A Heart to Serve // Becoming an Overnight Success, Part 1

A Different Perspective Official Podcast

Have you ever been impatient with God? I mean you’re ready to get on with it! You’re ready to go and do what God made you to do. And yet He, for some unknown reason, doesn’t appear to be in any hurry. It’s enough to drive you crazy!

I think anyone who has ever lived life, anyone who has ever wanted to get out there and do something, achieve something, fulfil their destiny knows the frustration of meeting stubborn resistance and delays. I think in particular when we're young and idealistic and ready to take on the world, the fact that the rest of the world doesn't seem to want to revolve around our plans and our hopes and our dreams is incredibly frustrating.

And as we get older the realisation perhaps that things aren't quite going to pan out the way we'd envisaged, at some point, for many, leads to the classic mid-life crisis. The whole thing between our expectations of life and the reality, the mismatch, the yawning gap between the two is a bigger deal than we might realise.

Many people are living lives of frustration and disappointment because things aren't panning out the way they'd hoped. Their careers, their finances, their dreams for marriage and family and where they'd live and what impact they were going to have in this world. And so what many end up doing is settling for second best, always dissatisfied quietly with their lot in life.

I wonder if any of that sounds just a little bit too familiar. I wonder if you're sitting there thinking 'that's just a bit close to the bone'. Well today, as I said, we're kicking off a new series of messages called ‘Becoming An Overnight Success’ to see what God has to say into this whole situation and I'm believing that just a few people are going to have one or two of those 'ah ha' moments as you discover what God's really up to in your life.

Overnight success seems to have such a great ring to it, the whole get rich quick and then retire in luxury is a secret seductive thought that many of us harbour. But the truth is that really there's no such thing as an overnight success or at the very least they're very rare. Yeah, there seems to be these internet sensations that rocket to stardom seemingly overnight.

I remember this guy called Psy first burst on the scene with his Gangnam style dance and music video, remember that. A slightly cubby Korean guy in a white suit dancing around the stage in that odd, somehow intoxicating Gangnam style and for some reason that just took off, in fact he became the very first You Tube video in all of history to reach a billion views.

Imagine something as crazy as that, that doesn't happen very often and even when it does the overnight thing is usually an illusion. I have no doubt that even Psy put in an enormous amount of work and effort to do what he did and yet so many people harbour this secret dream of overnight success.

The problem begins in our hearts because invariably God has made us to be a certain person to do certain things and naturally we have a heart to be that person, to do those things and to become who God made us to be. Problem is we approach this central issue of life with a ‘McDonald's two all beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame seed bun’ kind of mentality, a fast food mentality, instant success when in reality often our first few attempts at becoming the person who God made us to be can end up being something of a disaster.

In truth this series of messages is really about learning to play the long game because life is a marathon not a sprint and I don't know anyone who is better equipped to teach us about the long game than Moses in the Old Testament. Now the reason I choose Moses is that after Jesus he is the next most talked about character in the Bible. Certainly he is the most talked about Old Testament character in the New Testament.

And when you read some of the pithy summaries of his life and successes in the New Testament you could get the impression that Moses was somehow an overnight success. That's always the way, the further we are away from the reality of someone's life the more it seems to us that their success happened overnight somehow but it just wasn't like that.

Moses lived for a hundred and twenty years, now that's a very long game and he had three very distinct phases in his life. We're going to look at each one of those in this series to see what we can learn for our own lives, our own long game kicking off with his first phase, living effectively as Pharaoh’s son in Egypt. So here's how it happened.

The Israelites had been exiled as slaves in Egypt for over four hundred years. Pharaoh makes a decree about when Moses is born that all Israelite male children are to be killed but Moses’ parents in faith, instead put him in a floating basket on the Nile and Pharaoh’s daughter finds him.

As a result Moses ends up growing up as the prince of Egypt in Pharaoh’s house always knowing though that he was a Hebrew. He lives this life of amazing power and privilege and luxury but here's the problem, it's a problem if I can call it that, that each one of us faces at some point.

God had put something in Moses heart, call it a dream, call it a deep motivation, perhaps it was a calling, whatever it was Moses was given a heart for his people, the Hebrews and just as well because God's plan, unbeknown to anyone at that point was that Moses was to become the man who would lead God's chosen people out of Egypt, out of slavery, to freedom and towards the land and the life that God had promised their ancestor Abraham all those centuries before.

As Moses grew up, more and more, he saw the oppression and the brutality that Pharaoh inflicted over his people, his kinsmen, the Israelites. Until one day it boiled over, things came to a head, Exodus chapter 2 verses 11 to 15.

One day after Moses had grown up he went out to his people and saw their forced labour. He saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, one of his kinsfolk. He looked this way and that and seeing no one he killed the Egyptian and hid him in the sand. When he went out the next day he saw two Hebrews fighting and he said to the one who was in the wrong, 'why do you strike your fellow Hebrew?' He answered, 'who made you a ruler and judge over us? Do you mean to kill me as you killed the Egyptian?

Then Moses was afraid and thought, surely the thing is known. When Pharaoh heard of it he sought to kill Moses.

So the heart that God had put into Moses, a heart for God's chosen people, ends up completely disrupting the life of privilege that Moses had lived for the first forty years. The heart that God had put in him ended up turning everything on its head.

Tomorrow on the program we'll see how Moses ended up out in the wilderness tending sheep. What a spectacular disruption but right now can I say this is exactly what I see happening in people's lives over and over again and they don't realise it. God's given them a heart, a dream, a motivation, a calling to become who He's made them to be and to do what He set out for them to do and when you don't quite know yet what that is that heart that God has put inside you disrupts your life.

I wish God would set it out nice and neat in front of us so that we can see the big picture, so that we can see where our lives are headed, so that we know what's coming next and why and what it all means and where it's headed, wouldn't that be nice? Sure! But that's not how God works because He wants you and me living by faith not by sight, He wants you and me trusting in Him.

We expect to live lives that are always on the up, onwards, upwards, every post a winner but sometimes life is one step forward and three steps back as it was here for Moses who was ultimately seen as one of the most successful leaders of all time. But when you're down in the trenches it's easy to lose sight of the big picture.

So my point is this – sometimes who you are, how God made you, what he made you to do is going to seem to work against you and bring failure upon your head. But don't lose heart, God has a plan, it's just that His plan rarely involves overnight success.