Beth Moore - God Is On The Move - Part 2
Ephesians 5, and I want to read verses 15 through 18 to you. What I'm seeking to do over the next few minutes is prove to you, scripturally, which is what you should want, prove to you scripturally that what we're talking about this weekend is something that God wants for us according to his Word. So Ephesians 5, I'm gonna read verses 15 through 18. Says this: "Pay careful attention, then, to how you live, not as unwise people but as wise, making the most of the time, because the days are evil. So don't be foolish, but understand what the Lord's will is. And don't get drunk with wine, which leads to reckless living, but be filled by the Spirit".
Now, the reason he's making that comparison is really, really cool, really, really cool. And you know, I'm always careful to say in wine country, it does not say that having a glass of wine is a sin. Talking about drunkenness here. I hate to tell you, but I really don't think that the wine that Jesus drank was Welch's. I'm not sure of it. I can't be sure of it, but I don't think so. But what is drunkenness? That is drinking enough to where it is swaying, it's controlling your behavior, it's controlling your mouth, what you say, it's controlling how you're acting, the decisions you're making.
This is the same comparison. He said, "No, no. Be filled by the Spirit and the Spirit will begin to control a lot of what you're saying, a lot of how you're moving, a lot of what you're noticing". Are we gonna get...of course we are. We're gonna get it wrong lots of times. But he is so adamant that we seek to understand what the Lord's will is. He says earlier in Ephesians, he says, "And try to discern..." Oh, it's in that same 5th chapter. "Try to discern what is pleasing to the Lord".
How can we try to discern what is pleasing to the Lord? Wanna read you another couple of verses so you'll know. Psalm 32:8 says, God says: "I will instruct you and I will show you the way to go; and my eye on you, I will give you counsel". Remember that in Acts, Paul and his team, I mean, they'd start to go into a city and the Lord would be going like, "You're not going there".
Now, it is very possible because there were times that the apostle Paul actually heard God speak and he got a vision of Christ, and Christ just like showed up with him. But probably a lot of those times in Luke, he's moving in the Spirit just like we're trying to, where they're trying to get to minister someplace and God just slams that door and there's no way in. He's going like, you know, "We're gonna go over here because we can't go there". That's what we're talking about here.
So Colossians 1:9 through 11, this is my prayer for us, including me. This is what I'm asking from the Lord: "We are asking that you," and me, "may be filled with the knowledge of God's will in all wisdom and spiritual understanding, so that we may walk in a way," did you hear that action verb? "So that we may walk in a way worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him: bearing fruit in every good work and growing in the knowledge of God, being strengthened with all power, according to his glorious might, so that we may have great endurance and patience, with joy".
It is the will of God for us to discern, as often as he's willing to show it, what is the will of God? Otherwise, you know what we're stuck with? Doing like this... and then that's how we're going to decide what we're doing next. Or we'll just constantly make our spiritual practice asking God for signs. And I do believe, I ask God for signs, but I don't think we make a daily spiritual discipline out of it. He's like, "Open my Word and see what I'm leading you to do". He will always work consistently with his Word.
I mean, we'll watch an episode of "The Office" and suddenly God's calling us to move to Scranton, Pennsylvania. You know what I'm talking about? Like a great missions pastor, the kind that's really mobilizes will come and speak to our group and next thing we know we're, like, on a plane to New Guinea. And we haven't even sought, we don't even, we're unprepared because we're just like going with...I want you to understand before I give you this example, I so love and respect the people I get to serve. But there are people that will literally tell me, they will either come to the ministry, maybe to be prayed over, whatever it might be, or they'll just show up at my church or whatever, and God has moved them to Houston to work for me.
I am hoping the Holy Spirit's gonna tell me the same thing. Because I don't know what to think that you just completely relocated without a job here. When was the last time someone came to you and said, "I have a word from the Lord for you"? Oh, this happens all the time. And sometimes it's legit, sometimes it's legit. But are you like me and that you think, "Well, I better do it then".
Now, we hadn't heard a word, but now we feel compelled because, you know, we hadn't been hearing anything and they just heard a word for us. Like, you know what, God has your number. God has your number, God has your number, God has your number. I was thinking often with direction, with really strong direction, really life-altering direction we get from God, like a relocation, like a new job, like marriage, like so many things, like surrendering to an area of vocational ministry, whatever it may be.
Sometimes it may be out of the blue. Other times it is a strong confirmation of something that was already bothering us. Maybe we didn't even want it. We just kept stuffing it down and stuffing it, like an inkling of a feeling. And then he makes this, very often that's the way it will come. Now don't discount something that is out of the blue. I'm not meaning for you to, listen, if God just directs you out of the blue this weekend, don't discount it, but I am gonna say you are gonna seek confirmation from the Lord. We're not just gonna get a bright idea and that's it.
So let's take down a couple of points. And the first one is this. So we're talking about God on the move and how we're gonna respond. And number one is this, it's one word: move. Move. And by this I mean perhaps just in place, right where you are. It could be, and what I'm wondering, and this is what led me by the Spirit, I pray, to this particular topic for the weekend. When something happens in your life that just paralyzes you. It won't always even be what you expect it to be. You might have gotten a promotion at work and been given a really big title, and for some reason now, you don't have the confidence you used to have, and you're just, like, frozen.
And maybe that now you are a supervisor over somebody that was a peer to you and it's like, "Now I don't know what to do. I'm just paralyzed". It can come by a crisis, a sudden change, even a change of plans, a disappointment, a shock of some kind, not even always a bad one, a loss, but something can happen that psychologically or emotionally or spiritually just paralyzes us. And have you noticed that you'll just get in that, if you're like me, that compulsive mindset where you feel like you can't move. It may not be in every area, but what I will tell you is when we get paralysis in a particular area, it has an effect on every other area.
And so one of the things I believe God has brought us here this weekend for is that the areas where we are just, like, paralyzed right now, we need to get unstuck. Would anybody be into that with me? We just like, need to get, I need to see some hands. We need to get unstuck from that situation where we can get up and go forward. Listen to me carefully. Sometimes it's not time yet to move on. We just need to move. And why? Because living beings move from the very beginning, Genesis, and the living creatures moved along the ground, and this move, move, move, move. It talks about life, you look for it, all over scripture, Genesis to Revelation. It talks about living creatures that move, they move.
Acts 17:28 says, "For in him," meaning in Christ, "we live and we move and we have our being". You are alive. Say to yourself, "I am alive". You know what I want you to say? "I am still alive". I want you to say it again and I want you to say it with conviction, "I am still alive". Oh, yes you are, oh, yes you are, oh, yes you are. And I mean, you don't have to move on yet, but could you just move a little bit because you're just alive. You're still living, you're still breathing. You are not dead. So move and breathe.
Number two is this: move on. Every one of our seven points, listen carefully, will apply to every single one of us at one time or another in our lives. But what I'm asking God for us in this house over these couple of days is that we will be able to differentiate between what is a now word for us and what may be a later word for us or a word we're looking back at, "Ah, that's what he was saying to me at that point in my life," fair? So your word, like, you may, like, four of these points may be, like, "That's me right now".
But I want you to listen. I want you to listen, I want you to listen and sense the Holy Spirit working with you, the Holy Spirit who is around us, who loves his Word, who loves the Word, who loves to resonate hearts, the Spirit inside of us with what the Spirit is doing around us, see if he will define for you what is your now word and see if it's, "Move on". Because here's the thing, sometimes what happens is we get stuck because we are so heavy burdened we cannot move because we just keep accumulating life stuff.
Now that may be physical, I'm all about that. That could be that we just got too much physical stuff. It may be that, but I'm really talking about, like, we'll have unforgiveness toward one person and because we started practicing unforgiveness toward them, we just have a whole group of them before you know it, a whole classroom of people. You'll notice that if you give way to hatred for a couple of people, start noticing. You'll start noticing that you begin then to hate, like, whole groups of people. Why? Because we just, like, slip into that. It was a little harder with the first couple we hated, but after a while we got the swing of it. You know what I'm saying?
I mean, hate started becoming natural to us, and hate is natural to this world. It's natural to this world. And what happens is all this stuff accumulates, all this heavy baggage, and so we got our cross-body bag, but we've also got our backpack on, we got our pillow in under here, we're rolling a suitcase behind us, and we got another one right here, and this is the way we're trying to walk through life and we're wondering why we can't move forward, because we can't move on. But let me tell you something, we gotta move on, if we're gonna move forward, because there are things that have even been precious to you.
Listen, listen, things that have even been precious to you, that it is time now to move on from. That season has now ended and God has got some place he wants to take you and what you're saying is, "I wanna take all of this with me to the next place". And he's going, "You know what I want you to do? I want that to still be very dear to you. I want you to memorialize it. I want you to remember it. But we're not taking it with us. That hatred, that bitterness we feel towards someone, that resentment, all the stuff".
I mean, I'm a big believer in therapy. But you know, if you've been working on the same area for 15 years, it may be that your word this weekend is move on, move on. Because sometimes we're waiting to understand something. But maybe we won't get clear understanding until we see the face of Jesus. Maybe he says, "You know what? I was gonna give you that answer over there and where you're supposed to be moving, but you're so stuck, I can't get you there where I'd give you insight". Is anybody tracking with me this weekend?
We got to move on in order to move forward. Now here's an interesting thing. Jot down Genesis 33. Genesis 33. Now it's a story about Jacob and Esau. Now if you're familiar with the Old Testament story, you know that Esau stole his brother's blessing, he stole his brother's birthright. I mean, he was just a constant, constant deceiver. And Jacob, the deceiver, the one that is the supplanter, I mean, this thing is just a mess. Listen, if you think that your dysfunctional family is too much for God to work in, you have not begun to study the scriptures. I mean, there is hardly a functional family in it. I mean, hardly in it.
And so it has a place where Jacob has done Esau so wrong because Esau's been also full of himself, all the things going wrong, and then they are about to meet up as Jacob is being sent back home. And it's so interesting because he expects Esau to come in hatred but he doesn't. He comes and embraces him but he says to him something very, very interesting. He says to Jacob in 33:12: "Then Esau said, 'Let's move on, and I'll go ahead of you.'" And so he's saying, "Let's move on together". Well, Jacob is going like, "You know what, you go on without me. I'm glad that we've made up, but there are times that two people need to move on, two separate directions".
And so I want you to know that. Now, do not mess with me over getting home and going, "Beth told me to leave my husband". No, I did not. No, I did not, um-um. Perfectly good marriage, "But Beth told me, Beth told me that, I got a word from God this week and..." No, no you did not. Now if you are in danger, you get your hind end to safety. That I will tell you. You need to pull out into safety when you can and you need to get help. But what I am talking about is that sometimes the way we have to move on is that we have to move on in a couple of different directions when there has been just a lot of baggage in a friendship or a lot of baggage in a work situation.
Sometimes it comes time that it's just like, move on. Deuteronomy 2:2-3 says this, God says to the people: "You have circled this mountain long enough, now turn north". I'll say that again. It's Deuteronomy 2:2-3: "You have circled this mountain long enough". Like, how many times? How many times? How many times you circled that mountain? Have you fixed it? My guess is no. My guess is no, I haven't. Like, it's time to move on. It's time. Somebody say, "I need to move on".
All right, the third and last one for tonight is this: Move forward. Move forward. All right, you got Exodus 14. I want you to turn there with me. Exodus, second book in your Bible, Exodus 14. You'll recognize the place because this has been from the very beginning of Exodus in the historical narrative of the people of God, the descendants of Abraham, the Israelites at this point, they got to go to escape the famine in Egypt when the famine was in their homeland and they would have starved to death. Because of God's favor on Joseph, he gave him favor with the Pharaoh, his whole family was saved because they were given a place to move away from the famine.
Well, generations go by and they no longer have a pharaoh that has favor over them and they are multiplying and God is blessing them like crazy and they become then, they have to find a way to keep them down so they oppress them and they make them slaves and then, because they are reproducing enough, they're growing in population enough, where they decide, "No, we gotta find a way to exterminate their children". And so it just is the most heartbreaking and tragic story, but of course God raises up a deliverer and that's going to be Moses who's going to prefigure in some ways. Of course, Jesus is in a league all of his own. This is just a human, a very fallible, weak human, but he raises up Moses to lead them out.
Well here, finally, after ten plagues, after they've been through all of this, finally Pharaoh goes, "Get out, you can go". So out the Israelites go, but they get as far as the Red Sea and there's nothing but water in front of them and they look behind them and Pharaoh's army is coming back after them because why? Because they've come to their senses and realized so much of their prosperity was wrapped up in their slave class. Is this resonating with anybody? So they gotta have them. I mean, you gotta have people that are either cheap labor or they're free labor. And so they go back after 'em.
Well, this is where it gets very interesting. It says then, I want to read to you 10 through 16, 10 through 16, Exodus 14:10 through 16: "As Pharaoh approached, the Israelites looked up and there were the Egyptians coming after them! The Israelites were terrified and cried out to the LORD for help. And they said to Moses, 'Is it because there are no graves in 'Egypt that you have taken us away to die in the wilderness? What have you done to us by bringing us out of Egypt? Isn't this what we told you when we were still in Egypt: Leave us alone so that we may serve the Egyptians? It would have been better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the wilderness.'" So their thing is, "We should have stayed. We should have gone back".
I want you to watch the three different responses to what do we do now? Because this is the question many of us have in this room as we come this weekend, what do we do now? So for some of us, it's we go back into that slavery, whatever that was, back into that oppressive situation. And then watch what Moses, the leader, does. So Moses says, "But Moses said to the person, 'Don't be afraid. Stand firm and see the LORD'S salvation that he will accomplish for you today; for the Egyptians you see today you'll never see again. The LORD will fight for you, and you must be quiet.'"
Well, the Lord says to Moses in the next verse, in verse 15, "Why are you crying out to me? Tell the Israelites to break camp". In other words, tell them to move forward. Tell them to move forward. So here's, like, the people are going, "We need to go back". Moses is going, "Stand still". God's going, "Stand still? I'm gonna part these waters for you, and you're gonna walk your little self as fast as you can right over these waters".
Don't you know that they were like... Because it says that there were walls of water. And so, you know, can you imagine being the last few? And just like... and then here comes the water. It's like, you know, he's going like, "No, you don't stand. There are times you stand. But when I open the sea for you, girlfriend, guyfriend, for crying out loud, go, amen? Go forward".
I wanna tell y'all something that the Lord was really pressing on me and I believe this is of him. He's really been impressing on my heart recently how often we equate ending with failing. Stay with me here, stay with me here, stay with me here. That if anything ends, it had to have been a failure. Now we'll all agree that if we lived any time at all, any couple of decades, we all have had things end that were human failure. But we do it across the board.
And I'm gonna tell you what brought me to this example. A very good friend of mine is wrestling with this right now. She's had a brilliant career, a brilliant academic career, brilliant. But because in some of the last couple of places, she was unable to stay because of conviction, because of conviction. She bore publicly her soul about the fact that... we've all been there, so there's no shame on this at all, you know, that she's questioning her whole career. Because that is what we do. If it didn't end well, then all of it was bad.
And I want to say something to you. In God's economy, endings aren't always failings. They're completions. It was complete. You're saying, "Well, Beth, I got fired". Well, I'm gonna ask you, what were the 10 years before that like? Were you able to make a living to help your family? Did you make some friends and invest yourself in some relationships? How did you grow as a person while you were there?
But we dump the whole thing. The whole thing was terrible because it ended poorly. I am asking you, salvage the good that God has done. You get to keep the treasures out of that, the plunder out of it. Is anybody tracking with me this weekend? You get to keep that, it's yours to keep. What wonderful things happened? Quit looking at a completion of a season as failure. He's just done with that part. And you needed what he invested in that part of your life in order to go on to the next one. Lessons learned, tears shed, personal growth happened, some freedom from bondage. Listen, sometimes, the whole definition of success would be learning when to move.