Formation to Transformation | A Worship Devotional

Moses tells the Lord he cannot bear this people alone, and then he asks the Lord to kill him. This episode reads those two verses at the speed they deserve.

The word alone has been part of Moses's story since Exodus 18. Here he says it to the Lord in his own voice, and the Lord's answer, which we read tomorrow, is help. Elijah, Jonah, and Job prayed sentences like this too. If those are your words today, tell someone who can be with you today.

Anchored in Numbers 11:14-15. Part of What You Carry, a Formation to Transformation series through Numbers 11.

Moses gets sarcastic with the Lord. Did I conceive all this people? Did I carry them out of Egypt, that you tell me to hold them like a nurse holds a baby? Where could I get meat for all of them?

This episode takes his question seriously. Moses never was the parent of this camp, and the nurse turns out to be an honorable job with limits. For parents, for the person at work everyone comes to, and for worship teams carrying a hungry room.

Anchored in Numbers 11:12-13. Part of What You Carry, a Formation to Transformation series through Numbers 11.

Numbers 11 opens with fire at Taberah and a camp craving the food of Egypt while forgetting the slavery. By verse 10 every family is weeping at its own tent door, and Moses can hear all of it.

This episode looks at how Moses responds. The people complained in the Lord's ears too, and fire came. Moses speaks as the Lord's servant, asking for favor, and the chapter goes on to show the Lord answering him. A word for anyone hearing weeping at every door in their house, their workplace, or their church.

Anchored in Numbers 11:10-11. Part of What You Carry, a Formation to Transformation series through Numbers 11.

There is a walk you do every week that nobody sees. From the car to the door, keys in one hand, something to carry in the other, and whatever you woke up with riding along in your chest. Moses had a walk like that ahead of him, and there was one thing he refused to make it without.

God had offered the land with an angel ahead of them and without his own presence, and Moses asked first to be shown God's way. The answer is the verse. My presence will go with you, and I will give you rest. Then Moses says it back to him and holds God to it. He would rather stay in the desert with God than go up to the land without him. The word under presence is the ordinary word for a face, and the rest he promised is one you carry while you walk. You can have a morning go fine and never once notice you needed him. Before you walk in, ask for the thing Moses asked for.

Anchored in Exodus 33:14. Before the Doors Open is a short Sunday morning sending for the whole worship team.

Habakkuk ends his book with a line that sounds like David's. He makes my feet like deer's feet, the picture near the end of the song David sang when the Lord had delivered him from all his enemies and from Saul. A prophet with a question nobody resolved closes with a king's victory image.

Three verses ago rottenness was in his bones. Now his strength has a name, and the name is not his. The verse does not say the trembling stopped. It says where the strength is. Then the deer, sure-footed on ground that did not get flatter. And then the last line, a heading at the bottom of the book instead of the top. For the music director, on my stringed instruments. He got answered twice and neither answer was the one he wanted. What he never gets is the reversal. Babylon still comes, and he hands over a song with parts in it anyway, to the person who runs the music.

Anchored in Habakkuk 3:19. Part of The Waiting Season, a verse-by-verse walk through Habakkuk for worship leaders and the whole team.

At the start of this season I told you I was not going to read you the end of this book, and that nobody puts the six lines before it on anything. This is the morning I read you the six lines.

Fig tree. Vines. Olive. Fields. Flocks. Herd. That is an inventory, the breadth of what a family in Judah lived on, and taking all six away describes a household with nothing in it. Most of us have skipped that list for years and gone straight to the yet, and the yet does not mean anything until you have heard what it is standing against. Then look at where the joy is located. In the Lord. In the God of my salvation. There is no restoration in the verse. He does not say the fields will yield again. He says the list out loud, all of it, and then he rejoices, and the rejoicing is only honest because the inventory came first.

Anchored in Habakkuk 3:17-18. Part of The Waiting Season, a verse-by-verse walk through Habakkuk for worship leaders and the whole team.

Habakkuk gives you a list of body parts. His body, his lips, his bones, his legs. The man who stood on a wall in chapter two and demanded an answer is now telling you, one piece at a time, what the answer did to him physically.

Notice what he heard. The voice. The thing that makes his mouth shake is God speaking, and the answer he asked for is what is making his bones go soft. Then, I tremble in my place. He is shaking, and he has not moved. Everything in him is trying to leave, and he stays, waiting for a day with trouble in it. Quietly does not mean calmly. His lips are quivering. This verse says the shaking and the staying can be the same man on the same day, and the famous line about the fig tree comes two verses after a prophet with rot in his bones.

Anchored in Habakkuk 3:15-16. Part of The Waiting Season, a verse-by-verse walk through Habakkuk for worship leaders and the whole team.

Halfway through verse fourteen, Habakkuk says me. He has been describing a vision for ten verses, with God as the subject of almost every sentence, and then the prophet puts himself in the picture. They came as a whirlwind to scatter me.

Start with the smallest word in the reading. For. You went out for the salvation of your people. Everything since verse three has been terrifying, and verse thirteen says plainly what it was for. Then the enemy's own spears finish the men carrying them, which is one thing God did in one vision, not a promise about every situation. And the gloating that was supposed to happen in secret is in the song now, sung out loud for twenty five hundred years. If you belong to God, you are among the people he went out for. What he does about the whirlwind, and when, is his.

Anchored in Habakkuk 3:13-14. Part of The Waiting Season, a verse-by-verse walk through Habakkuk for worship leaders and the whole team.

The sun has never once waited for anybody. A harvest that needed one more day, a funeral that ran long, a prayer that was almost finished. It goes down when it goes down anyway. Then Habakkuk remembers a day it did not.

Most readers hear Joshua at Gibeon in the first line, the day held open so that a thing God had started could be finished before dark. The waiting you have been doing has felt like the clock stopped on you, and the verse does not say what your stopped clock is for, only who Habakkuk remembered when his felt that way. Then verse twelve. You threshed the nations in anger. That is judgment, and threshing is the last step of a harvest. It happens in season, and it ends. The God you are waiting on has acted inside time before, and when he acts in anger, the anger is aimed at wickedness, it is measured, and it stops.

Anchored in Habakkuk 3:11-12. Part of The Waiting Season, a verse-by-verse walk through Habakkuk for worship leaders and the whole team.

Somebody carried you once and you do not remember it. Asleep in the back of a car, or on a couch at somebody's house well past midnight, and you woke up the next morning in a bed. Whoever did the carrying did not wake you up to explain it.

Underneath. Not around you and not out in front of you. Underneath, which is where you put your arms when you are holding the weight of something rather than guarding it. The eternal God is your dwelling place is a strange pair with the line that follows it. You live in him, and he is under you. You are inside the thing that is also holding you up. And the last line says he went out ahead of them and cleared the way before they ever got there.

Anchored in Deuteronomy 33:27. Before the Doors Open is a short Sunday morning sending for the whole worship team.