Sandy’s face grew red and her eyes watered as she wept, talking to me outside church, right before the service. She said, “I’m not able to hear from God. I haven’t been able to hear from Him in so long.” I prayed with her, asking the Lord to open her heart to the messages, those she’d hear from her pastor. As service proceeded inside, the lesson from Exodus 14, with the story of the Israelites who were ‘in-between’, and facing a sea of water—the Red Sea, kept my attention. After all, they were escaping, or hoping to, the Egyptian army who trailed them.
Inside those verses, there’s a part where Moses said to the whining Israelites who think they’ve come to the wilderness to die, “Fear not, stand firm, and see the salvation of the Lord, which He will work for you today. For the Egyptians whom you see today, you shall never see again. The Lord will fight for you, and you have only to be silent.”
Fear stops us. Fear causes us to trust our emotions, which can be wrong. And fear takes us from trusting God to questioning Him. The Israelites had lived in slavery for so long and it was familiar—and their living free was a new page in their story. A totally, unfamiliar walk.
