What Can We Learn From Moses? — Spurgeon on the Reluctant Leader
⏱ 13 min read
You have been asked to do a thing you do not feel equipped for. Maybe it is small — to speak up in the meeting, to lead the women’s study at church, to take on the elderly parent’s care, to begin the difficult conversation that has been waiting for a year. Maybe it is large — to move the family, to leave the job, to start the work nobody else seems willing to start. And the inside of you, when the asking arrives, sounds nothing like the women you read about in the devotional books. The inside of you sounds like a stammer. Who am I, that I should go? Send somebody else.
That stammer is the most quoted sentence in the book of Exodus, and the man who said it became the man God spoke to face to face. What can we learn from Moses in the Bible is, in part, this: the reluctance was not a disqualification. The reluctance was, somehow, the soil the obedience grew in. Charles Spurgeon — who knew something about being called into a pulpit too large for the man standing in it — wrote three lines in Morning and Evening that read the inside of the reluctant leader more carefully than any modern leadership book. This is the slow reading of them. The Everspring Bible Study Workbook for Women carries this kind of slow reading into a daily companion, if you would like a place to take the practice after the article. For now — read slowly.
Moses was eighty years old when he met God at the burning bush. He had spent forty years as a prince in Pharaoh’s house and forty years as a fugitive shepherd in Midian, and the second forty had quietly hollowed out the first forty — the confident young man who killed an Egyptian in a flash of righteous anger had become a slow, married, sun-worn shepherd whose Hebrew was rusty and whose sense of being a leader had drained out of him decade by decade. The bush was lit on an ordinary afternoon. The voice from inside the bush asked him to walk back into the country he had fled. And Moses — the man whose name now sits on more children’s Bible covers than any other — said no, four times, in four different ways, before he finally said yes.
What the reluctance actually was
The reluctance was not unbelief. Moses had heard the voice. He had taken his shoes off. He believed the bush was God. The reluctance was the older, quieter thing that lives inside any honest soul who has been asked to do more than she feels equal to — the felt sense that the asking has arrived at the wrong address, that whoever God thinks she is, she is not in fact that person, that the gift the asking requires is not in her hand and has never been in her hand.
You will recognise the texture of it. The reluctance does not feel like rebellion from the inside. It feels like accuracy. He has the wrong woman. If He knew me from the inside, He would ask someone else. The reluctance is, in its strange way, a form of humility — but a humility that has not yet been corrected by the larger truth that He already knows you from the inside and is asking anyway.
Spurgeon, sitting by a window in his garden one evening, wrote a sentence that catches the moment the reluctance begins to quiet:
“I was sitting, the other night, meditating on God’s mercy and love, when suddenly I found in my own heart a most delightful sense of perfect peace.”
— Charles Spurgeon, Till He Come
Read it twice.
The phrase that does the work is suddenly I found. Spurgeon does not say I produced the peace. He does not say I worked my way into the peace. He says I found it — as if peace were a thing that arrived on its own while he was sitting still, attending to mercy and love. The reluctance Moses was carrying at the bush was the absence of exactly this kind of finding. Forty years in Midian had drained him of the felt sense that God was for him, that mercy was near him, that the asking was an invitation and not an assignment. The bush was the long-delayed return of the finding. Moses spent the conversation arguing because he had not yet sat long enough in the mercy to find the peace.
(If the inside of a long delay has been your shape this year, what does the Bible say about death — Spurgeon on dying well is the contemplative companion that walks the Midian-years of a soul. And if the practice of writing into the slow finding has not yet found its shape, how to Bible journal for beginners walks the no-art-skills version of the practice, while how to journal Bible verses step-by-step with examples is the more structured cousin for the woman who wants a method on the page.)
What Spurgeon names — suddenly I found in my own heart a most delightful sense of perfect peace — is the experience the reluctant leader does not believe is available to her. She believes obedience must be done out of will, out of grit, out of the muscle of self-overcoming. She does not yet know that the peace is found, not manufactured. Moses, by the end of the bush conversation, had not been talked into anything by argument. He had been quieted into something by presence. The voice did not give him a new set of skills. The voice gave him I will be with thee, and the with-ness was the only equipment he received.
The second passage: the cool twilight of the called
“Speak, Lord, for thy servant heareth! O that he would walk with me; I am ready to give up my whole heart and mind to him, and every other thought is hushed. I am only asking what he delights to give. I am sure that he will condescend to have fellowship with me, for he has given me his Holy Spirit to abide with me forever. Sweet is the cool twilight, when every star seems like the eye of heaven, and the cool wind is as the breath of celestial love.”
— Charles Spurgeon, Morning and Evening
Read it once at speed. Then read it again, slowly.
Notice the opening phrase. Speak, Lord, for thy servant heareth. The line is borrowed from young Samuel — but Spurgeon is using it here to describe the posture of any soul who has finally finished arguing and is ready to listen. This is the posture Moses arrived at, eventually, after four objections. Who am I. What is Thy name. They will not believe me. I am slow of speech. The objections were the four-stage release of the will. Underneath the fourth objection, when God’s patience finally outlasted Moses’ fear, the bush became silent and Moses said yes. The yes was the cool-twilight moment Spurgeon names — the moment every other thought is hushed and the soul is only asking what He delights to give.
The phrase that quietly upends modern Christian striving is I am only asking what he delights to give. Moses did not have to wrestle God into giving him courage. God delights to give it. The reluctant leader has been wrestling with the wrong thing — wrestling herself, wrestling her felt inadequacy, wrestling the absence of the gift she has not yet asked for — when the asking would simply have opened the hand that has been waiting to give. Spurgeon is naming a Father whose condescension is not reluctance but eagerness. He is ready to give up his whole heart and mind. The reluctant leader receives the courage, in the end, not because she earned it but because she finally finished arguing long enough to receive it.
Sweet is the cool twilight, when every star seems like the eye of heaven. This is the contemplative image Spurgeon offers for the inside of the called soul. The cool twilight is the quiet hour after the day’s argument has spent itself. The stars are not stars; they are eyes. The wind is not wind; it is the breath of celestial love. The image is the Hebraic image of the bush re-translated into an English garden. The fire in the bush, the cool wind in the evening — both are the same Presence, addressing the same reluctant soul, in the language each soul can hear.
What can we learn from Moses in the Bible at this turning point is that the yes is the cool twilight. The yes is not the heroic moment of will. The yes is the quieter moment when the wind moves and the soul says Speak, Lord. It is available to you in the same garden, in the same kitchen, on the same evening you have been arguing with the asking. The arguing was the day. The yes is the twilight.
A pause, here, for the body
The teaching has a body to it. The reluctant soul holds its reluctance in the shoulders and the jaw — the long-set tightness of a woman who has been bracing against the asking for weeks. Pause now.
Sit somewhere quiet. Put both feet flat against the floor. Let your shoulders drop by a small amount — not by trying to relax them, but by stopping the small ongoing effort to hold them up. Let the jaw release. Take one slow inhale through the nose. On the exhale, let the breath go all the way out, slower than the inhale, until the lungs are nearly empty. Then let the next inhale arrive on its own.
Notice, on the second breath, whether the chest releases a half-inch lower than it was. The release is not the obedience. The release is the body’s small finding of the cool twilight. Moses at the bush had been carrying eighty years of braced shoulders — the prince’s shoulders, the fugitive’s shoulders, the shepherd’s shoulders, the called man’s shoulders. The yes did not come until the shoulders lowered. Your yes is in the same place. The body knows how to find the cool twilight. It has only forgotten because the asking has held it braced for so long.
The Everspring Bible Study Workbook for Women is built around this kind of slow daily finding. One passage at a time. Room for the honest sentence. No demand to be more spiritually accomplished than you are on the day you sit down. The reluctant woman who has been carrying her asking in her shoulders for a season needs a structured page that will lower them quietly, evening by evening, until the yes can come.
The third passage: virtue going out of Jesus
“He is so prolific of grace, that like the sun which shines as it rolls onward in its orbit, his path is radiant with lovingkindness. He is a swift arrow of love, which not only reaches its ordained target, but perfumes the air through which it flies. Virtue is evermore going out of Jesus, as sweet odours exhale from flowers; and it always will be emanating from him, as water from a sparkling fountain. … If our Lord is so ready to heal the sick and bless the needy, then, my soul, be not thou slow to put thyself in his way, that he may smile on thee.”
— Charles Spurgeon, Morning and Evening
Read it three times.
Spurgeon is naming the most consoling thing about the calling of the reluctant — the fact that virtue is evermore going out of Jesus, whether or not the called woman feels equal to the asking. The grace Moses needed for the burning bush conversation was already emanating from God before Moses ever turned aside to see the fire. The fire was not the source of the grace; the fire was the announcement of the grace that had been there the whole time. The virtue is evermore going out. The reluctant leader does not have to produce it. She has to put herself in His way.
The phrase is small and it does most of the work. Put thyself in his way. Not generate the grace. Not prove yourself worthy of the grace. Put thyself in his way. The grace is already moving. Your job is to stand in its path. Moses stood in its path the moment he turned aside to see the bush. The turning aside was the whole of the obedience required at that point. The grace did the rest.
For the modern Christian woman who has been asked to do the thing she does not feel equipped for, this is the line that quiets the ten-year argument. You do not have to manufacture the courage. The courage is evermore going out of Jesus. You only have to put yourself in His way — by sitting down, by opening the page, by asking the question, by stopping the arguing long enough to be in the air the grace is moving through. The reluctance does not have to be cured before you can stand there. The standing-there is what cures the reluctance.
Be not thou slow. Spurgeon is gentle but firm. Moses was slow — he took four objections to arrive at his yes — and the slowness was forgiven, and the yes was honoured. But Spurgeon’s small instruction at the end of the passage is the contemplative correction to the long delay. Be not thou slow to put thyself in his way, that he may smile on thee. The smile is waiting. The grace is moving. The reluctant leader has been hesitating in a corner of the room when the simple required act is to walk into the path the smile is already taking.
The reluctant leader’s slow yes
What can we learn from Moses is, finally, the shape of a yes that does not look like a yes from the outside. Moses said yes after four objections, with a slow tongue and a borrowed brother and a staff he did not know what to do with. The yes was not impressive. The yes was real. He walked back to Egypt. He stood in front of Pharaoh. He carried the people forty more years through a wilderness he had walked himself. The reluctance never fully left him — read Numbers if you want the evidence — but the yes held, because the I will be with thee held.
Your yes, when it comes, may also be unimpressive. It may be a slow tongue. It may be a borrowed brother. It may be a staff in your hand that you do not know what to do with. The smallness of the yes is not its disqualification. Moses’ yes was small at the bush and large at the Red Sea, and the largeness came not from his growing competence but from the with-ness of the One who had asked him. You have been asking for the competence. He has been offering the with-ness. The with-ness is the only equipment the obedience actually requires.
(For the sibling slow readings in this contemplative-fathers series, what can we learn from King David walks Spurgeon on the man after God’s own heart, and what can we learn from Paul the apostle walks Owen on Paul’s sufferings — both of them lives that began, like Moses’, with a reluctance that was eventually quieted into a yes.)
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A daily home for the practice
The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Bible Study Workbook for Women. Each evening, a short passage and room for the honest sentence — the small daily anchor that holds the reluctant heart in proximity to the One who calls, until the with-ness becomes the yes.
The Everspring Bible Study Workbook for Women carries Spurgeon’s slow vocabulary — the cool twilight, the virtue evermore going out, the smile waiting in the path — into a daily companion built for the woman whose reluctance is, at last, ready to be named and brought home.
