Exodus: Who Am I?

Welcome to the sermon. Today we're in Exodus 3 & 4, exploring one of life's most foundational questions: "Who am I?" Through Moses's encounter at the burning bush, we'll confront the shame and insecurity that so often writes our life's story. We'll see how God's answer to our feelings of inadequacy is profoundly different from the world's, shifting our focus from our weakness to His powerful presence.

Scripture References

• Exodus 3:1-14: The Burning Bush, God's call, and Moses's first question, "Who am I?"
• Exodus 4:1-17: Moses's excuses, God's provision of signs, and His promise of help.

Key Points

1. Unredeemed Shame Writes Our Story

Our behavior is rooted in what we believe about ourselves. While guilt says "I did something bad," shame says "I am bad." If this shame isn't redeemed, it becomes the author of our story, creating vows that dictate our actions. Moses was crippled by shame: he felt he belonged nowhere, was a failure rejected by everyone, was too old, and was disabled by a speech impediment. His shame was about to make him miss his destiny.

2. The World's Answer vs. God's Answer

How does God respond to Moses's crippling insecurity? Our culture—and even AI—advises self-reflection, validation, and positive reinforcement. The goal is self-love. God's approach is completely different. When Moses asks, "Who am I?", God doesn't list Moses's qualifications or tell him "You've got this." Instead, He gives a radically different answer that changes the entire equation: "I will be with you."

3. God's Presence is the Antidote to Pride

God's answer isn't a non-answer; it's the only answer. Focusing on ourselves leads to one of two places: pride ("I am adequate") or insecurity ("I am inadequate"). Both are forms of pride because they are self-obsessed. The way out is to stop looking inward, which leads to depression, and to look at God, which leads to rest. God's presence, not our adequacy, is the foundation for our calling.

Conclusion

God's promise, "I will be with you," is the definitive answer to our deepest insecurities. He doesn't call the adequate; He makes Himself present to the inadequate. Even God's anger at Moses's final excuse was the protective love of a Father, angry for him, not wanting him to miss his destiny. God wants to take the pen from the hand of your shame and become the true Author of your story.

Calls to Action

1. Identify the Script: Recognize where shame, rather than God's truth, is writing the script for your life.
2. Shift Your Focus: When you feel inadequate, intentionally shift your question from "Who am I?" to "Who is the God that is with me?"
3. Rest in His Presence: Stop striving to become adequate. Instead, receive the promise that He is with you as your all-sufficient help.

Transcript

Hey, before we, open our Bibles and study Exodus chapter three. I've got some bad news, which is that Forrest Cavalli is stepping off staff here at Radiant Church. I know, here's the good news. Forrest and Jessica and the boys, they're not going anywhere. They remain, like, a really important part of our church. And, there's a couple.

There's there's a bunch of reasons, but I'll list a few, things that I'm just celebrating. One is that Forrest is so very servant hearted and was so patient with many of us, and in fact, there's a number of interns that could have jumped in and taken, Forrest job because there's a real gift in his life and developing and equipping and training others because he's got a real patience and a desire to equip the people around him.

So Micah stepping is stepping in and taking Forrest's job, which is exciting. There's there's so you everyone knows this. We've become so dependent upon our devices that when they when they fail us, it fills us with rage. Does it not? There's so much pressure that happens when our systems fail. And Forrest was so patient. Most of us would be like, can I just throw it in the creek right now?

And he was like, no, just give it a sack. Don't throw it. Can I punch it? No, you can't punch it. Just give it a sack. So we've appreciated his heart to serve. Also, he's been, incredibly gifted. We we don't have a better technician, a unicorn who could figure out anything we were facing. And so we're going to miss that.

But the big issue is he wasn't just good as a technician. He had a real heart for Jesus and for the church. And, in our mission statement, it says that we're doing what we're doing because we want to see the lost found, and we want to see prodigals come home. And Forrest wanted that to happen with us.

And pushed for that. And I feel really blessed by the growth in his life that he would lead packs and he was always interested in what was happening in men's ministry. And there's been growth in his marriage and in his family. There's also been a huge cost to him and his family. He has not gone to church for five years.

So here he is attending. You're sure it even looks iron to like? Maybe you had time to iron it?

Hey. Let's just. Would you guys stand so we could just bless you and thank you. Not you guys, Forrest and Jess. Well, you can stand to.

Raise.

Yeah, guys. Yeah. Oh. Hey, let's just pray for him as he embarks on a new job at Spirit Radio. We're excited about what's next for them. And let's just bless blessed Jesus. Thank you, for these two. And we don't just thank you for what they do. We thank you for who they are to us. We thank you for their lives and that they've chosen to live on a mission with us.

We're so thankful for them. And we just a blessed spirit. Radio. Bless. What force is going to put his hands to? We bless his family. I ask that you would refresh he and Jess and the boys as they step into this new adventure together, and that they would get to know you in greater ways as they continue to trust and put one foot in front of the other.

Thank you for their lives. And everyone said Amen. Exodus chapter three. We're going to read verses one through 14 and chapter three, and then we're going to read one through 17. In chapter four now Moses was tending the flock of Jethro, his father in law, the priest of Midian, and he led the flock to the far side of the wilderness.

And he came to Horeb, the mountain of God. And there the angel of the Lord appeared to him, and flames of fire from within a bush. And Moses saw that the bush was on fire. It did not burn up. So Moses thought, I will go over, and I will see this strange sight. Why the bush does not burn up.

When the Lord saw that he had gone over to look, God called from within the bush. Moses, Moses and Moses said, here I am. Don't come any closer. God said, and take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy ground. And then he said, I am the God. I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.

At this Moses hid his face because he was afraid to look at God. And the Lord said, I have indeed seen the misery of my people in Egypt. I've heard them crying out because of their slave drivers. I'm concerned about their suffering, so I've come down to rescue them from the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land into a good and spacious land, a land flowing with milk and honey, the home of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the parasites, the heavyweights, and the Jebusites.

And now the cry of the Israelites has reached to me. I've seen the way the Egyptians are pressing them. So now go. I'm sending 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 will be with you, and 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 will worship God on this very mountain.

And Moses said to God, suppose I go to the Israelites, and I say to them, The God of your fathers has sent me to you. And they ask me, what is his name? Then what shall I tell them? And God said to Moses, I am who I am. This is what you are to say to the Israelites. I am has sent me to you.

Chapter four, verses one through 17. Moses answered, well, what if they don't believe me or listen to me? And they say, the Lord did not appear to you. And then the Lord said to him, what is it? What is that in your hand? Staff, he replied, and the Lord said, throw it on the ground. So Moses threw it on the ground, and it became a snake, and he ran from it.

And then the Lord said to him, reach out your hand and take it by the tail. So Moses reached out, took hold of the snake, and it turned back into a staff in his hand. This, said, the Lord, is so 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.

Then the Lord said, put your hand inside your cloak. So Moses put his hand into his cloak, and when he took it out, the skin was leprous. It it had become white as snow. Now put it back in your cloak, he said. So Moses put his hand back into his cloak, and when he took it out, it was restored like the rest of his flesh.

And then the Lord said, if they do not believe you, or pay attention to the first sign, they may believe the second. But if they do not believe these two signs, or listen to you, take some water from the Nile and pour it on the dry ground. The water you take from the river will become blood on the ground.

And Moses said to the Lord, pardon your servant, Lord, I have never been eloquent, neither in the past nor since you have spoken to your servant. I am slow of speech and tongue. And the Lord said to him, who gave human beings their mouths, who makes them deaf or mute? Who gives them sight or makes them blind? Is it not I, the Lord?

Now go. I'll help you speak. I'll teach you what to say. But Moses said, pardon your servant. Lord, please send somebody else. And then the Lord's anger burned against Moses. And he said, what about your brother Aaron the Levite? I know he can speak well. He is already on his way to meet you, and he will be glad to see you.

You shall speak to him and put words in his mouth. I will help both of you speak and will teach you what to say. He will speak to the people for you, and it will be as if he were your mouth, as if you were God to him. But take this staff in your hand so you can perform the signs with it.

The word of the Lord. This text deals with the most significant questions we can ask in life. Who am I and who is God? And these two questions are actually incredibly connected. Or at least that's what John Calvin starts his institutes of the Christian Faith saying. He says all true wisdom consists of two parts the knowledge of God and the knowledge of ourselves.

So first Moses asks, who am I? Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh? And then he, he says, if they ask me, what is your name? God? What? What do I say to them? Who are you? Although who God is is primary, I believe we have to answer the question of who is God before we can understand ourselves.

We're going to focus on this question of who am I? And next week we're going to focus on the question of who is God? The revealing of the divine name and the divine character of God. Questions of our identity and questions that surround our insecurities are crucial because our behavior stems from, or is rooted in, what we believe about ourselves.

We always act congruent with what we believe about ourselves. So often we come to church thinking God just wants to deal with the fruit of our behavior. God certainly has something to say about our behavior, and he does have certain ways that we behave. But the way that he gets at that is by addressing what we believe, what we believe about him, what we believe to be true about ourselves.

Because how we behave flows from what we believe about ourselves. Listen to me. If the devil can get you to believe a lie about who God is and about your identity, he can step back. His work is done because you will live out of that lie. You will begin to behave based on what you believe about yourself and what you believe about God.

Likewise, if we can be rooted in the truth and our identity is secure and we know the truth about who God is and about who we are before God, we will behave according to what we believe about God. I want to show you an example of this. I worked through this with the men this weekend, but how many of you remember this incident?

Of course you do. This is slap gate. This is the slap heard round the world. This is Will Smith slapping Chris Rock at the Academy Awards, because Chris Rock made some jokes about Will Smith's wife and in particular, her hair. And so, Will Smith had some things to say on live TV. And then walked onto the stage and slapped, Chris Rock.

And I remember watching this and thinking like, man, what's going on for Will Smith? Like, this seems seems like a huge overreaction. Did they not come to the Academy Awards knowing that the comedian was going to roast those in attendance?

Why did he respond the way he responded? This happened in March of 2022. The slap heard round the world. But Will Smith would release his memoir in 2021. And in the memoir, there's a backdrop, there's a context. There's something that Will Smith believes that led to this behavior when he was around nine years old. He has a vivid memory of his father physically abusing his mother, and then he struggled his whole life with considering his father a hero.

And then, having witnessed his father hurting someone he loved. He says, I was probably nine and I watched my father beat up my mother, and I was too scared to do anything. And then he says, what kind of kid just stands there and let somebody hit their mother and they don't do anything, you know? And that became the real core trauma of my childhood, that my personality and my persona became the form around to be the opposite of that.

You know, I was never going to be scared again. And that became the central core of the wound that I was overcoming throughout my childhood. And then ultimately throughout my life. Will Smith froze as he watched his father beat his mother. And he was the oldest child. Do you know who stepped up to fight his dad? His younger brother.

His younger brother stepped out from behind him to take on his old man. Right. This is what Will Smith says. Within everything that I've done since then the awards, the accolades, the spotlights and the attention, the characters and the laughs. There has been a subtle string of apologies to my mother for my inaction that day, for failing her in that moment, for failing to stand up to my father, for being a coward.

In the memoir, it says what you have to come to understand is that Will Smith, the alien annihilating emcee, the bigger than life movie star, is largely a construction. A carefully crafted, honed character designed to protect himself, to hide himself from the world, to hide the coward. He says, I decided to be funny because I wanted to please my father.

Because as long as daddy was laughing and smiling, I believed we would be safe. I was the entertainer in the family because I wanted to keep everything light and fun and joyful.

There is a place in all of us of deep shame.

A place that you believe the grace of God just can't touch. And when God touches that place. When we discover that there's more grace in God than there is sin in us, our lives are transformed and we're standing on holy ground. And this is what happens for Moses on this day. Instead of. Our shame being redeemed by the author of our story, the shame that Will Smith felt wrote his story.

Shame was holding the pen. Writing this script and this slap didn't come out of nowhere, did it? This is a man who decided a long time ago I'll never be a coward. And I'll never watch somebody hurt my lady. And so he was acting consistent with what he vowed as a nine year old, to be. And to do.

Notice the guilt. The guilt that Will Smith experiences is expressed. And he says, I didn't stick up for my mother, and I feel that that was wrong. But the shame that he experienced is I'm a coward and I will never be a coward again. Shame is telling a story. It's not just presenting the facts. And again, if it's not redeemed by the author of your story, it will become the author of your story.

Shame is super easy to feel. I know we've all felt it, but it's actually really difficult to define some of the more helpful things I've heard is that guilt is that I did something wrong. I didn't stick up for my mother, but shame is that there's something wrong with me. I'm a coward. Guilt says I did. Bad. Shame says I am bad.

When we feel guilt, we need a judge to wash us, to proclaim us innocent. We talk a lot in church about God being a just judge who justifies us when we feel guilt, but when we feel shame, what we need is a father who incorporates us into the family, even with our weaknesses. What a person feeling shame needs is to belong, to be brought near.

Another reason that your shame is difficult to identify. I don't know if you've experienced the feedback loop of shame, but I have, which is that you feel bad for feeling bad and it just kind of doubles down and it keeps spiraling. Anybody felt sad and then felt sad for feeling sad. It just kind of keeps going and it's hard to pull out and we continue to sink.

Another reason our shame can be tough to get a handle on is because of the many things we do with it, and we got to talk at tables. Yesterday, as men, about what we do with our shame. Some of us motivated. That's what Will Smith did. I will never be a coward again. And I will be very, very funny.

So that piece remains in my house. So you can motivate your shame. You can go work out. You can become a success to cover your nakedness.

You can also meditate on it. That leads us to sit down, to pull back, to fade, to black as we just meditate on our inadequacies and the things in our lives that the grace of God just can't touch. And then many of us have men as have have numbed it. You can medicate it to. You can numb out and you can want to escape this reality.

None of these things worked, and none of these things worked in the life of Moses either. Who you better believe motivated at one point to kill an Egyptian. He took matters into his own hands. You better believe that 40 years in the desert had him then meditating on it. Just him and the sheep going. Why did I do that?

There's something so wrong with me. And then, of course, he attempted to medicated. Of course he tried to escape it right. And we've all been guilty of these things.

None of them seemed to lift the shame. I know I've tried to motivate it. Medicate it. Meditate on it. I've never thought myself out of my shame. I've never dwelt on it long enough that I dealt with it. Anybody have anybody?

When God sees this. I mean, even as I share the story of Will Smith, don't you get a sense that we're standing on holy ground? Like this is sacred space. Like God's about to move in this guy's life. I don't think he came to these conclusions overnight. Probably. Probably cost him dearly. This revelation of what's been going on internally for him.

When someone finally turns aside to see what God is saying to them and their circumstances, and then meets us in this place of shame, and when we discover that there's more grace in God than there is sin in us. This is a place that we return to over and over again. Moses came back to this mountain eight times.

And some of you can recount right now. No, I remember the moment. I really believed that there was more grace in God than there was sin in me. And I remember what happened when God spoke to that place. And you could go back there. You do go back there over and over again. So I told you about the shame of Moses or the shame of Will Smith.

But I want to also talk about the shame of Moses. Maybe you see yourself in this story. Moses, as you know, grew up. Well, let's just say it this way. Moses belongs nowhere. And to no one.

He's a Hebrew, raised initially by a Hebrew and then eventually by an Egyptian. He's between two worlds. He then flees to go to the deserts of Midian. The Bible says that he goes to the back of the desert. I love that phrase because I don't actually know what that is, but I totally know what that is. It's like, is this a desert season in your life?

And you're like, this is a back of the desert season in my life. Where is that? I don't know, but we all know. We all know where the back of the desert is. You know, it's like there's some people just sitting in the back of the church with their arms crossed. But this is like you're in the foyer, or because you can't even bring yourself to come in.

This is where he goes. When he goes to Midian, he gets married, starts working. This is a prince of Egypt. He gets married, becomes a shepherd, just starts working a dead end job. And then he has a son. He starts having a family. And his first son is Gershom. And he literally names his kids stranger. Poor kid. Talk about bearing the weight of your father's mistakes.

And we'll call him stranger foreigner because he has no land.

This is the shame of Moses. He doesn't feel like he fits anywhere. He's also a failure. He tried to do something noble and he failed. And he was rejected by Egypt. And then he was rejected by the Hebrews. Remember that he kills an Egyptian, and then he goes to try to help the Hebrews. And they're like, who are you?

Thanks, but no thanks. And he loses on both fronts. And I know some of you are nodding because you're like, yeah, sounds like the story of my life. We know that Moses had bigger plans than merely rescuing one Hebrew, because act seven says this. He supposed that his brothers would understand that God was giving them salvation by his hand, but they did not understand.

He stepped out. He risked. He did something noble, and it was not met with applause. And he failed. The other thing cooking that's creating shame in Moses's life is that he's too far gone. He's now been in the desert for 40 years. Moses. His dream had always been to help and to free the Israelites. But these 40 years of humble them, he's thrown these dreams away because he's too old to be broken, too awkward, too unimpressive, and just too late.

He's too late. And then the last thing that brought great shame on him is his disability. His speech. And this isn't especially intriguing because the Lord chooses as his mouthpiece. This man who says I'm not eloquent either in the past or since you've spoken to your servant. I'm slow of speech and of tongue. And in Exodus six Moses will add, how then shall Pharaoh listen to me?

For I'm uncertain? I have I am of uncircumcised lips. And most scholars commentators have believed down through the ages that this man had a stutter. So the strong Charlton Heston, who's like, let my people go. You know, it was probably more like. Let him go.

We don't know for sure if he had a stutter. This is still a question, but we know for certainty that Moses is very aware of his weaknesses and his inadequacies. It's causing a deep seated insecurity in him, and he's about to not step out and do what God's calling him to do, because he's his shame. Is scripting his story.

So notice that these insecurities have him completely out of touch with his gifts right? The things that he does have to bring. One commentator says this we can feel Moses's almost overwhelming insecurity. How uncertain he was. First, there is his sense of personal inadequacy. Is this the same man who once thought he could solve everything by simply making his presence felt?

It is. But his self-confidence has been deflated by the experience of failure and the 40 long years of relegation which followed. Then there's his desperate attempt to plead ignorance and incompetence. And the lack of personal stature, and the authority that would command attention and command the message and of any natural abilities that would suit him to the task.

Finally, he came to the place where we too so often find ourselves. And he said, here am I. Send somebody else. I love that. Here am I. Send somebody else. So how does God address Moses? His insecurities, his pain, and his shame? How many of you feel very defeated in addressing your own insecurities, your own inadequacies? How many of you feel really frustrated with addressing the inadequacies and the insecurities in someone else?

Isn't it frustrating? Right. Good luck telling someone that they're loved if they've decided otherwise. It's maddening. Good luck telling someone they did a good job if they've decided otherwise. Good luck telling someone that they're beautiful or that they look nice. If they've decided otherwise. Good luck telling someone they belong in this church when they've decided otherwise. Good luck telling someone they have nothing to fear if they've decided otherwise.

Is the frustration growing in you right now? Even in addressing our own inadequacies and insecurities.

We've been studying to preach. Together with all the pastors. So Jared Turner, who pastors Radiant Hillary and Ralph Garcia, who pastors Radiant Exeter. Myself and Glenn, we get together and we study the text together. And as we were studying, we decided to do what everyone does when they have a question about how to address insecurities, we asked, I that we asked the super intelligence, like, how do I help someone who's insecure?

And in 1.3 seconds it gave us these seven insightful points. The first is you listen and validate. The second is that you encourage self-reflection. Three you provide positive reinforcement for you. Encourage new experiences. Number five set healthy boundaries. Number six offer professional help. Seven. Be patient and understanding because it's going to be a process. So we thought it would be fun as we were looking at this to see how God scored.

To take these seven points and see how God did as God responded to Moses's insecurity. Number one, listen and validate. We decided God gets a half point. God gets a half point here because he does listen to Moses's continuing excuses for quite a while, but he certainly does not validate Moses. Number two is to encourage self-reflection, and this does not happen.

God really misses it here. Moses is full of self reflecting and God's like shit should stop.

The more Moses starts to self-reflect, the more he starts to shy away from what God's asking him. Number three provide positive reinforcement. Once again, God fails. Apparently, God didn't consult superintelligence before he did this, so he doesn't call out any of Moses's, attributes that call qualified him for this call. Number four encourage new experiences. Here we go.

God did it. God was like, I'm. I'm encouraging you to do something different. Let's do something different in life. And he encourages that. He's like, I want you get this to go talk to Pharaoh, and you know, lead my people out of Egypt. It's a new experience for you, Moses. Setting healthy boundaries. Number five again, another zero. God doesn't need to set healthy boundaries because he's not afraid of Moses taking advantage of him.

In fact, God wants Moses to be more dependent on him, not more independent. So there's not a separating himself from Moses. Number six, he definitely offers professional help, which is sweet. He's like, you will do signs. I'm gonna give you power to perform signs. And it's it's really going to help. And I'm going to be involved. And I am a professional deliverer.

And number seven is to be patient and understanding. And I think that God was very patient with Moses as he gives excuse after excuse. God offers abundant help and just keeps reminding him of the truth. So a final score we're giving like a we're going to give, we're going to round up. We're going to give our three. This is an F.

So what I want you to see really clearly this morning is that there's a real huge discrepancy between our cultures. Wisdom kind of summarize through AI and God's wisdom. And the big difference is this idea of self validation and affirmation that's just non-existent in the text. Listen to what happened to Will Smith. So he hits rock bottom after he slaps Chris Rock.

He calls it not rock bottom, but a cliff top. And this experience forced him to turn inward because his external pursuits could no longer satisfy him. Anybody been there before? Again, this is holy ground. This is what he says about what happens. Smith's spiritual work includes drinking the hallucinogenic brew. Are you Oscar? 14 times a day. And during these experiences, he had powerful visions that led to a revelation of self love.

He realized he did not need hit movies or validation from others to feel worthy, stating this if I'm this beautiful, I don't need Jada or anything else to validate me. This is the clear difference between the wisdom of our age. This guy didn't need ayahuasca. He needed a father who didn't beat his mother and who brought him in and said, in your weakness, you're my son and I love you.

And I've called you by name, and I'll even take your greatest shame and write it into your story. That's what he needed. And instead he gave him self self-love. God doesn't spend any time reminding Moses of how awesome he is, although that's what all of us would do in that situation, right? Moses. Who am I to confront Pharaoh?

Oh, you're Moses. You meet face to face with God. You're a beast. You're the only guy we got who speaks both Egyptian and Hebrew. You're the guy. You're the only guy who knows the Egyptian court. Who are totally done this. Oh, you got this. That's not encouraging. You got this. So the big difference is we offer self-help. The Bible offers.

I will be with you. That's God's approach to this insecurity. But Moses said to God, who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the children of Israel out of Egypt? And he said, I'll be with you. Yes. At first it seems like God's not even listening to Moses because he's answering a different question than Moses is even asking.

Right. But that's the point. Moses is focusing on the wrong thing. He's fixating on himself. And when we do this, we devolve either into pride or insecurity. The pride of. Oh, yeah. Hey, I am a beast. I do know two languages. I do think I've got this. Or the insecurity of going, wait, as I measure, I just don't measure up.

Both are forms of pride, by the way. Even your insecurity and will land there. The Lord does not call us because of our adequacy, nor is his presence conditional upon us becoming adequate. It is rather promised to those who are inadequate. When we say, But I'm not adequate, the Lord says, you need not tell me, but I will be with you.

I went to, I went to Southland's, church this week, and I did speak to a group of pastors on, Monday or Tuesday and Wednesday and, pastors are maybe the worst group of people to preach to. And there's a special kind of insecurity that comes up in me. And there's a special temptation when you're talking to the talkers.

Right? Everyone knows where you're going in the preach before you go there. And if you find some new angle on it, they all know it's heresy. Before you get there as well. And it draws out this special kind of insecurity. I mean, one of the guys I was preaching to was one of my profs in seminary, and I'm trying to pronounce parasites, you know, I'm like Jebusites looking at him.

Paris, Hittites, maybe just staring at him. And again, the way out of this is not to be like, no, man, you got this. You're funny. And doggone it, people like you, you know, I guess is not the way out. You belong here, man. You've been pastoring fruit for 20 years.

You've got something to say. That's never the way the Lord leads me out of that insecurity. You know how he does it.

Your mind. You belong to me. And I won't share you with another. You're my son. So whether it goes well or doesn't go well, you can rest secure that I've made a claim on your life. You belong as a son in my house, not as a performer on a stage. I won't let that happen. That's the way out for me.

And this is the way out for most of us. Even after Moses died, God would have to remind Joseph who was feeling insecure, or Joshua, who's feeling insecure. I won't leave you and I won't forsake you. I'll be with you. Matthew 28. When we get this great commission, go into all the world, make disciples, disciple nations. All right, we got this.

No way. And then he says, I'll be with you even to the end of the age. He promises his presence to the insecure. And what more do we need, then, to know that he's with us? And that his abilities are stepping on to the scene. Corrie Ten Boom said if you look at the world, you'll be distressed. If you look within, you'll be depressed.

And if you look at God, you'll be at rest. This is what happened for Moses.

God is with us. We read in Romans eight that he's not just with us, he's actually for us. He's for us. Not just with us. He's not with us going like, oh my gosh. He's not with us going, hey, you're on your own with that. Good luck. He's not just with us, he's for us. He's carrying this thing forward.

Worship team. Would you guys come? I wanted to ask you a question this morning as we come to the table. Where is it that you're needing to remember that God is with us?

Where is it that self focus and insecurity is stealing from the call of God on your life?

It's so great when that's interrupted. That happened for me twice this week. I've been pouting all week. I've got good reasons. I've preached six times in seven days. I don't even know what's coming out of my mouth right now. Everything's mushy. I'm pouting. So self-focused, so interested in what I am doing and what I need to do and how behind I am.

And then I forgot. But then I remembered that we were going to the rescue missions empty bowls event, and I show up in self-pity. And then I was so, so thankful.

To be invited into the bigger story and to hear stories of people's lives being transformed. I marched in, going like, I don't even know why they invite pastors to fundraisers. Don't they know that we're all poor? You know, and then guys started to share their life change, you know? And I was like, God, thank you for saving me from me.

Thank you for saving me from me. Saturday night. Last night again, I'm like, I got to pray. I got to do this. I got to do that. And then I go to Eli Garcia's quinceanera. Mila Garcia's quinceanera, and Ralph is once again, I'm like, what am I doing here? And Ralph is now blessing his daughter publicly. And I'm like, oh, thank you for saving me from me, from being so focused on what I have to do and my inadequacies and what I can pull off and just save me from me.

At the end of this text, God actually gets mad at Moses.

His anger flares up.

The anger of God is one of the most misunderstood aspects of his love. When Moses encounters God's anger, it is not the wrath of an indignant monarch, but the intensity of a loving God. Moses was on the verge of missing a great destiny. Rather than leave Moses to his mediocre existence, God flashed his anger in an attempt to capture Moses's attention and provoke him to obedience.

Not because God was so egocentric that he wanted his will done at all costs, but because he cared enough for Moses not not to let him miss this opportunity. The anger of the Lord is not to be avoided. It is to be embraced. For it is God's protective love and action. He doesn't get angry at us. He gets angry for us because he does not want us to miss the best.

God's anger may startle us, but his indifference would devastate us.

If you have some sense that fear or insecurity or focusing on your inadequacy is stealing something of God's best for your life. This morning, would you stand before you? Think about what other people think of you. Just stand. Your insecurity. Your focus on yourself is stealing something of God's destiny on your life. Stand up.

We take.

The pen out of shames hand. And we put it back in your hand. You write the story. You decide what's possible. You determine our days. We're so tired of being focused on ourselves. What we bring, what we do, what we have, what we see, what we don't see. Lord, save us from ourselves and catch us up in this massive story.

Who are you? God. We're tired of thinking about our own identities and our own giftings and our own weaknesses. Who are you and what can you do? And what are your strengths? And what are you saying? And what are you calling us in to catch us up? We come back to that and we ask. Help us to behold Jesus.

Help us to look beyond our own navel gazing. And to see the cosmic exodus that you're leading and make us a part. Lord, we humble ourselves right now, and we see our insecurity as another form of pride. And it's not that we think too highly of ourselves, it's that we think too much on ourselves, and we renounce our pride.

We humble ourselves, and then we don't wallow in the shame of that. We don't sit in the doghouse because we've done it again. We don't circle the round about again. Lord, we step into the destiny that you have for us. You've got a good plan for every life here. Let's just come to the table and remember, as we lift up Jesus, the God that we serve and the cost that he paid, that we would be folded into his family, let's remember his commitment to us even in our weakness, his body broken for us, his blood shed for us.

So that we could participate. In communion with him.