The Book of Exodus - Week 3: October 18, 2026

Good morning.

Welcome to Connect Church.

I'm Nate Rovenstein, lead pastor, and we're really glad that you're with us this morning.

And welcome to those that are joining us online or will listen to this sermon later on.

There are two voices that shaped me much, that shaped much of my adolescent identity.

Both voices were seventh graders at South Junior High School in Salina, Kansas.

I will never forget the rotations in gym class when we went around the weight machine.

I'll never forget how before each rep I had to change sometimes dramatically the amount of weight for each apparatus.

And then after each rep, feel the shame that came from knowing that the next participant on the apparatus would know just how little weight I was actually lifting.

And because of the things like that and other things that happen in gym class, right?

The first voice that shaped me was in my own mind.

And it told me over and over again, Nate, you're a scrawny, non-athletic, junior higher, and therefore, because of that, you do not fit in the cool kids club at South Middle School.

The second voice that shaped me in my adolescent journey was a classmate of mine who was in that gym class.

I can't remember his face or his name, but he was with a group of people who I consider to be the cool club.

And I heard him say one day as I was standing next to my best friend, Mitch, who was the only person shorter than me in the class.

I remember that voice saying to me, Ah, look at that.

The two smallest kids in class have matching gym bags.

And I think the voice in my mind about how I felt as I went through those reps on the machine, was what made the voice that I heard out loud land deeply on my memory and psyche.

These voices negatively shaped my identity for way, way too many years.

And what I've come to understand since then is that everyone else in that gym class, including the teachers, the young man whose voice spoke to me that day, and those kids in the cool club, had that cool club that my shame had locked me out of, were and likely are still trying to find their own identity.

I don't share that story for any other reason except to help you understand that all of us have voices that shape our lives.

I know that all of us have voices internal and external that shape our identity, many of them much louder, honestly, and way more painful than the voices I was listening to in junior high.

Can you relate to that?

The voices that shape us.

Because this search for identity is basic to the human condition.

And how we go about that search is in many ways the most important determination of the direction of our lives.

How we go about finding out who we are.

Our identity comes from those around us, the voices in us, our cultural influences, our family structures, the messages of society, the influence of friends, the wiring in our brains, the words spoken to us, the trauma we have experienced, the bad choices we make, the good choices we make, the schools that we attend, the neighborhoods we live in, the books we read, and on and on the list goes of all the voices that shape our identities.

In fact, these identities become so strong that when we introduce ourselves, we talk about them in language like the careers that we have, the sports teams that we support, the pronouns we choose, the hobbies we love, the families we are a part of, our sexual preferences, our broken relationships, the neighborhood we live in, the political party we align with, the nation we are from, the culture we are part of, on and on again.

These are all ways we identify the fact that all of us need to know who we are.

And all of us come to that determination by these voices, internal and external, that speak to who we are.

But what if I told you that Moses, the main character of the book of Exodus that we've been looking at, struggled in the same way?

He struggled deeply to know who he was.

And he had voices just like we do that shaped who he was.

And his story of how he discovered who he was and what God had for him is a great paradigm for us to consider as we understand and learn to understand the identities that we have.

My own journey towards finding a healthy sense of identity is marked by the lessons that Moses learned and more importantly, that Jesus taught.

Because I think it matters so much that we know who we are.

And so we're gonna look at this today in this crucial story of Exodus.

And we've been in this series, and Pastor John over the last two weeks has started us out on this wonderful journey.

And today we come in some ways to the most important part of Moses' journey when he discovered who he was.

I would encourage you, if you were not here two weeks ago, October 4th, go online and listen to John's sermon as he laid out this series for us.

And you can do that, by the way.

Our sermons are available on YouTube if you want to watch the video, but a much better recording on your wherever you get your uh podcast, or you can go to our webpage and there's a version of that, a podcast that you can listen to.

I'd encourage you to listen to that sermon on October 4th because it set the stage for us as we look at this book of Exodus, which is the story of God's involvement with a specific group of people.

And what we've been seeing in this series is that God saw, he heard, and he came down to help.

He was concerned and he came to help.

And God gave this group of people his name, which we'll look at today, and he told them to bear it well, and he gave them this new identity based solely on their relationship with him.

And as we've looked at this series, we're we're we're framing it this way.

We we're calling it the saga of Moses and we and then the saga of the Israelites, of the Hebrews.

We see that that God uh rescued Moses and then he commissioned him.

We're looking at the commissioning part today, and then we're gonna see that God did the same thing with Israel.

He rescued them and then he commissioned them, and that will be the rest of the series.

And we've looked at John's introduced some of these themes, so many rich themes in the book of Exodus, themes that are called back to throughout the entire Bible.

And these themes are, you know, before the story and after the story and called back throughout all of Scripture.

And today we're gonna just pick a couple of those themes.

We're gonna zero in on two things this morning in terms of our thematic understanding, and that is this theme of identity and this theme of bearing God's name well.

So let's look at the story.

We remember that God rescued Moses.

Last week, Pastor John led us through how God rescued Moses and through the midwives and the women in the story, particularly, and how they Moses was rescued from that fate that came upon so many young Jewish boys.

One day after this, now this is this is one day, uh, much later, Moses had grown up, Exodus 2, chapter 11.

One day, Moses had grown up.

He went out to where his own people were and watched him at their hard labor.

His own people meaning the Hebrews.

He saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrews Hebrew, one of his own people, and looking this way and that and seeing no one, he killed the Egyptian and hid him in the sand.

And the next day he went out and saw two Hebrews fighting.

He asked the one in the wrong, Why are you hitting your fellow Hebrew?

And the man said, Who made you ruler and judge over us?

Are you thinking of killing me as you killed the Egyptian?

And then Moses was afraid and thought, What I did must have become known.

When Pharaoh heard of this, he tried to kill Moses.

But Moses fled from Pharaoh and went to live in Midian, where he sat down by a well.

Now it's interesting.

Remember, God saw, God was concerned, and God took action.

Did you notice Moses did the same thing?

Moses saw something, he was concerned about it, and he took action, and it was a disaster.

His efforts were a disaster.

Someone was murdered.

The people he was trying to help turned on him, and Moses ended up in exile, sitting by a well in his own identity.

When Moses tried to do this thing that God eventually commissioned him to, his actions ended up in disaster.

It becomes clear in these chapters that Moses was struggling with his identity.

He was trying to figure out who he was.

Think about it.

Moses grew up around Pharaoh.

He knew his father wasn't Pharaoh.

But you ever wonder if he wondered who his dad was?

What was his dad like?

He knew at some level that he was not an Egyptian.

He knew he was a Hebrew, but and he knew that for a variety of reasons.

Clearly in the text he understood who he was, but I wonder if he could even still hear his mother's voice.

Who remember his mother who weaned him and got paid to do it?

I wonder if he still heard his mom's voice at some sub you know level, unconscious almost, whispering in his ears the songs of the Jewish people, the lessons of the Jewish people.

But he was raised in a Hebrew palace, an Egyptian palace.

Is he Egyptian?

Is he Hebrew?

Yes.

Yes.

But is that who I really am?

When he takes this action and defends this Hebrew, like, was he trying to rescue the people?

Was he trying to start a revolt?

Was he just doing what happened in the moment?

There's so many questions.

You can talk about him in your growth group.

What was going on in his mind?

But clearly what was going on in his mind was confusion.

He knew he was not who he had been raised to be, but who he had been raised to be was all he knew that he was.

If he was trying to rescue his people, at least this Jewish person in this story was not having it.

He was not accepted by the Jewish people.

He didn't feel comfortable in the Egyptian palace.

Now, Hebrews 11 tells us by faith, Moses, when he had grown up, refused to be known as a son of Pharaoh's daughter.

He chose to be mistreated along with the people of God rather than to enjoy the fleeting pleasures of sin.

This is an interesting take.

Many years later, the New Testament writer looks back and realizes that at some point Moses began to understand who he was.

But I promise you, this was not a straight line for Moses.

He didn't just wake up one day and realize he was a Hebrew and understand everything about it.

It's clear it wasn't a straight line for him.

The Hebrew writer was probably looking at his whole life and saying, through the whole process, he came to understand who he was.

This identity struggle with Moses to know who he was led him to exile in the wilderness.

Pharaoh comes after him, and you know the story.

If you don't know the story, there's movies about this.

This is one of the stories in the old in the scriptures that has become well known beyond just those of us in the church.

He goes to the far side of the wilderness.

He's in Midian.

And you know, even if you don't know who you are, you still gotta live.

Right?

You still gotta have a life.

And so Moses, still confused, I'm sure, about who he really was.

He he finds himself sitting by a well and he meets a woman and he gets married and he has a family.

He has to feed himself, he has to take care of his family.

He he has urges and desires to be married and raise kids.

So he does what everyone does, even when we don't know who we are.

You live the life the best you can.

And now, many years later, out in the wilderness with this new life that he's built around, even the confusing identity that he has, the Bible tells us Moses was tending the flock in Exodus 3, Moses was tending the flock of Jethro, his father-in-law, the priest of Midian, and he led the flock to the far side of the wilderness and came to Horeb, the mountain of God.

And there the angel of the Lord appeared to him in the flames of a fi of fire within a bush.

And Moses saw that though the bush was on fire, it did not burn.

So Moses thought, I will go over there and see this strange sight.

Why the bush does not burn up.

And when the Lord saw that he had gone over to look, God called to him from within the bush, Moses, Moses, and Moses said, Here I am.

So much about this story we won't have time to get into today.

The whole phenomenon of the burning bush.

What it was, how did it burn and not burn up?

But here's what I want us to catch as we're talking about it today.

First of all, this story reminds me of when God came looking for Adam and Eve in the garden.

And it reminds me of story after story in Scripture where God comes looking for people.

This is the God we serve, friends.

There's confusing things in the Old Testament.

I understand that.

There's things about the Old Testament that are hard for us to get our minds around.

That doesn't mean that we miss the picture.

We shouldn't allow that to cause us to miss the picture of the Old Testament.

The Old Testament of the God who sees, is concerned, and over and over again goes after people who aren't necessarily looking for him.

He finds us and he calls Moses twice.

Just like when he called Abraham and Jacob and Samuel, Moses, and Moses.

And Moses responds with his little phrase, here I am.

But who was he?

Who was Moses in this moment?

Was he a privileged Egyptian?

Not anymore.

Not anymore.

Was he an enslaved Jew?

Well he was Jewish, but he wasn't enslaved.

He wasn't with his people.

Was he a refugee in Midian?

Yes.

Yes, he was a little bit of all of that, wasn't he?

He was Egyptian in some sense.

He was Jewish in some sense.

He was a refugee in some sense.

But when Moses said who, uh when Moses said, here I am, he was he was kind of saying, whether consciously or not, this is all I know, but here I am.

I think that's a great place to be when God says, Where are you?

Here I am.

Even when I don't know who I am, here I am.

Moses had positioned himself to receive from God something.

Something that would change his life.

And so, in verse 5 of the same chapter, the scripture reads, Do not, do not come any closer, God said.

Take off your sandals, for the place where you're standing is holy ground.

Then he said, I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.

At this Moses hid his face because he was afraid to look at God.

And the Lord said, I have indeed, here it is, seen the misery of my people in Egypt.

I have heard them crying out because of their slave drivers.

I am concerned about their suffering.

So I have come down to rescue them from the hand of the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of the land into a good and spacious land, a land flowing with milk and honey, the home of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebuzites.

And now the cry of the Israelites has reached me, and I've seen the way the Egyptians are oppressing them.

Here's this God again who saw Moses and came to him, and now he sees the Israelites and comes to them.

This God who keeps coming after people.

He sees, he's concerned, and he takes action.

And this had to be good news for Moses.

This had to be good news for Moses for at least two reasons.

One, God showed up to him on the other side of his failures.

Think about how it must have felt to Moses that God would show up in this moment.

In his confused identity, here's God, the creator of the universe, speaking to him, calling his name twice, Moses, Moses.

And somehow at a very deep personal level, again, Moses probably pretty confused as to even who Yahweh was.

Like he wasn't raised with all the teachings and the stories, but he knew enough of them to know that God was here.

So at a personal level, this had to be powerful to Moses.

And then at a secondary level, it must have been very comforting for Moses to know that the God who showed up to him was the God who was going to show up and rescue the Israelites, the people that he was drawn to at some level, that he knew he was a part of in some way, that God was gonna do something.

Maybe, maybe even in Moses' mind, I don't know.

Maybe in his mind he connected the idea that I tried to save them that couldn't, but God is now gonna step in and do what I couldn't do.

I don't know what was going through his mind, but it had to be comforting to Moses to know that first of all, God shows up to me when I fail, and secondly, God's gonna help my people.

But then it gets very real.

Because God said, Guess what, Moses?

You're the one.

Wait a second.

I want someone to rescue my people, and I'm so glad you showed up, God.

But I I'm guessing Moses was like, Me?

The despised refugee Jew who is kicked out of my home, living on the far side of the wilderness.

Me?

You want me?

You're commissioning me?

You can you can hear it.

We'll hear it later on in the passage, but let's read on in Exodus 3.10.

So now go.

God says, I'm sending you.

Whoever you are, whoever you think you are, Moses, I'm sending you to Pharaoh to bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt.

You can hear Moses' doubt as to God's wisdom in verse 11 and a whole bunch through the rest of this passage, honestly.

But God said, But Moses said to God, Who am I?

He already said, Who am I?

First he said, Here I am.

Now he's like, Who am I?

That I should go to Pharaoh and bring the Israelites out of Egypt.

And God said, I will be with you.

And this will be the sign to you that it is I who sent you.

When you have brought the people out of Egypt, you will worship God on this mountain.

Moses had started this conversation when God called his name with a statement, Here I am.

But now he has the question, but who am I?

Who am I?

And God answers his question in a powerful way.

Moses asks, Who am I?

and God says, I will be with you.

So all of us that are struggling to know who we are, the first thing we need to hear is God saying, I will be with you.

I will find you, I will call your name.

I want to be with you.

God wants to be with us.

And when we doubt that, we need to think of the cross of Jesus.

God wants us to be with us.

So there's this, there's this, first of all, this identity, uh, is this sense of presence that God wants to be with us.

But Moses needs more.

Verse 13.

Moses said to God, suppose I go to the Israelites and say to them, the God of your fathers has sent me to you, and they ask, What is his name?

And then, what shall I tell them?

And God said to Moses, I am who I am.

Perhaps one of the most important phrases in all of Scripture.

This is what you are to say to the Israelites, I am has sent me to you.

Moses is finally getting to the right question when he asks God, Who are you?

Like we all have this existential question of who am I?

But the right question is to ask God, who are you?

That's where rebuilding our identity starts, right?

That's why I think theology is the queen of the sciences.

The question we have to ask is, Who is God?

And the more we understand about who God is, the more we'll understand about who we are and what life is all really all about.

Moses gets to the right question, and God said, I am who I am.

Or another way to say this, another maybe more accurate way of saying this is I will be whoever I will be.

Moses, I am who I am.

Like whatever you may think about who I am, whatever others may say about who I am, whatever your mind conceives, I am who I am.

I will be who I will be.

And God is saying to Moses, guess what, Moses?

There's always going to be a mystery about me to you.

You will never be able to put me in a box.

You will never be able to say, I understand everything about the great I am.

I will be who I will be.

And part of you understanding who you are is accepting that I will be who I will be.

As far as you're concerned, that's where it starts.

So what did God say?

First of all, I will be with you and I will be who I will be.

I will be with you, but you can't shape me.

I will be with you and I will be who I will be.

Our search for a clear identity starts with a willingness to let God be God.

And that's hard for us humans.

It was hard for Adam and Eve.

It was hard for Satan.

So I got thrown out of heaven.

We have a desire to be who we will be.

I will be, we want to be who we want to be.

And God says, Let me be who I am.

And that puts God really far away in many ways.

But I'm glad God also said something else in his name.

Let's read it in verse 15.

And God also said to Moses, say to the Israelites, the Lord, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Joseph, has sent me to you.

This is my name forever.

The name you shall call me from generation to generation.

Go assemble the elders of Israel and say to them, The Lord, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, appeared to me and said, I have watched over you and have seen what has been done to you in Egypt, and I have promised to bring you out of your misery in Egypt into the land of the Canaanites and the Hittites and the Amorites and the Perizzites and the Hivites and the Jebusites, a land flowing with milk and honey.

This phrase in here that we might have missed is this simple phrase of, This is my name, you shall call me for all generations.

Here's what God was saying: I think I will be mysterious to you, Moses.

I will be with you, but I will be mysterious.

However, I will also reveal myself to you.

I will let you know who I am.

This is the story of Scripture.

This God who is who he is, regardless of what we may think, has chosen in so many ways throughout the Old Testament and most clearly in Jesus to say, Yeah, but I'm gonna let you know who I am.

Think about this.

The God of the universe, who we can never fully understand, says, I'm gonna let you know me.

I love that we want to know God.

I'm changed by the fact that he knows me.

He knows us.

And he chooses, even more importantly than that, to let us know him.

God is mysterious, we can never home know him.

But he reveals himself to us.

So I think identity is found.

When the God who we can never fully explain reveals himself to us and promises to be with us, even as we struggle to understand all of this.

You can't grasp me, but I will stop.

I will step by step reveal myself to you and be with you and commission you to a mut a task much bigger than anything you can accomplish on your own.

God promises presence.

He reminds us that he's mysterious and beyond our comprehension.

He says, I will be with you and reveal myself to you.

And then he says, I want you to do something, Moses.

I'm not doing all of this just so that you can know me.

I'm commissioning you to be a part of rescuing those who are in bondage.

And here, let me tell you something.

This voice that I'm talking about, this present, mysterious, revealing, commissioning God is infinitely louder and stronger and better than any seventh-grade boys' voices that tried to shape my life or that are trying to shape yours.

It comes down really to which voice are you gonna listen to?

Moses must have been in awe of God's new identity and commission for him.

And I would love to tell you that Moses said, I've been moved.

I'm ready.

Let's do it.

But then Moses did what many of us do: the litany of excuses.

I'm just gonna read these.

See if you can relate to them in chapter four.

It's a long passage.

Let's let it stand on its own.

Moses answered, What if they do not believe me or listen to me and say, The Lord did not appear to you?

Then the Lord said to him, What's that in your hand?

A staff, he replied.

The Lord said, Throw it on the ground.

And so Moses threw it on the ground and it became a snake, and he ran from it.

Then the Lord said to him, Reach out your hand and take it by the tail.

Throwing it down was the easy part.

Picking it up.

So Moses reached out and took the hold of the snake and turned and it turned back into a staff in his hand.

This said the Lord, is so they may believe that the Lord, the God of their fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has appeared to you.

Then the Lord said, Put your hand inside your cloak.

So Moses put his hand into his cloak, and when he took it out, the skin was leprous.

It had become as white as snow.

Now put it back into your cloak, he said.

So Moses put his hand back into his cloak, and when he took it out, it was restored like the rest of his flesh.

Then the Lord said to him, If they do not believe you or pay attention to the first sign, they may believe the second.

That's a little foreshadowing there.

But if they do not believe these two are signs or listen to you, take some water from the Nile and pour it on the dry ground.

The water you take from the river will become blood on the ground.

And Moses said to the Lord, Pardon your servant, Lord, I've never been eloquent, neither in the past nor since you have spoken to your servant.

I am slow.

Speech and tongue.

Excuses.

And the Lord said to him, Who gave human beings their mouths?

Who makes them deaf or mute?

Who gives them sight or makes them blind?

Is it not I, the Lord, the God who's with you, will give you words.

Now go, I will help you speak and I will teach you what to say.

But Moses said, Pardon your servant, Lord.

And this he finally gets to the truth.

Please send someone else.

And then the Lord's anger burned against Moses, and he said, What about your brother?

Aaron the Levite?

I know he can speak well.

He's already on his way to meet you, and he will be glad to see you.

You shall speak to him and put words in his mouth.

I will help both of you speak and will teach you what to do.

He will speak to the people for you, and it will be as if he were your mouth and as if God, as if you were God to him.

But take this staff in your hand so you can perform these signs with it.

Excuses.

What if they don't believe me?

God says, Let me show you something with that what's in your hand.

I'm clumsy mouth, I'll be your mouth.

Send someone else, and well, I'll send Aaron with you.

Over and over again.

Here's the thing this is the equipping part of the journey.

When God commissions you, He has to equip you.

He has to help you and I overcome the stuff that makes us not want to do what He's calling us to.

But the equipping and the commissioning comes after the new identity.

Understanding who God is helps us understand who we are so that God can commission us to do what God wants us to do.

And the equipping is the day-to-day journey in that process.

If you know this, we're gonna look at the story.

You're gonna see this, you're gonna see that it wasn't, it took even way more than this for the children of Israel to be let out.

It took ten plagues foreshadowing, right?

It took a journey.

Maybe I can say it, kind of wrap this all up with this statement.

We want to know who we are, but ultimately we are who God says we are.

That's who we are.

Identity and then burying his name.

Identity and commissioning.

You can't do God-sized things with human-created identities.

But if God shapes your identity, he commissions you for God-sized tasks.

Or forgiving your ex-spouse.

Or whatever.

Those are God-sized tasks, by the way.

And many, many other examples I could give.

You belong to Yahweh if you've trusted Jesus as your Savior.

So know his character, follow his instructions, bear his name well, because he commissions you so.

This theme of identity and vocation explodes in the New Testament.

This calls forward to Emmanuel and to the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, where he says, Stop with your past.

God says, I will give you a new identity and a new vocation.

Let me take you to two scriptures in the Old Testament, New Testament, and we'll wrap this up.

Hebrews chapter 8.

Hebrews 8 · chapter mention

I was reading this this week in my own sort of devotional pattern, and it came to this verse.

This is a covenant I will establish to the people of Israel after that time, declares the Lord.

I will put my law in their minds and write them on their hearts.

I will be their God and they will be my people.

No longer will they teach their neighbor or say to one another, Know the Lord, because they will all know me from the least of them to the greatest, for I will forgive their wickedness and remember their sins no more.

The writer to the Hebrews is quoting Jeremiah 31, which is quoted, by the way, multiple times in the New Testament.

And Jeremiah 31 says, There will come a time when everyone can know God in this intimate way, that Moses met God that day at Mount Horeb, where we will know God and God will know us because Jesus came to make a way for us to know God this way.

And I want to tell you a story as I end this sermon about another scrawny, short little man in the New Testament who met Jesus, the one who made himself known.

You know the story.

Jesus in Luke 19 entered Jericho and was passing through.

A man was there by the name of Zacchaeus.

He was a chief tax collector and was wealthy.

He wanted to see Jesus, but because he was short, he could not see over the crowd.

I wonder if he had a gym bag.

So he ran ahead and climbed a sycamore fig tree to see him, since Jesus was coming that way.

And when Jesus reached the spot, he looked up and said to him, Zacchaeus, come down immediately.

I must stay at your house today.

So he came down at once and welcomed him gladly.

All the people saw this and began to mutter, he is gone to be the guest of a sinner.

But Zacchaeus stood up and said to the Lord, Look, Lord, here and now.

Listen to this.

Here and now I give half my possessions to the poor.

And if I have cheated anybody out of anything, they will pay back four times the amount.

And Jesus said to him, Today salvation is come to this house because this man too is the son of Abraham, for the son of man came to seek and to save the lost.

There's a seeking God again.

But listen to listen to what Zacchaeus did.

Nobody told Zacchaeus, give your money away.

Zacchaeus wasn't following rules.

Zacchaeus was responding to presence.

Zacchaeus was responding to the fact that he had been made new, that he had a changed life.

Zacchaeus didn't, nobody made him do this.

God, he responded to a new identity.

And so often we try to follow Jesus by following the rules.

And Jesus says, Let me change you, and you won't need the rules.

Your generosity will overflow.

You don't need somebody to tell you to tithe because you're going to give your money away.

You don't need to have somebody force you to volunteer because you're going to step into hard places.

You don't need somebody to encourage you to go do this and that because God's going to commission you in your little moments of life.

Because when you see Jesus, when you know Jesus, when Jesus transforms you and you understand by first looking at him who you now are, God begins to transform you.

Is it a straight line?

Absolutely not.

Zacchaeus had bad days after this.

I'm sure of it.

But there's this constant renewal of who we are.

Identity means God is with us.

You can't figure them out, but he's going to show you enough of himself to commission you to what he asks you to do.

So let me wrap this up with just three challenges, three questions, maybe three ways to respond as the worship team comes back on stage.

First of all, I would say Jesus is here and he's looking for you.

If you never trusted Jesus as your Lord and Savior, why not today?

Maybe this is your Moses moment.

Where the great I am is standing and calling your name.

He's not asking you to understand everything about him.

He's just saying, trust that what I did on the cross for you matters enough to change you.

And then step into that new life and let him change you by faith.

Trust Jesus today.

Some of you need to hear secondly that you are who God says you are.

It sounds good in this room to be told it makes sense, right?

As we're sitting in this room that you are who God says you are, but tomorrow's coming.

Those voices are not gonna leave.

Internal and external voices don't go away.

Some of you need to remember you are who God says you are.

You've trusted Jesus a long time ago, but you are who God says you are.

Let that shape you.

Don't let any other voice shape you.

And by the way, who God says you are, it might not fit in well with what culture says who you are.

And that's okay.

You are who God says you are.

This mysterious, revealing, present God.

And then I would say for all of us, you are capable of what God calls you to.

You're not capable of what God calls me to.

I'm not capable of what God calls you to.

But you are capable of what God calls you to.

Because you are who He says you are.

Lord, help us to remember this.

Sounds good in this room, but it will take your Holy Spirit to make it real in our lives.

So would you do that?

In Jesus' name.

Amen.

We've seen how God rescued Moses and commissioned him for a significant task, and next week we're going to start seeing how God does the same for the children of Israel.

But for now, let's stand and worship the Lord.