Moses: Prisoner to the Will of the Spirit

The New Testament shows us clearly that the Lord Jesus wants us to take the low place of slaves. We have no choice in the matter. We cannot decide not to be slaves if we really want to be disciples of Jesus. Slavery is a self-emptying and humbling position. This is what it takes to be a prisoner of Jesus and of being imprisoned to the will of the Spirit.
“Moses was learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians and was mighty in words and in deeds” (Acts 7:22). This man Moses, ordained and predestined by God to deliver His people from Egypt’s bondage, was laid in an ark or basket of bulrushes and carried by the current of the river right close to Pharoah’s palace. There he was taken in and raised as Pharoah’s own grandson, taught in their finest school, trained to lead the armies of Egypt, and his name went abroad throughout the land as a great orator and a great warrior. None of the children of Israel in Goshen had the ability, nor the background, nor the knowledge to do the job as well as Moses to deliver the Israelites from bondage.
Moses tried but failed miserably, the same way we all have failed to bear fruit and conquer sin. He found, just as we all do to our utter dismay, that his own strength was pitifully weak in comparison with the task that must be done. This was all in the plan of God, for after He had proved that the greatest of the great was insufficient for the job, then He sent His chosen servant into the wilderness to be stripped of his strength and ability, to die to his own will and knowledge and desires.
In his own efforts Moses had slain one of the enemy and had hidden his body in the sand. That decaying, stinking thing hidden in the earth was a testimony that it was not the deliverance God’ people were after and needed. Many ministries have cracked under the strain, and many of God’s people have become disillusioned at this high pressure type of thing, as men have tried to rise up and stay the enemy before they themselves had come under the wilderness stripping and discipline of the Spirit. With what rest and what ease Moses lifted up his rod and delivered God’s people and destroyed the might of Egypt, once God had brought Moses into submission. This is the work God is doing today with His true ministry.
The answer is not in the few sheep Moses fed in the wilderness or how fat and productive he could make them. The purpose of God during that forty years was in that man, that ordained and chosen one in the process of God’s dealings. He realized now that the answer is not in him, in his strength or ability. He must hear the voice of God, and he will not move until this comes. Forty years of discipline—all this time the weight of Israel’s burdens pressed down upon his heart, and their cries for deliverance were continually in his ears. There is travail in his soul that finally brought him to a face- to-face meeting with God at the burning bush.
When God finally spoke to this man to go forth and bring deliverance to His people, this Moses confessed his weakness and inability to God and declared that he could not even speak properly and needed someone to do his talking. What a stripping of his own strength! What a binding of his own freedom! At last God had a prisoner who could only move at His word. Then he was ready to bring deliverance to the nation. Now God was ready to entrust him with the greatest power and authority that had ever been possessed or used by man.: “that the excellency of the power may be of God not of him” (2 Corinthians 4:7-12).