now have been stripped away.
In truth, behind every excuse is rebellion of the will.
That's the root of it.
And so it is with us.
So it is with us.
Excuses are only the wrappings.
What's contained in the package is refusal, obstinacy.
I don't know what area of your life that you may today be trying to fend off God with excuses.
But I challenge you to examine that area of your life closely
and see if there isn't behind all of the facade some disobedience in your life.
Where you're saying, God, I will not do this.
It may be that that is a struggle with you in the matter of baptism.
There is no question but that the New Testament commands disciples of the Lord Jesus Christ to be baptized.
We have excuses upon excuses as to why we will not do that or should not do that or cannot do that.
The real problem is we just don't want to.
It's the will.
On the matter of stewardship.
I can't do it now.
And the real problem is we do not want to give.
But Lord, you're asking me to do too much.
I can't spend the time involved.
I don't have the time.
Too many other things.
My family and the problem with service for Christ is we just don't want to do it.
Lord, I know I should be in church.
But you know, just this weekend, I don't get to go fishing just like I am delinquent.
And the problem is we just don't want to get up on Sunday morning and go to church.
We don't want to come back on Sunday night.
It's a matter of the will.
God is patient with fear as He was with Moses.
But now He gets to the bottom line where Moses says, send somebody else.
I don't want to go.
And then the anger of the Lord burned against Moses.
And He said, Is there not your brother Aaron the Levite?
I know that he speaks fluently and moreover behold, he is coming out to meet you.
When he sees you, he will be glad in his heart.
You are to speak to him and put the words in his mouth.
And I, even I, will be with your mouth and his mouth.
And I will teach you what you are to do.
Moreover, he shall speak for you to the people.
It shall come about that he shall be as a mouth for you and you shall be as God to him.
And you shall take in your hand this staff with which you shall perform the signs.
God is getting rather strong now with His servant.
God gives to him a mouthpiece, Aaron, his own brother.
God says to him, You have my provision.
God says, You are going to go.
You and I will never deal with the real problem by merely reciting excuses.
We must honestly expose the roots of the problems in our life.
And then there will be some basis for change.
I don't know what Moses' real problem was.
I've tried to think what it would be.
I wonder if we don't have here a man who is 80 years of age and who is saying,
I have a routine established and I'm an old man.
And life has gotten comfortable and I don't want to go back.
I don't want to face all of that.
God is saying to him, Go.
Change becomes hard, doesn't it?
Linda Kling has written these words, Change.
Even the word threatens me.
The thought of going from a comfortable though boring situation into unknown territory is frightening.
It's hard enough to adjust to a room full of furniture that's been switched around,
much less adapt to a whole new set of circumstances that God is arranging in my life.
I guess the Lord had to make us basically hesitant and wary of change so that we'd be stable
and wouldn't go running away every time we encountered an unlikable circumstance.
But God doesn't want us to be stagnant either.
For a long time I've been praying that I would do something in my life,
that He would do something in my life.
But when He tries to answer that prayer by introducing something new and challenging to me,
I run scared.
I had expected He would bring some new interest into the old familiar situation.
But He surprised me.
Instead He closed that door and opened another saying,
This is the way, walk ye in it.
I've never been an adventurer or explorer.
Cozy, familiar surroundings are what I prefer.
But I am going to take a step of faith and show the Lord I really trust Him.
I'm going to follow.
Follow Him no matter where He leads.
Is God disturbing your nest?
Is God rearranging the furniture of your life?
Don't use excuses.
But say as did this writer,
I'm going to follow Him wherever He leads.
When God calls you and me to serve Him or to some act of obedience,
He gives us all that we need.
Like Moses of old, He gives us His presence.
He gives us His person.
He gives us His power.
He gives us His promise.
And He gives us His provision.
And so let's put away the excuses and be obedient.
Living by excuses will cause us to miss God's best.
And it's a lousy way to live.
So let's live by faith.
Obeying God.
The God who calls us and who will provide all that we need.
Let's bow together.
What do you need to say to the Lord this morning?
Is there an area of struggle?
Have there been excuses?
Will you put them away and give them to Jesus this morning?
Will you say to Him, Lord, I'll follow You wherever You lead?
Lord, You rearrange my life.
You feel free to make the changes.
You may have to honestly say, though I struggle,
I am willing to be made willing.
Can you say that much?
I am willing to be made willing.
For it is God who works in you, beloved,
both the willing and the doing of His good pleasure.
Let's sing together.
All to Jesus I surrender.
All to Him I freely give.
I will ever love and trust Him
in His presence daily live.
I surrender all.
All to be my blessed Savior.
I surrender all.
Our Heavenly Father, we sing these words not because they are set to a nice tune,
but because they express the attitude of our hearts.
Wherein we have been using excuses,
we set those aside and we say to you this morning,
we'll follow where you lead.
With our heads bowed, may I say one more thing to those who are here
without a personal saving knowledge of Jesus Christ.
My friend, beware of the excuses that the devil will give to you to keep you from Christ.
Excuses like, I'll have to turn over a new leaf in my life first.
I have to reform. I have to clean up my act.
Or, there are so many hypocrites in the Church. I don't want to be a Christian.
Or, I'll do it later. There's plenty of time.
Recognize that those are empty, that the real problem is in your will.
Will you today believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and make that step of faith?
If we can help you do that, will you come to the front of the auditorium afterward?
There will be some staff members or elders here. I'll be shaking hands at the door.
Let us know of your desire today to understand better what it means to trust Christ.
Let us pray with you, without coercion and pressure,
but with sincerity and love for your soul.
Let's stand together. We'll be closed in prayer.
Now Father, as we go from here, I pray that we will go in obedience to that calling in our lives.
That we will sense the commission that you've given us to be your witnesses.
May we know, deeply know, and experience in our hearts all the provision that you've made for us
that we might obey and fulfill the mission you've given to us in life.
In Jesus' name, Amen.