Moses Is a Type of Christ; Honor Your Father and Mother
What is your idea of honoring the person who gave you life? Because that answer will also help you understand your relationship to God. ♪ ♪ What I want to do is talk a little bit about the story, if you remember, of how the children of Israel came to be in Egypt's bondage. I don't want to get into great detail about this, but if you remember before they were enslaved in Egypt, the children of Israel were prospering and multiplying, so much so that when a Pharaoh who rose up who knew not Joseph, that means Joseph had already died and some time had passed. That Pharaoh was afraid that the Hebrews would become so mighty a people that he stripped them of their freedom and enslaved them. That's kind of a real simple and quick way to breeze through multiple chapters of Exodus. The Bible says the more they were afflicted, the more they proliferated and reproduced and had, they were prosperous even in their captivity. Although they prayed and they prayed for deliverance, in order to stop the population from growing as fast as it was, Pharaoh ordered the midwives to kill every Hebrew male-born child.
The midwives━there's all these little sub, sub-stories. One day I want to go into doing messages and sub-stories within the messages because there's so much there. The midwives feared God and not Pharaoh, so they refused. And I love that. You know, listen, sometimes being disobedient is a good thing. And there's a, there's a perfect case in point of being disobedient. They completely disobeyed Pharaoh and they, they said, “We're, we fear God, not you.” So they kept basically letting the babies live, but Pharaoh gave the order to kill all Hebrew male babies at birth. In the midst of all this, probably one of the most familiar stories, probably even people who are not Christians or Jews or faithing people know the story of the child Moses who is born to mother and father, mother Jehoshabed, father Amram. And he is born during this period where the edict is given to kill all of the firstborn, first it was firstborn and it was all the male children.
And so it's kind of interesting. A set of two people, the foundation of godly parents who would go to whatever lengths they could to protect their child from the evils of the world and the edict of death. Jehoshabed, it's kind of interesting, that's the mother of Moses, she saw that her baby was beautiful. It even interests me that the Bible repeats that three times in different places, that she saw that the baby was beautiful. That prompted me to kind of read between the lines and I think the deeper meaning is not simply that she saw that her child was beautiful as in an attractive child before God, but rather wrapped up in the thought is that the child was given some unique role in life.
But how could a mother know that? All right? I think every mother, every father, every parent looks at their young baby and thinks, “The world is before you; you might go seize it. What great things you might achieve,” but who could know? We don't know. The other thing that I think is it's tragic in today's society, we don't hear of people wanting to dedicate their children to the Lord anymore, it's very few and far in between that say, “I wish to dedicate.” Meaning, even if I do it, what would, what would happen to the child? There's a lot less of that. In fact, in the early years, formative years of this country, almost every child born in this country was dedicated to the Lord. That's kind of an interesting thing if you think about how things have changed. Now the Bible says if you train up a child, specifically in the faith, in the ways of God that he or she will not soon depart, even when they're older.
And I think we tend to make that into a caricature sometimes. I think what it is, is what we are instilled with in those formative years. Whatever that is, it could be the food we eat, the language around us, praying, God, anything that a child is exposed to. It doesn't mean that they are going to adhere to it through the course of their life. But as you get older, you'll find yourself usually reverting back to things that you may not even be aware were implemented and put into your brain in those formative years. So nothing could be more important than raising a child with good, godly values. And I believe that the family of Moses, if you take a look, I'm not going to say that they knew everything because there wasn't a revelation as we know it, but they had some form of worship, of faith. And I say that because if you take a look at Jehoshabed specifically, she had a plan. And think of this, the plan was so risky to hide, to try and hide a child for three months.
Now I know some of you here have babies and have had babies. So you know how difficult it is to keep a baby silent. So if you can imagine that, and you know we tend to caricature this a bit, but if you can imagine each time that baby would cry, the reaction that she must have had to kind of hush it and shush it down and get it to shut up, right, “You're going to draw attention and probably get us all killed,” right? So you've got that going on for three months until obviously she couldn't hide the baby anymore. And of course, you know the story. They built that little ark and they pitched it inside and they put the child inside the basket. Think of this, because we seldom pick this story apart, but all the things that had to align for Jehoshabed's plan to actually work. I want you to think about this right down to the most minute thing. You know, we tend to go back to Cecil B. DeMille's depiction of this event and think that here Miriam was going around the bulrushes and moving the basket along.
Do you realize that the impossibility of that, especially in the Nile? If you don't know what's in the Nile, then stay ignorant, but I highly doubt that a person would be smart enough to step into the Nile and meander around. So the, just the gentle stream had to be moving in the right direction at the right time, at the right flow as the daughter of Pharaoh, the princess, was bathing. All of these things had to align. There had to be some, we'll call it some real markers to say God's hand was in this. And then of course, you know Miriam is right there and points out that there's the child there; brings the child in and points out that the mother might be able to be found. I don't know how that's so miraculous. Find a mother that can nurse this baby, and it just so happens to be Jehoshabed, right? A great coincidence that happened here. Now there are people that would say that Jehoshabed's actions, how could a responsible, good, godly woman put her child at risk? But she really had nothing to lose if you think about it if, if the edict was given for children to be murdered, to be slaughtered, she had nothing to lose but by trusting God.
And I don't want anyone to think that trusting God is just simply wishful thinking in prayer because God really had to be in this. Think of everything that could have gone wrong including, by the way, that basket meandering off to the other side as the Nile's quite wide. It could have drifted off to the other side. There's so many different things that could have happened. I will say this; Jehoshabed had to be very brave if you consider the time that she lived in. I've said this before; do not get mad at me. The time, this particular time that we're looking at, women had one role and that was to produce children and to raise them. To step out of that box could be death for any reason. You could be stoned to death and killed for any reason. So she was a brave woman if you consider the time she lived in, her plan, which had to have been ordained by God. Consider that Moses may not have known the identity of his parents until a little later. So remember I quoted, I paraphrased the Scripture of Proverbs 22, “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is older he should not soon depart.” Very interesting that Moses kind of made a full circle back to concepts that he didn't spend the formative years learning, if that makes any sense to you, because we know he was given up when he was three months old and then nursed by his mother for as long as she could.
So in that space of the three months plus the nursing period is all that the mother could have given to the child in terms of, even though the child's just a baby speaking to the child. So it's interesting that we have a full circle on Moses' behalf coming back to the faith that he truly couldn't have possibly known deeply, but was at least exposed to by Jehoshabed. So you've got to think about that. And the other thing that I would say is important is if you think about their whole family. Now Moses' brother Aaron, who would become the first high priest of Israel and his sister Miriam, who was a prophetess and a musician, they all are under this umbrella, if you will. So I think it's kind of fascinating. Moses' story, if you will, at best, is interesting on so many levels. My interest today is actually not Mother's Day. I'm pointing out Jehoshabed because it just fits neatly here. But my message is actually more about Moses being a type of Christ. And I'm going to show you in a few minutes here how much so by Scripture, how much so when you can see the parallels in Scripture.
But what I do want to point out is that Moses, we know, was not God. He was just a human, not; unlike Christ who was man and God, Moses, just a man, all human, one hundred percent human, and interesting. And I will keep repeating this until enough people hear this. Do not, you know, we, we lift people out of the Bible because God highlighted them. But please never forget something, especially for those people who grapple with forgiveness, their issues of past or even present that they seem to fumble on perpetually. God chose Moses. He didn't choose Moses because he was perfect. He didn't choose Moses because Moses wasn't a sinner. Moses killed a man. Moses was trained; Moses was exposed out in the world. If you think about it, Egypt is analogous to the world in all the ways of the world being surrounded by the opulence of Egypt. That whole surrounding, if you will, was, we'll call it the foundation that this person grew up in. So never say that God can't take a person from where they were found and make them something else. Remember my message? “I'll make you fishers of men.
I'll make you something you're not.” That's what God does. This is my whole issue with the people who are fundamentalists or perfectionists who keep going down the same rabbit hole of, “You must be perfect and you must be”━good luck preaching that in this day and age because you've got, it seems every person is either suffering from some form of mental illness or a complete denial of God, which makes for a lot of societal issues we're now having to reap from. So what I'm saying to you is all of this comes back to a very important thing. I'm focused on Moses, by the way. Now I've moved a little bit away from the moms, and that is understanding God's ways. And clearly, if we take a look and we were to put Moses and Christ side by side, they are not the same.
But if you start analyzing, because this whole series in the tabernacle have been shadows and types, we're going to go through some of the Scriptures and I've prepared a good amount of them if you'll come here. I've prepared a good amount of them. If you find, if you're reading this and you see typos, don't shoot the typist, all right? I never said I was a good typist. So we may have you search out, some of these have been condensed because of long lengthy passages that I didn't want to have to write out, but Moses on this side, Christ over here.
And so I put down, for example, here Psalm 105:26, Moses is called “his servant”; Christ in the New Testament is called “my servant.” Psalm 106, Moses is called “his chosen”; God speaking about His Son says “I have chosen” in Isaiah 42. So you can kind of see I've put these. He's referred to, Moses is referred to as “priest” and where there is no personal or pronoun before it, it's simply a reference to show you. So you'll find the scriptural references that I put up here in Deuteronomy 33:4, and 5, “king”" Acts 17. So again, the columns Moses and Christ; if you take a look, Exodus 3:3, “shepherd,” John 10, we know Jesus is referred to many times as “the shepherd,” “the good shepherd,” even “the great shepherd.” “Mediator” in Exodus 33, “one mediator” in 1 Timothy.
“Intercessor,” both of them, you can see the scriptural references. In Acts 7, Moses is called “deliverer” and “ruler,” in Romans we have Christ being referred to as “deliverer” as well as 1 Thessalonians 1:10. And again, “ruler” here, Moses, the same passage, and Christ referred to in Micah. It's kind of interesting, this is what I told you, you cannot, if you start doing these type of studies, you cannot separate Old and New Testament. You cannot. There's no way. You can see how tied together they are and the more you study this, this is what's mind boggling to me. The more you study these, the more you realize that God not only had a plan, but a lot of these are shadow and type or mirror of each other. Only you can see Moses exemplified this as all human. Christ comes as the Son of God, condescends, and takes up a lot of these roles or passages.
It's very clear and as we get into them, you'll see more and more. So here we have the reference, the male children to be cast into the river, Exodus 1:22; the children of Bethlehem to be slain, Matthew 2:13-16. You start seeing the similarities and you start recognizing that there's no error even in the shadows and types pointing to Christ. Hebrews 11 speaking of Moses. So the top one will be Moses, the bottom one will be Christ; “by faith he forsook Egypt,” Hebrews 11, “Out of Egypt I have called my son,” Matthew 2.15. “He endured as seeing him who is invisible,” Hebrews 11:27, “He that has sent me is with me,” or in essence “you will not see the Father; if you came to see the Father, you're going to see Me,” you've got the same concepts. “He supposed his brethren would have understood, but they understood not,” Acts 7:25 speaking of Moses, “his own received him not,” John 1. The rest of these Scriptures they keep just adding on to this, “Who made thee a judge and ruler over us?” That is in reference to Moses, straight out of the Old Testament and then here in the reference to Christ, “Who, who made me a judge or divider over you,” Luke 12.
“This Moses whom they refused, the same did God send to be a ruler and deliverer,” Acts 7:35, “God hath made the same Jesus whom ye have crucified, both Lord and Christ.” And the Scripture references are right there beside each one of these. “He sat down by a well,” Exodus 2:15, “Jesus therefore sat thus on a well.” I condense these so you see the dot, dot, dot. I didn't want to write it all out. It's a lot to write out. “He looked on their burdens, make them rest from their burdens,” Exodus 2:11; “Come unto me, I will give you rest,” Matthew 11. “Let my people go,” Exodus 9, the passage out of Isaiah 61, this is, Jesus quotes this in, or at least part of it in Luke, “to proclaim liberty to the captives.” “All shall bow down themselves unto me,” Exodus 11, reference to Moses/voice of God speaking; “And at that time, at the name of Jesus, every knee should bow,” reference to Christ out of Philippians 2.
“How long shall this man be a snare unto us?” Exodus 10, the people that wanted to stone Moses; “a stone of stumbling and a rock of offense,”1 Peter 2:8, reference to Christ. “Certainly I will be with thee,” Exodus 3:12; “he that hath sent me is with me,” John 8:29. Do you see the parallels? Pretty crystal clear and the list is very long. I only chose the ones that I chose here, but this is what I'm saying to you. As you start analyzing these, and there are some that are much closer than others, you realize that God was not saying, “I'm just going to keep reinventing and trying something new.” No, this was the plan all along, except that God at some point, seeing a stiff-necked and disobedient people, recognizes; Genesis 3 tells you all you need to know. That is really where we see God's plan spelt out. Most people think, “Well, there was the Old and then there was the New.” God had it all mixed together all at once, so sorry to burst some of the bubbles of people out there who say, “Aw, I can only read one Testament.” Okay, well then you should only be wearing one shoe.
“This is the finger of God,” Exodus 8:19; “If I with the finger of God,” Luke 11:20. “Moses stretched out his hand over the sea,” Exodus 14:21; if you remember this passage, “What manner of man is this that even the winds in the sea obey him?” Matthew 8:28; 8:27. “The people thirsted there for water,” Exodus 17; “If any man thirst, let him come unto me,” John 7. “Almost ready to stone me,” something that was going on, the people, again, disappointed, mad, angry at Moses, Exodus 17:4; “They took up stones to cast at him,” John 8, referring to Christ.
“Spring up, O well,” Numbers 21:16-8; “The water that I shall give him shall be a well of water,” and if you read the rest, it's springing up. So you've got these great parallels. “Moses brought their case before the Lord,” Numbers 27:5; we have the reference to Jesus in 1 John as an advocate with the Father. “Who is on the Lord's side, let him come unto me,” and then, “He that is not with me is against me.” So top, Moses, bottom, I repeat again, is Christ, and you can see these parallels very clearly.
The man, Moses, was very meek, Numbers 12; Christ says, “I am meek and lowly in heart.” You've got these parallels. The parallels come down to Jesus being the embodiment. He's not speaking of the reference to another. He is that. Moses could not say he was that, but Jesus comes and He basically becomes all of that in Himself, not speaking about somebody else. There is where we see shadow and type breakdown. “When the people saw that Moses delayed to come down,” Exodus 32; “my Lord delayed his coming,” Matthew 24. “I took twelve men of you,” Deuteronomy 1:23; “He ordained twelve,” Mark 3:13 and 14.
“Seventy men of the elders of the people,” Numbers 11; “The Lord appointed other seventy also,” Luke 10. Behold the cup of the covenant; “Behold the blood of the covenant,” Exodus 24; “this is the cup of the new covenant in my blood,” Luke 22. “So Moses finished the work,” Exodus 40; “I have finished the work,” John 17. “I have pardoned according to thy word,” Numbers 14; “even as God for Christ's sake hath forgiven you,” Ephesians 4:32. “According to all that the Lord commanded him,” Exodus 40, verse 16; “even as I have kept my father's commandments,” John 15.
“He made known his ways unto Moses,” Psalm 103; “the Father loveth the Son and showeth all things that himself doeth.” In Deuteronomy 33:1 we have a parting blessing and then from Luke 24:50 and 51, “While he blessed them; While he blessed them, he was parted from them.” “Let the Lord set a man over the congregation which may lead them out and bring them in, that the congregation of the Lord be not as sheep with have no shepherd”" and of course, if you go down here, I will not leave you and I am the good shepherd,” and there were so many other references here, I just decided to leave it at two, but there were so many of those. “Then sang Moses and the children of Israel this song unto the Lord,” Exodus 15; “They sing the song of Moses, the servant of God, and the song of the Lamb,” Revelation 15:3. And then some other points of interest here. So, “The law was broken in his hands,” Exodus 32; Psalms 40 and verse 8 says, “The law is as the law perfectly kept in his heart.” “The bread that sustain life,” which is a reference back to the manna; “the bread that gives life,” John 6:33.
“Moses, in Numbers 7:13, praying for a leper; in Matthew 8:12, He healed a leper. We have in Hebrews the reference to the first Passover; and in Luke we reference to Christ as the last Passover; the last Passover that was celebrated in Christ being our Passover. Forty days in the mount, Exodus 34; and forty days in the wilderness, Matthew 4:2; that gives you just a small, and as I said, it's abridged because the list is very, very long.
In fact, if you really want to knock, I always have these, “If you want to knock yourself out” moments. If you want to knock yourself out, you should start going through the Scriptures and finding all these parallels. What it does is it, it gives you a clear demonstration of something that God was not saying, “Oh, you know what? All this other stuff didn't work. Now let Me show you the plan that I think will. Here's My only begotten Son,” but rather because you can see the parallels, you can see that God's ways have always been consistent.
And the choosing, I go back to this for a second, the choosing of Moses, the question might be; and here's an interesting one for you, we don't get to choose who brings us into this world. It's a novel thought for rebellious children, isn't it? “Well, I don't have to love,” and they'll fill in the blanks, “I don't have to love my mother or my father,” a rebellious child speaking, right? You don't get a choice, but you can look back and be grateful for those people that gave you life. And if you're being raised up in a Christian home, you can be grateful for the fact that God brought you into this family. And everybody's circumstance is different. Some people are brought into this world in luxury, some are brought in poverty, some are brought into a family that's dedicated to trying to do the best and reach for the best and strive for the best, and others it's just que sera, sera. But if you really look at it, we are like the people in the Bible in this respect, just like Moses.
No, Moses didn't say, “I want to be born a child to servants that are slaves in Egypt.” Do you really think that would have been the thought of a child? But if you could look at this, step back and realize this is, there's an underlying point here, which is we don't get to choose, and sometimes it takes a lifetime of looking at the circumstances to recognize God's hand and control in your life and in mine. I've said many times, you know, speaking of my own personal relationship with both mother and father, not, not the greatest, and for decades, lamented certain things about, I wish certain things would have been different, but the reality is when I look back; this is the mature person speaking, this is the child of God speaking that says they did the best they could. You know, I don't think any parent has the exact roadmap. You could be the person that reads every book on how to feed your child, how to bathe your child, how to change your diaper, how to do dah, dah, dah, dah, dah━nothing's going to be perfect.
It's not all going to be mapped out for you. Get to when the child's a teenager. Oh, those are wonderful years, aren't they? And how to figure out how to deal with that, when it seems like you have sacrificed for your children and your children can't even see your sacrifice. You know how many people I talk to or I receive letters from that tell me that? They have a child that is, the child does not care, has blatant disregard that one or both parents went without to provide for the child. And that's why I said growing up in a, in a household of faith, it doesn't mean that that child is going to maintain the faith all the way through. But if the foundation of that life, the first and formative years infused into that life where the values of God and the concepts of God and the workings of God are spoken, are mentioned, and that is the currency of your household.
It may not be that kid gets to be 18 and says, “I'm out of here,” but just remember one thing, something happens as we mature and you start coming back to things. You don't even know why you're going back there. And this is what that Proverbs 22 means. So when we look at the life of Moses, Moses is an example and I use Jehoshabed as an example. Do you really think, I'll ask the question in the reverse now. Do you really think that Jehoshabed could have known who her child was going to turn out to be? No, of course not. And I can do the reverse. The mother who is the parent of a mass murderer, do you think that that mother could ever have envisioned that that would be the future of her child? This is what I'm talking about. I'm not talking about the flowers and the candy and the bravado. I'm talking about where the rubber meets the road, where the frustration, the anxiety, the anger, the improbability of not being able to completely guide that child's life to have the best success both for education, for spirituality, everything, the difficulties there.
You know, if we were going to really look at this day or any other day, these are the conversations that need to be happening on a regular basis and bringing people back to hard concepts of the Bible that make you really recognize, you know, God has this worked out pretty good. The pattern for a mother, Jehoshabed is one of them, willing to risk everything to protect her child and not; hear me out. I am a law-abiding citizen, but she was not abiding by the laws of Egypt when they said, “Every child,” that child was going to live no matter━in her eyes, her faith, her reasoning.
And so let me give you the parallels also of two mothers that come back to the same place, because you've got Jehoshabed, not knowing this child will turn out to be the deliverer of the people, not knowing what God had planned for this child. You've got the same really parallel universe with Mary; Mary, the mother of Jesus, every mother in Jerusalem thought they would give birth to the Messiah. I've said that before. There's at least two scriptural passages that refer to that. But can you imagine for Mary specifically, embarrassment, shame, kind of a freak show if you think about it, that she's pregnant without ever doing it? That's kind of a weird thing, okay? And I'm sure endured everybody calling her liar and being ostracized in her community and then giving birth to this child━“Oh, by the way, an angel talked to me and an angel told me blah blah,” “Yeah, sure; sure an angel talk to you,” right? So you've got all of these different dynamics and even then the child is born, I'm talking about Christ, and there's no way that Mary could have ever have known.
Sorry, you could say, “Well, but she, an angel spoke to her and an angel told her this,” yes, but she didn't believe. Remember, she was gathered with her other children wanting to take Jesus and put Him away because they thought He was crazy. So you've got to stay with within the confines of the Bible to recognize; imagine the difficulty. You know, we tend to just kind of paint the picture of Christ and Mary as very simplified, but I think there, there's a lot of underlying difficulties there, especially when we read about how it says, you know, well, “What about your mother and your father?” or “Your mother and your brethren”" and they're, they're there. And He says, “Who are My family?” And He's talking to His disciples and speaks specifically about those that do the will of God, not necessarily by blood, would eventually be blood family by His blood, but then speaking. It doesn't mean because biologically that━they would have put Him away.
So take that isolated moment and think of the frustration of Mary looking at this child of hers who's making all kinds of proclamations that seem wild, baffling, outrageous, and what? What does the parent; put aside motherhood for a second, what does the parent do with a child who's making all kinds of, think about it, absurd comments, “I am the way,” “I am the life.” You know, if your kid does that, then you say, “Okay, come on, Johnny, it's time to go,” straightjacket time, right? So, but if you think about it, the frustration and everything that she went through to the ultimate end of watching her child being crucified, and that, to me, that's another one of these because we can so caricature the story.
The torment of knowing her Son didn't do anything wrong and watching Him be crucified and watching the fate that He's going to die. And you have to also keep in mind, as much as some of these had heard His preaching and heard Him say, “I will raise up; the Father will raise Me up; I, I lay down my life, I'll take it again,” but they, none of them heard. So, for this mother, this is the end. And so when you take even the two mothers and you compare them, they're not too different.
And I've said before, and this always gets me in trouble, but I'll say it again, a careful analysis of Scripture will show you that Mary was just human. She did not possess any special powers. She should never be deified; never. People that pray to Mary because they believe praying to Jesus is, is too direct. Well, listen, that's like saying, “I want to get to San Francisco, but I'll go to New York to get to San Francisco; and I live in Southern California.” It's kind of a little bit like that, but in the spiritual realm it makes no sense when Jesus revealed Himself to us for the very purpose of going directly to Him. So, I can tell you, as I said, many more parallels between both Moses and Christ and between the mothers. Probably, as I said, the difficulty with me is I'm into looking at more of what's underneath it all. I'm not; I'm not interested in the flowers and the fluff. So when I dig down deep enough, I realize God chose Moses to be a deliverer of the people and he didn't have the powers.
He wasn't, he wasn't part God. So think about, just think about that and again, it's probably something we don't really think about. Imagine the pressure after a life; I've said Moses' life is divided up into forty-year segments. So say the first forty years are spent in Egypt, the next forty years are spent on the backside of the desert, and the next forty years are spent delivering, and you can finish the rest. I could only think of the mind of Moses that, imagine, “God wants me to do what?” Try and put yourself in Moses' shoes for a minute. God, on the backside of the desert, finds him, directs him, calls him by name and, “And You want me to do what?” That's kind of a big, mighty task and of course, you know, Moses basically doesn't want to be the spokesperson.
So God says, “Okay, your brother Aaron can be that.” But what made God choose Moses? What made God choose Jehoshabed and Amram? What made God choose Mary? And you could say, “Well Mary's easy. She had to be in the generations and the genealogies.” I'm not talking about that. There could have been any other person in that family line. The thing is God, He looks down at all this and He says, “That one,” knowing, apart from Christ, the imperfection of us all, the imperfection of the mother, the imperfection of the child, and yet God says, “And I'm going to use that one right there.” And this is the thing I think our society has forgotten. In a day and age where we're constantly arguing these, what I would call a non-argument, you know, people want to talk about when life begins and, and where it's actually life versus when it's not a life.
How about the miracle of this? Think about it. And again, I just like to stir the pot, but it's relevant to what I'm going to say. You think it's an accident that the whole reproductive system that God designed, and it's not, I'm sorry, it didn't happen by accident. If you'd like to think that this man or woman evolved, you, you, you can have your right to that. But the intricacies and the, the brilliant and intelligent design of all this that makes it that, for, for example, in a woman's cycle and the time that she can actually be ready, and what a man is capable of doing.
And God's design did not include, if you want to look at this rightly, making alterations to the pattern, just like the pattern of the tabernacle, not making alterations to the pattern that He designed in man and in woman. Now, listen, highly, highly debatable subject right now, a hot topic for people about gender and gender assignment and gender this and gender that. But, you know, when you go to a doctor at the end of the day and you have to fill out a form, you know, there's going to be a question that says, “How were you born? What were you born as?” I don't care what you want to identify as. Listen, today I woke up and I felt a little bit like a tiger, okay? And I'm sorry; I didn't wear my tiger outfit to church today, okay? But the question is asked, not what you identify as. What are you biologically? And that, my friends, even if you have yourself altered medically, you were made one or the other.
That's not a religious comment. That's not a racist or bigoted comment. That's a thinking person who can stand and honestly say it's one or the other. And if you want to be somewhere in the middle, that can be your, your design, but that's not God's design. That was never God's design. Now step back from all that and recognize something. The child Moses, we don't read that he possessed great, until later on, of course, but in his infancy we don't read that he possessed great skill or anything. We don't read that Jehoshabed was some woman who had an agenda to be the greatest woman in Israel. We just have regular ordinary people following, first Jehoshabed following her desire for her child to live and would do anything for that, and Moses, who eventually will follow God's orders to become the deliverer. Now we are just like the people in the Bible.
You don't get to choose who brings you into the world. Moses didn't get a choice. And I love the fact that God includes these imperfect people. This is what I wish the rest of the world could hear and understand, because it's so much of this, what's been, people have been conditioned to think, “Well, if you're a Christian,” and then they fill in the blanks. This is what our faith looks like. God takes the most imperfect, weak, homely vessels and uses them for a purpose. And if you're willing to submit yourself to that purpose, you find out exactly who you are and what, what plans God actually has for you are much greater than any plan you could conceive of. So I'd say this, if you call yourself a Christian, a follower of Christ; some define Christian as a follower of Christ, a little Christ, in any way, shape or form you're identifying with Christ, then you're also identifying with something else.
Christ specifically, when He told His disciples, “I will not leave you orphans. I must go away, but I won't leave you orphans. I'll send the Spirit.” We're never alone. So the people who are sitting in front of me, in the sound of my voice, your mother may be departed, deceased, or the memory is too painful to even talk about. I'm not asking you to go there. I am saying, “Do you recognize you're not alone?” God gave us that Spirit. And He also gave us the Spirit to look at this in proper perspective.
As I said, “Honor thy mother and father's not a day, one day.” It should be the task of a child. You could have, sorry, I'm just going to say it, your parents, because we're all, we all have parents somewhere or we're either parenting or, or a child. Your parents could be pretty annoying, you know that? Anybody here that's thinking, well, your mom or your dad, you know, right up until the end, they were naggers. They, they annoyed you. They said crazy stuff, right? That's what brought you here; just remember that, okay? That's what brought you here. And maybe if you can step back from yourself, you might be just as crazy as they were. That's the genius part of this, is when you really look in the mirror, you go, you know, a real reality check says, “Who am I?” That's the real reality check.
You know, I, I spent the first probably thirty-plus years of my life being very angry at certain things regarding my parents. And I've, I've shared this with you before. You, you come to a point where you realize they did the best they could. And some of their insanity, as you get a little older, you see it in yourself and you recognize that's what blood does, right? Welcome, welcome to the family, right? “Oh, I don't want to ever want to be,” I know people that say, “I don't, I don't want to be like my dad or I don't want to be like my mom.” And when you talk to them, if you know them, you're like, “Damn, what are they talking about? That's just like a chip off the old block, right? Come on, be honest with yourself.” But for this day, for people who were not close or don't care or have some issues or resentment or whatever it is, I'd say to you, take this as another way to look at life.
Because there are people who wouldn't miss celebrating Mother's Day or Father's Day for the world and there are other people, they just want this day to be over. They just get; just hop over it. Let me recalibrate this as, as Christians. That's why I said I don't like this one day thing. It's like somebody who says, “I'm going to go to church on Christmas because that will be my one, or Easter because that's my one day.” Coming to church one day in a year doesn't make you a Christian. Celebrating Mother's Day or Father's Day, one day a year; sorry, that doesn't make you good or bad. It just means you're, you want me to say it? You're part of the sheeple people.
That means, you know, everybody does this, “We all do this. Come on, we're all going to do this now, right, because we all do it.” Now, I'm probably a little bit different. I'm like the salmon that's going the wrong way, okay? But I'm always going to point out why. Because I'd prefer to tell you, if you're going to, if you're going to honor somebody, you do it year round, you don't pick a day. If you're going to look at, and today is Mother's Day, I'm going to ask the question. It's not: Do you have a great relationship with your parent? But rather, what is your version of honoring them? Now, we have this all wrong because we've succumbed to commercialism. And I want you to think about this. I cannot tell you because we don't really have it written in detail for us, if Moses ever went back to Jehoshabed and, you know, honored her, we don't know that.
And I can't say; we've got some small indicators of things, but not too much. And in Christ's way, He basically, it was very clear if Mary wasn't following basically the voice of God, He said, “Who is My family? It's only those that do the will of the Father.” So I think there's, there should be a little bit of recalibrating here for all of us. Those of us who want to get caught up in the commercialism, that's your problem. Mine is more to stay grounded in, “Why should I pay attention to this day?” And you should for a reason, but not for the reason that everybody wants you to. Not because there's people lining the streets here selling flowers, not because the restaurants are going to make a killing and overcharge you today and make it, you know, so you say, “I'm never going to a restaurant again.” No.
Think about this, as I said the other way, maybe your parents are deceased. I still look back almost on a daily basis and there's, I'm not going to say every day, but it's almost every day and express gratitude to God that these two people who probably I was very harsh with in my growing up, in my years of being a little bit on the other side of the tracks, that they brought me into this world that they gave me life, that they tried their best, and they could not know through the little baby they held in their hands to the years, the difficult years, where I would end up. No one has that.
No one knows. You don't have the luxury of saying, “I want to be, you know,” I'm in the womb somewhere swimming in a sea of stuff, “and I want to come out and I want my mother to be”━it doesn't work that way, right? So you get what you get and the key thing here is to understand what the key concept of honor is. Now, I do believe this and showing you the comparisons of Christ and Moses, that was my point of the message and now I'm going to go circuitously around, back around to where I started to talk about this in another way, so that there's something to take away from this message, not just to keep it in the series on the tabernacle, but something to keep in line with this message and with today, which is I'm going to, I'll probably end up asking you this on Father's Day: What is your idea of honoring the person who gave you life? Because that answer will also help you understand your relationship to God.
I want you to think about that. That whole mindset is a microcosm relating how you relate in the earthly realm and in our early years, we don't know, we're not educated, we have no clue, but as you get older, ignorance cannot be claimed. You come to a knowledge, so your understanding of that is actually a microcosm of your understanding of how to relate to God and how to honor God. Now, if you think, bear with me for a second, if you think that honoring God one day a year by coming to church on Easter, I'm going to pick that day because that's, that's like, it is, if you think about it, it is analogous to what we're doing when we say we're going to celebrate one day of motherhood or one day of fatherhood versus, you know, you may, you may wake up tomorrow with thoughts about either parent, whether they're alive or not alive and think, “Oh God,” because there are Sundays you may wake up and you go, “I'm too tired, I want to go back to sleep,” or, “Oh church”" right? Come on now.
Some of you are liars going to hell just for that! My point is you get up. You get up and you go. You get up and you, you start the moment, the momentum of honoring God. And honoring God isn't just coming into church for one day or one hour. Honoring God is your behavior throughout the course of the week, throughout the course of the day. So that's what I'm trying to say to you. When, when you read honor thy mother and thy father, I think a lot of people think it's their version of honoring is appeasement. It's, it's, and I'm not trying to abase anybody. Don't get me wrong, think, “Well, you know, I, I did this today.” I'm talking about, well, how do you treat that person the 364 other days? Because that understanding will also help you understand your true relationship with God because the same people that gave you life that brought you here on earth, that allowed you to be, well, they were given that grace and that blessing by the Creator.
So the same thing, the Creator that gave me the ability to recognize Him opened my eyes and give me spiritual life, the same concept. Do you get what I'm saying? So I don't want people leaving here thinking, “Wow, Pastor Scott's a downer. She doesn't like to celebrate anything.” I didn't say that. You know? But maybe think of it this way. Maybe instead of, you may already have plans for today, but maybe you plan tomorrow to do something that's honoring; not, not an activity, not spending.
This is, this is where I said we've gone in the wrong direction, the commercialization of things. But how do you honor someone? You show appreciation; you express appreciation, not simply for a task or one isolated thing. And as I said, if, if you really get the concept, it brings something really incredible in my mind, all of these biblical parallels show us, we can, we can learn from all of it. It just happens, as I said, it's Mother's Day today. I'm looking at Jehoshabed and I'm thinking to myself, the women of this world who identify as Christians, we don't have to be, we don't have to be what the rest of the world wants us to be or what Hollywood's ideology of womanhood should be now is every woman should be seen as the, the AK-slinging, “I can kick your butt just as good as anybody,” you've got to, you know, be, be tough.
And you know, I think if people actually get back to their proper, I hate to say it, their proper roles that God ordained we might actually find ourselves again an impressive group of people who are balanced by God's plan. And that plan, by the way, you know, some people find it offensive and they read Ephesians, what Paul describes as the proper plan. They get offended by that, but the reality is, I'm not going to stand here and argue with me that most men, most men, I'd probably say ninety percent of men, are stronger than me physically. They're, they, God, endued that to most men. I'm not going to stand here and say, I, I could do what other men can do; I can't. And I, I'd be an idiot to argue that. And then you've got men in this day and age who would like to believe that they can have a child or that they can have a monthly cycle. Okay. That's another crazy argument. The, the two things I just said are, are both crazy.
They're both insane. But I can stand here and tell you something very sane, that if we embrace what God gave us, that includes how we came into this world, you don't get a choice. So you embrace that, you honor it, you respect it. That's probably the key thing. If I could isolate one singular word that's missing, a huge swath of society has no respect. Not a joke. I'm not saying this because Rodney said it. No respect whatsoever. They have no respect for God, for God's house. Go out on the road, tell me that the people that, most of the people that you are driving around are respectful drivers. Don't answer that especially in, in California. Don't answer that. My point here is this. You've got to see things properly in proper perspective. So yes, it's Mother's Day. I'm highlighting this parallel of even the mothers, but I don't want to be mistaken or taken out of context.
The bigger picture here is that God has given us the gift of life. And whether you are a father or a mother with children, maybe your children are even, here's one for you I haven't mentioned. Maybe your children are estranged from you; they've completely rejected you. And I know that there are at least several here in this sanctuary who, who represent that. The sting and the hurt of knowing that sacrifice, love was poured in, maybe in the child's mind they didn't get, they didn't receive, whatever it was that went wrong and they've taken off and they wholly reject you. They want nothing to do with you. Well, I'm going to say, I pray for those people to come to an awareness like I did, that at some point you open your eyes and you say, “God brought me here and I didn't just magically show up.” It took two people to produce this thing called Melissa and I must be grateful for the life I've been given and I can't start cherry picking.
I don't get the choice to decide. And along the way, maybe I learn that God's got many lessons to teach me, which I found out by the way, about becoming a better daughter even later in life, even though I can't speak to my parents, but becoming a better daughter later in life has made me a better child of God. So that's the ultimate takeaway. This has nothing to do with commercialization or a special day, but rather coming to a greater awareness. And the more and the quicker we come to that awareness, the better we can stand before God and recognize His plans. You know, we don't get to call the shots just like the child doesn't get to pick the parent; we don't exactly get to pick everything that happens. God has a plan. It's not all wound up.
We have free will. But if we're trusting Him like Jehoshabed, then trust me on this other thing. Jehoshabed's trust in God to protect that child, to carry that child, to bring that child to the right place at the right time, wasn't just luck. That was something that had to be from God put into that woman's heart, and every parent should have that mindset. And every child, if they have the luxury of coming to know who God is, should be able to turn around and say, “Regardless of what,” fill in the blanks, “I'm extremely blessed because of the care.” And you can say, “I should have had more, I should have had less.” I don't care what that is. You get old enough you realize that that's your selfish mouth. That's your ego. That's your ideology. And maybe when you became a parent, you weren't that great. You thought you were, because we all have great ideas of how we are in, in, not in reality, but in our own mind.
So all I'm asking you to do is kind of recalibrate this and maybe instead of making it a day, you begin to make it a lifestyle, not just on Mother's Day or Father's Day, but you start recognizing the behavior of the child towards the parent is a reflection and a better understanding of our relationship with our Heavenly Father. That is probably the most important takeaway of the day. It can make comparisons all day long, I can give you Scripture references, I can make all the salient points, but my most important point here, leaving here is how do we become better children to our Heavenly Father? And that goes back to recognizing the blessings we've received, being grateful for them and honoring Him.
So there's no harm and no crime in honoring our parents. That's what the Bible tells us to do. Make sure that it's done in a way that you're understanding. This is all practice, by the way, all of this; not the commercial stuff, the stuff we talk about here, this is all practice for eternity and you start down here. You start practicing your relationship with your Heavenly Father by the way you treat your parents down here.
And that relationship, as I said, more and more, the older you get, you'll begin to see it. It'll all come into place. And for the younger folks listening to me who are rolling their eyes going, “Oh God, you don't know”" I hate to tell you, but I was once your age, I absolutely do. And it's not going to get better. It's going to get worse for you if you don't change your mind. That's all I have to say about that. See, this wasn't just a one-sided message for the one, one people, but for the, all of the people listening to me. Now, with all seriousness, let me just say this to you. These are always difficult days for me because I, I'm more interested in teaching you lessons that are applicable than celebrating what the world does. But I don't want to negate the fact that if you understand where I'm coming from, honoring your mother and father is a good thing year round, so happy Mother's Day.
That's my message. You have been watching me, Pastor Melissa Scott, live from Glendale, California at Faith Center. If you would like to attend the service with us, Sunday morning at 11am, simply call 1-800-338-3030 to receive your pass. If you'd like more teaching and you would like to go straight to our website, the address is www.PastorMelissaScott.com.
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