Living Fearless by Jamie WinshipSampel

Annunciation

There is no Hebrew word meaning “obey”; neither is there an English word for שמע. While this Hebrew verb is often translated as “hear,” it means much more than just hearing or listening but rather to “hear and respond appropriately.”

When the Bible says that YHWH “heard” the people, it means that He heard them and then acted on what they heard. So when we talk about obeying God, let’s think beyond rule-following to hearing God and responding appropriately.

Moses is listening to God and asking questions, but ultimately he responds with, “Please my Lord, send the message [of rescue to Israel] by [someone else]” (Exodus 4:13). Get this, reader! The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the great I AM, announces to his friend Moses that his identity is the one sent to draw Israel out of bondage, and Moses responds, “Send somebody else.”

If we could pull Moses aside for a moment and ask, “What emotion is driving your decision-making process right now?” I’m guessing he would answer like most of us and say fear grounded in shame. Moses might remind us of his last failed attempt at rescuing just one of his own Hebrew countrymen from an oppressive Egyptian and of his forty years in exile as a murderer. He went from a position of power and authority in the greatest kingdom of the day to being a sheep watcher of the desert” (Exod. 3:1). Now he’s supposed to go deliver the entire nation? Get real!

But God is not offering this annunciation of invitation to Moses so he’ll get real but so he’ll get true! Jesus says, “If you. . . [live] out what I tell you . . . you will experience for yourselves the truth, and the truth will free you” (John 8:32).

Moses really did make a mistake by moving to help his people without first asking God for wisdom. This real mistake had real consequences that cannot be denied or ignored. But this mistake did not steal Moses’s God-given identity and replace it with an identity of failure and shame. God’s appearance and words to Moses are restoring Moses to who he has always been—a friend and a deliverer of a nation.

In what ways is your false view of yourself, however real the mistakes you’ve made in the past, diminishing your capacity to hear and respond appropriately to the God who calls you by name and whose Word is ready to slice through all the lies you’ve come to believe about yourself?