Good morning to you all. Happy New Year. It may seem hard to comprehend at this time, but your best is yet to be. God has a plan for you.
For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future (Jeremiah 29:11)
Let us re-visit this song, as we start a new year and declare. He has the whole world in His hands. This song was produced during the Pandemic.
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After Moses had killed an Egyptian he fled into the wilderness
and we read this in Exodus Ch3:1-12
Now Moses, having been through all of this, fled into the desert, he was out tending a flock of sheep beyond the wilderness near the mountain Horeb and an angel of the Lord appeared to him in flames of fire in a bush and Moses saw that the bush was on fire but it wasn’t burning up. So he heads over there and he thinks, “well, I’ll have a look at this to see why the bush isn’t burning up.” When the Lord saw that Moses had gone over there, God called out to him from within the bush and said, “Moses.” And Moses said, “Here I am.” God said, “Don’t come any closer. Take off your sandals because the place where you’re standing is Holy Ground.”
Then He said, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob.” And at this Moses hid his face because he was afraid to look at God and God said, “I have indeed seen the misery of my people in Egypt, I’ve heard them crying out because of their slave drivers and I’m concerned about their suffering so I have come to rescue them from the hands of the Egyptians and to bring them out of that land into a good a spacious land, a land flowing with milk and honey. So I’m going to send you to Pharaoh to bring my people, the Israelites out of Egypt.”
And Moses said, “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?” And God said, “I’ll be with you and this will be the sign to you that I have sent you. When you have brought them out of Egypt you will worship me here on this mountain.”
Amen
Your best is to be. God does have a plan. We will look at that later on.
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Let us go into a time of prayer. To help us, let us sing; You are beautiful beyond description.
Let us pray
Father God, I put my trust and my faith in You as we journey together through a New Year because I know that nothing is impossible with You. I know You will make a way when there is no way. You raised Lazarus from the dead. You parted the Red Sea. Father, You look out for Your people, and for that, I praise You. You are the same God today as You were then. I believe in the power of Your hand.
I desire to do Your will oh God, and I pray that I may serve You in the manner that You require. Lord, in humility of heart I admit that I can do nothing of myself, but only as You give me Your sufficient grace, Your wisdom and Your strength.
Help me I pray, to live each day of my life in holiness and righteousness, in humility of heart and with self-control. Help me to walk in spirit and in truth and to know that the best is yet to be.
May I look to You and not to the ways of the world. May I grow in grace and in a knowledge of the Lord Jesus, and may I apply myself diligently to pursue You greater plans and purpose in my life, willingly accepting correction, eager to forgive others and enjoying sweet fellowship with You day by day. This I ask in Jesus' name,
Amen.
Let us share together in the Lords prayer
Our Father, who art in heaven,
hallowed be thy name;
thy kingdom come;
thy will be done;
on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive us our trespasses,
as we forgive those who trespass against us.
And lead us not into temptation;
but deliver us from evil.
For thine is the kingdom,
the power and the glory,
for ever and ever.
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And when I think how God, his son not sparing, sent him to die, I scarce can take it in.
Then sings my soul, my Saviour God to thee.
Lets sing
Your Best Is To Come. God has a plan
Let me give you some background on Moses. The nation of Israel ended up as slaves in Egypt and they were breeding very fast. I mean there was so many of them that Pharaoh was concerned that the whole nation of Egypt would be over-run by the Hebrews. So, what he decides to do is to put them all into slavery and he tries to have all the young Hebrew baby boys killed.
Moses is one of those baby boys and he escapes, and he ends up growing up, ironically, in Pharaohs palace and Moses, even though he grew up in this Egyptian privilege in the palace of Pharaoh, Moses always had a heart for his own people, the Hebrews, who were in such terrible conditions in their slavery.
One day after Moses had grown up, he went out to where his people were and he watched them in their hard labour and he saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, one of his own people and he looked this way and he looked that way, he did not see anyone, so he killed the Egyptian and hid him in the sand. On the next day he went out and saw two Hebrews fighting and he said to them, “Why are you hitting your fellow Hebrew?” And they said, “What, have they made you ruler over us? Are you going to kill me as you did that Egyptian?" When Pharaoh heard of it he tried to have Moses killed but Moses fled from Pharaoh and went to live in Midian. One time he sat down by a well. At this well he sees these young daughters of a priest being abused by some rough shepherds and he goes and stands up for them. That’s what Moses was like, it’s what God had put in his heart, it’s what made him tick and it’s the same with you and me. There are things that we are, things we love to do, things that just make us tick.
For Moses it was a heart for his people and a sense of justice, and God, later on, used that mightily. We all go through roller coaster rides, down and up, down and up, up and down and then ultimately, we feel like we end up in the middle of nowhere. Similar to Moses, from Pharaohs palace to herding sheep in the desert. It’s the way life goes sometimes.
It’s like God takes us out of the game and puts us on a shelf somewhere hidden and we think it’s all over. But it’s not. Think of a caterpillar that becomes a butterfly hidden away in a cocoon. A baby grows in its mother’s womb hidden away from everybody’s eyes. It turns out God does His greatest works in the hidden, in the desert, in those places where we feel completely alone, where we feel like it’s all over.
Moses spent years wandering around the desert, he knew it like the back of his hand and later, when God made him the leader of his people, Israel, during the 40 years exodus, they spent a lot of their time in the land that Moses lived in as a shepherd. Even in the desert God was getting Moses ready, getting him to know the land by herding sheep, he knew it like the back of his hand, it equipped him for the role that God had for him.
When we’re in that wilderness like Moses was, we may think it’s all over, we think God has given up on us, but that’s not true. This year 2024, we may find it a difficult year. On the other hand, it may be a prosperous year. Whatever it brings, God is doing to do some amazing stuff.
God is already out in the New year with us and he is saying , "I have a plan for you.” That’s what he did with Moses, He gave Moses one of the greatest leadership roles in Israel’s history, this man who was a burnt-out old wreck, living in the desert. This man who had no future, this man who’d killed an Egyptian and thought that he had nothing left. God came and spoke to him in the desert and said, “Moses, go tell Pharaoh, go tell him to let my people go.”
Moses didn’t realise it but God was in that desert. Moses didn’t realise it but in all that time in the wilderness God was getting him ready for greater things because for Moses, in that desert, his best was yet to come and for you and me in our wilderness, in our situation. Whatever that is, I want to encourage you to believe that your best is yet to come! Can I encourage you, that maybe, the reason God’s put you and me in this place, is so we can hear God’s voice more clearly? So we can hear God say to us, “I am in this wilderness with you. I am on the mountain top with you. I am in the valley with you. I am here just as certainly as I was there with Moses, I am there with you”. And the message He had for Moses is the message he has for you, “Your best is yet to come”.
God called Moses into the most amazing place, to go to Pharaoh, to tell Pharaoh to let my people go. Moses led the Israelites for 40 years in the desert all because when he was a burnt-out old wreck, when he thought he had no future, it all happened because God showed up in the desert. And for better or for worse today, God’s word for you is this – your best is yet to come. God has put something in you, God’s given you some ability, God’s given you some passion just like He did with Moses and God has a plan to use that. That’s how God does it, all the time when we’re in the wilderness, He’s changing us, moulding us, softening our heart, but hardening our feet, getting us ready to go.
We can be in that desert, we can be in that wilderness, we can be in that valley, even on the mountain top, we can feel that no-one’s there and God’s not there and nothing’s going right, and we can think, “God’s given up on me. There’s nothing left in my life, there’s no future, there’s no hope”. But we are wrong. God is in that desert and God is waiting for just the right time to step into our lives and to use what He has invested in us.
You have something like that in your life, you have some abilities and some dreams and some gifts and some capabilities and some passions that only you have. I don’t have them, the next person doesn’t have them; you do, and in the middle of the desert of life, when it feels like there’s no-one there, no-one to care, God is in that place.
I want to encourage you. God is saying to you, to us all, “Your best is yet to come”.
Amen.
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Surrender all to Jesus. Know and believe that your best is yet to be.
The Lord bless thee, and keep thee:
The Lord make his face shine upon thee, and be gracious unto thee:
The Lord lift up his countenance upon thee, and give thee peace.
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