How Do We Define Ourselves?

Guest Speaker Steve Saccone titles his message for Mosaic, "Fresh Start on Destiny".   We just finished a decade, which is kind of cool.  Television shows talk about all the special events that reflect on this decade and everything that happened in it.  There are so many things that change in any given decade and there always defining moments that identify or mark this time.  The same is true for our lives, good or bad.  Many of us have God encounters where our lives expand and we feel spiritually close.  But on the other hand, many times in our lives we have times where God seems nonexsitent.  It is so hard during these times to deal with this.  In both of these type of defining moments, in some ways, we can get paralyzed. 



Today, Steve reviews what happend in the story of Moses.  When we hear a story like Moses', we might think, "Well, what do I have in common with a guy who delivered a nation from slavery or from a guy who saw a buring bush?...This is a guy who parted the Red Sea and lived a couple of thousand years ago."  What do we have in common?  Moses had failures and stumbles even while he was still keeping his eyes on God .. Clearly, this was a guy who experienced the ups and downs of God.  Moses' life can be divided into 4 seasons.  Along the way, he learned to reconcile each seasoon and he pushed through.   

In the Book of Philippians 1:6, Moses believed in this verse.  he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.  So, when we read this, we can learn to have more faith that God is at work for what he wants to do through us. 

Moses got off to   a rough start.  He was born as a Hebrew, but he was placed in slavery by the Egyptians. Exodus 1 says, "Then a new king, who did not know about Joseph, came to power in Egypt. 'Look,' he said to his people, 'the Israelites have become much too numerous for us. Come, we must deal shrewdly with them or they will become even more numerous and, if war breaks out, will join our enemies, fight against us and leave the country.'  So they put slave masters over them to oppress them with forced labor, and they built Pithom and Rameses as store cities for Pharaoh. But the more they were oppressed, the more they multiplied and spread; so the Egyptians came to dread the Israelites and worked them ruthlessly. They made their lives bitter with hard labor in brick and mortar and with all kinds of work in the fields; in all their hard labor the Egyptians used them ruthlessly."  This was the world Moses was born into .  And then you see in verse 22, "Then Pharaoh gave this order to all his people: 'Every boy that is born you must throw into the Nile, but let every girl live.'

Then in chapter two, "Now a man of the house of Levi married a Levite woman, and she became pregnant and gave birth to a son. When she saw that he was a fine child, she hid him for three months. But when she could hide him no longer, she got a papyrus basket for him and coated it with tar and pitch. Then she placed the child in it and put it among the reeds along the bank of the Nile. His sister stood at a distance to see what would happen to him. (photo from http://www.1st-art-gallery.com/)

 

Now imagine being Moses' mother and you hid your child for three months, but you can no longer hide him because he is crying, so you put him on the river!  Imagine going through the same emotions with your child and being in this situation.    

"Then Pharaoh's daughter went down to the Nile to bathe, and her attendants were walking along the river bank. She saw the basket among the reeds and sent her slave girl to get it. She opened it and saw the baby. He was crying, and she felt sorry for him. "This is one of the Hebrew babies," she said. Then his sister asked Pharaoh's daughter, "Shall I go and get one of the Hebrew women to nurse the baby for you?"

'Yes, go,' she answered. And the girl went and got the baby's mother. Pharaoh's daughter said to her, 'Take this baby and nurse him for me, and I will pay you." So the woman took the baby and nursed him. When the child grew older, she took him to Pharaoh's daughter and he became her son. She named him Moses, saying, "I drew him out of the water."

So, Pharoah's daughter finds the baby and, instead of killing him, she takes him as her own.  When you think of Moses, he was born of a people who believed in One God, but he was raised in the house of "many gods".  Born to a slave, but raised by an Egyptian prince.  What an identity crisis!  If there wasa anyone who would have a crisis of faith, it would be Moses.  I would imagin that Moses frequently asked where God was.  But when we read the story, we see that God was at work all through Moses' life.  Sometimes in our own lives, defining moments that are in the negative camp leave us wondering where God is and we sometimes let the negative side of the circumstances derail us in our faith.  But what God wants us to know is His hand is at work in our lives whether we feel His presences or not. 

As Moses grew older, he began to make his own decisions and as his second season of life began, but it aslo didn't begin very well. He was about 40 years old and saw an Egyptian beating a slave.  He then killed the Egyptian and buried him in the sand.  Later, he saw two Hebrew slaves fighting and when he went to break up the fight, they asked how he could be their judge after he himself had killed.  Moses thought nobody knew!  It's not like the Internet existed back then which could spread the word quickly, but word had indeed gotten around amd Moses was now afraid for his life. How did Moses react?  How did he respond?  He ran like many people do!  They hide.  As in our own lives, Moses hid.  But we don't need to run from life, rather we need to run too God.  We don't have to earn our way back to God.  He extends Grace to us. 

A week ago, Steve and his family went to Chicago for the holidays and he was reminded of the notion of God's grace.  As they walked onto the plane, he noticed looks he was getting from the other passengers because he was bringing on board his one year old son, Hudson.  People were anxious because they knew a young child usually cries.  Steve worked his way towards the back of the plane and sat where a woman sighed so loud her dread was obvious.  Inevitably, his son started crying and 30 minutes went by without a break.  Sherry, his wife, was apologetic, but the woman next to them was stiff and almost not acknowleding their pardons at all.  We live in a world like this, don't we?  People don't give us grace.  God is not like this.  In the world, if you don't benefit people, they don't give you grace, but God does.  Our world has made it tough for us to swallow the concept that God wants us to come to Him! 

In Chapter three, the beginning of Moses' third 40 year period, now 80 or so, "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 desert and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. There the angel of the Lord appeared to him in flames of fire from within a bush. Moses saw that though the bush was on fire it did not burn up. So Moses thought, "I will go over and see this strange sight—why the bush does not burn up.  When the Lord saw that he had gone over to look, God called to him from within the bush, 'Moses! Moses!' And Moses said, 'Here I am.'  'Do not come any closer,' God said. 'Take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy ground.' Then he said, '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.

The Lord said, 'I have indeed seen the misery of my people in Egypt. I have heard them crying out because of their slave drivers, and I am concerned about their suffering.  So I have 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, Hittites, Amorites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites. And now the cry of the Israelites has reached me, and I have seen the way the Egyptians are oppressing them.  So now, go. I am sending you to Pharaoh to bring my people the Israelites out of Egypt.'

Wait a minute, did you see what happened?  This was Moses who was a murderer!  But God appears before him in a burning bush.  Imagine Moses hearing that God had chosen him.  Moses was thinking, "hold on, I don't know if you have the right guy.   People may have questioned themselves if Moses was the right guy, but he was.  Have you experienced times when you were judged by someone based on one of your worst moments?  Isn't that painful?  It drives us to define ourselves by our worst moments.  We become paralyzed and unable to be courageous for the Kingdom because the shame that others won't let us forget.  Thank God, He sees us at our best.  Thank God, He sees us for what we can be in Him.  God has a plan and He will be faithful to complete it.  He wants us to take part. 

Moses tells God that he is not the right man, but God says he is and that His people will celebrate in worship on this same mountain where they are.  Then Moses asks who he shall say has sent him to free the Israelites and God says, ''This is what you are to say to the Israelites: 'I AM has sent me to you.'  God also said to Moses, 'Say to the Israelites, 'The Lord, the God of your fathers—the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob—has sent me to you.'  This is my name forever, the name by which I am to be remembered from generation to generation.'"

These men God named are the heros of the faith and God basically says Moses is to tell the people that He is the doorway of deliverence and freedom; the pathway to peace and the roadway to life and joy.  Like Moses, our instinctive reaction is to think we are not capable and we fall from our call. But God can finish a great work in us! 

As we get to the end of Moses third 40 year period, we get to an interesting time in his life. The last chapter of Deuteronomy talks about Moses climbing Mt. Nebo and how God shows Moses all of the land that He delivered the Israelites.  It was on this mountain top with God that Moses died and was buried in an unknown place.  He was 120 when God called him to climb a mile high mountain.  Was this a metaphor of his life?  There were many mountains he had to climb.  God was with him at every climb as he led his people to freedom.  God showed up.  Somewhere along the way, Moses learned to trust Him.  What else strikes Scott is that God buried Moses. God was there in the beginning and He was there in the end.  Who goes to a funeral when someone dies?  Friends and family go, right?  God seems to say here that He is a friend of Moses.  God is a friend of ours, too.  He wants to walk with us and share life with us.

So if there are 3 things to take from this message, they would be:

1) God doesn't want us to be define ourselves by our worst moments. 

2) If we do our part, God will do His.

3) God wants to send us out of our Egypt.  That place where you can bring others to freedom.  God wil give you strength.

There will never be any one like you.  The last three versus in Deuteronomy talk about how there was no one ever again like Moses.  There is no one quite like you either.  You cannot be the best version of someone else.  You have to be you and trust that God is bringing out the best for our lives.  God will not ask us why we were not like David or Moses.  He will want us to be what we were ordained to be in ourselves.  Will we?

Who Would Sell God's Children?

It's interesting to be back in America after you've been in a foreign country. It's odd to come back to cars and air conditioning. For the last year, Johnson Bowie has been on this quest fighting human trafficking. About a year ago, he picked up this book called "Not For Sale" on his way back Nicaragua. God gripped him because there is still slavery in America. It is the number two or three top criminal enterprise in the world behind the drug trade. It is a $31 billion a year business with over 27 million people in slavery as we speak. Slaves can be child soldiers, physical slaves or sex slaves. Last year, David Batstone, the author of the book, actually came and spoke at Fusion and talked about a project, the "Veronica House".

"Veronica" was the name of a little 10 or 12 year old girl who, by some circumstance, ended up on the streets of Peru selling candy and hats to buy books for school. One day, while she was out selling, some "friends" gave her clothes to look better so that she could sell more candy. But that night, the "friends" came back and told her she owed them money for the dress. The next night, she was raped by more than 10 men to pay. Veronica was able to break away one time to go see Lucy, a local hero of children on the streets, but there wasn't enough room in Lucy's shelter, so Veronica was sent back for a short while after being told she could return in a few weeks. But two weeks later, she was found strangled to death by a john in a hotel room.

So, Johnson and his team went to visit the Veronica House. On the way, Eric, one of his team members, had had a dream that a little girl was being raped in the street and people were just walking by, not doing anything about it and not even paying attention. The girl looked right at Eric and said, "Is there no one who will stand up to this?"



It was a little heavy when Johnson left. His team loaded up on a plane to go down to Lima to see Lucy. They knew it wasn't going to be a normal mission trip. They went prepared to do whatever they had to in order to help. Lucy is sort of the Mother Theresa of Lima. Children would pour out from the streets to hug her when she came around. At one point, a commotion arose when Johnson's team was there. Children are told not to sell in the streets and a policeman was confiscating candy and hats. Lucy stormed out and put the officer in his place.

In 1991, the president of Peru decided he was going to "cleanse" the streets. After the announcement, kids were turning up dead in the streets. The government was literally killing them! One night, Lucy, a lawyer at the time, gave a couple of kids her card saying, "If you need a place to stay, come and bring your friends if you need to." But when Lucy came back by her office, there were over 600 kids piled in the room!! This was where Johnson and his team went to visit. He also went out into the streets to see the river banks where the kids slept, to see the cardboard box homes and to see the kids huffing glue bags to ease the pain. They heard about how the government handed out food, but had put broken glass in the sandwiches. They saw the scars all over the kids' arms from where they would cut themselves so the police wouldn't touch them because they were covered with blood.

Lucy would cry while telling a story about how a boy made a Mother's Day card for his mother. Lucy encouraged the boy to give the card to his mother, but instead he gave the card to Lucy because he said she was the closest thing he'd ever had to a mother. Only a few days later, the boy was killed while crossing the street.

Lucy told Johnson about the "Magdalene House" which she had opened to more than 200 street kids, but said that the government had shut the house down when some rich neighbors complained about it. This forced the kids back into the streets and since then, several have already died.



Johnson and his team went with Lucy to talk to the teenage prostitutes on the streets. There, they met Eve. Eve was kidnapped, tortured and raped one night by a john, who was caught and was sent to prison. But now Eve can't sleep in the same place on any given night because she found out that the john's family is trying to kill her.

Johnson met Tulo, who was raped and put into sexual slavery. She ended up getting an infection that nullified all of her reproductive organs. They met Lucero, a very pretty girl. There's something wrong if you are pretty on the streets because someone will take you. A family actually took her and made her their slave. There was a mother, father and the daughter was Lucero's pimp! They owned her. She's now trapped in the cycle of this life. She has to pay for the street corner she's forced to stand on, pay for the hotel room she's raped in and pay for the clothes she has to buy to find new "clients". Lucero ended up getting pregnant and so her girl pimp kicked her over and over again in the stomach to induce an abortion. No amount of money could pay to get these girls off the streets because of the system.

While they were there, a story came out in the newspaper saying, "Sluts Don't Even Honor Good Friday". It had a picture of the very people Johnson was sitting with on the front. The girls were hurt and angry because the newspaper didn't understand that these children didn't have a choice and even hated life on the street. Driving down the street at midnight, Johnson's team saw car after car after car; literally hundreds, lined up waiting for girls to come available for the night.

Every Easter, these kids pull out pictures of kids they know who've died on the streets. At this point, Johnson shows these pictures to his audience. He points out a baby who died of AIDS. There was a 4 year old who was taken, raped and killed. Only a few months later, both parents died of tuberculosis. Stopping at another slide, Johnson shows a 24 year old man with his daughter, Tatyana. Talking with him, Johnson learned that his daughter died while he was in prison. Sometimes, policemen would shoot kids just for being where they shouldn't be in the streets.

On one day, Johnson was able to stand in front of these kids and open up the Bible to Genesis 39, where Joseph was taken, sold into slavery and thrown into prison. These kids didn't know the stories of the Bible, but there was something magnetic about the Word. He promised them that, like with Joseph, God had not forgotten them and the Lord was with them. This was on Easter Sunday that he was telling them this! But one kid said, "You don't understand. People don't come to see us. Why would you come to see us?" Johnson said it was because he wanted them to know God had not forgotten them.

One kid named Ruben and his brother grew up being repeatedly raped by their father. His father would send them out into the streets to earn or beg for money and they would not be allowed home until they returned with the money. Ruben was gay and sat down with them to explain the unbelievable events in his life. After everything that he shared and everything that was forced on him as a child, Ruben asked Johnson to pray with him and then he asked if Johnson thought God could forgive him... Reuben, that night, asked Christ into his heart.

There was another home where about 20 kids were staying. One of the kids' mothers were on the street prostituting herself and the kids went and got her off the street! While they were at this home, a license was revoked for the home to stay open, but God opened the doors to keep it going. Meanwhile, the Veronica House is almost finished, but not quite. But for every night it is not finished, the girls who know about it have to go back out into the streets and prostitute themselves again.



Johnson's team had an itinerary while they were there. There were some listed events and sights they were going to see as part of their trip, but there came a point where they had to stop themselves and decide if they were missionaries or tourists. When they decided they were missionaries, that is when they were forever moved by what they saw and heard.

The itinerary our world sets for us here in the U.S. is 1) Get a good education 2) Get a good job. 3) Make a lot of money. 4) Get a nice home. 5) Have kids. 6) Give them a good education. This is a cycle that doesn't end. The reality check here is "Is this all that God has lined up for us?" Will we go 60 years on the world's path or go on God's path? When will our lives matter? When will we decide we have a life of mission and not a life as a tourist? There is a bigger plan!

1 Peter 1:13 says "Prepare your minds for action". Something amazing happens on a mission trip. Do you know why? You are there for a reason! You have a mission! What if we woke up with a mind of action and mission every single day? What would happen if we started living life ON PURPOSE. Ephesians 5:15 says, "Be very careful how you live".

Smith Wigglesworth was a plumber in the early 1900's who wrote devotionals. One of his stories was titled "Opportunity for Action". Someone told him they were going to have some entertainment and wanted him to come asking if he had a talent. Smith said the he would come and sing. When he got there, he sang a song of praise to God which ended up turning the dance into an opportunity where 6 young men came to Christ.

Mother Theresa once said, "If you can't feed a hundred, feed one."