This in the second chapter, we have been dealing with life change and trusting God in the midst of it. And today we're going to look at Moses and find that the kind of life change that Moses experienced was a change in life expectations. Exodus chapter 2 beginning in verse 11. One day after Moses had grown up, he went out to where his own people were and watched them at their hard labor. He saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, one of his own people.
Glancing this way and that and seeing no one, he killed the Egyptian and hid him in the sand. The next day he went out and saw two Hebrews fighting. He asked the one in the room, why are you hitting your fellow Hebrews? The man said, who made you ruler and judge over us? Are you thinking of killing me as you kill the Egyptian? Then Moses was afraid and thought what I did must have become known. When Pharaoh heard of this, he tried to kill Moses.
But Moses fled from Pharaoh and went to live in Midian where he was sent down by a war. And then this one verse from Acts chapter 7 verse 25. Moses thought that his own people would realize that God was using him to rescue them, but they did not. Have you ever been disappointed with God? Disillusioned with him because you expected him to work in a certain way and he didn't?
Perhaps you prayed intensely and with some sorry regarding an urgent need in your life and that prayer was not answered as you had thought it would be. Maybe you gave sacrificially believing that God would then make you prosperous in return, but he didn't. Or perhaps you struggled with some issue of sin in your life, asking God to take away the temptation, but he didn't. Perhaps you prepared for service as a missionary, but were unable to raise the necessary financial support.
Or maybe you prayed and began a business believing that out of your heart it was God's will only to see it fail. You see what we expect in life is not always what happens. Then what? There are a few life changes that strike more strategically at the Christian's faith than when we expect one thing from God and something totally other happens. It is one thing to feel that people have failed you, but when it seems that God has let you down, that's almost more than you can bear.
It is an experience that can actually devastate you. James and Terri Alexander kissed their son Matthew goodbye at the airport. He was a senior at Wake Forest University and was on his way to spend a month of his summer with youth permission in Marseille, France. Following that, he was going to go to the University of Burgundy for a semester of study. He would be home to enjoy Christmas with his family.
About at Kennedy Airport, he boarded TWA flight 800 last July 17th and he bowed with 229 others. The expectation of his parents of a spiritually enriching month for their son and a wonderful Christmas reunion with him was snuck out in an instant of time. What we're going to learn from Moses' life today is that change is what you have to expect in life. Change is not something that's unusual. Change happens over to great people of faith.
And I hope that you will see today with me that when you encounter conflict in your life between what you expect God to do and what actually happens, that conflict becomes an opportunity for you to learn something more about God. These unrealized expectations I'm talking about do not mean that God has failed you, although that's what it feels like. Using Moses as our example, I want to make three observations today about life expectations.
I think that we can better understand them and avoid the threat to faith that these disappointments can pose to us. The first observation I want to make is this, that one's theology forms his life expectations. Now that's natural. What we believe to be true about God, forges how we expect God to act. And through our theology, what we understand about God forms our life expectations. What did Moses believe about God? Remember, he had no penitence. He wrote it later.
He wrote the book in Genesis, Exodus, the Zedekes, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. He had no written inspired revelation from God. He had oral traditions, perhaps some written accounts of God's dealings in Israel's history. What he learned about God he learned undoubtedly through his mother in his childhood, as she cared for him and nurtured him until he was taken into Pharaoh's household. What did Moses believe about God?
What we see from our text is that Moses in the first place believed in the true God. Even amidst the pagan deities of Egypt, Pharaoh himself being one of those deities, Moses stood to believe in monotheism. He believed in the one true God. His very name implies paganism. The name Moses, Josephus tells us, comes from two Egyptian words, the word mo, which means river, and sus, which means drawn out of. The Egyptians looked upon the river as a god.
And perhaps when Pharaoh's daughter was beside the river that day, she was out there praying that the river would bring her a child when this basket appeared in the bulrushes. Which he named his child Moses, the one drawn out of the river. But Moses believed in the true God, the God of Ibrahim, Isaac, and Jacob. Secondly, he believed the true God had chosen the Hebrews. He believed that, his mother undoubtedly told him. And Moses believed that he was one of the Hebrews.
It emphasizes here in Exodus chapter two and again in Acts chapter seven that these were his own people, his own people were enslaved, and he went out to save them. Hebrews 11, 24 tells us that Moses refused to be called the son of Pharaoh's daughter. He did not want to identify with them because he knew that God had chosen the Hebrews and he was one of them. The third thing that he believed is that he believed that this God was powerful and intended to deliver the Israelites. He believed that.
And fourthly, he believed that God had purposed to do this, notice, through him. This is before Mount Sinai. Moses is 40 years of age here. And he believed that not only was God going to deliver the Israelites, but that God was going to do it through him. These are Moses core beliefs and I ask you a question, what are yours? What are your core beliefs? Because those core beliefs make you what you are and they will fashion what you'll become.
Your theology will frame your life expectations as they did Moses. Now this theological understanding spurred Moses to form an expectation of how God was going to use him. He had become famous. Stephen says in Acts chapter 7 that Moses had become famous and powerful in speech and action. He doesn't go into detail about that, but Josephus, the secular historian, records that Moses led an Egyptian army in defeat of the Ethiopians.
And it was such a spectacular victory that even Pharaoh himself felt threatened by the ability of this young man in his court. And some of Pharaoh's court officials actually planned in some way to get rid of this young Moses because he was perceived as so popular and so powerful in speech and action that he had to be gotten rid of. And Moses probably concluded from that experience that God was going to use him to lead a rebellion among the Hebrew slaves.
That's probably how he thought God was going to use him. But it may be that killing this Egyptian was intended by Moses as a signal to the Israelites to rise up against their oppressors. And thus he was shot the next day when he went back and he was rejected. And they said, who made you a ruler and a judge? Moses was devastated. Despite his sincere beliefs, his expectations were shattered.
And Moses' theology was okay, but based upon that good theology, he made a wrong assumption and expected something that God hadn't said. God hadn't told him yet how he was going to use Moses. But I want you to write down that first observation that your theology, what you believe about God, forms what you expect out of life. It is very important that you believe the right thing. Secondly, there's this observation that wrong expectations can lead to disappointment with God.
Moses thought he had it all figured out. But Moses needed yet to learn more of God before he was ready to be used as God's deliverer. Moses tried it his way and his expectation failed. It is not difficult to imagine the disillusionment that must have shrouded his soul, eaten away at his innards as he fled from Egypt across the Arabian desert and into Midian, the Sinai Peninsula whether in into Midian.
He had 40 years to think about this disappointment, 30 years to contemplate on what had gone wrong, 40 years to reexamine his theology and the fear of disappointment with God. And from the time he was 40 until he was 80 years old, there was no record in the Bible of any revelation from God. None. Can you imagine the loneliness, the questions, the wonderment that must have crossed through Moses' heart over those decades of his life? God uses our disappointments to teach us life lessons.
By the time he was 80, Moses was humbled, good and humbled. He was broken of his reliance on his own ability and his wisdom. In fact, by the time he was 80, Moses even sees himself as weak and incapable and he is reluctant even when God appears to him on that holy ground on the Horde to accept God's commission. He is reluctant. He is humbled. But because of that, Moses is also usable.
God had prepared him not only with leadership skills in his early life, but now he had prepared him with character. And God appears to him with a new understanding of himself at the bush and gives to Moses the commission and the enablement to accomplish that commission. Like Moses, you may have also had certain expectations in life based upon what you sincerely believed about God and about yourself, but your expectations were crushed and you are living today in some medium of your soul.
Perhaps you were serving God in some sort of ministry and your dreams were rejected and you fled. Or you prayed for the health of a loved one and your expectations of answered prayer of recovery were not realized. Perhaps you were sure God was leading in a business decision and now that decision has got financial disaster to you. It may be that you read your children according to the book, but today they don't follow God at all.
Perhaps you did what you believed God wanted you to do, but nonetheless your marriage ended in divorce. There are many, millions, many, millions where the soul can dwell. And it was in his soul's million that God called Moses to the burning bush and rescued him from his disappointment. And I get excited about thinking that it may be a time for God's burning bush in your life.
There's a third expectation or third observation about life expectation that I want us to think about and that is that expectation built on God will be rewarded. You see what Moses had believed about God was not incorrect, but his conclusion was. He may have thought that he had God all to do that, but he needed to know more of God and to know God more intimately by his personal name. And that's what God gave him on that heart. Who shall I say is sick of me?
asked Moses. And God says, tell them that I am what I am. I'll send you. And God revealed to Moses the meaning and the relationship of his name Yahweh. And then he received revelation of God's way, God's way, not Moses' way of rescuing the people that God loved. In your million, in your million too, God's goal is that you might come to know him and develop a loving relationship with him. Your daily encounters with God will give you insight into his ways and his purposes.
And as you gain that insight, then begin to build new expectations of life and that understanding that he gives you. Moses' initial understanding of God wasn't wrong, but his understanding grew. And as a result of that, God did something greater in Moses' life than Moses could have ever dreamed of. Stop and think about it. If Moses had done it his way, he might have been successful.
He might have been able to lead a sufficient revolt against the Egyptians to get some of the people out of Egypt, but thousands would have been killed. But God's way was entirely different. God had a better way. And it may be that God has allowed you to experience disappointment, but when you have interpreted it as his failure in your life, so that in the end he can teach you more about himself and do something greater in your life than you could have dreamed of.
So what do you do with disappointments with God? How do you handle those? Well, like Moses, we may spend some time hurting. Hopeful it won't be 40 years. And nowhere does God say that 40 years was wasted either, but it was 40 years. We can answer that question by looking at Moses' life, but I want us to go to a New Testament scene to answer the question of what you do with disappointments with God.
And to do that, you may want to turn your Bible to John chapter 11, because here we have another disappointment, this time with Jesus. Mary and Matthew send a telegram, so to speak, to Jesus telling him that his good friend Lazarus was sick. And he says that Jesus delayed going back to Bethany, but then he left him, headed back with his disciples to that place just outside of Jerusalem.
And in verse 20 it says, when Martha heard that Jesus was coming, she went out to meet him, but Mary stayed at home. Lord, Martha said to Jesus, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. What do you think she's been thinking about for the last four days? What do you think has eaten away at her heart? Found her brother, exactly in that grave? She says, I know that even now, what God will do and whatever you ask, and Jesus said to her, your brother will rise again.
Martha answered, I know he will rise again in the resurrection of the last day. Jesus said to her, I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live even though he dies. And whoever lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this? Yes, Lord, she told him. I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, who was to come into the world. I have to make this very quick, but try to track with me. How do you handle disappointment like Martha and Mo have with Jesus?
Like Moses had with God, how do you handle those kinds of disappointments? First of all, I noticed that Martha acknowledged her soul's pain. And that's what you have to do. There are some of us who think that it's spiritual to cover up the pain in our souls. And we think that I am not supposed to be disappointed with God, but I am not. And we deny what is actually there. That is neither spiritual nor godly. God deals with us on the basis of truth.
And the first thing we have to do is to be honest with God. And if we feel that God has healed us, if we feel, now he heals us, but we feel it, if we feel that we're ready to tell him, just as Martha did, Lord, if you had been here, would you have been here? The second thing I noticed she does is that she affirms what she believes. Jesus led her to do this. She talks about what she believes in verse 22. I know that even now God will give you whatever you ask.
Verse 24, I know that he will rise again in the resurrection of the last bow. She believed these things. That's her theology coming out. And that's the second thing that we all need to do. Aren't we? We have acknowledged our pain. We need them to go back to the roots of our theology. What do I believe? What are those core beliefs in my life? Even if I feel that they've not been enacted, that I've not experienced the benefit, how do I nonetheless really believe about what?
And then the third thing I noticed is that she built her new expectation on a new understanding that God gave her. Jesus said to Martha, I AM, notice by the way that's me, the same one that Moses got. But this time Jesus said I AM the resurrection and the life. And he goes on to elaborate on that. And he said, you believe this? And she said, yes I believe that the Christ, the Son, the living God, and she began to build her new expectation.
And he knew that through her disappointment and the pain, that Jesus was able to come to Bethany and do something for her that she could never have imagined. For she understood that Jesus could heal the sick, but did she understand that Jesus could raise Lazarus from the dead?
And so Jesus came and gave her a new understanding, I AM the resurrection, Martha, it's not that resurrection is coming in the future, that's true, but there's no Martha, I AM the resurrection, you're standing in the presence of resurrection. And having given her that new understanding, that new revelation of himself, she expresses this wonderful statement and then Jesus walks up to the grave and raises Lazarus from the dead.
I don't know what God is going to do in your life, but I can tell you this, that if like Moses and like Martha and like a lot of us in our spiritual pilgrimages, you are sitting here today disappointed with God, and the expectations in life that you've developed is how you thought was good theology, have failed. God's in that, and God's teaching you something. And what you need to do is to acknowledge your pain to God.
You need to go back and reaffirm what you believe to be true, and then let the Lord bring you a new understanding of himself, and give you his perspective on what you've been through in this disappointment. And to give you a new expectation, which will most likely be something far greater than you could ever have imagined on your own. Will you do that today?
Instead of being angry at God and disappointed and disillusioned, will you come back to the Lord and say, Lord, here's the truth, here's how I feel. Lord, here's how I believe. Now show me yourself. And in some way, God is going to do that. And he will renew you. And you will have a vision, you will have a dream, you will have an expectation that will be God-sized. Let's pray.
... If our heads are bad, I want to read to you just a few sentences from the James Alexander family, this young man who died in fight 800. The father said, It's done a lot to teach us about suffering and the common bond we have with humanity. We have gotten comfort even from unbelievers who are willing to cry with us. I believe, he says, that God, that's God's common grace. At the heart of it, it's just the grace of Christ that gets us through it. He's there, he's sufficient.
Oh Father, I pray that some think he's here this morning and hiding inside, that today they find Jesus Christ's grace sufficient. And I pray that you will bring that child of yours in your arms back to yourself and meet them in the middle of their soul with a new understanding of yourself, a new expectation for life. And do that in such a way that you will be truly honored. Would you stand with me please and let's sing with our heads bowed to the Lord.
Have thine own way, Lord, have thine own way. Thou art the Father, I am the claim. Noblery and nobly, after thy will, While I am writing, muted and still. Where Jesus, you are the Father, Where reminded that rubble of clay, from which you have breathed the breath of life. Now form and fashion us, Filling in our expectations of life upon what is true. Form and fashion us with expectations that only you can fulfill, And that you will do it for the glory of God.
Thank you for not leaving us in midium, For not leaving us in disappointment, But for reclaiming us and causing us to walk on with you. Amen.