Reflection 2 | Week 1 | Show Me Your Glory

Week 1, Reflection 2 in our study through the Book of Exodus.

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Reflection 2. Show me your glory. Exodus 33, verse 18.

Exodus 33:18

Then Moses said to him, If your presence does not go with us,

do not send us from here. And then Moses said, Now, show me your glory.

Something happened to Moses between that bush in Midian and leading the Israelites to Mount Sinai.

It is easy to read Exodus quickly, plague after plague, the sea splitting,

manna falling, thunder on Sinai, and experience it as spectacle,

a sequence of captivating miracles.

But if you slow down, you notice something underneath the events.

Moses is changing, not just his circumstances, his desire.

At the bush, Moses asked, who am I? He was measuring himself against the task

and finding himself small.

That is where most of us begin And where many of us stay We stand before God's

invitation And our first language is inadequacy I'm not enough I don't know

enough I'm not the right person.

But watch what happens as Exodus unfolds. Moses confronts Pharaoh,

not once, but repeatedly.

He stretches his hand over the sea. He climbs Sinai while the mountain shakes.

He intercedes for a people who have already betrayed the covenant.

And somewhere in that journey, a shift occurs that is easy to miss.

Moses stops measuring himself. He starts wanting God. The turning point comes in Exodus 33.

The people have sinned catastrophically, the golden calf, the breaking of covenant,

the near destruction of everything. Moses has interceded.

God has relented. The crisis has passed.

And in the aftermath, when Moses could ask for anything, security,

clarity, a guarantee that the future will hold, he asked for this.

Now, show me your glory. Not safety, not answers. Glory. More of God himself.

This is not the same man who stood at the bush. Something has grown in him.

Not confidence in the usual sense, not self-assurance or competence.

What has grown is desire. His appetite for God has expanded.

Each encounter did not satisfy Moses. It deepened his capacity for wonder and

sharpened his hunger for more.

This is the pattern Scripture is showing us, and it reframes everything we think

we know about spiritual growth.

We tend to imagine maturity as the gradual taming of our desires.

The mature Christian, we assume, is the one who wants less.

Less of the world, less of themselves, less in general. And so we curate.

We stop watching certain films. We stopped the endless pursuit of the upgrade.

But along the way to becoming content, we can learn to distrust ambition,

to be suspicious of strong emotion, to treat passion itself as something dangerous.

Holiness becomes a project of reduction. We subtract until what remains is acceptable.

But Moses' life tells a different story. Growth did not shrink his desires. It expanded them.

It redirected them. The longing that had once been scattered for significance,

for control, for a life that made sense, was gathered up and aimed at something inexhaustible.

Moses did not become a man of fewer desires. He became a man of deeper ones.

And this changes how we understand the invitation. To pursue God is not to arrive

at a place where you finally stop wanting.

It is to enter a life where your wanting grows, but toward a God who can never be exhausted.

The absence of a ceiling is not a threat, it's a promise.

You will never outgrow the possibility of becoming more alive,

more attuned, more saturated with the presence of God.

Think of standing at the edge of a mountain range that disappears into the distance.

You're not trying to complete it. The horizon stretches not because you are

failing, but because it exceeds you.

Its vastness is not an indictment, it's an invitation.

Each step forward widens the view. Your capacity for awe expands.

You do not resent that there is more to see, you are grateful that there is more.

This is what the life of faith was meant to feel like, not a checklist to exhaust,

not a standard to meet, a God to move toward, one who always has more of Himself to give.

Moses' journey from the bush to the mountain is the arc of discipleship itself,

from reluctance to longing, from fear to desire, from bare feet trembling on

holy ground to the audacity of asking for glory.

And that arc is not reserved for prophets. It begins the moment you turn aside

to look and start a journey that does not end.

The fire still burns, the mountain stands open, and the God who met Moses has

more of himself to show you than you have ever yet dared to ask for.

Questions for reflection. Question 1. What resonated or surprised you from the

story of God appearing to Moses?

Question 2. What messages have you absorbed, from the church,

from culture, from family, about what mature faith looks like?

What does a good Christian do with their desires?

What might change if your desires were not obstacles to holiness,

but the very thing God wants to redirect and deepen?

Question 3. Write your own prayer to God, talking about your hopes for this study.

Deep Dive. From Exodus 2.11-12. One day, after Moses had grown up,

he went out to where his own people were and watched them at hard labor.

He saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, one of his own people.

Looking this way and that and seeing no one, he killed the Egyptian and hid him in the sand.

Set aside the violence for a moment and notice the identification.

Moses sees an Egyptian and a Hebrew. He could have identified with either.

Every external marker of his life would have predicted Egypt.

Pharaoh's daughter is the one who named him. Pharaoh's house raised him,

Egyptian tutors educated him.

By every visible measure of formation, he was Egyptian.

And yet, in that moment, he knows whose side he is on. The text does not explain how.

It does not say Moses had been wrestling with his identity or that he had recently

learned something about his origin or that a peculiar experience had clarified things.

It just shows the moment of identification and lets it stance.

Whatever had formed Moses deeply enough to act on, it had been working underneath

the surface for years, where the text does not let us look.

Most of us will not face a moment as dramatic as Moses, but we will see smaller versions of it.

The moment when the people who shaped us expect one thing and conscience is asking for another.

The moment when speaking up would jeopardize a position we have spent years building.

The moment when identifying with the wrong person, the unpopular one,

the one outside the room, the one no one is defending, would be socially expensive

in ways we can clearly calculate.