God's Leadership Through Transition

This is April 23rd, and I'm going to be reading from Deuteronomy chapter 31. You'd find that in your Bibles. Verse 14, beginning with verse 14. This is sort of the end of the speech that Moses has been making to the people of Israel. The Lord's told him, given him instructions about how the book of Deuteronomy is to be written and then it's to be read periodically by the people of Israel. And when he finishes that, the Lord said to Moses, now the day of your death is near. Call Joshua and present yourself at the tent of meeting where I will commission him. So Moses and Joshua came and presented themselves at the tent of meeting. The Lord appeared at the tent in the pillar of cloud, and the cloud stood over the entrance of the tent. This is the beginning of the transition. God has already told Moses that he wouldn't be able to enter the land of promise, so he knew that already. The Lord had already told him that Joshua was going to be the one who was to take over for him, so he knew that too. But now comes the event where the transition is going to be made, the change of leadership. I'm not sure exactly how long Moses had been leader for the people of Israel. We know it was 40 years of wandering in the wilderness, but they started in Egypt and traveled some distance before they came to the land of Canaan and then refused to go in. So the wandering in the wilderness was 40 years. So it was well over 40 years, maybe even 50 years, that Moses had been the leader of the people of Israel. Now he is no longer going to be their leader. A transition and change is going to come. Anytime you have someone who's been a leader of a group of people for so long, there's always anxiety whenever there's a change of leadership. But in the Bible, you'll see things are quite different than what happens among human beings when there are changes of leadership. If you have a company, or if you have a football team or a basketball team, and say the football team, the coach is fired, and they call a new coach, what happens is the coach generally gets rid of all the assistant coaches and brings with him all of his own coaches. So he has people that think like he does and have the same ideas he has and looks at him with authority and respect. And the whole thing changes. The plan of attack for the football team, everything changes because you have a new person with a new way of thinking and a new direction. It's true also for companies. You have a CEO who comes in and he decides he's going to do something spectacular. Some of you might remember a few years back, Penney's hired a new man. He was with Apples. He came in and he said, I'm going to turn Penney's around and almost broke it. They finally had to get rid of him, get another guy in with a new idea, and he starts all over again. In human terms, what we do is when there's leaders, we follow that human leader with their personality, with their ideas, with their direction, with their thought. But in this story, the change of leadership is really not as significant perhaps as we might think it would be. Even the tenure of Moses with the people, for who was really the leader of the nation of Israel to bring them out of captivity? It was God. You remember how God started this with Moses? He said, I hear the cry of my people. I want to deliver them from Egypt. And he called Moses to go do the job. God was interested in delivering the people of Israel before he even talked to Moses about it. It was God's idea from the beginning. If you'll remember when Moses went to the Egyptians and to Pharaoh, everything that Moses did, God told him what to do and what to say. Sometimes Moses didn't believe it was going to happen. Sometimes he had questions about whether or not God was really doing the right thing. But he did exactly what God asked him to do. You'll remember as they came up out of the land of Egypt that at every point Moses was told exactly what to do when they came to the Red Sea. God told Moses exactly what to do. Hold your hands up. And when you do, I'll take care of the rest of it. You see, Moses was so dependent on God that everything he did was in direct obedience to him except for one time. God told him to speak to a rock and water would come out of it. And Moses was so irritated with the people he was working with he decided not to do that. He said to the people he was upset with them because they didn't trust him. And now he said, Aaron and I are going to have to make water come out of this rock. And he hid it. Water did come out. But he did something that was terribly tragic. Some people think, I'm not sure that it was fair for God to tell Moses he couldn't go into the land of promise just because he did that one little thing wrong. But you know what he did wrong? Was he acted like he was the leader himself instead of God. God told him to speak. He hid it. But that wasn't the big thing he did. He said, Aaron and I are now going to have to make water come out of this rock. He substituted himself for the very ruler of the universe. Everywhere else in Moses' life it was simple. God told him what to do and he did it. And God did all the work. So the people of Israel were having a new person that they were going to have to look at and talk to. But it was still the same God who was directing them and leading them. This is comfort to us. Always in the work of the Lord. I think sometimes churches sort of get like the businesses in the athletic world. Call a new pastor in some of the bigger churches and they get rid of all the old staff and bring in their new staff and they have a whole new idea about how to do things like a business or a football team or a basketball team. And so every person that comes is a big change. They want to do everything different. In the kingdom of God, the church should always have one leader and that's God. And this exchange between Moses and Aaron, excuse me, between Moses and Joshua was really not a change of leadership. It was a change of channels. It was still God who was leading. He did lead by telling Moses what he wanted to do. From now on out, he's going to lead by telling Joshua what he wants Joshua to do. You see, all human leaders in the kingdom of God are really not leading themselves. They're listening to God and doing what God tells them. So in the church, it is God always who's leading the church, the Holy Spirit who is always guiding us, the Holy Spirit who's always directing our attention. And therefore, we should never be distressed whenever Sunday school teacher changes or pastor or staff change. If we're really doing this right, we're listening to God and asking what he wants to do. Now there may be times, excuse me, I'm having trouble with my throat. What I'm really afraid of is when you feel my throat being, you know, getting stopped up that you'll all start going, trying to help me out. That happen to you when you're around someone that's that way, you want to help them out. What God does is he says, I have somebody I want to use. And if we're dependent on the Spirit and we're actually communicating with God, then it is God always who's the leadership in the church. Now there may be a time when you want someone like Moses who's speaking, and Moses wasn't a great speaker and he wasn't chosen because he was a speaker. He was chosen because he wasn't a speaker, because God wanted him to speak. Sometimes we think that in the church you should find people who are particularly talented in an area to lead. God sort of does things kind of backwards. He said to Moses, I want to take you, Moses said, I'm not a speaker, he said, I know that. I can't do all those things, I know that. But what I'm going to do is take you and I'm going to do through you what I alone can do. And I don't want everybody to say Moses is a great speaker, I want them to say God is a powerful leader by taking someone who can't do it and enabling them to do it. This is the way God works throughout the scriptures. I want you, Moses, because you can't speak, and I'm going to make you a speaker. His word to Moses was, who made the tongue in your mouth? I did. I can make it do whatever I want. All I ask of you is you do what I tell you. Now he comes to take Joshua. Joshua was a man that was reliable, but what he was going to use with Joshua was he was going to make him a great heroic fighter, a leader of military people. Moses was at the end of his life, he chose Joshua. Joshua hadn't been to military school, but it didn't matter. God was going to tell him what to do, and he trusted him that he would do it. Sometimes knowing things makes it difficult for you to do what God wants you to do. If Joshua had been to West Point and learned military strategy, when he got in his first battle he would have been really upset, because the military strategy was to walk around Jericho one time every day, and then on the seventh day walk around it seven times, break the glass and shout. There's nowhere in any place that you'll find that kind of military strategy. So if Joshua had been a trained military man, he would have said, God, that's the stupidest thing I've ever heard of. I'm not going to do that, everybody in the world laugh at me that's been to have military training. But you see, what God needs are people who are willing to do whatever he tells them, and he gives them what they need. So whenever you have the church that's really a spiritual church, where people are living in obedience to Christ and open to the Spirit of God, there is never a change of leadership, because God through his Holy Spirit is always leading the church. The change is the channel through which he gives you the Spirit. Now the spiritual leadership in the church can be all kinds of people. We talk about things at business meetings, ask God what he wants, and all of us participate in finding the direction he wants us to go. So the Spirit's in all of us, not just in one person. We're depending on that. So it doesn't matter the mixture of people who are in business meetings making decisions, so long as they all really depend on God, for he is the leader. Now God wanted to make sure in the Old Testament that it wasn't the same way we do today with the Spirit of God present in people. There was a clear evidence of God's presence with the people of Israel. They had a tent of meeting. So God said, I want you to go to the tent of meeting. This is where when Moses wanted to talk to God, he went into this tent. God said, this is the place I'm going to use to talk to you. So Moses would go into the tent, and the Lord would come, and God and Moses would have conversation there in that tent. He said, I want you to go to the same tent of meeting, but this time I want you to go in there, and I want you to take Joshua. What he wanted to do was give the people around them a visible sense that the Spirit of God was now going to be controlling Joshua's life too. Now we don't use the tent of meeting where you know that I go and talk to God and come back and tell you what God is doing in the New Testament era. Every time a person says, I give my life to Christ, the Holy Spirit of God enters their life. And if you've ever made that surrender of yourself to God, the Holy Spirit lives inside of you. So the presence of the Spirit shows up in your character, in your nature, in your transformation of who you are. That's how we know the Spirit is in another person's life. There are fruits of the Spirit. How do you know an apple tree from a peach tree, Doug? You don't? I thought you knew all about trees. Would you like some help? There you go! There you go! See how much more you knew than you thought you knew? And the fruits of the Spirit are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, mercy, self-control. And the fruits of the Spirit are sins. That's how you know the difference. What controls the life of a person? Is it fighting and quarreling? Constant bickering? Is it immorality? Or is it love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, mercy, and self-control? So you look around and you see people whose lives are transformed like this. They've changed from what they used to be to something different. You know the Spirit is in them. You can trust that. So when we sit down with the Spirit of God in all of us and begin to say, God, what do you want us to do? He gives us a common answer to this. It doesn't make any difference who the chairman of the committee is or who's on the committee or who the pastor is or who the staff is. It is the Spirit of God that leads us. And we never change that as long as the church is guided by that. You can have a new pastor, a new youth director, new teachers everywhere, but as long as the Spirit is here, it's the very same leadership. They had a little building where you went to, and when you went in there, you knew you met God. We have a different thing. When you say to God, I give you my life, we know that the Spirit comes in and takes control of that person and their life is going to be directed by God. Will we make mistakes about the will of God? Of course we do, but that's why we have the rest of us around. You know, if you have seven cooks, they might be able to help another person who's making a mistake when they're cooking. If you have 30 people who are listening to the things that need to be done and saying, God, what do you want us to do? You have some confidence that most of those people, if their lives are Spirit controlled, they're going to get the right answer. So we're looking at how God leads the people. He makes it visible to Moses and Joshua and all the other people. There's a change of the personnel, but it is still the Lord God Almighty who is leading the people of Israel. Don't get distressed about the channel through which this comes. Don't get distressed because Moses is not going to be here anymore. For God is here. The Lord God Almighty is here. And He will continue to lead you. So Moses takes them into the house where the tent of meeting is. Then the Lord appeared in the tent in a pillar of cloud. God in the Old Testament gave visible evidence of His presence. Sometimes we think that that's an advantage to us, but it really isn't. Because there should be visible evidence in the lives of people who have the Spirit in their life. You ought to be able to point to your life and say, my life before Christ was like this and my life after Christ was like this and there would be a difference. There has to be. God cannot come in your life and you remain the same. So in the Old Testament there was a visible cloud to show that God was there at the tent of meeting. In the church time, in our age, there is a visible evidence in the behavior of people to show that God is there and at work in their life. And the cloud stood over the entrance of the tent. This evidence of God's presence was like a stamp of authentication. What is taking place here is at my direction. God told them what to do. They did what He wanted. He made it clear to everyone who was watching. He was at work. And so the leadership change took place. The leadership of the people as they saw Moses taking a back seat now and Joshua moving forward may have been disconcerting to them. We don't know. There wasn't very much discussion about it. God made it so clear that this was His change and that's what we always ask. Whenever we select people or try to find people to do work in the church, one of the things we ask them is not, are you trained? We don't ask them if they really want to do the job that we're asking them to do. We ask one thing of them. We want you to talk to God. And we want you to ask Him, is this something that you want me to do? Because when God assigns us to a responsibility and His Holy Spirit lives within us, then the result is guaranteed. It will always be successful. Because God doesn't fail in things. Now sometimes it doesn't work out the way we think success is, but God always achieves His ends, His goals, and His purposes. It may take Him a while. It may be in an indirect route, but He still does. This passage is a wonderful example of how God leads His people. Now a lot of times we look at the Old Testament in one way and we look at the New Testament in another. But I want you to see in this that God did the same thing with Joshua and Moses that He does today. He calls His people and said, I appointed you to be a leader. That's what all this story about spiritual gifts is about. I have given you the gifts to serve Me. It's like He gave these in the Old Testament. And I am here to place a stamp of authentication on you. Your life used to be one way and now it's different. And now I'm giving you an assignment and I expect you to begin to live and to do the work that I've called you to do. That's what God did in the Old Testament. It's what He does even today. Now His method by which He does this is a little different, but the thing that He does is exactly the same. Every leader is God called. Every leader must be dependent on what God asks. Every leader is simply a channel through whom God works. It's easy for us, you know, whenever we do something and success comes from it to look at ourselves and think about how well we've done. But in the work of the kingdom, what God expects when we take a responsibility, whether it's teaching children, adults, or speaking, or giving our witness, or whatever it is, when we take that responsibility and do it, and it's done, and people respond to it positively, we must always remember this is God at work. For if we begin to think of ourselves as good teachers, or good preachers, or good witnesses, we begin to take credit for what belongs only to God. And when that happens, like what happened to Moses, he begins to withdraw his presence and power from us. Not only that, he will begin to punish us for taking credit for something that really is his work. All of the things you see in the scripture are the power of God at work through people. So that in the kingdom of God, there is never any leader but God. And the leadership of God only works through people who are completely submissive to him, and who will give him the credit for what he does, and depend on him for wisdom, guidance, and direction. So the transition is beginning to be made. Moses had given his life to this mission. He had told them, now you're going to enter the land of promise, and all the way through this book, from chapter 10 to chapter 30, he told them all the blessings that would come if they did the right things, and all the curses that would come if they did the wrong things. And he told them everything they were supposed to do. It is the crowning moment of Moses' life. Now he's at the end, and all these things he said is yet to take place. And yet the message that God gave to Moses in verse 16, you and the Lord said to Moses, you are going to rest with your fathers, you're going to die, you're going to be with your forefathers, and these people will soon prostitute themselves to the foreign gods of the land they are entering. They will forsake me and break the covenant I've made with them. On that day I will become angry with them, forsake them, and I'll hide my face from them. They will be destroyed, many disasters and difficulties will come upon them, and on that day they will ask, have not these disasters come upon us because our God is not with us? And I will certainly hide my face on that day because of all their wickedness in turning to other gods. I can't imagine a more depressing thing for Moses than what he heard from God. He had already warned them what to do. He told them what to do. Warned them if they didn't, all the curses that would come to them. Told them when they entered the land of promise they were to be faithful to God and do everything he asked. I don't know why God did this. Moses is soon going to be dead, he's not going to know all this. Looks like it would have been more kind if God would have said, well I know what's going to happen, but Moses I appreciate the good job you've done, why don't you go on now to your death and the end of it's over. And then he turned and said to Joshua, now I want to warn you what's ahead. Moses with all the things he did heard in the very last words from the Lord, these people are going to forsake me, they're going to forsake the covenant you've given to me, that I've given made with them, they're going to withdraw from me and I'm going to withdraw from them. It wasn't God's will that that would be done. It's what he knew was in the hearts of the people who were there. I think there's an important lesson for us. We sometimes expect a little too much of each other. We forget that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. There's none righteous, no not one. And so when we read a story about a Christian brother or sister that's fallen, made mistakes, done the wrong things, we get down. I tell you the truth about all this. There's not anybody here who inside of your own heart doesn't have times of rebellion against God, including myself. Don't be shocked that there's sin in the lives of people who are trying to follow Christ. God was saying very honestly to Moses what's going to happen. There are going to be times when these people will turn their back on God and they're going to turn away from me and I'll deal with it. I'll withdraw my presence from them to go through the difficult days. You're going to see in the book of Judges it happens over and over and over again. The positive thing is God knows you can't be perfect. And he never wrote the people of Israel off because they were going to fail him. He could have said right here they're going to do this so I'm just going to strike them all dead right now. But his determination was I'm going to work with these people until I bring out of them some of the people who are followers of me and faithful to me. God is immensely patient with people, with you, with me. He doesn't give up on us. He constantly works with us. He does sometimes say okay if that's what you want to do, you're on your own brother. And whenever you get in over your head and you think you're going to drown, I want you to stop and think where is God? And then you'll realize you've strayed away from me. You turn your back on me, I'll turn my back on you. And disaster will come to you. Two things that he said were going to take place. Failures and difficulties. And when God takes his hand away from us, what that means is he's no longer guiding our choices so we're going to make really stupid choices that are dangerous and destructive. He's not going to be providing for us so we'll find ourselves in difficulty with provision. He's not going to be protecting us so we'll find ourselves in constant trouble. And our lives are not going to be an influence of good to the people around us. That's a sign God's withheld himself from us. He's not keeping the covenant promises because we haven't kept them. We're not doing everything he told us to do. We're not submissive and surrendered to him. So the time comes, Moses realizes, the people of Israel are going to fail God. He's going to turn his back on them. He's going to bring judgment on them. But his purpose in judgment is restoration. He didn't give up. This could have caused Moses to realize this had all been hopeless to hear this, except he knew God better than that. He knew that God didn't write people off, the people of Israel, off entirely. He brought judgment and waited for them to say, Lord, we're sorry. So don't give up on yourself. Don't give up on other people you know that the Spirit of God is in them. For God is at work always to transform us, to change us from what we are to something different, more like himself. Moses hears these final words, God's words of promise, prophecy, if you will, about the future of what they're going to do and what he's going to do. Now what he's preparing Moses for is the song of Moses. Moses can say to the people of Israel, these things are going to happen, but here's what God is going to do, the word of hope. God wants us to be realistic. When we turn ourselves away from God, the judgment comes, but there's always hope. That's what he's preparing Moses for. He wants Moses to write a song, and the Bible calls it the song of Moses, about all that God can do and wants to do. And this song from God is a song of redemption and salvation, forgiveness and healing. It's there for us, it's there for all the people around us. God is not unrealistic about his people. He knows what we are, and he knows what we aren't. He accepts us the way we are with the intention of changing us from what we are to what he wants us to become, and that's true for you. Now you know what you are, because I'm going to ask you in just a moment to think of the things in your own life that you know God would want to be different in you. That's what you know you are. And then when you look at Christ, you say, if I was more like Christ, what would I be instead of this way? What does he want me to be? And that's his future for you. Would you bow your heads for a moment? If you were looking face to face with God, and you were to say to him, what is the biggest thing in my life that you'd like to see different? What comes to your mind? If you can't think of anything, then you're the candidate to just go straight to home with him. But if you're realistic with yourself, you know God has changes to make in you. Now, ask God, what do I need to do to allow you to change me? We're thankful that the leadership in our own lives is not another person, but it's you. And we trust your Holy Spirit in this evening to show us who we really are. Show us the ways in which we turned our back on you, in which we say, this is what I'm going to do. I don't care what you say or the Bible says. Show us those places. Show us the kind of person you want us to be, and help us to know the very first steps we need to do to start, to acknowledge our sin, and to ask you to change the way we think about this thing in our lives. And Father, like the people of Israel in the land of Canaan, we are not always faithful, but help us to be faithful, to always trust you. In the name of Christ we pray, Amen.