you A good morning to you. I'd like
to encourage you with a few thoughts from Exodus chapter 24 today,
and I hope they'll be helpful for the journey ahead. We live
in a culture, our American culture, that prizes efficiency and accomplishment,
and loves to see the two things work together. They're interconnected. We want to accomplish things,
and we want to accomplish them as efficiently as we possibly
can, so there's no waste, and we get a lot of things done.
and you come to the end of one year, and you look forward to
another year, and a lot of times these time management expert
gurus and so forth, they encourage you to sit down and do some evaluation
over the last year. What did you accomplish? What
could you have done to make that accomplishment more efficient,
and get more done, and so on and so forth. Look forward to
the next year, and what do you anticipate accomplishing in the
year ahead, and how can you accomplish that thing efficiently, etc.,
etc. It's just so highly prized to accomplish a lot in as short
amount of time as possible, as efficiently as possible. But
the thing is, God doesn't always work that way, and it's very
clear in Exodus 24, in verses 15 and following. Now notice,
and get this, have you ever thought about this as you read this passage?
It says, Moses went up into the mountain, and a cloud covered
the mountain. This is where he's going to go
up on the top of the mountain, and God's going to give him the law and
all the instructions about building the tabernacle and so on and
so forth. He goes up into the mountain, a cloud covers the
mountain, and verse 16 says, Now the glory of the Lord rested
on Mount Sinai, and the cloud covered it six days. six days. On the seventh day, the Lord
called to Moses out of the midst of the cloud. You get the significance
of that? Moses goes up on the top of the
mountain and What's he doing for six days? What's he doing? Just kind of hanging out, basking
in the glory cloud? There's nothing going on. What about efficiency here? There's
more. It says the sight of the glory
of the Lord was like a consuming fire on the top of the mountain
in the eyes of the children of Israel. So all the rest of the
people of Israel are down at the bottom of the mountain, and
they're looking up, and they see this fire of a cloud up on top of the mountain,
and Moses is in that cloud. He's been there for six days,
and now the Lord finally speaks. So verse 18 says, Moses went
into the midst of the cloud, and he went up into the mountain,
and Moses was on the mountaintop 40 days and 40 nights. Now, as
you read the book of Exodus, and you read the next several
chapters here in the book of Exodus, ask yourself the question,
how long would it have taken for God to give this information
to Moses? At best, supposing that Moses
had to inscribe it all on rock or something, a few days? But 40 days and 40 nights, and
six days before God even speaks to him? This isn't very efficient. Oh, but God is accomplishing
his purposes in it. What's he doing all this time?
Well, I don't have the answers to all of that, but one thing
I do know is what's going to come down the road here very
quickly. While Moses is up on the mountaintop,
eventually the people are like, where is this Moses? We don't
know where he is. Then they end up making the golden calf, and
they renege on their promise to obey the Lord and to keep
his commandments and all the rest of that. I'm wondering,
is part of the purpose of the Lord in being so, quote, inefficient,
a means of putting his people to a test? Will they be faithful
without the constant pressure and push of Moses' leadership? Will they obey without Moses
constantly harping on them to obey? What will they do? What's
this all accomplishing in Moses' life, as he just waits on the
Lord? I would suggest one of the things
it's doing is building in him patience, trust, reliance upon
the Lord that he's going to desperately need for the next 40 years, really. Yeah, the Lord's got his purposes
in his timetable, and his timetable isn't always ours, and his way
of doing things isn't always the American way of doing things,
with high efficiency, quote-unquote, and an accomplishment of a great
deal in a short period of time. but he does accomplish what he
intends to accomplish in his time and in his way, and it's
always good, and it is always truly efficient. Let's keep that
in mind as we go through our day today. We may find ourselves
in a standing in line waiting on something, or in some other
way, seemingly wasting our time. What is the Lord wanting to accomplish
in my life through this today? Well, our Father and our God,
teach us, we pray. Give us patience, and help us to look at things,
look at life, and look at the delays of life, the inefficiencies
of life, from your perspective, we pray. We ask this in Jesus'
name, amen. All right, listen, have a good
rest of your day. May the Lord bless you.