Author Archives: Karla Jo Wasion

I love Jesus and His Church. His Word is Truth, His heart is good, and His return is sure.

Exodus 4: He’s Got Your Back

I try to imagine the conversation between God and Moses.

God: Ok, I want you to go to Pharoah and tell him that I said to let his entire workforce go, so that they can come out here to the desert and worship Me.

Moses: *blink*

God:

Moses: I mean. They’re not gonna believe me. Or even listen to me. Right? I mean, like, I think maybe this might not be … *trails off, just short of telling God He’s got a messed up plan.*

God: *sigh* Throw down your staff…

That’s how I imagine it, but odds are it didn’t go down quite like that.

“Then Moses answered, “But behold, they will not believe me or listen to my voice, for they will say, ‘The Lord did not appear to you.’” The Lord said to him, “What is that in your hand?” He said, “A staff.”  And he said, “Throw it on the ground.” So he threw it on the ground, and it became a serpent, and Moses ran from it. But the Lord said to Moses, “Put out your hand and catch it by the tail”—so he put out his hand and caught it, and it became a staff in his hand— “that they may believe that the Lord, the God of their fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has appeared to you.” (Exodus 4:1-5)

When God tells us to speak something, He will back up our words with His power.

The Lord said to Moses, “… Lift up your staff, and stretch out your hand over the sea and divide it…

… Then Moses stretched out his hand over the sea, and the Lord drove the sea back by a strong east wind all night and made the sea dry land, and the waters were divided. (Exodus 14:16, 21)

When God tells us to do something, He will back up our actions with His power.

Joshua and his men circled Jericho the way God told them to, and it fell.

Elijah confronted the prophets of Baal at the word of the Lord, and fire fell on a water soaked altar.

Ezekiel, in obedience to God’s command, prophesied to an army of bones, and that army came to life.

Servants filled the water jars at Jesus’ command, and the water became wine.

 “I [Paul] came to you in weakness, in fear, and in much trembling. My speech and my preaching were not with persuasive words of wisdom but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power, so that your faith might not be based on human wisdom but on God’s power.” (1 Corinthians 2:3-5)

Our obedience to God will result in the presence of the power of God.

Has He called you to speak something? Do something? Preach, teach, prophesy something? Lay something down, take something up, let go, grab hold, walk away from, return to? Let me ask it this way… what has God been asking of you?

“Do whatever He tells you,” His mother told the servants. (John 2:5)

Through the life of Moses, and beyond, we find this principle at work –

We bring the obedience, He brings the power.

But soon, we will discover another principle from Moses and the Israelites –

When we bring disobedience, He still brings the power. But the results are a lot different! Stayed tuned.

Exodus 3: Exodus Easter

Sometimes I read a chapter of scripture and nothing really catches my eye. Other times I find something that jumps off the page and into my heart. But this chapter filled my heart with beautiful things to ponder.

Then He said, “Do not come near; take your sandals off your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.”  

Exodus 3:5

This was not the first time God encountered Moses’ life, but it was the first time that Moses encountered God. We know that from the beginning God had been actively setting Moses up for what is about to come. And then one day God drew Moses to His presence through a burning bush. What had been an ordinary bush was now holy ground because it was occupied by a holy God.

God is holy, so what He inhabits with His presence becomes holy. If you want to know if God inhabits a place (or a life), look for holiness in that place.

Then the Lord said, “I have surely seen the affliction of My people who are in Egypt and have heard their cry because of their taskmasters. I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey…“

Exodus 3:7

He saw. He heard. He knew. And He came. This can go one of two ways in our lives. In our suffering, we can know that He sees it, hears our cries, and knows our pain, and it can provide us with comfort, and compel us to seek His nearness. Or, it can make us blame Him for our suffering, be bitter toward Him, and compel us to push away from Him.

God is intimately aware of our suffering. What we do with that knowledge is a testing ground for our heart.

 But I know that the king of Egypt will not let you go unless compelled by a mighty hand. So I will stretch out my hand and strike Egypt…

Exodus 3:19-20

A mighty hand was needed, and a mighty hand is what Pharoah received. In the same way, Satan was never going to let go of his hold on this world unless a mighty hand compelled him.

Yesterday, we observed the Friday when God stretched forth His hand(s) and struck the kingdom of darkness.

And tomorrow we will celebrate the resurrection that brought us out of our death and into His life.

Because He saw. He heard. He knew. And He came.

Exodus 2: Destiny

Vs. 2: “The woman conceived and bore a son, and when she saw that he was a fine child, she hid him three months.”

I recently heard a Jewish Rabbi teach on this verse. In the Hebrew language, the word “fine” (in the ESV, other versions may use a different word) is Tov, which means good. But it has such a deeper meaning than simply “good”. It’s a word that means something is directly related to the will of God.

In a time when Pharoah was set on exterminating the male Hebrew babies, Moses’ mother looked at her newborn son and knew that he was born as a result of God’s will. This boy who should have been killed as soon as he was born, was not only kept alive, but raised in the house of Pharoah himself! And this same boy would one day be the man God would use to destroy Pharaoh and his army, and deliver an entire nation of people from captivity.

We next see Moses as a grown man, and his destiny comes into view:

When the Egyptian was beating the Hebrew – Moses stepped in.

When two Hebrews were going at it with each other – Moses stepped in.

When the shepherds were harassing the daughters of Midian – Moses stepped in.

Moses was made for rescue. God’s use of Moses to deliver his people, which we will be reading about soon, was not a random choice. He was formed in his mother’s womb to be a rescuer.

God is intentional in the way He forms us, and the purpose He puts in us.

Ephesians 2:10 – “For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.”

Moses’ mother, Jochabed, knew that his birth was God’s will. And Hebrews 11 tells us that it was by the faith of his parents that Moses was hidden from Pharaoh, and that they were not afraid of the Egyptian king’s command.

So here’s what I want to ponder today –  do we see the importance of destiny, and how the enemy will attempt to thwart it? This is why we must be people who will stand in the gap for the destinies of the next generation. Our children, their children, those in our churches who are stepping in to take the baton from our generation… they have destinies on them that the enemy wants to kill. I believe Moses’ mother saw it, and followed the leading of the Spirit of God in hiding him, and then in putting him into a basket in the river. She allowed him to be rescued by the very people who wanted him dead, because she trusted the will of God. This was her intercession for the destiny of her son, and it provokes me.

What will be my intercession for the destiny of the next generation?

Exodus 1: Who Is Afraid of the Men?

It started in Genesis when Joseph was sold into slavery by his brothers and taken to Egypt. Then God sent a famine, which brought the rest of Joseph’s family to Egypt seeking food. Tears, forgiveness, and grace all flowed freely, as did favor. Because Pharoah favored Joseph, he also showed kindness and favor to his family.

And then Joseph’s generation died, a new king came to power, and everything changed.

And this is where we can learn an important lesson.

 He said to his people, “Look, the Israelite people are more numerous and powerful than we are. Come, let’s deal shrewdly with them; otherwise they will multiply further, and when war breaks out, they will join our enemies, fight against us, and leave the country.” 

Exodus 1:9-10

Oppression doesn’t always come from a desire to have more power and control. Sometimes it comes from fear. Maybe we try to hold down and control the thing (or people) we fear the most. And maybe when it works, we feel powerful, and we want more of that feeling. Maybe.

But sometimes it backfires. Egypt’s king was afraid of the large number of Israelites, so he had them oppressed and what do you know? The more they were oppressed, the more they multiplied, and I wonder if that’s what happens when we try to push down and control the thing we fear. It just gets bigger.

So the fearful king tried a different strategy. He tried to control their population by killing off the boy babies, because boys become men and that was actually the fear the king was trying to hold down.

“…otherwise they will multiply further, and when war breaks out, they will join our enemies, fight against us, and leave the country.” 

Women didn’t go to war, men did. So the king needed to stop boys from becoming men.

And that right there is a rabbit trail I wish we had time to explore. Instead, the conspiracy theorist in me is just gonna throw out a few questions to ponder –

Why is our culture trying so hard to keep boys from becoming men? Why are they being encouraged to become girls? Why are they calling masculinity toxic and encouraging men to suppress who they were created to be? Who is afraid of men being men?

Thankfully, the midwives feared God more than they feared the king, and the plan to eliminate the growing population of boys who would become men failed.

What is your fear? How are you handling that fear? Is it working?

Do you fear God more?

As the Church, have we adopted the fear of our current culture and bought into the lie that men are bad, or toxic? God forbid. I pray that we will be the ones who fear God enough to speak the truth and who encourage men to be men. Godly men, but by all means, men.

But Some Doubted

Then the eleven disciples went away into Galilee, to the mountain where Jesus had directed them. When they saw Him, they worshiped Him; but some doubted. Jesus came near and said to them, “All authority has been given to Me in heaven and on earth. Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations…

Matthew 28:16-19

Judas was gone, so they were down to eleven. Eleven would eventually become twelve when they add Matthias. All but one of these twelve men would be martyred for their faith. Only John would survive, but would be exiled to Patmos, an island inhabited by criminals and political prisoners.

But as they stood here on this mountain, looking at the man they watched die and be buried in a tomb, some of them waivered. Some of them were uncertain as to what they were seeing. Some of them wondered if it could really be true. Some doubted. And yet, Jesus commissioned them all to go and make disciples.

At some point, their doubts became faith. How can we know this? Because people don’t risk, and ultimately give, their lives for something they doubt ever took place. I mean, I wouldn’t, would you? Would you go into a place that kills Christians and share the gospel, which includes the resurrection, if you doubted it happened?

Here’s my point with all of this –the doubters weren’t disqualified.

We all doubt, at some point. We may not doubt the resurrection, but maybe we doubt when we’re told that someone was completely healed of an incurable disease. Or when someone gives a testimony of seeing a deformity become undeformed in front of them. And don’t we often waiver between doubt and belief when we hear the stories that come out of places like Mozambique of dead bodies being raised to life? We want to believe it’s true, but doubt shows up anyway.

Some of us doubt things a little closer to home. Maybe we think our church is too dead to revive. Our bank account is too low to pay our bills. Our health is too far gone to be healed. Maybe our loved one has wandered too far to be brought back or we’re too broken to be of any use to the Kingdom of God. See what I mean? We are some who doubt.

He knows our doubts just as surely as He knew the “some” of His own disciples who doubted. But like them, He commissions us anyway. Calls us to go, to make disciples, to lay down our lives. He still fills us with His Spirit and His gifts and puts us into His body in whatever way He sees fit. Our doubts do not deter Him from calling us to keep following and keep going.

If Jesus doesn’t disqualify us because of our bouts with doubt, then who are we to disqualify ourselves?

Some doubted. Some still doubt. It’s ok. Let’s tell one another, pray for one another, and then go make disciples anyway.

The Servants Knew and So Did I

The man in charge tasted the water; it had now turned into wine! He did not know where it had come from, but the servants who had drawn the water knew. 

John 2:9

The words are in here. Waiting for me to set them free in the form of coherent sentences. The words, though, are swirling around like dust in a shaft of light, mixed with the emotions of what I see in this story. And not just this one, but every where in the gospels that I look at Him. *Sigh.* I’ll do my best to herd the words into a story of sorts.

This man, the one in charge at the wedding, he thought he was just tasting good wine provided by the bridegroom. (yeah…I caught that. Did you? Jesus. Our bridegroom. New wine.) Anyway.

The servants knew all about that wine that used to be water. They had seen it, participated in it. These were the hired help. Waiters. Seen, but perhaps unnoticed by the people eating and drinking and being merry. But they saw what Jesus did and I wonder what they thought of it all. Did they want to just fall down at His feet and never get back up?

I remember when it happened to me. My daughter was a teenager. That sweet girl is now, well, edging close to 40, but let’s not get sidetracked. Back then she was young and she was running wild from her pain with people that were not good for her. That sounds kind of generic, so let me see if I can put it another way. Her friend group was not just not good for her, they were actively bad for her, destructive in so many ways. As her mother, I was wringing my little hands half to death with worry and prayers that felt like they were hitting my ceiling and bouncing off the walls. And then Jesus told me how to fill the waters jars, so to speak. But instead of water jars, I would be filling bowls.

When he took the scroll, the four living beings and the twenty-four elders fell down in front of the Lamb. Each one held a harp and gold bowls filled with pieces of incense, which are the prayers of God’s people…

Revelation 5:8

“Ask Me to remove them from her life.” (this generated not a small discussion on – a. is that legal, you know, spiritually speaking, and b. what exactly did He mean by “remove”. We worked it out.)

So right there, in that two story house, I began to fill the bowls. And two weeks later the first friend left her life. And then another, and another, until they were all gone for various reasons. But here’s the thing. My daughter didn’t know, and those friends didn’t know that there was glory all over this thing. But I knew. In that house, where I often felt like the servant that wasn’t seen, I knew where the wine had come from, and it put me at His feet never wanting to get up. As one by one He removed the danger from my daughter’s life, I knew I was seeing glory. I knew He was there and it undid me in ways I can’t describe. He knows and I know that I will never be able to thank Him enough. We both know the glory He has spilled into my life and the lives of my family and how it has all become a fire in my bones that I pray will never burn out.

Words and thoughts like dust particles, but I want to capture them for you. To say to you that there is glory all around you. Bowls being filled as you pray for something that seems too big to be answered. Ordinary water being turned into not just something better, but into the best thing. Glory that may go unnoticed by others, but you will know, because you have done what He asked of you, so you’re in on it. You’re a witness to the miracles of what He’s done, and what He’s doing. You are filling bowls with what looks like unglorious water, but oh, just wait. He will bring forth wine. The very best wine. And you will know.

Let it be a fire in your bones. Let it bring you to His feet and may you never want to get back up.

I Am Not The Anointed One

He did not fail to confess, but confessed freely, “I am not the Christ.”

John 1:20

John the Baptist had been sent by God to be a witness, to testify of the Light, to carry a message of repentance and baptism, and to call people to turn back to God and to prepare the way for His Messiah.

But John had no Savior complex. He knew who he was, and who he was not. He was not the Christ, (anointed one).

And I thought of the people that have come in and out of my life over the years. The ones I thought I could change. Fix. Be the solution they needed. These people have included my husband, my kids, family members, friends. All the people. I wore their problems and their hurts like they were my own and in the end, they were still broken and I was exhausted.

Through a long process I am learning to do things differently. To untangle myself from things that are not mine to hold or carry. To have compassion without needing to have the answers. I still don’t do it well, which may be why God needed to give me the words I need to speak to my own soul.

I am not the anointed one. I am not the Savior.

We are His witnesses, and we carry the message of salvation through the gospel, but we are not the Christ.

We cannot save anyone. We aren’t anyone’s greatest need. We cannot fix what is broken. But if we don’t remind ourselves of who we are, and who we are not, before you know it we are neck deep in someone else’s brokenness, trying with all our might to save them, change them, or convince them.

We can invest ourselves in the lives of others, but doing it without taking on the weight of their lives requires that we know the difference between bringing them to Jesus, and trying to be Jesus for them.

I am not alone. Many of us are fixers by nature. Helpers to the core, because helping someone else, having, or being the solution to their problem, meets some kind of need in us.

We can help, but we can’t be their hope. We can walk with them, but they cannot need us more than they need Jesus. We can speak truth, but we can’t obey it for them. For their sake and ours, we have to freely make our confession:

I am not the anointed one.