Exodus 3:15
God also said to Moses: “Say this to the people of Israel: Yahweh, the God of your ancestors—the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob—has sent me to you.”
I wonder what you would say if God asked you to lead his people at a time of desperate need. I suspect that you, like Moses, would have a string of questions to ask! The first thing that he needed to know was who was sending him. The people of
Israel were bound to ask, and he needed to have a good answer for them. God told him that he should say that “I am” had sent him to them, and then spelt out that this was God’s eternal name and that he was the God of their forefathers. We can be sure that the stories of the great fathers of the Jewish faith would often have been told among the people of Israel, and they needed to know that Moses stood in that line of succession.
At the end of Jesus’ earthly ministry, a similar situation occurred. As Jesus sent out his disciples he recognised that they would need to know with what authority they went. Matthew records that the resurrected Jesus took his disciples up to a mountain in Galilee and there he informed them that he had been given all authority in heaven and earth. It would be in his name that they went out to make disciples of all nations. The unfolding story of the early Church in the Acts of the Apostles makes it consistently clear that their mission was inspired, energised and directed by the risen Jesus.
The work of the Church today will never get anywhere unless we are clear that we are acting with the authority and in the name of the risen Lord Jesus Christ. This should give us great encouragement as we serve him together.
Question
How should the fact that we are working with the authority of the risen Christ affect our work for him?
Prayer
Risen Lord Jesus Christ, I thank you that every day you give me the authority to go out and serve you. Amen