The Work Is Too Heavy for You: Can You Receive Help?

PRAYER OF CONSECRATION Wake up, sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.  Jesus, I belong to you. I lift up my heart to you. I set my mind on you. I fix my eyes on you. I offer my body to you as a living sacrifice. Jesus, we belong to you.  Praying in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, amen.  Exodus 18:13–27 The next day Moses took his seat to serve as judge for the people, and they stood around him from morning till evening. When his father-in-law saw all that Moses was doing for the people, he said, “What is this you are doing for the people? Why do you alone sit as judge, while all these people stand around you from morning till evening?” Moses answered him, “Because the people come to me to seek God’s will. Whenever they have a dispute, it is brought to me, and I decide between the parties and inform them of God’s decrees and instructions.” Moses’ father-in-law replied, “What you are doing is not good. You and these people who come to you will only wear yourselves out. The work is too heavy for you; you cannot handle it alone. Listen now to me and I will give you some advice, and may God be with you. You must be the people’s representative before God and bring their disputes to him. Teach them his decrees and instructions, and show them the way they are to live and how they are to behave. But select capable men from all the people—men who fear God, trustworthy men who hate dishonest gain—and appoint them as officials over thousands, hundreds, fifties and tens. Have them serve as judges for the people at all times, but have them bring every difficult case to you; the simple cases they can decide themselves. That will make your load lighter, because they will share it with you. If you do this and God so commands, you will be able to stand the strain, and all these people will go home satisfied.” Moses listened to his father-in-law and did everything he said. He chose capable men from all Israel and made them leaders of the people, officials over thousands, hundreds, fifties and tens. They served as judges for the people at all times. The difficult cases they brought to Moses, but the simple ones they decided themselves. Then Moses sent his father-in-law on his way, and Jethro returned to his own country. CONSIDER THIS Jethro is one great father-in-law. Yesterday, he was a powerful prophetic witness to the one true and living God. Today, he is an executive coach! Wisdom can be hard to come by in the wilderness, but when it comes, it is oh so practical. Moses’s father-in-law replied: “What you are doing is not good. You and these people who come to you will only wear yourselves out. The work is too heavy for you; you cannot handle it alone. Listen now to me and I will give you some advice, and may God be with you.” So the advice is pretty straightforward and doesn’t need further explanation. It can be brought down to a single word: delegate. Despite how obvious it appears to the onlooker, it was not apparent to Moses. That’s the observation I want to make here. We all find ourselves deeply immersed in our particular lives and contexts. We are so deep in it can be hard to see even the most obvious things. We all need a Jethro or three in our lives. We need people who are close enough to us and know us sufficiently well to feel the freedom and permission to say, “What you are doing is not good.” We need the kind of elders in our lives who love us enough both to encourage us and also to tell us when we are doing it wrong.  I wonder who among us (present company included) needs to hear this admonition today?  The work is too heavy for you; you cannot handle it alone. Are you the kind of person whom others can help? I guess what I'm asking is, Can you accept and receive help from others? A lot of people can't. Are you embarrassed by the level of your chaotic mess and don't want to be exposed? Are you too controlling to let someone else come in and exercise their discretion in your situation? Are you too self-sufficient to admit you have a real need for help? We all have great limitations and definite incapacities. That is not the problem. The problem is when we can't own those limitations and incapacities. At this point, they become handicaps on the fulfillment of God's capacities in our lives. Hear me right. We don't limit God. We just handicap our ability to be effective agents of God's capacities in our lives. Jethro spotted it immediately in Moses and gently but directly called it out.  The work is too heavy for you; you cannot handle it alone. Okay, I'll go first. I tend to be the kind of person who thinks they actually can't be helped—that it would be too difficult to bring someone into the depths of my unique ways of ordering and organizing things. I tell myself it would be too difficult to explain it all, and by the time I did, I could have already done it myself. The wilderness is a good place to let the Holy Spirit sort us out on such matters as this and to deliver us from the chaos and into new creation.  THE PRAYER FOR DELIVERANCE Lord Jesus, you are my Deliverer. I am not asking for you to deliver me from my limitations but rather to deliver me from my tendency to try and deny or cover over my limitations. Deliver me from my self-sufficiency, and my pride, and my unwillingness to trust others, and my need to be in control and to manage everything myself. I receive your deliverance into a place of embracing my limitations and even embracing my incapacities and my weaknesses. This is where your strength will become manifest and even magnified through others who bring gifts and capacities to the table. I receive your deliverance from the chaos of my making and into the new creation of your making.  It will be for my good, for others' gain, and for your glory.  Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost. As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be. World without end, amen! Amen!