Adonai: Owner Of AllParaugs

Ceding ownership of our lives to Adonai means allowing Him to use us in any way He chooses. 

In Exodus 4, Moses had been summoned by God to the mission of leading His chosen people out of bondage in Egypt—a mission that Moses felt thoroughly inadequate to complete. Moses, an adopted son of Pharaoh’s daughter, was now a disgraced, former leader (because of his murder of an Egyptian in Exodus 2:11-15) who had spent many years in exile in the desert as a shepherd. On top of this, God had ordered him to be His mouthpiece to Pharaoh, commanding him to free God’s people, and yet, as Moses confessed, 

“I have never been eloquent, neither recently nor in time past, nor since You have spoken to your servant; for I am slow of speech and slow of tongue.” 

Still, Moses clearly knew who he was arguing with, addressing God respectfully as “Adonai” (Exodus 4:10, 13). Combined with this acknowledgment of God as Adonai was the realization that, as Creator and Master, He owned all things and could use them in the way He saw fit. As such, Adonai took up this ownership and replied to Moses, 

“Who has made man’s mouth? Or who makes him mute or deaf, or seeing or blind? Is it not I, the Lord? Now then go, and I, even I, will be with your mouth, and teach you what you are to say” (Exodus 4:11-12). 

When I was a young man, I had my own serious speech impediment that required extensive speech therapy to overcome. No one who knew me as a stuttering youth could have envisioned that my vocation and calling would be to preach God’s Word. We may be uncomfortable with what Adonai is calling us to do or feel inadequate for the task at hand; however, we must remember that when we cede ownership into His hands, we find that Adonai is a Master who in surprising, paradoxical ways uses “earthen vessels so that the surpassing greatness of the power will be of God and not from ourselves” (2 Corinthians 4:7).