"I am the God of your father Abraham, and the                                      "Let my people go!"
       God of Isaac and the God of Jacob"

Think for a moment about the phenomenon of Moses and Aaron standing before the world mega power leader, Pharaoh. Then think that he was a wanted man by the Egyptians and rejected by his own people.  Think that he had been doing nothing for forty years besides looking after sheep. Then consider the demand he was about to make.  He was about to tell Pharaoh to stop his building program and let a million or more slaves go for a walk in the desert.  Every way you look at it spells foolishness, pain and death.

What we are really talking about in the experience of Moses is a tale of two spaces – revelation space and fulfillment space.  Moses accomplished nothing until he discovered the essential importance of both spaces.  He had already been in the fulfillment space (Egypt) and genuinely wanted to help his own people.  What he didn’t realize was that you need what happens in the revelation space in order to know how to operate in the fulfillment space.  No burning bush, no success with Pharaoh. It took Moses forty years to learn that lesson.  Even then he was a slow and slightly unconvinced starter.

Without an ongoing experience of life changing revelation from God we will be as useless to our own generation as Moses was to his.  Good intentions won’t do it and God has not planned to do it apart from the people who believe in him.

As God’s intention was to see the people of Israel set freed from the slavery of Egypt, it is God’s desire to see the people of our communities set free to worship and serve their Creator.  This was the purpose of the coming of Jesus Christ.  In the same way as Jesus was the agency of this message in his own generation he committed that same work to each generation of disciples.  Jesus’ life and ministry was based on the same principles Moses.  He came to a given situation with revelation from the Father.  Because of his relationship with the Father he knew what to do in every situation in order to see the kingdom plan of God fulfilled.

We need to discover the importance of these two places in our own lives.  Sometimes Christian people like us spend a lot of time in revelation space - we listen to sermons, go to conferences, bible studies and prayer meetings.  We may well hear from God in those spaces but all too often what we hear doesn’t result in real change. Add to this the fact that our approach to discipleship rarely requires us to be accountable for what we have heard from God and we end up with a succession of experiences that look like revelation but are not.  The reason they don’t qualify as genuine revelation is because genuine revelation is defined only by the measure to which it changes our heart and our lifestyle.  The burning bush was only valid if there was an exodus and the exodus was only possible because there was a burning bush (and subsequent encounters with God).

If Jesus said, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me….He has sent me….to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovering sight to the blind…” (Luke 4) but then didn’t heal people or cast out demons he would have failed the purposes of God in the same way as we often do.  We are always getting more Biblical information and accumulating time in prayer, but it doesn’t often seem to lead to any captives being set free.

We have many examples of good followers of Jesus who are out and about doing all kinds of works that are carried out simply because they are committed to a certain Christian value without embracing the spiritual dynamic of the New Testament. In doing so they replicate Moses’ decision to use his human position and ability to defend his people.  When we engage in good works with good intentions we will fail in the same way:  good idea, sincere intention but no power and authority from heaven.  Perhaps the most frustrating of all enterprises are works that look Christian but are not God sponsored.  Christianity is not a religion.  It is not a ‘way of life.’  It is a relationship with the Father and the Son and the works produced by that relationship.  Part of that relationship is seeking God for revelation and the change in our own life that comes as a result of that encounter.  The other part is the way we exercise faith in the place(s) implied by that revelation to see God’s work fulfilled. The difference will be the attendance of God’s power, authority and provision.

Anyone who has tried to serve God’s purposes in any of the spheres of life to which we belong will know that this is a challenging and difficult task.  We could hardly suggest that it is more difficult than the one facing Moses.  The challenge for us will be to follow the example provided by Moses and even more strongly modeled by Jesus Christ.  That process begins at something equal to the burning bush and ends up in something like the royal court of Pharaoh.  Moses was enabled to do the second because he had embraced the first.  We must go to the revelation space before we act in the fulfillment space.  We must not assume that revelation space is of any value unless there is fulfillment space.

It is easy for us to confuse genuine revelation with mental agreement.  We can listen to something being said or read something and agree that it is right or good without it having any affect on us.  Genuine revelation is measured only by life transformation and life transformation is only known by its fruit.  Revelation must change who we are as well as what we do.  In the case of Moses, he was changed because of his encounter with God. That change involved going back to his Midianite family and all of them packing up and heading for Egypt.

Moses was in Midian because he had the right idea but the wrong way of implementing it.  Over those forty years in Midian he must have thought about his people in Egypt still suffering as slaves to Pharaoh.  He must have known that they should be set free but his own impotence and previous failure would have deemed the task impossible.  A single encounter with God began to change that.  It didn’t happen in an instant.  That encounter was the first of hundreds, maybe thousands.  The important thing was that it was the beginning of a pattern in his life.  He would spend the rest of his life going from revelation space to fulfillment space and then back to revelation space and then on to yet another fulfillment space.

As we all know from the story.  The experiences that followed were filled with challenges, risks and unexpected twists and turns.  But we all know the result.  There was a day when a million and a half Israelites danced beside the Red Sea because they were free.  Every day there was supernatural food and water, even in their stubbornness and failure.  Every day there was the presence of a cloud and every night, a pillar of fire.  There were victories in battle and finally there were new homes and lives for them in the land given them by the power of God.  All of this was made possible because someone experienced life-changing revelation and then followed that revelation to where God’s purpose was fulfilled.

It comes down to some kind of table where you get to fill in the blanks.  I will use the example of Moses so that you can get an idea of how to set up a table like this for your own sphere.

You could use a table like this to illustrate the experience of other people in the Bible whom God called to participate in the fulfillment of his purposes for their own spheres.

DEVELOP YOUR OWN TESTIMONY OF WHAT IS HAPPENING IN THESE SPACES FOR YOU  
AS IT APPLIES TO THE PLACE(S) WHERE GOD HAS CALLED YOU TO BE A MISSIONARY