God's School for Spiritual Leaders

One day a bricklayer was injured on the job. He sent the following letter to his employer describing his accident and requesting sick leave.

Dear Sirs,

I arrived at the job after the storm, checked the building out and saw that the top needed repairs. I rigged a hoist and a boom, attached a rope to a barrel and pulled a load of bricks to the top. I then secured the rope at the bottom of the building. After repairing the brickwork at the top of the building, I filled the barrel with leftover bricks. I went down to the ground floor to release the rope securing the barrel. However, I did not realize that the barrel was now heavier than I was. It jerked me up off the ground, and losing my presence of mind for a moment, I simply held onto the rope. I began to ascend the building at a high rate of speed. Halfway up, I met the barrel which was coming down fast, and sustained a blow to the shoulder. I kept hanging on, however, and went right to the top, where I hit my head on the boom, and got my fingers jammed in the pulley.

In the meantime, the barrel hit the ground and burst open, spilling bricks all over the place. The barrel was now lighter than I was. I started down the side of the building at high speed. Halfway down, I met the broken barrel coming up, and sustained a severe blow to my shins. I continued down and landed heavily on the pile of bricks, receiving several cuts and abrasions. At this time, I must have lost my presence of mind, because I let go of the rope. The barrel came down at a high rate of speed and hit me on the head, knocking me unconscious for a moment. I respectfully request disability leave.

Have you ever had days like that? Perhaps you’ve had times in your life when everything you did turned out wrong. You meant well, but nothing seemed to be working out. In Exodus 2, we meet Moses at just such a time in his life. He had just made the most momentous decision of his life - he had chosen to identify himself with the Hebrews in their affliction. He had turned his back on a glorious career in Egypt, perhaps one day to become the next pharaoh of Egypt, and had chosen to be one of God’s people.

The book of Acts sheds some light on his thought processes at the time:

Acts 7:22-29 Moses was educated in all the wisdom of the Egyptians and was powerful in speech and action. When Moses was forty years old, he decided to visit his fellow Israelites. He saw one of them being mistreated by an Egyptian, so he went to his defense and avenged him by killing the Egyptian.

Now here’s why he did that:

Moses thought that his own people would realize that God was using him to rescue them, but they did not.

I want you to realize that Moses had tremendous qualifications to be the leader of the Hebrews. He had received the best education that money could buy in the world of that day. He had been raised in the king’s house. He was used to issuing commands and orders. He was a man of authority with contacts in high places. He was at the very peak of his life - forty years old. Young enough to be a man of action, old enough to have gained some experience and wisdom.

But most importantly, Moses had a burden for his people. He saw their need. He empathized with the Hebrews to the point where he wanted to join them in their sufferings. He hurt because they hurt. He wanted to help them. What more could you ask for in a leader?

But Moses was rebuffed by the very people he was trying to help:

The next day Moses came upon two Israelites who were fighting. He tried to reconcile them by saying, ‘Men, you are brothers; why do you want to hurt each other?’ But the man who was mistreating the other pushed Moses aside and said, ‘Who made you ruler and judge over us? Do you want to kill me as you killed the Egyptian yesterday?’ When Moses heard this, he fled to Midian.

What looked so promising turned out to be a disaster. Moses had chosen to leave the Egyptians and join the Hebrews, only to find that the Hebrews wanted to have nothing to do with him. Moses was like a man on a trapeze who had let go of his own bar, only to find that the other bar that he thought he was jumping to was nowhere in sight! Now what?

Well, the Bible says that he fled to Midian. Midian is located east of Egypt in the Sinai peninsula on either side of the Gulf of Aqaba. It is a desolate place. Dry and barren, the temperature regularly goes into the hundreds. Nothing much grows there, only enough for the bedouins to graze a few scrawny goats and sheep. Midian is what we would call a God-forsaken place. And that is where Moses found himself.

He had been rejected by the Hebrews. He was wanted by the Egyptians. He must have felt like an utter failure, a wash-out. Here he was forty years old, with no future ahead of him. He had tried to do the right thing and it turned out incredibly wrong. Moses in Midian was a man who was totally defeated. Have you ever felt that way?

I want you to know that our disappointments can become God’s appointments. God wasn’t finished with Moses. Far from it. He had only just begun to develop him. What Moses thought was the beginning of the end of his life, was only just the end of the beginning! God uses the times of failure and defeat in our lives to teach us some of our most significant spiritual lessons. He uses the wilderness times to help us to better know Him and thus to equip us to better serve Him. When Moses ran from Egypt to the wilderness of Midian, he was running straight into the arms of God.

There are three things we need to know about Moses’ time in Midian.

1. It was a time of humiliation

2. It was a time of obscurity

3. It was a time of learning to wait on God

1. It was a time of humiliation:

Moses was forty years old when he fled to Midian. He had lost his career and his bright future as possibly the next king of Egypt. He had lost a fortune as the heir of the riches of the royal household. He had not even been accepted for the new job that he had applied for - being the new leader of the Hebrews. They didn’t want him. He had been rejected.

The only thing left for him to do with his life in Midian was to become a herder of sheep and goats. And that is what he did. He became a shepherd. But even that occupation was humiliating, because Moses had grown up in Egypt, where shepherds were despised.

Genesis 46:34 …all shepherds are detestable to the Egyptians.

To say that Moses was over-qualified for his work is the understatement of the year! He had all the academic degrees and graduate qualifications possible. He was a learned man. And here he was herding sheep. But this was precisely God’s plan for him.

Why did God plan it this way? Because he had two things for Moses to learn.

1. how to be humble

2. how to be a shepherd

You cannot be a spiritual leader that God can use unless you have learned humility. And you cannot learn humility without being humiliated. If you do not learn humility, then whenever you do something in God’s kingdom for God’s glory, you’re going to try to hold on to some of that glory for yourself. If you are going to lead people, and things go right, the people are going to praise you. And if you haven’t learned humility, then that praise is going to go to your head. You’re going to start believing that you are the reason why things are working out so well.

But humility is also necessary in a spiritual leader when things go wrong…

There is a very interesting verse in Numbers.

Numbers 12:3 (Now Moses was a very humble man, more humble than anyone else on the face of the earth.)

We believe that this verse, which occurs in parentheses was not written by Moses, who wrote the book of Numbers, but by a later editor, quite possibly Joshua. Now this verse occurs in a context where things were not going well. The Israelites were grumbling and complaining. In fact, Moses’ own brother Aaron and his sister Miriam were gossiping about Moses’ wife. They were also saying “has the Lord spoken only through Moses? Hasn’t he also spoken through us?” They were challenging Moses’ leadership. Why was it so important that Moses be humble at a time like this?

So that he wouldn’t answer them himself. Moses didn’t try to defend himself. A spiritual leader never looks worse than when he is defending himself. Much better to let the Lord answer for him. And that is exactly what the Lord did. Later in that same chapter in Numbers, God called Moses and Aaron and Miriam together and God read the riot act to Miriam and Aaron. He told them to cut it out. Moses never had to say a word to defend himself.

Do you know the difference between false humility and true humility? False humility is when you try to fool people into thinking that you are humble. Like the Dickens character Uriah Heep, you go around rubbing your hands together and telling people what a humble man you are. That’s just pride. True humility is to be totally unconcerned about what people think of you. Now when Moses was in Egypt, he was very interested in what people thought of him.

Just before he killed that Egyptian, the Bible says that he looked around to see if anyone was watching.

Exodus 2:12-14 Glancing this way and that and seeing no one, he killed the Egyptian and hid him in the sand.

Rather than looking around, he should have looked up!

The next day he went out and saw two Hebrews fighting. He asked the one in the wrong, “Why are you hitting your fellow Hebrew?” The man said ‘Who made you ruler and judge over us? Are you thinking of killing me as you killed the Egyptian?” Then Moses was afraid and thought, “What I did must have become known.”

Concern for what men think of you will lead only to fear. When you do not follow the Lord’s will, when you do not concern yourself with what God thinks of you, you become consumed with what other people think of you. And that brings fear and paralysis.

Proverbs 29:25 Fear of man will prove to be a snare, but whoever trusts in the Lord is kept safe.

Moses needed to learn true humility. He needed to die to himself. Someone who is dead to self doesn’t take things personally when he’s criticized. Someone who is dead to self doesn’t let it go to his head when he’s praised. Only someone who is dead to self can be used in God’s service.

John 12:24 I tell you the truth, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.

God taught Moses humility by leading him into the wilderness.

2. He also taught him how to be a shepherd.

That was important, because people are like sheep. You know what sheep are like! Sheep are dumb, they need to be led gently and tenderly. They like to wander away at the slightest whim. They are defenseless against predators, they need to be guarded and protected. And they need to be fed and watered. All these things that are true of sheep in the physical sense, are true of people in the spiritual sense.

In order to teach Moses how to lead people, God enrolled him in Sheep Herding 101. It was an eighty semester course - it lasted forty years! I imagine that at the end of that time, there wasn’t too much about shepherding that Moses didn’t know! Because the Bible says in…

Psalm 77:20 You led your people like a flock by the hand of Moses

So this time of personal humiliation for Moses in Midian was precisely what God designed in order to equip him to serve as a spiritual leader later.

2. The time in Midian was a time of personal obscurity.

Moses literally dropped out of sight for forty years. As far as the Egyptians were concerned, Moses was dead. They didn’t even bother to go looking for him in the wilderness.

You have to understand what this meant for Moses. He had been a very public figure. He was an Egyptian prince. He probably rode around in a chariot, and there may have been several chariots with bodyguards accompanying him. People saw him coming and bowed down as he rode by. Moses must have hosted lavish banquets in the great banquet halls of Egypt. His name was right at the top of the social register. When people wanted favors, they contacted him. All the noble families of Egypt must have been vying to get their daughters engaged to this man.

And now in Midian, he was alone. Alone with God. As he walked around the rocky hills tending his sheep, he had lots of time for reflection and communion with God. He began to get to know God better. The Bible tells us that Moses was a man who knew God face to face. How did he get to know God so well? It wasn’t in Egypt. He didn’t have time to get to know God there. And he didn’t start to get to know God when he became the leader of the Israelites. There wasn’t any time to do it then. Moses got to know God in Midian.

Exo. 3:1 Moses led his flock to the far side of the desert and came to Horeb, the mountain of God.

The name Horeb means desolate. There wasn’t anything there. Horeb was a place, far from the people, far from the noise and commotion of daily life where Moses met with God. That’s why he called it the mountain of God.

Do you have a Horeb in your life? A place you can go to meet with God? A place that is far from the hustle and bustle of daily life where it is quiet, where you can hear His voice as you read His Word?

We all need a time and a place in our life where we can meet alone with God. Sometimes God will lead us into a wilderness experience in order to meet with us. I know that many of you have had a wilderness experience in your life - a time when things were really rough. Maybe it was an illness that laid you aside. Maybe it was a business failure, or a failure in an important relationship in your life. But God met with you in a special way in that time. And you grew in your relationship with Him because you went through that time. Maybe you’re in a wilderness time right now. Don’t despair. God wants to meet with you in your Midian, just like he met with Moses.

God may have to take away from us all the things that capture our attention, so that He alone might be our focus. He wants to know each one of us the way he knew Moses.

Moses’ life falls into three great periods. He spent forty years growing up in Egypt. Those were years when Moses was in the limelight. Then he spent forty years in Midian. The forty years in Midian was for him a time in the shadows. Then he spent the final forty years of his life back in the spotlight as the leader of Israel. But by then he was a changed man. He was a man of God. What was the key period of his life? The forty years in Midian.

What you are in the darkness will determine what you will be in the light. What you are in your quiet time with God will determine your effectiveness as a Christian. Too many of us are trying to build a superstructure of spirituality on a too-shallow foundation. We don’t spend time alone with God in the quiet shadows of life, but we hope to be able to live the Christian life, and serve effectively in the church, and raise children who will want to follow Christ. It won’t happen unless we’re meeting alone with God in the shadows.

3. Moses’ time in Midian was a time of learning to wait on God.

Moses, as we’ve already seen, had a burden for God’s people. He wanted to deliver them. But he was 40 years ahead of God’s timing in that regard. God had told Abraham in Gen. 15 that his descendants would be held for 400 years in Egypt. When Moses presented himself as the deliverer of the Hebrews by killing that Egyptian, he was way ahead of God’s schedule. He was running ahead of God.

And he was running ahead of God in the power of the flesh. He offered his leadership on the basis of his earthly qualifications. He had a good education. He was a man of power and position in Egypt. He had all the human assets necessary to be a great leader. But God knew that Moses needed 40 years of spiritual training before he’d be ready to lead God’s people!

Moses needed to learn to wait on God. He needed to learn that God doesn’t accomplish His will according to our expectations or according to our timetable. He needed to learn that God doesn’t do His work by human strength or human power or human intelligence, He does it by His Spirit.

Proverbs 3:5-7 Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make your paths straight. Do not be wise in your own eyes; fear the Lord and shun evil.

God used a time of failure and defeat - a wilderness experience - to teach Moses some important spiritual lessons. He used that time to refine Moses and equip him to be a spiritual leader he could really use. Moses’ disappointment became God’s appointment. God can do the same for you.