God Makes the Ground Holy

Discarded chewing gum from one pop star has fetched up to fourteen thousand dollars online. The gum is worthless. What buyers pay for is who chewed it. The same logic sold Justin Timberlake's uneaten French toast for over a thousand dollars and raised $5,300 for a tissue Scarlett Johansson used on a talk show. Nothing about the objects changed. Their association did. Exodus 3 runs on that same principle.

It Is God Who Makes the Ground Holy

Forty years separate Exodus 2 from Exodus 3. The prince who killed a man and ran is now an old shepherd working his father-in-law's flock, and the chapter opens on a day with nothing special about it. He walks a mountain he has probably climbed a thousand times. He notices a bush that burns without burning up. Ordinary day, ordinary curiosity, and God is already standing in it.

Then comes the instruction to take the sandals off, because the ground is holy. Read the reason carefully, because it runs the opposite way to instinct.

It's not the ground that is holy, but it is actually God who makes the ground holy.

Run that back through the gum. You keep trying to generate your own significance, to make your life mean something by achieving enough or pleasing enough people. Exodus 3 reverses the direction. God attaches Himself to your life, and the attachment is what makes it valuable.

Do you know what you are associated with? That is the more important question than who you think you are.

Which turns Monday into something other than another Monday. If you are a mother doing the same chores, a student, a worker, someone retired or nearly there, asking whether any of it signifies, the answer is that God steps into it. Nothing about the chores changes. Who is standing in them does.

The same correction applies to rooms. Early in ministry Pastor Josh read the size of a crowd as the measure of God's anointing, and a thin or unresponsive room meant the absence of God. It took years to learn that the presence in the room is what makes it holy ground, whatever the numbers.

God Is Not a Jukebox

There is a second story running underneath Moses' story. While one man gets a burning bush, close to a million Israelites get nothing but bricks. If you have never had an encounter, you are in that crowd, and the honest version of the complaint is that other people seem to hear from God and you do not.

In one church that pressured everybody into speaking in tongues, a young woman sat crying because it would not come. Half that room was probably faking it; she was the honest one. What she wanted was plain enough. I want to see the burning bush. And nothing came.

God does not operate like a jukebox that you press the button, music comes out.

Watch what a long silence does if you let it settle. The lack of an experience leads people to denial, and denial is a much bigger step than disappointment. Exodus 3:7 is God's answer to the crowd with no bush: I have surely seen the affliction of my people, and have heard their cry. Four hundred years of saying nothing, and He names their suffering item by item.

The four hundred years had a purpose. Suffering created a people who wanted saving. Had Egypt treated Israel well, they would have assimilated, worshipped whatever was on offer and wanted nothing.

The greatest danger of the Christian faith is not persecution. Persecution always promotes something powerful, but it's actually prosperity.

Only the I Am Has the Final Say

Moses asks who he should say sent him, and God gives His name for the first time: I am who I am. A name in that world carried a person's core identity, and this one means God depends on nothing outside Himself. What He says is what is.

The practical edge is authority. Plenty of things claim the final word on your life, including YouTube, books, and confident friends with opinions about you. None of them get it. Take the I am out of impossible, and what is left is possible.

God Wants Your Availability

What follows the burning bush is an argument. Who am I. They will not listen to me. I am slow of speech. Forty years earlier this man took a life to fix things himself, and now he cannot be talked into anything.

God recruits that version of him, the one with no confidence left.

That posture, I'm not good enough, is actually good. I'm going to use you now.

English is not Pastor Josh's first language, and preaching every week to people who only speak English has been the thorn in his flesh. Why not send someone with perfect English. He asked the same question about his health, and noted that the younger, stronger, healthier version of himself was the one God seemed to use least, because that version was full of himself.

God does not need your ability. God wants your availability.

Paul's line in 2 Corinthians 12 is the same shape: my grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness. Weakness is the condition God works in, and your inadequacy sits closer to a qualification than an obstacle.

Please Send Someone Else

Then Moses stops hedging and simply refuses. Oh my Lord, please send someone else. Standing in front of the Almighty, having just been given His name, he says no.

God's anger is kindled, and then He supplies Aaron anyway. The refusal does not cancel the call. Sovereign grace means the decision was never yours to veto, and the help arrives on the other side of your no. The last instruction almost reads as comedy: take in your hand this staff. Don't forget the staff. The staff is the sign that you are not doing this alone.

You Are Standing in the Burning Bush

Matthew 5 settles the identity question before you can argue about it. Jesus did not tell anyone to become salt or to work at being light.

He said, you are. You are already identified as salt and light.

Salt keeps its chemistry and loses saltiness only by dilution. Light has no rival, since darkness is only the absence of it. The worst thing light can do is stay hidden, which is exactly what "I'm not good enough" accomplishes. So the week's instruction is small and concrete:

• Treat Monday as holy ground, because of who is standing on it.
• If you have never had an encounter, do not turn a silence into a verdict.
• Bring the inadequacy to God rather than using it as the reason to decline.
• Stop trying to convince anyone. Be the light and let God do the work.

You do not have to climb a mountain to find the bush any more. Jesus finished that work, and the Spirit lives in you.

Where you are standing is where God is.