The Long Exile // Becoming an Overnight Success, Part 2

A Different Perspective Official Podcast

I don’t know about you, but I’ve often thought to myself, wouldn’t it be nice to become an overnight success. All this hard work, all the grind, if only we could bypass that bit and just arrive and success. Problem is, that life often heads in the other direction. Just when we think things are bad … they go from bad … to worse.

The idea of becoming an overnight success is incredibly alluring, it's seductive. As an American colleague of mine once said 'it has cerebral curve appeal'. You just want to pull up next to it and stay there for a while. In this success driven, success focused, success orientated world in which we live, man … it would be so nice to dispense with all the hard work of getting there and just get there. Arrive – success, woo hoo! If only.

I'm now on the other side of fifty, well and truly and whilst yet I've had some successes in my life, nothing spectacular mind you, just the odd success here and there, I have never, not once had an overnight success. They've always involved twists and turns, surprises and setbacks and hard work and sheer grind over the long haul.

Now that can mean one of two things, either I'm not very smart or overnight successes are as rare as hen’s teeth. I'm going to go out on a limb here and go for the second of those two options, hopefully. I'm not a gambling man but lots of people put money on lotto or the pools or they buy a lottery ticket or worse still they go to a casino all with a dream of winning the big one, striking the mother load. How many of them ever do? Answer: almost none.

As a percentage the big winners are close to zero per cent of all the players, after all they don't build casinos on winners do they? But as we journey through life with a dream or a calling or whatever it is in our hearts, sometimes instead of getting closer to that success we're hoping for things go, as I said at the top of the program, from bad to worse and that's what I want to look at right now, from bad to worse on your road chasing after your dream, following your calling.

Because it happens, it happens way more often than we'd like to think and if we don't know what's going on, if we don't realise what God's up to here it's actually rather devastating.

Moses was a man who had a dream, a calling to help his fellow Hebrews. Even though through God's mighty hand he ended up not as a slave like all his fellow Israelites but as an adopted son of Pharaoh living in privilege and comfort with wealth and power, deep in his heart he ached to see how his people were being mistreated and abused until one day he comes across an Egyptian guard beating one of the slaves so he rises up and kills the guard, whoops, bad move. Now the heart that he had for his people completely disrupts his life.

His first forty years he spends in privilege and then this one event means that the next forty years he's going to spend in poverty. Let's pick up the story, Exodus chapter 2 verse 15 to chapter 3 verse 1:

When Pharaoh heard of it he sought to kill Moses but Moses fled from Pharaoh, he settled in the land of Midian and sat down by a well. The priest of Midian has seven daughters, they came to draw water and filled the troughs to water their father's flock but some shepherds came and drove them away. Moses got up and came to their defence and watered their flock.

When they returned to their father Reuel he said, “how is it that you have come back so soon today?” They said, “an Egyptian helped us against the shepherds, he even drew water for us and watered the flock”. He said to his daughters “where is he? Why did you leave the man? Invite him here to break bread”. Moses agreed to stay with the man and he gave Moses his daughter Zipporah in marriage. She bore a son and he named him Gershom for he said, “I have been an alien residing in a foreign land”.

After a long time the king of Egypt died. The Israelites groaned under their slavery and cried out. Out of their slavery their cry for help rose up to God. God heard their groaning and God remembered His covenant with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. God looked upon the Israelites and God took notice of them.

Moses was keeping the flock of his father in law Jethro, the priest of Midian. He led his flock beyond the wilderness and came to Horeb, the mountain of God.

Now I want to stop there and think about this. Put yourself in Moses shoes for a minute, for the first forty years of your life you live in a palace as Pharaoh’s adopted son. Pharaoh in Egypt has all wealth and all power and all privilege and all comfort, life just doesn't get any better than this BUT God puts this heart in you, a heart for your own people, a heart for God’s chosen people and through this one act of taking out a guard who was beating a defenceless slave now you're not only booted out of home you have to flee for your life and go and live in the wilderness.

In fact we're told in the last verse there, Exodus chapter 3 verse 1 that when God finally came to find Moses another forty years later he found him out beyond the wilderness, out the back of nowhere. The contrast between the first forty years and the next forty years couldn't be more stark. From privilege to poverty, from significance to insignificance. We're told not a lot about his forty years in the wilderness but you can imagine what Moses was thinking, right? Can you imagine how he felt? Can you just imagine?

So by age eighty Moses is a burnt out old wreck, a has-been, a nobody out in the back of the wilderness tending sheep. Dream over, right? Regret filling your heart. He would have been through all the stages, denial, anger, fear, regret, bitterness, finally just giving up and tending these wretched sheep and then, then God comes to him with a crazy plan.

We'll talk about that another time but for forty years in the wilderness, beyond the wilderness he had no idea that God even had a plan, that God even cared about him, that God even remembered him. I'm guessing you've been in that place too, dream over, calling dead, you can't possibly resurrect this mess from the ashes right?

Yet mark this, God had Moses cooling his heels for forty years in the very same wilderness through which He would later lead the nation of Israel on the Exodus. So by the time God comes back to him in the burning bush Moses knows this land like the back of his hand and what was he doing? Shepherding a flock of sheep.

So in fact God was getting Moses ready in this forty years of lonely wilderness experience to take on the mantle of leadership of Israel and guide them for another forty years, a million or so people, shepherd them through the very same wilderness that he already knew.

And listen, when setbacks come into your life, in my life that's exactly what God's doing for us, getting us ready, preparing us, teaching us, moulding us, shaping our characters for the next thing He already has planned, already has prepared for us to do.

I remember the exact moment on the exact day when God called me to preach the Gospel to the nations. It was so clear even a dummy like me couldn't miss it. I'd been a Christian for, oooh, I don't know, five minutes but I was raring to go. Problem was that at first God had an eight year wilderness experience for me to travel through; He needed to prepare me, to shape my character, to get me ready.

The call came in 1996 but God didn't release me until 2004 to do what I'm doing right now. Fortunately right at the beginning a guy called Mark Brett, I'll never forget this, it was during a worship time at theological college where I was studying. Mark sidles up to me after one song in the worship time and he says, "Berni, look I don't know if this means anything to you but I think God wants you to know that He's not in a hurry".

That word from God gave me the patience to wait on God in the wilderness while He did the things He needed to do. And can I give you that same word today? If you're in a wilderness, if you're wondering where the dream went, wondering 'what happened to the calling?' Wondering where the passion in your heart has disappeared to, don't worry, God is still in control, He hasn't forgotten about you, He hasn't lost sight of His plans, He's just getting you ready for the next thing.