Sometimes we feel overwhelmed.  Life has led us to the foot of that proverbial and insurmountable mountain. 

It is in these moments that we feel hopeless and inadequate.  We are not strong enough to carry on, much less to conquer the challenges that confront us.  We see the soaring heights and breadth of the difficulties in front of us, but fail to see a way over or around.  We have assessed our abilities and concluded their futility in the face of such challenges.  We may even come to a point where we question the whole course of our life’s journey up to this present moment now that we find that its end has led us to an impossibility. 

Moses had one of these moments.   Standing before God on Mount Sinai, Moses was presented with that mountain.  Speaking from a burning bush, God called Moses to a humanly impossible task…to lead the millions of Israelites out from Egypt and from the bondage of slavery.   “You’ve got the wrong guy,” and “I can’t even speak well…” were the gests of Moses reaction to God's call.  All Moses could see at that moment was his inadequacy. 

Perhaps overwhelmed and even anxious, Moses may have forgotten that it was God who had brought Him to this point in his life.  It was God who providentially had Moses placed in as basket to be floated on the Nile when he was just a baby to save his life, and God who allowed Moses to grow up in the Pharaoh’s palaces to be taught and trained with the best education available at that time.  In the 40 years Moses spent herding sheep, God was preparing him to lead the Israelites out of bondage and into the promise land.  Perhaps in these first 80 years of his life, Moses could have never imagined that his commissioning at the burning bush was the culmination of God’s plan for his life up to this point.

But it was, and had always been God’s plan.  And God knew all along what He wanted to do through Moses and that Moses would indeed feel inadequate and be overwhelmed when He called him to such monumental task.  In response to Moses' recognition of his weakness, God reminded Moses of His own omnipotence and omniscience.  God did not give Moses a pep talk here, nor did He try to prop up Moses’ self esteem and self worth.   God did not remind Moses that he had been well educated in Pharaoh’s courts, or that he was the best candidate due to his wonderful resume and qualifications.  It was not a cheer of “You can do it!” from God, but rather “I, the God of creation and the universe, the one who was and is and is to come…the great I Am, will do it through you.”  

Perhaps the fact that Moses recognized his own inability was the very reason God was able to use him.

So in life, when we face that insurmountable task, one that God has brought us to, we can look at ourselves, size up our inability, and lose hope.  Our other choice is to understand that the place we have come to is exactly the place God has led us to in order to call us to greater tasks.  Indeed we are inadequate to take on such challenges by ourselves.  But it is God who reminds us of His power and might, and that He will always be by our side.

Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows  (James 1:17).

We thank God for all the blessings that He bestows upon us, His beloved children.  As humans, even we know how to give good things to our children.  How much more does God give good things to His own (Matthew 7:11).

We delight in and enjoy the blessings that He gives us…the wonderful family, close friends, the church, our health, house, car, finances, and so on.  We thank God for the gifts and talents He’s graciously given us and the opportunities He’s provided.  Even the difficulties that come our way in life turn out to be blessings in disguise.  Most of all, we thank God for the blessing of having a personal relationship with Him and for salvation.  If we were to count all our blessings (if that were even possible), we would then understand with our finite minds to some minute degree how infinitely God loves and cares for us!

Some blessings seemingly fall directly from Heaven, sent to us from God himself, like a miraculous restoration of our health when we are sick, for example.  And while God does not use UPS or FedEx, other blessings we have in life are sent to us through people in our lives.  God uses them to bless us.

The question arises, therefore, if God can use a person to bless if they are not blessed themselves?  This is not to say that there is a person out there who has no blessings because everyone is blessed by God in some way (whether by common grace or special grace).  It is, rather, to question if one can be used by God to bless another in a certain aspect of life if they themselves are not bless in that very aspect of their own life.  I would submit that such a thing would not be possible.

For His Children who acknowledge His blessings, does God therefore bless us for our own good and only our own?  Are the blessings we receive to be stored in our own silos of wealth and prosperity for our enjoyment only?  Or are we blessed to be a blessing?  Did God bless me with the financial prosperity, the material wealth, the beautiful family, the close friends, my health, the productive career, the once in a lifetime opportunities for me alone to hoard for myself?  I would submit that the answer is “No.”

Abraham was chosen by God to be the Father of many nations and descendants.  God blessed Abraham and promised him that he would be a channel of blessing to all nations:

I will make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and will give them all these lands, and through your offspring all nations on earth will be blessed. (Genesis 26:4)

In a direct way, we are blessed as a result of the blessing that Abraham was blessed with.  It is a chain reaction.   And in a direct way, each blessing in our lives can and should be a blessing to others in one facet or another.  We need to bless others with those blessings with which we have been blessed.

God bless you.

The best part of my day is when my wife arrives home with the kids.  My 3 year old son, Nathan, walks to the front door, stretches his hand up and stands on his tip-toes to barely reach the doorbell.  It rings and I get up quickly and do a brisk walk from wherever I am in the house to open the door.  He usually is staring through the narrow window smiling at me, and before I can unlock the door, he has already greeted me with a warm and cheerful “Hi, Daddy!”  My wife walks in after him carrying my 10 month old daughter who recognizes me and waves her hands irratically in the air and jiggles her legs as she smiles and squints her eyes.  She doesn’t speak any words, but I know she is happy to see me.  It is indeed priceless. 

The whole procession of wife and children lasts but a few fleeting seconds, but how I value these moments!  As a father, I know and sense in part now what I previously did not before I had children.  I think about God, our heavenly Father, and how He also longs to see us His beloved children each day.  Yet buried in all the business of our day, we often neglect the time we should be spending with Him.  Not only is this time and activity the most important part of our day, it is also one in which God delights.  He loves us and wants us to spend time with Him.

One of the wonderful analogies I love in the Bible is that of the church as a living body.  As a student of physiology and pathophysiology, there are so many parallels that can be drawn out of the natural world to illuminate spiritual truth.  One of the questions that has been on my mind is that of how the body grows.  How does a baby become an infant, a toddler become a child, and a child become an adult? 

We know that the body starts off as two cells that form one cell at conception.  From the very beginning, this cell divides ferociously, growing in size.  From this one cell, all the cells of the body are derived.  Growth of the body is therefore not a function of increase of the individual cells, but that of replication and exponential multiplication of those cells.  The cells don’t grow bigger, but more in number (perhaps 10-100 trillion cells in the adult body). 

What spiritual truth can be gleaned from this?  For the church to grow, cells must divide and replicate.  If the cells represent the individual believers, it is imperative that each person must replicate for the church to grow.  This means that each member needs not only to lead others to Christ, but perhaps also disciple and train that person, so he or she too will replicate.  And so the process repeats itself.

What we often see in the church today is that members defer the task of evangelism and of leading others to Christ to the collective body.  We have left the command of Christ to go and make disciples to the whole rather than the individual.  This falsely relieves us of our responsibility of personal evangelism.  This is not to say that collectively we can do great things for the God as a whole body, but perhaps it is at the cellular/individual level that the body, i.e. the church grows. 

What then is our individual responsibility as it relates to church growth?  It is to replicate ourselves by personally bringing another to Christ.