What do you have in your hand?

God met Moses in the wilderness, at a burning bush, to call Him to the task of going back to Egypt to bring his people out of slavery and into the promised land. To Moses this task looked just too big. Surely God had the wrong person, for Moses could not talk, had committed murder and therefore was a fugitive in a foreign land. But, God does not make mistakes. He knew exactly what He was doing when He met Moses and called him for this task, and God had resources that Moses did not know about. God's resources are mostly right in our hand and it is mostly unconventional. Very often it is everyday things that we do not regard as a godly resource because it is so ordinary, so everyday, so conventional and after all we expect the spectacular. While God is also the God of the spectacular, He surely also is the God who does spectacular with the ordinary. Moses had many excuses for not embracing God's calling for him, and thought the people would not believe him anyway.  In this discussion with God, he asks God for a sign that it was really Him.  God asks him:

2“What is that in your hand?” And he said, “A staff.”

A Staff... a pretty ordinary item for a shepherd in the wilderness. With this staff he protected the sheep and gathered them together when they went astray. With this staff he walked over the rugged terrain and most probably killed many a snake. Yet in this instance God sees much more than a shepherd's staff. He sees a staff of miracles. With this ordinary item, God would do the spectacular. God would turn it into a snake that ate the faro's magician's snakes. With it God would turn the waters of the Nile into blood, part the seas, bring water out of the rock, win a war against the Amelekites and it would become one of the 3 items that would be stored in the Holy of Holies of the tabernacle, always blooming, even without being connected to a tree. God himself would give this staff life and life in abundance.

So the question to each of us this week is: "What is in your hand?" What did God place in your hand to perform His Kingdom purposes with? Perhaps it is time to walk through our lives to contemplate and write down what do we have in our hand?  It is highly likely that God placed a handful of treasures in our hand to be used in a time such as this, for His Kingdom purposes. Are we willing to make ourselves available to Him?  Will we recognize the moment when He wants to use what He already put into our hands? 

 

He is the God that does the spectacular with the ordinary

 

It must be you - Bart Millard