Lord, Please! Send Someone Else: Moving in Your Mission When You Are Not Motivatedنموونە

When I was a young girl, I would sit on the living room floor in front of the big, brown, box television, completely mesmerized by the four hour VHS film of Moses. My dad, sitting in his chair, would alternate between reading his Bible and glancing at the screen as sounds of biblical history filled the room.

During the movie, I often found myself imagining how different my life would be if I had lived in the biblical days. No matter how many times I watched it, there was one particular scene that always captivated me and snatched me away from daydreaming back into reality:

The scene of Moses holding the 10 Commandments on top of the mountain.

I loved that scene.

In it, his face glows with radiance from his mountaintop encounter with God, perfectly depicted through the TV screen. At that moment, Moses seems like one of the bravest, courageous, obedient servants of God.

And he was. However, to my surprise, I quickly learned that this servant of God did not start out this way.

Moses–the one who God used to threaten Pharaoh, lead the Israelites out of Egypt, part the Red Sea, and deliver the Ten Commandments–spends a chapter and a half in the book of Exodus trying to convince God that he was not the man for the job. With excuse after excuse, Moses made every effort to get out of God’s request to help set His people free.

We finally get to the moment of truth in Exodus 4:13 where Moses begs, “Lord, please! Send anyone else” (NLT).

What an honest statement! But God didn’t tell Moses, “Nevermind; don’t worry about it.” He had created Moses for this very moment. God knew that Moses couldn’t become the man on the mountain without first overcoming the man running from the mountain.

Often, our mountains represent our missions in life, and running from a mission is something, I believe, we have all done at one point or another. Some of us are doing that right now. We feel that the things God is asking us to do are difficult and will require us to return to people or places that we dread. Or He is asking us to do something that we feel ill-equipped and unqualified to do.

But the God Who created us knows our capabilities and He calls us on missions with that in mind.

Throughout this devotional, we, like Moses, will learn what it looks like to move toward the missions God has given us even when we are not motivated.