But Moses protested again, “What if they won’t believe me or listen to me? What if they say, ‘The Lord never appeared to you’?” Then the Lord asked him, “What is that in your hand?” “A shepherd’s staff,” Moses replied. “Throw it down on the ground,” the Lord told him. So Moses threw down the staff, and it turned into a snake! Moses jumped back. Then the Lord told him, “Reach out and grab its tail.” So Moses reached out and grabbed it, and it turned back into a shepherd’s staff in his hand. “Perform this sign,” the Lord told him. “Then they will believe that the Lord, the God of their ancestors—the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob—really has appeared to you.” (Exodus 4:1-5)
I love to bake. I REALLY love to bake. Cooking…..not so much. But baking? LOVE! I call it therapy. It relaxes me. We are right in the middle of prime baking season. I make 11 or so different kinds of Christmas cookies, but before I can even start, I have to ask myself, “What do I have on hand?” I can’t really bake without all the ingredients.
We saw yesterday in A whole lot of nothing that there are 4 key ingredients to a miracle:
- An impossible situation.
- The Word of the Lord.
- Obedience to the Word.
- Intervention of the power of God….MIRACLE!
God can use our nothing to make something, but there is always an action required of us. And it usually has to do with something we already have in our hand.
Moses was a shepherd. He carried a shepherd’s staff with him almost constantly. It was something he always had with him – something he used regularly in his day-to-day activities. It wasn’t really anything special. It was probably old and weathered a bit. I’m sure he didn’t really even think much of it.
When God called Moses, He called Him as is, staff and all. And He wanted to use Moses to perform signs and wonders and miracles. This was totally not in Moses’ “wheelhouse” so to speak, and it made him more than a little nervous. He had questions flying through his mind. “What if ?” “How?” “Me?” “Really?” “I can’t…”
So God asks the question….”What do you have in your hand?” And Moses answers, “What? This old thing? It’s just a staff.”
God took that shepherd’s staff…that thing that was so common to Moses…and used it to perform a miracle. And not just one miracle. LOTS of miracles. If you read Exodus 7-14, you will see miracle after miracle after miracle, and they all started with God telling Moses, “Take the staff in your hand and…..” The Red Sea parted. Water came from a rock. Miracles…..through what Moses had in his hand.
Moses’s staff had nothing to do with parting a Red Sea or bringing water from a rock, but that’s the cool thing about it. God didn’t really NEED the staff. What He needed was his trust. It was nothing more than an act of faith.
Moses could have said, “What does holding a stick up have anything to do with getting across this Sea? We need a boat, God!” Or “What does hitting this rock with a stick have anything to do with giving Your people something to drink, God? We really need a spring! Can’t You lead us to a spring?” He could have talked himself right out of his miracle.
He could have devalued what he had in his hand and missed the whole thing. We do the same thing. We look at what we have compared to what we need and say “It’s not enough. It’s just this or it’s just that. How could it POSSIBLY make a difference?”
Usually, the key to our miracle is right in our hand, and we miss it because we think, “What? This old thing? How could it possibly make a difference?” God doesn’t NEED “this old thing”…..He needs our trust. He just needs our act of faith. And it is usually through something we already have in our hand. Don’t try to figure it out. Just do it….that is when you will see the miracle. So I ask you:
What do you have in YOUR hand?