Being the Message – Part 5

No matter how connected we are virtually, we will always need a face-to-face community because we are created to live in intimate relationships, as is God. Today, I want to think about what our relationship with God is like. Are we ready to bump into God at the end of the street or do we miss him because we are looking down at our phone or simply not paying attention? Alternatively, it might be that we do encounter God but we are stuck in the “who me?” zone.

“Could God use me?”, is a great question. That question stimulates us to probe deeper – does my life matter? Who am I in the big scheme of things?  We somehow know or expect others to do great things – after all we see humanity progress – but me? The question is who does God use?

My home has possibly hundreds of books in it. I’m a bit of a Bookaholic. There’s probably a twelve step solution – it’s just that I haven’t found it yet. The other day a thought ran through my mind. Just a couple of hundred years ago most people had just one book in their home: the Bible. I began to wonder what that would be like. How could you survive with only one book?  And yet, when I think about it if you had to be on an island with just one book, the Bible is endlessly interesting because it is filled with stories that can be read over and over again and reinterpreted as you grow and mature. There is wisdom and action!

But who makes it into the Bible? Who are these action heroes? We have a tendency to glorify people or think they are larger than life when in reality the Bible is populated by people like you and me!

An Extraordinary God

I think one of the overarching themes in the Bible is that we have an extraordinary God. It’s a testimony to who God is. Our God has an amazing heart – He keeps loving where others would stop. God has tremendous determination – things don’t work out for hundreds of years or generations but He doesn’t stop trying. He never gives up. The people in the Bible are all over the place but we remember many of them as heroes because, despite their limitations, God was able to pull out a message through their lives. Like Moses, for example, he might have made a mistake or two, but that doesn’t mean God couldn’t use his life to give a profound message. It’s about staying in the game.

When we think of the Book of Acts we think of a moment in time. Circa something – we don’t think today, but why shouldn’t the Book of Acts be a show with multiple seasons and episodes. Who says the Book of Acts has to be over?

Extraordinary people

We can all challenge ourselves to be a person of Biblical proportions – why not! Your ability to be the message is not as far away as you might think. If we are going to think of a Biblical figure we may as well picture Moses.

We are not so different from Moses. He’s a huge figure in our minds but maybe God thinks you’re a big deal too; it’s just that your mind hasn’t caught up with that idea!

 “The path which all past saints walked as they strove to fulfill God’s providential Will is the very path we must walk again today. Beyond that, we must continue on to the end of the path, even walking trails they left untrodden. Therefore, humanity can never find the path that leads to life without understanding the particulars of the providence of restoration. Herein lies the reason why we must study the Principle of Restoration in detail.” (Exposition of the Divine Principle, p. 187)

The Principle of Restoration and Moses

Moses was the most reluctant of heroes. He didn’t expect to be called. He was enjoying life in the palace, although there was always this Hebrew identity pulling at him. He had a double life of sorts and that made it hard for him to be the message. Who knows how long his life would have continued as it was if he had not encountered an Egyptian beating a hapless Hebrew slave. And the rest is history as they say. Moses had to flee into the desert to escape repercussions, but this turned out to be a blessing in disguise. The desert was a humbling experience and the place he had multiple show downs with God.

There must have been times in the desert (remember – he grew up in a palace) when Moses wondered if God was really there. He must have lost all feeling of God’s presence in his life in the mundane months and years of feeding his family and surviving, just as you probably have. But one day God revealed himself to Moses through a burning bush. God was saying, “Moses, I know your name. You may have felt distant but I know who you are and where you are.”

Who me?

What has been your burning bush moment? A colleague of mine shared this story with me:

“Early in my second year of trying to live a life with God, I heard an elder advise to “pray the Divine Principle,” meaning to speak the Divine Principle as a prayer. Soon thereafter I participated with my small group in a 40-minute prayer, and decided to “pray” the chapter on the Human Fall. As I proceeded through my narrative, I was transported in the Garden of Eden. I was no longer speaking; I was watching and feeling everything as it unfolded. Suddenly, I was brought back by the music of the closing song. I had become totally unaware of time passing. Walking out of the prayer room, a Bible on a table caught my eye. A golden light surrounded it. I took that as a confirmation that what I had experienced was the truth of the Bible.” (Tyler Hendricks)

Realistic Imaginations on Flickr
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/

 

That was Tyler’s burning bush. A more recent story is that of a neurosurgeon who shares his unusual testimony in the book, “Proof of Heaven.” This doctor was skeptical of God and an afterlife until an infection sent him into a coma that was so deep all electrical activity in his brain ceased for days. During that time he travelled in the spiritual world and met the sister he never knew he had.

What’s your story?

Perhaps you haven’t seen a burning bush yet but don’t give up, it will happen. Many people experience something described by John Calvin as having a light turned on inside. He called the light the Holy Spirit.

By that light, we catch the words inside the words, “the divine inner meaning of the Scripture.” It’s not because we’re smart, or from what someone told us to think. It’s from “seeing God himself in the words.” – A Compendium of the Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. Hugh T. Kerr (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1939), p. 17.

Looking for God’s message in our lives

God knows where you are, what you are about, and wants to share with you in the same way he spoke to Moses. Why not? However, there are three steps you need to take, just as Moses did, to activate your mission to become the message. To understand more about those three steps we have to delve into the Bible and Principle of Restoration.

Step # One – Embrace God’s Calling

We have to embrace God’s calling in our lives. What did God call Moses to? He asked Moses to lead the people out of Egypt.

“So I have come down to rescue them from the power of the Egyptians and lead them out of Egypt into their own fertile and spacious land. It is a land flowing with milk and honey.” Exodus 3:8

God wanted to take this minority people and give them influence in the world so that they could proclaim the message. Maybe He wants to give you more influence too but you have to see it and to own it.

“Seeing” is believing

Dr. Balcomb shared some interesting reflections in a recent message:

“One of the biggest challenges for me, and perhaps for many of you, is to keep God’s perspective and not be overwhelmed by the small scope of what we see as human beings. Sometimes there seems to be just too much trouble in the world, too many problems in America, even struggles in our own community or our own families, and it seems this is really too much, we’re kidding ourselves if we think that we are going to make an impact.

But that’s not true. In fact, throughout history God always has been looking for a small group of people to start with. In the speech that Father Moon gave to the United States Congress, he walked the congressmen and senators through the path of God’s history, starting all the way back with Abraham, Isaac, Jacob—the fathers of faith.

One thing he pointed out was that if you were able to rely only on the Bible, you would think that these men and their families were the only people on Earth. They strode alone across the plains of Canaan or Syria. There’s very little account of them interacting with anyone else at all. So you may think, “Well, in those days it was easy. God had His champions; there was almost nobody else around; God talked to them every day; and, of course, they were able to keep the vision of God’s plan alive,” but in reality, of course, it was very different.

They also were just a handful of people in a society with many different religions, many different cultures, many different languages, and they faced exactly the same challenges we do today to keep faith alive, to keep believing that the small things that “I” do can make a big difference on the great scale. And the truth of the matter is that often they didn’t know the plan of God in its complete scope; they knew only the little part that God had asked them.

Of course, it didn’t change at the time of the Exodus—this is all from Father Moon’s sermon—when Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt, what we think of is, perhaps you’ve seen the film “The Ten Commandments.”

Such an amazing and dramatic story with the Red Sea parting, and the Egyptians in chaos, but interestingly the Egyptian records of that time don’t have any record of the Israelites leaving. It might be that losers don’t like writing that part of the history, but more likely it just wasn’t such a big deal for them. For a big Egyptian empire with millions of people, the departure of a few thousand people from their minority group may not actually have warranted a great deal of interest. It’s kind of a shock to hear that, but that what it seems that it might be.

So from God’s perspective, from the providential perspective, the Exodus was extremely important. It was the beginning of a new history. But for everybody else, it was no big deal. And again, when Jesus came 2,000 years ago, for the writers of the Bible, for the community of faith, for the saints Paul and others, this was the turning point of history, but at the time nobody knew that.

Why am I telling you this? Because I think it is important to remind ourselves that just because the world at large and America as a whole may not see the opportunities of God’s coming Kingdom that we see, it doesn’t mean that it’s not happening.”

God is calling us, just as he did Moses to influence the world around us.

Step # 2 Stop giving God excuses

Once we realize that God Has called us into a destiny and hopes we can influence others and be the message, we do exactly what Moses did. We make excuses!

“But Moses pleaded with the Lord, “O Lord, I’m not very good with words. I never have been, and I’m not now, even though you have spoken to me. I get tongue-tied, and my words get tangled.” – Exodus 4:10

We easily get into that the kind of space whereby we come up with a litany of excuses that range from I have too many faults, to my family is not perfect, to we don’t have enough of a financial foundation, to I’m too old; God can’t use me.

If we look at the history of restoration we see that God has a habit of asking people to do things they can’t do with their own strength so that we learn to rely on our relationship with God.

Or we might worry like Moses about what other people think. Moses said, “What if they do not believe me or listen to me and say, ‘the Lord did not appear to you?’” Have you ever had an experience or believed something you were afraid to share because of what people might think at work or at school. You clammed up just as you were about to speak. It’s only when you lose the fear of people that you gain your destiny. This week take a leap of faith.

The final excuse is the best one of all. “I’m just not that spiritual!” We’ve all used that one but I don’t think that God only chooses the spiritual ones, or maybe our definition of what it means to be spiritual is just too narrow. We are all spiritual beings after all. Moses was just as caught up in who he was or what he thought he was capable of, but we all need to have more faith in who God is.

Sometimes God is pushing and pushing us to the point where run out of excuses. It’s only then that we can connect to our true humility and discover we can be the message if we just let go.

Step # 3 We have to know that God is with us in the present moment

When Moses asked, “Who shall I say is sending me?” God replied, “Tell them that my name is ‘I AM’.” I was always intrigued by that answer. Why didn’t he say creator or father or parent? God said instead, “I AM.” But it’s the perfect answer. God is a present tense God. He is not just the God of the past, the Old Testament or the New Testament. He is not a future tense God, only concerned about when the Kingdom comes, but the God of today; the God of your today. God is the great I AM.

How does knowing that God is with you (for sure) affect you? How can you be more sure that He will speak to you, just as he did to Moses? Can you embrace God’s calling for you to be the influencer in the places where He leads you? It’s not about what you can do, but what God can do through you to be the message. God says I AM what you need, I AM with you always, I AM.