You’re Not All That!

RTG Index | Lectionary Overview

Reading: Numbers 11:10-16 (CEV)

Good Afternoon! I'm Henry Neufeld, president of Pacesetters Bible School with today's Running Toward the Goal.

Angry complaining! How often we hear the sound of angry complaining in our churches, our homes, our schools, or our communities.

And if we’re in a position of leadership, we likely assume that the complaining is all against us. Probably we’re encouraged in that view when the complaints are directed at us by name! You might be thinking, “Hey, people *are* complaining about me.

And they were complaining about Moses as well.

Moses has an interesting relationship with God. They speak face to face. They discuss. They even argue. What’s interesting is that sometimes they will argue on different sides. When the Israelites made the golden calf, God wanted to destroy them, but Moses interceded. Here, it’s Moses who is doing the complaining.

He doesn’t ask that Israel be destroyed. He breaks out into a complaint that ends up, in essence, “If you’re going to make my life *this* miserable, God, just kill me and get it over with!”

Now there are several responses I might imagine God having to this type of complaining. “Moses, you know I can take care of you! Where is your faith?” “You’re doing to me precisely what the Israelites are doing to you!” “Shut up and get back to leading my people!” “I think I’ll wipe them out now. You’re obviously no longer interested in interceding for them.”

But instead God moves in an unexpected way.

“Get me seventy men from the elders of Israel, men who are leading . . .” he says. I’m giving you a more literal translation of this verse than the one I read above, because I think it makes it clear that these are men who are not only capable of leadership, but they are also *acting* in leadership roles.

Moses is to collect seventy men who are leading.

I suspect God wants to say the same thing fairly often to pastors and leaders in our churches. The complaints are coming in, and we claim them all as our responsibility, our calling, our very own, personal problems with ministry.

But it’s not our personal responsibility, not alone! And it’s not our personal calling. It’s God’s calling. So what about those personal problems? Are they ours alone to bear? Are those complaints ours alone to bear?

Of course, we may have been arrogantly keeping all of the decisions, the responsibility and even the activity to ourselves. In that case we need to gather the seventy around us and empower them to take on their part of the burden. We may have been isolating ourselves from the rest. In that case we need to share with them the burdens that we are carrying. They may be sharing the burdens, but we aren’t recognizing what they are doing. Then we need to look and see. We need to discover that we are not alone, that much is being done around us.

God is willing to pour out his spirit, a spirit of wisdom, a spirit of truth, a spirit of righteousness—in all, a spirit of godliness on those who are willing to hear the call. But we have to be willing to let God work through them.

Moses was a great leader. Moses was a close friend of God. Moses heard God’s voice on a regular basis. Yet the tasks of leadership at times got to be too much for him, especially when he forgot that it was God’s work he was doing and it was God’s responsibility to complete that work. But more importantly, I think, we should notice that the work became too difficult for Moses when he forgot that there were other people all around him who could share those same burdens.

No, Christian leader, you’re not all that. You’re just God’s instrument to get just the things God wants done.

Let God worry about the rest.