Moses’ Leadership

Mission Briefing

The sheep had wandered to the far edge of the wilderness, the way sheep always do, and Moses had followed them the way he always did – one more ordinary day in forty years of ordinary days. He was no one now. He had been someone once: a prince of Egypt, raised in Pharaoh’s palace, educated, powerful, with every door open to him. That was before he killed a man. Before he fled. Before the desert swallowed him whole and the years piled up like sand. He had a wife now, a father-in-law, a flock to tend. He had made his peace with small things. And then a bush caught fire and did not burn down, and everything changed.

Mission Verse

“And God said, ‘I will be with you.'” – Exodus 3:12

Moses brought five reasons why God had the wrong man. God answered every single one the same way – not by arguing the point, but by pointing past it. You are not enough. That is exactly right. But I will be with you. That changes the whole equation.

Mission Briefing

Moses had been a fugitive for forty years. Not a dramatic, hunted fugitive – just a man who had closed a door behind him and never gone back. He grew up in Pharaoh’s household, nursed in secret by his own Hebrew mother, raised between two worlds and fully belonging to neither. When he saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew slave, something broke in him and he intervened – and a man died. The next day, two Hebrews were fighting and he tried to step in again, and they turned on him: who made you ruler and judge over us? Are you going to kill us like you killed the Egyptian? Moses ran. Pharaoh wanted him dead. Egypt was done with him. He crossed the desert to Midian, married Zipporah, had a son, took up the shepherd’s crook. Forty years. The man who had once stood in palaces was now walking the back side of nowhere, following sheep.

The burning bush stopped him in his tracks – not because fire was unusual in a desert, but because this bush would not stop burning. Moses turned aside to look. That moment matters: he turned aside. He could have kept walking. He did not. And God spoke to him out of the fire: I have seen the suffering of my people. I have heard their cry. I know their pain. And I am sending you to Pharaoh to bring them out of Egypt. Just like that. Forty years of hiding, and now this. Go back. Face the man who wants to kill you. Confront the most powerful empire in the world. Tell them to release their entire workforce. Moses – who once had power and threw it away, who had failed his own people the one time he tried to help them – was being sent back in.

So Moses pushed back. Not once – five times. Who am I to do this? God answered: I will be with you. What if they ask your name – who sent me? God answered: Tell them I AM sent you, the God of Abraham, of Isaac, of Jacob. What if they do not believe me? God gave him signs – a staff that became a snake, a hand that turned leprous and healed again. I am not a good speaker – I never have been, even before today. God answered: Who made your mouth? I will teach you what to say. Each excuse was real. Moses was not being cowardly or theatrical – he was being honest. He genuinely did not think he was the right person. He had the track record to prove it. And God heard every objection and did not retract the call.

The fifth excuse had no new content – it was just: please send someone else. And the text says God’s anger burned against Moses. Not because Moses was afraid, but because Moses had stopped wrestling and started refusing. There is a difference. God appointed Moses’s brother Aaron to speak alongside him and then said: Go. And Moses went. He picked up his staff, said goodbye to his father-in-law, loaded his wife and sons onto a donkey, and started the long road back to Egypt. The man who had fled now returned. Not because his fear had disappeared. Not because his objections had been resolved. But because God had answered them all with the same unshakeable promise: I will be with you.

Courage is not the absence of every good reason to stay home. It is going anyway because the one who calls you is greater than everything standing in your way.

Your Child and This Moment

Children know exactly what Moses felt. They know the weight of standing at the edge of something hard – a new school, a difficult conversation, a room full of strangers, a try-out they might fail, a moment when someone needs them to be brave and every part of them wants to be somewhere else. They do not need us to tell them the fear is imaginary. It is not. Moses’s objections were real. His track record was genuinely not great. And your child’s fears are real too. The thing they are afraid to try is actually hard. The person they need to stand up to actually is bigger than them. Telling them not to be scared does not help. Telling them that God goes with them – that is something they can hold onto.

What is worth noticing in Moses’s story is what happened between the fifth excuse and the first step. We do not get a lot of detail. We do not know exactly what shifted. But something did – and he went. That moment of going despite the fear, despite the uncertainty, despite not feeling ready, is the moment courage actually lives. Your child will have that moment too. Probably this week. Probably in something that looks small from the outside and enormous from the inside. The question is not whether they will feel afraid. The question is whether they have been told, clearly and often, that they do not go alone.

Moses spent forty years in obscurity before God called him. He did not feel qualified. He was not, by any ordinary measure, the obvious choice. But God did not call him because he was the most polished option available. God called him because God had a purpose, and Moses – broken history and shaky voice and all – was the one for this moment. Your child does not need to be the most confident kid in the room to be used for something good. They just need to know who is walking with them.

Put It Into Practice

• Name the Five Excuses. This week, when your child says “I can’t because…” or “I’m not good enough to…” treat it as a conversation starter, not a problem to fix. Ask them to name their excuses out loud – all of them. Moses named his. There is something about saying the fear aloud that makes it smaller and makes the path forward clearer. Then ask together: what would it look like to go anyway?
• Find the Burning Bush Moment. Moses almost kept walking. He turned aside. Help your child practice the habit of noticing – pausing when something pulls at their attention, when a situation calls for courage, when someone needs help and they feel the pull to act. Talk about a time this week when they felt that pull. Did they turn aside? Did they keep walking? Neither answer is wrong – it is a practice, and it starts with noticing.
• Say It Before They Go. Before anything hard this week – a test, a social situation, a scary first – say these words out loud to your child: I will be with you. Not as a magic formula, but as a reflection of the deeper truth. You will not always be physically present for every hard moment in their life. But God will. Build that anchor early, and build it with your words.

Hero Mission Activity – The Five Excuses Fire

You will need five small pieces of paper or index cards, something to write with, and either a candle with adult supervision or a fireplace – or if you prefer no fire, a bowl and some torn pieces. Together, think of five things that make your child feel unready or afraid – things they are facing right now or things that feel too big. Write each one on a separate piece of paper. Read them out loud, one at a time. After each one, say together: “I will be with you.” Then – with a parent holding the candle or supervising closely – burn each piece of paper as a symbol of releasing the excuse and choosing to go anyway. If fire is not practical, tear each piece slowly and drop it in the bowl. The act of doing something with your hands makes the idea land differently for kids.

Talk about it together:

• Ages 4-6: Moses was really scared. Have you ever been scared to do something? What happened? Did anyone help you feel better?
• Ages 7-9: Moses gave five excuses for why he could not do the job. Do you think his excuses were silly, or do you think they made sense? Why do you think God still said go?
• Ages 10-13: Moses had already failed once – he tried to help his people and it went badly wrong. Do you think that made it harder or easier to trust God this time? What do you do when you have already tried something and it did not work out – how do you decide whether to try again?

This week’s challenge: Choose one thing you have been putting off because it feels too hard or because you do not feel ready. Write it down. Stick it somewhere you will see it. Every time you see it this week, say: “I will be with you.” By the end of the week, take one step toward it – just one.

Mission Prayer

Pray this together, or let your child hear you pray it over them. You do not need to have everything figured out first.

“God, we are a lot like Moses. We have our list of reasons why we are probably not the right person for the hard thing in front of us. We do not feel ready. We are not sure we are brave enough. Some of our reasons are pretty good, honestly. But you already know all of that, and you still say go – and you still say you will be with us. So we are going. Help us take the first step. Amen.”