But I will be with you. Genesis 3.12
That was God’s answer to Moses’ vocational insecurity. How do you answer yours? Hopefully, you were well trained in the content and craft of ministry. The Church affirmed your gifts when they hired you. Congregational affirmation is harder to come by as time passes, but they keep letting you go to work and that’s not nothing. Those are okay, but success is the best credential. It’s also the hardest to measure. Minister long enough and you’ll wonder if that word means what you think it means.
Congregational affirmation is harder to come by as time passes, but they keep letting you go to work and that’s not nothing.
Moses was successful by one measure. But, it took a long time, burdened an already burdened people and earned him grief from Pharoah and friends alike. And, in the end, despite a resume full of Israel’s most epic miracles he delivered from Egypt but not to the Promised Land. Whatever confidence he had on the safe side of the Red Sea, forty years of malcontents and manna wore it down. Which may be why God answered Moses with the promise of divine “with-ness”. That’s the same promise Jesus gave us at the end of the Great Commission and the only credential that will never fail you, even when you feel like a failure.
