Read Acts 7:20-29
20 “At that time Moses was born, and he was no ordinary child. For three months he was cared for in his parents’ home. 21 When he was placed outside, Pharaoh’s daughter took him and brought him up as her own son. 22 Moses was educated in all the wisdom of the Egyptians and was powerful in speech and action. 23 “When Moses was forty years old, he decided to visit his own people, the Israelites. 24 He saw one of them being mistreated by an Egyptian, so he went to his defense and avenged him by killing the Egyptian. 25 Moses thought that his own people would realize that God was using him to rescue them, but they did not. 26 The next day Moses came upon two Israelites who were fighting. He tried to reconcile them by saying, ‘Men, you are brothers; why do you want to hurt each other?’ 27 “But the man who was mistreating the other pushed Moses aside and said, ‘Who made you ruler and judge over us? 28 Are you thinking of killing me as you killed the Egyptian yesterday?’ 29 When Moses heard this, he fled to Midian, where he settled as a foreigner and had two sons.
When I look back over my life since finishing school, I have to admit that it could be read as something of a random hotchpotch! Since school I have worked for a year with an engineering company, studied sports science and physics, studied theology, taught English in Thailand, taught Life Skills to disaffected young people, looked after two children under 5, undertaken various roles within church (mainly teaching and preaching), taken on various temp jobs and taught sport (not in that order)! Despite the apparent randomness, however, I have been constantly amazed by the ways in which God has used all of these different experiences to shape and help me. I was particularly struck with this during my time in Thailand and had a clear sense that all the various bits and pieces of work I’d done up to that point had, in different ways, equipped me for what I was now doing. Even the various computer and organizational skills that I’d learned on my year in the engineering company proved invaluable, despite the fact that about a month into this job I was fairly sure that a career in engineering was not for me!
God does anoint and supernaturally equip people for the work he wants them to do. However, he also uses the mundane and perhaps seemingly random experiences that occur in our lives to prepare us for this calling. Moses is a great example of this as his upbringing was essential to God’s call on his life. I think this is brought out strongly in the film “The Prince of Egypt,” which clearly shows how Moses’ early life within Pharaoh’s household gave him the access that he needed later on. Further, Moses was educated in the Egyptian’s ways thus would have known how to address Pharaoh and best deal with the challenges he faced. On top of this, there is the suggestion that Moses was, in his younger years, somewhat rash. It is perhaps again significant that God didn’t actually call him until he’d had some 40 years away from Egypt to mellow!
- Have a think back over your life. Are there things you’re doing now that God has clearly used your past experiences, upbringing… to prepare you for?
- Do you have any ideas about what God might be preparing you for in the future?
- In times of hardship, or when what we’re doing just seems boring or pointless, is there any comfort derived from reminding ourselves that, although we can’t see it now, God will be using this time to prepare us for what he has next?!
If you have a bit longer…
…and want to find out more about Moses, you can watch some videos that we made for BOC on Moses. They star the amazingly talented Hannah Scott and Claire Fletcher with some brilliant animations by our very own Micha B (and Becky Jordan as an excellent flip chart stand!).
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