Exodus 3:10-12 – God qualifies the call

Right there at Horeb, after revealing His knowledge of the plight of His people and their indescribable oppression, God told Moses He was sending him to deliver them. Moses did not exactly seize the opportunity at God’s call to leadership. Instead, he showed great inhibition. He was no longer that person, who so boldly took matters into his own hand and killed the taskmaster who ill-treated a fellow Hebrew. No longer was he that self-assured person who tried to resolve a dispute between two Hebrews. After 40 years of looking after sheep in the wilderness, he must have been humbled. He was not so cock-sure as he was. Moses felt he lacked the social standing to accomplish the task. The purpose of these verses is not to show the unwillingness of Moses to serve God, but that he needed a proper orientation concerning serving God.

So, in verse 10, we see his doubt over his own social standing. His response to God’s call was, “Who am I, that I should go to Pharaoh, and that I should bring the sons of Israel out of Egypt?” He doubted his personal standing. He did not even take the time to process that call before he responded. The reality of God’s call is that He is no respecter of a person’s social status. Like Moses, we need to know that it’s not our status that will commend us to the work of God, but our availability. We need to know that there is nothing in us that will qualify us for God’s call, not our education, not our capability, nor our position. Our qualification to minister on God’s behalf is found in Him alone. He Himself qualifies the call into any ministry.

God did not buy Moses’ reason. He gave Him the key qualification that he needed to succeed, i.e. His own presence. The surest key to success in any ministry is the presence of God Himself. Let’s hear again what God said to Moses, “Certainly I will be with you, and this shall be the sign to you that it is I who have sent you….” This is the surest sign of a God-sent, God-approved ministry. People tend to look at the wrong measuring yardsticks. Some think that the attendance at a meeting is the yardstick to measure success. Others use the activities or the programs as a gauge. But the true yardstick is really His presence. God’s personal attendance at any gathering will be the marked difference between what’s of God and what’s not.

One more thing needs to be clear. The objective of any call of God is always a call to lead others from their “Egypt” or bondage to the place where they can experience God personally and worship Him. That is the objective God gave to Moses. He was to bring the people out of Egypt to the mountain of God’s presence, to worship Him. This defines the goal of our ministry: to lead others to God to worship Him.

Two things to bear in mind as we seek to serve God. Firstly, the most important qualification is not our position but His presence. Secondly, the key objective and goal of our ministry are to lead others from the peripheral to the core, to leave the mundane to the crux. We must lead others to worship Him and Him alone. That’s the measure of success!