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[Music] The God of Great Surprises, a message by Dr. Bruce W. Thielman. Now I would ask you to attend with me to the reading of God's word, as it is found in the book of Exodus, the third chapter, beginning the reading at the verse numbered one.

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Now Moses was tending the flock of Jethro his father-in-law, the priest of Midian. And he led the flock to the far side of the desert and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. There the angel of the Lord appeared to him in flames of fire from within a bush. Moses saw that though the bush was on fire, it did not burn up.

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So Moses thought, "I will go over and see this strange sight, why the bush does not burn up." When the Lord saw that he had gone over to look, God called to him from within the bush, "Moses, Moses." And Moses said, "Here I am." "Do not come any closer," God said. "Take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy ground."

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Then he said, "I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob." And at this Moses hid his face, because he was afraid to look at God. The Lord said, "I have indeed seen the misery of my people in Egypt. I have heard them crying out because of their slave drivers, and I am concerned about their suffering.

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So I have come down to rescue them from the hand of the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land into a good and spacious land, a land flowing with milk and honey. Now the cry of the Israelites has reached me, and I have seen the way the Egyptians are oppressing them. So now, Moses, go. I am sending you to Pharaoh to bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt."

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But Moses said to God, "Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?" And God said, "I will be with you, and this will be the sign to you that it is I who has sent you. When you have brought the people out of Egypt, you will worship God on this very mountain." And may the same God who inspired these words incline our hearts to the understanding of them.

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Pray with me. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. It was the night of April 14th. The American steamship, the Californian, was crossing the Atlantic, about 1500 miles east of Boston. About 1130 at night, one of the seamen, standing watch on the bridge, saw another steamer pass in the distance.

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He flashed the morse lamp to the other steamer, but got no response. At midnight, the second officer, Herbert Stone, came to the bridge and had no more than taken his place there when he saw a bright flash in the sky in the direction that the other steamer had taken, and then following that flash, very quickly, four more flashes.

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He called to the captain, asking what to do, and the captain said, "Attempt to get in touch with the other vessel with the morse lamp." An effort was made, but again there was no response. At 1.40 a.m., Herbert Stone saw several more flashes in the sky, and then darkness. Now, during all of this time, this ship, the Californian, was standing stationary in the water.

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The captain did not want to enter a field of icebergs in that part of the ocean at night. Now, in point of fact, the flashes which Herbert Stone saw were distress signals, but they were not interpreted by him or the captain as distress signals, because the Californian was at that time picking up no radio distress signals.

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Every sailor knew that a ship that was in difficulty would send out its SOS principally by radio, but no word of such a radio message being received had come to the bridge of the Californian. The reason no word had come was this. The radio operator on the Californian was asleep.

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He was a new radio operator, had just completed his training a few weeks before, and was fast asleep. So from the Californian, from its captain and its second mate and its crew, came no help at all. They sat still in the water, just nine miles from one of the greatest maritime disasters in all of history, the sinking of the Titanic.

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It's a tragic thing to miss the signals. I want to talk to you tonight about a man who didn't miss the signals, and because he didn't miss them, his whole life and the life of the world was changed. And I'd like to think with you also about our alertness to the signals

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that God surprisingly sends into the midst of our lives. Moses was tending the sheep of his father-in-law, Jethro, in a wilderness area called Midian. And one day he happened to notice a bush on fire. Now that in itself is not an unusual circumstance.

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In the hot, dry heat of the desert, such things often happen. This was not peculiar. But as Moses looked at the bush, he noted that it was not being consumed by the fire. And this interested him, and so he turned aside to see it.

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And as he approached the bush, God said to him, "Moses, do not come near. Take off your sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground." Now it's very interesting to notice, I think,

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that Moses didn't miss this surprising episode in his life. Right into the middle of his humdrum day, right into the middle of the grind of his regular shepherding duties, came this bush that was burned but not consumed.

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And Moses was interested enough in that to turn aside to see it. Now the sad thing is that many people have circumstances just like that in their lives. But they miss the signals. They're asleep at the switch.

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Or they're so busy with the sheep that they miss the burning bushes. For example, every year there are a number of young people on the campus who come to me and say that they are very anxious to discover God's will for their lives. And in order to discover this,

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they are going to separate themselves from the pressures of society, draw apart from all of the roles that are imposed upon them by their friends and their family and their colleagues. They want to be able to get apart to a separated place for an extended length of time

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to discover, they say, to discover themselves, to come to know the real me and what God wills for me. And every time I hear that kind of thing, I'm reminded of the words of Paul Tournier,

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the great Swiss psychiatrist, Christian, who says, "Suppose that you did try to peel off all the roles imposed upon you by society, and suppose that you did strip away all of those things that you do because other people expect you to do them,

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and suppose that you finally got down to the very center of yourself, and when you got there, you found an onion." Now, he didn't mean that as a joke. You realize, of course, that an onion is simply a series of one skin inside another.

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And what Tournier is saying is that suppose you started to skim off, to peel off, to tear away, to rip aside, all these roles given to you by parents and school and your age and this country and any other influence that is upon you.

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Suppose that you pulled all of this away, and when you got down to the center of yourself, you found nothing. Suppose that you pressed to the very middle of you, and when you got there, you discovered that nobody was home.

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That is to say, suppose you learned that the self is not something that you go looking for, but rather that the self is something that you create, that the self is not some identity which is lost and needs to be located, but rather the self is precisely the way in which you respond to those things

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which God puts into your life. Maybe the self is what comes into being at the moment when you react to the burning bushes, to the surprising signals that God weaves into the fabric of your day. For example, here's a man like James Chalmers,

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who was one of the great missionaries to the South Sea. One day when he was in high school, his Sunday school teacher read a letter from a missionary. And after reading the letter, the Sunday school teacher said, "I wonder if there's any young man in this class

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who might consider investing his life in world mission." James Chalmers heard that sentence. It fascinated him. It was a burning bush experience for him. He turned aside and contemplated it.

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His self began to form in response to that, and he went on to write some of the most beautiful chapters in the history of mission. Or take a man like Coleridge Patterson, who also served in the South Sea. When he was a very young boy, a minister came to visit in their home.

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And when the minister went to leave, he walked over and put his hand on the head of the youngster, Coleridge Patterson, and said to the boy's mother, "Won't you give me Coley?" And the boy was so struck by this, so captured by this minister

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asking his mother for him, for the service of Christ, that was so much of a burning bush experience, so surprising and so startling, that he began to think about it and to dwell upon it.

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And his self began to form in response to that, and he went on to become a great servant of Christ in mission. Look for a moment at your own past. Haven't there been in your past events or words or moments

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which, when contemplated by you, have had a tremendous impact on the you that you've turned out to be? Here's a woman named Rosa Parks in Birmingham, Alabama. She's black. She gets on a bus. She's told to move to the rear.

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She refuses to do so. She sits down in the front seat. When she sat down, a young black minister in that town named Martin Luther King, Jr., stood up. That was the burning bush experience for Martin Luther King.

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He went on to lead the Birmingham bus boycott, which was the first step in the national ministry, the international ministry, which became his. See, what I'm saying is this.

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There's going to come a time when each one of us is going to face Jesus Christ, and he's going to say, "Why did you respond to me as you did when you saw me?" And we're going to say, "When did we see you?" And he'll say, "Would you remember when that minister in your college chapel

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held out the challenge to you and you felt your heart being moved within you?" "I was there then." "Do you remember that time when you found yourself surrounded by all kinds of temptations, but you stood fast and resisted them?"

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"Do you remember that? I was there then." "Do you remember when your mother said to you when you went off to your senior year in college, 'Do whatever you will as long as it's within the will of God?' "I was there at that time."

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"Did you see me then?" See, all of us already have burning bushes in our background. There have been times when our consciences have been touched. There have been times when we've felt urges or seen a light in the face of the Spirit of God.

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There's been times when we've felt called to service. There have been times when we've made promises to God. There have been times when we've vowed to do certain things in the name of the Christ who saved us. And what I'm saying is we need to be faithful to those moments,

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to respond to the glow while it's there. I'm calling you and myself to renew the vows we made at those times before the light of the bush goes out. You see, what we need to remember is that God sends these surprising interruptions into our lives

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in order to give us his surprising assignments. See, he never gives us a glow without also giving us a goal. He never helps us to become a self without calling us into some kind of service. Moses goes over to the bush, and what does God say to him?

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He says, "Moses, I will send you to Pharaoh to set my people free." Every time you encounter God, you see other people. You cannot love God without loving other people. This last spring I was in Washington, D.C. as the guest of the United States Army

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to preach the sunrise service at Walter Reed Medical Center, which is the official Army service. It was a great experience. I went to Washington a day early because I wanted to see the new Vietnam Memorial, which I'm sure you've heard is very controversial.

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I'd like to talk about it at some length tonight, but we don't have the time. Suffice it to say that this new memorial is made up of great slabs of granite, black granite, and the stone is very highly polished, so polished that you can see almost as in a mirror your reflection in it.

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Then carved into the face of this granite are the names of the 55,000 men and women who lost their lives during the Vietnam conflict. Now, what happens when you look at these slabs is, first of all, you see your own reflection, and then as your eyes change focus,

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you begin to see all of the names that are on the stone. First you see the liniments of yourself, and then you see the names that are listed. Well, that's what happens at a burning bush. In responding to one of these surprising interruptions of God,

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you begin to discover yourself, but invariably the focus begins to shift from yourself to some act of service. You see, the scriptures teach us that God has a call for every one of us. We often think that only ministers and missionaries have calls. Not so.

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We are all called of God. We're called under different circumstances. Not all burning bushes are the same, but we are all called. And the way in which we can identify our call is by looking at the gifts which God gives to us

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to meet the call. You will notice in this story of Moses at the bush, Moses says, "I can't do what you're wanting me to do." He doesn't realize that even at the moment when he's being called, he's being gifted by God with leadership abilities that set him apart from all other men.

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Now, make sure you understand what the gifts that God gives are. A gift is not a talent. A talent is a skill or an ability or an art. But a gift is something which God gives that when you exercise it, there is more of Him in it than there is of you in it.

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You perhaps have heard two people sing the same song. Both very talented people. Both sing it beautifully. At the end of the one song, you applaud. At the end of the other singing of the same song, you weep.

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Because that song has somehow, by that second singing, moved down into your heart. Now, that is the work of the Holy Spirit. That is the exercise of a gift that God has given. And when we, at our burning bush times, begin to look at the gifts God has given,

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we begin to discover the area of service which is ours. You may have the gift of exhortation, of prophecy. That is, you are able to understand the Word of God and to tell others about it. You may have what Paul calls the gift of service.

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That is, you can love people so gently that they don't feel your meddling in their lives. You may have the gift of teaching. Truth is made up of both experience and information. You may be able to impart information in a very graceful way.

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You may have the gift of exhortation, which means you can comfort those who are inflicted. You can encourage those who are discouraged. This is the gift that doctors and nurses and people of that kind so much need.

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You may have the gift of giving. That is, you may have a gift from God to make money, be a very successful business person. You are to earn as much as you can in order to give as much as you can.

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You may have the gift of mercy. This world has a lot of wounded people in it, and it takes great patience and great grace to deal with hurt people. That gift may be yours.

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Now, I've just mentioned some of the gifts that Paul records in Romans 12, and there are other lists of gifts in the New Testament. But what I'm saying is that when God surprises us with burning bush moments and surprises us with a call to service,

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we can begin to discover through the gifts he has given us what that service is going to be. And we need to know how we're called. We need to know what service is to be ours because, you see, when you get out into life and begin to exercise the call which is yours,

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you're going to hit up against some very hard moments. And the only thing that will help you through is the knowledge that you're doing exactly what God wants you to do. [Bell rings]

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Please turn your cassette to the other side. The finest new biography of Martin Luther, which has been written in honor of his 500th birthday, is one by H.G. Hyla. And in that biography he tells of some words which Luther scribbled

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in the margin of his study Bible, and the words were these. "The greatest comfort is to be sure that what you are doing is God's commandment because that is truth you will be able to endure and take hold." And when we speak of Martin Luther, that reminds me again of Martin Luther King.

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There came a time when Martin Luther King was leading a freedom march out of Selma, Alabama. He went there many weeks in advance and he prepared his people psychologically and he prepared them spiritually. They went forth fully expecting to be martyred.

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And the march started one morning, the television cameras were there, and they came to a bridge just outside of Selma. And there were a lot of sheriffs there and other constabulary and they had their billy clubs and police dogs.

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And they yelled out to Martin Luther King, "Stop and disperse!" And King replied, "We've come too far to turn back now!" And they knelt to pray. And the policemen with their billy clubs charged across the bridge

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and they bashed them on the heads and they stomped them and they knocked them about on the streets. And millions of people in this country saw it all happen at the very moment it happened on their television screens.

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And in that moment when they saw that, Martin Luther King and his people won the battle which was theirs. What was it that King said when they tried to stop him? He yelled out, "We've come too far to turn back now!"

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That meant, "Look, we've seen the burning bush. We've responded to the signals of God. We know what our call is. We have been gifted by the Spirit of God to carry out that call

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and we will do it!" And he transformed this country in the doing of it. And God surprises us with interruptions and he surprises us with assignments. And he also surprises us with the promise of his presence.

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He says to Moses, "Take off your shoes. I'm going to send you to Pharaoh and I will be with you." You see, when God calls you and sends you out with the gifts of his Spirit, you don't have to grapple with God.

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You are grasped by God. Moses enters into a little argument with God here about whether he's going to be able to do this or not, and I happen to think that's a very good thing.

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It shows that the relationship between God and Moses was an open one. If you can't argue with someone in a relationship, then there is no openness there. There will be no honesty there.

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And Moses begins to debate this with God, and what silences Moses is the evidence of the presence of God in his life. God says, "I will be with you." Now I happen to believe that if Moses had not gone,

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then God would not have been with him in the same way. If he'd have ignored that bush, if he would have turned his back on the assignment he was given by God, I don't think he would have known the presence of God in the same way.

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Jesus says in Matthew 28, "Go ye into all the world, and lo, I am with you always." That is, I am with those of you who go. People who are all wrapped up in themselves

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constitute very small packages, and there's no room for a big God in a small package. But people who open themselves to God's leading, these are the ones that know the power of his presence.

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Just this afternoon I was watching television, and I saw one of these commercials where two nuns are riding along in a car, and there's a great big Goodyear blimp following them. You may have seen that.

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There's also one with a young couple that have just been married. Every time I see those commercials, I'm reminded of a friend of mine, a minister from Southern California, who a few years ago was called upon to conduct the funeral of Captain Jim Maloney.

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Now, Jim Maloney was the captain of the Columbia, which is the great dirigible, great blimp that takes the pictures at the football games and the parades and things of that kind, those spectacular aerial shots. He was buried in Covina, California,

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and the airship Columbia and its crew were there for the funeral. The mourners were all gathered about the grave, and off in the distance was the Columbia, tuned into the service by radio. And as the minister began his last prayer, he said, "Love knows no limits.

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Love has no end to its trust. Love knows no fading to its hope. Love can outlast anything." And as he said that, the Columbia began to approach the place

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where the mourners were gathered. And as he pronounced the word "Amen," the roar of the engines was directly above them, and they looked up, and that great airship was no more than 50 feet above their heads, a spectacular, immense, silver, power-filled ship.

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And the crew leaned out the windows and threw flowers, which spattered on the turned earth and on the shoulders of the mourners. And then, very gracefully, the ship pivoted and began to climb and moved off to disappear in the California haze.

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I think of the presence of God like that. Sometimes he comes upon you with so much power and so much splendor and so much size and so much roar that you're awed and struck dumb by his nearness.

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And other times, he seems to be far away, lost in the haze of your living. But he is the Alpha and the Omega. His is the love which, whether visible and powerful or invisible and powerful,

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will not let you go, will not let you down, and will not let you off. The God of the burning bush never leaves. Ours is a God of great surprises. He interrupts our days to give us surprising calls.

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He gives us surprising assignments and surprising gifts. And he surprises us most wonderfully of all with the power of his presence. And since I've mentioned Dr. King twice before, I might as well conclude by mentioning him once again.

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There came a time, shortly after his home was bombed, when he was filled with despair. And he went one night into his kitchen, and he paced back and forth. And finally he sat down in a chair, and leaning his head in his hands, he prayed,

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"Oh God, I have nothing left. I have no more strength. I am all alone." And writing later of that moment, Dr. King said,

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"I heard the voice of God, and he said to me, 'Stand up for righteousness. Stand up for faith.

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And I will be at your side forever.'" And so it was for him. And so it will be for all those who serve faithfully. And God, a great surprise.

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Let us pray. Our Father, we thank thee for every heart and mind, young or old, that is seeking to know thy will. Make them sensitive to the signals.

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Alert them to the gentle surprises of life. Indicate to them, as they search out their gifts, how best they are to serve thee. And then, Father, go with them in that service,

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even as thou hast promised. And we will give to thee the honor and the glory forever and forever. And the Lord bless you and keep you.

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The Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious unto you. The Lord lift up the light of his countenance upon you and give to you and to all those whom you love and to all those whom nobody loves his peace.

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[ silence ]