In his sermon 'The Fearlessness of Faith - Moses's Parents,' Scott Brown explores the biblical narrative of Moses's parents acting out of faith and fearlessness. The sermon begins with an examination of Exodus 2:1-6 and Hebrews 11:23, highlighting the courage of Moses's parents who defied Pharaoh's command to kill Hebrew boys by hiding Moses. Brown emphasizes that their actions were driven by faith in God rather than fear of man, and this faith was instrumental in the continued multiplication of the Hebrews, defying Pharaoh's oppressive measures. The sermon draws parallels between the biblical account and contemporary Christian life, encouraging believers to live fearlessly and wisely, guided by faith. Brown elaborates on the concept of godly disobedience, illustrating how Moses's parents and the Hebrew midwives set a foundation for deliverance and the gospel message. He further discusses the importance of interpreting scripture accurately, understanding authority structures, and exercising discretion in practicing faith. Brown uses personal anecdotes to underline the challenges Christians may face today and the necessity of a strong, faith-driven life. He concludes by highlighting six qualities demonstrated by Moses's parents: fearlessness, wisdom, unity, perseverance, recognition of weakness, and divine preservation, urging believers to build a life marked by faith and trust in God's promises.

Please open your Bibles to the inerrant and pure and sufficient word of God to Exodus chapter two. Exodus chapter two will begin in verse one and we'll continue to verse six And then we'll pick up in Hebrews 11, 23 and read that. Exodus chapter 2 verse 1. And a man of the house of Levi went and took as wife a daughter of Levi. So the woman conceived and bore a son, and when she saw the son was a beautiful child, she hid him three months.

But when she could no longer hide him, she took an ark of bulrushes for him, daubed it with asphalt and pitch, and put the child in it, and laid it in the reeds by the river's bank. And his sister stood afar off to know of what would be done to him. Then the daughter of Pharaoh came down to bathe in the river and her maidens walked along the riverside. And when she saw the ark among the reeds, she sent her maid to get it. And when she opened it, she saw the child.

And behold, the baby wept. So she had compassion on him and said, this is one of the Hebrews children. And then opening to Hebrews chapter 11 and reading verse 23. By faith, Moses, when he was born, was hidden three months by his parents because they saw he was a beautiful child and they were not afraid of the King's command. Let's pray.

Lord we pray that you would make us the kind of people who have no fear of man, we only fear you. All of our delight is in you and seeking the delights of men becomes something that doesn't matter to us anymore. That we would, in our own hearts, have the faith that breeds fearlessness. That in our homes we would cultivate it and in our church we would have it. And that you would also spread it throughout the land like you did the Hebrews multiplying fearless faith exponentially, amen.

So in these passages of scripture, we're dealing with this legacy of faith. We've seen the faith of the midwives that made them fearless. Now we turn toward Moses fearless parents and then later on in the chapter we didn't read it but will you find that Moses himself was fearless he did not fear the king and he would rather suffer than to fear And so what we find here in this passage is that Moses' parents by faith in fearlessness they hid their son and thereby disobeyed Pharaoh in their hiding of him. And what we have seen already, and this is also implied in this text, their disobedience unleashed a powerful blessing in the land as the multiplication of children continued on, you know, for another 80 years. Pharaoh was already in fear of the Hebrews.

They had already multiplied because they were obeying the command to be fruitful and multiply. But 80 years later, it was even worse. And this multiplication that God has ordained for his people continued on. And so much so that I think we should be very clear to say it this way. The disobedience of the midwives and the mamas set the stage for the deliverer.

That was the legacy of their blessing. That was the legacy of their blessing. That was the legacy of their fearless faith. Is that God had ordained to send a deliverer to release the children of Israel from their bondage to be a picture of the gospel. And this is the most prominent Old Testament illustration of the power of the gospel that delivers from bondage.

So we're talking about the faith that makes you free of fear so that you become the kind of people who say, whom shall I fear? What shall man do to me? The fear of man is a snare. And how critical it is to understand what Moses understood when he wrote Deuteronomy, when he said, don't fear man whose breath is in his nostrils. You see this legacy of fearlessness in this family and in the midwives that existed in their time.

Moses was hidden out of out of fearlessness. We we live in a world of fear. We spend much of our lives doing things out of fear, feeling things out of fear, and God wants to deliver us from from our fears. The world is fearful, but the church needs to be fearless and to preach a gospel that sets you free from fear. Now, Moses was hidden.

I thought that was really interesting to read it again and to meditate on it. And it brought me back many years ago. It was in 1988, the year that my wife and I moved to North Carolina, that homeschooling was finally legalized. It was illegal before that, and it didn't become legal until 1993 in the entire United States. But what that meant is that there was a lot of hiding going on among Christian people.

And most of the homeschoolers that we knew were hiding their children during the government orders that made homeschooling illegal. And when we moved to North Carolina, even though it was legalized, people were still very reluctant to let their children run around all the time during the day. And even in North Carolina, the child labor laws, last time I checked, were such that You can't even have your kid go out and mow the lawn until 3 o'clock in the afternoon, right now. So we definitely have lived under some restrictions. I realized when I said that about mowing the lawn, many of you gasped.

I don't know why you would do that. But we're answering the question, when is disobedience to the government appropriate? And there are many things that we need to do to try to cleanse our minds. What Christians do is that they're washed in the water of the Word. And they try as best they can to stop thinking like the Gentiles, to stop thinking the way that they used to think.

Literally to be transformed according to the renewing of the mind. And this is what the church always needs in every generation. We grew up, we grew up wrong, okay? And we need to get set right, but only the Word of God does that. And guess what?

You know this. It takes it, it takes time to have your mind changed, to be transformed. And the Word of God does that. And I pray that these passages of Scripture that we are going through will wash our minds to take away the inner Marxist within us, to take away whatever it is that is withholding our own obedience and delight in the law of the Lord. So we're walking through these passages of scripture.

Frankly I want to do this for my own sake as well. I think our congregation needs to be clear about these matters because we've had a lot of different discordant thoughts about it over our lives. But when something so shocking that has happened in our current environment, what Christians should do is to slow down a little bit and to consider what the word of God says. To be deliberate, to be mature about it, don't run off half-cocked, understand what God has said. And so that's why we're doing this series and we plan to continue to try to understand at some level of depth various passages of scripture so far, you know, we've looked at Looked at a couple of things in Romans chapter 13.

We've looked at the Hebrew midwives We will we will need to look at Rahab We will need to look at Rahab. We will need to look at a number of other instances where there are particular didactic, authoritative statements about those situations. We don't build our doctrine off of narrative, but when you have narratives where there are specific commendations from God, then you have a narrative that you understand, you know, far clearly. We have to be good interpreters of Scripture. Narrative is not imperative.

We're in a narrative passage, but by the way, I hope you noticed that we're in a narrative passage where God weighs in on the situation. And so you have a narrative that's mixed with imperative, in this case here. But learning how to interpret the Bible according to proper rules of hermeneutics is critical and I hope we can do that during this time as we as we take our time to walk through these passages of Scripture. So let's begin in verse 1. Exodus chapter 2 verse 1.

And a man of the house Levi, a man of the house of Levi, took a wife, a daughter of Levi, so the woman conceived and bore a son. Now that sounds wonderful. You know when that happens here we get so excited. What do you think they were thinking? The king had just issued an edict to drown your son.

And so imagine what they were thinking. The consequences of this pregnancy was massive. And If that baby was born a boy, what would they do? They were faced with that situation. Now, it is clear from the word of God that when Moses was born, he was circumcised.

He was marked for the rest of his life as a Hebrew. We don't have any indication that Amram and Jacobet, Moses' parents, were rattled at all. It says here that they did not fear. They were not rattled. It was their fear of God though that upheld them.

They had a living and a supernatural faith. It was faith. I believe it was saving faith. The Word of God makes it very clear, so clearly stated in Romans, that the justified shall live by faith. That Abraham, by faith, was accounted as righteous.

And everyone who's ever been saved has been saved by faith. No one has ever been saved by the works of the law ever, not in the Old Testament and certainly not in the New Testament, but they were saved by faith. But I think What's striking about the narrative is that there is a declaration of their fearlessness. And it seems to me that they were walking in the matter of Isaiah 26 verse 3. You will keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you because he trusts in you and then the Lord says through Isaiah trust in the Lord forever For in Yah the Lord is everlasting strength, for he brings down those who dwell on high.

The lofty city, he lays it low, he lays it low to the ground, he brings it down to the dust. And the people who have faith believe that. They believe that God is going to do business with the wicked in his own time. The Apostle Paul taught us how to deal with that, with the troubles that come to us. He said that God commands, vengeance is mine, I will repay saith the Lord.

And I believe that Amram and Jacob had that very same kind of faith. So what did they do? Well they did something that you might think was pragmatic, faithless, fearful, the second part of verse one. And when she saw that he was a beautiful child, she hid him three months. Now, was the hiding of this boy an expression of fear?

Answer, no. It was an expression of wisely executed faith and while they they believed they were in subjection to the higher authorities as I think as Romans 13 makes it very clear, there are higher authorities. They had greater confidence in the higher authority than they did the lower authority of the civil magistrate. And God has established various authorities. They have real authority.

You have the authority of the civil government and I'll describe it like this. The civil government has very, according to the word of God, has very little authority over lots of people. If you look at how God defines the authority of the civil government, it's very clear that they don't really have that much to do. They're to protect and they're to punish evildoers. That's pretty much it.

With the church, you have authority over a larger number of people than the government, and actually over a larger list of things in that realm of authority. And in the family, you have tremendous authority among the husband and wife, tremendous authority over a very small group of people. So, do you see the sort of the cascading numbers of people that God has established his authority over. With the civil government, a little bit of authority over a lot of people. The church, more authority over a smaller group.

In the family, way more authority, way more jurisdiction authority over a lot smaller number of people. You know, the government can tell you to do certain things, but they can't tell your wife to do certain things. So there is just a different kind of authority structure that we have. There are higher authorities and there are lower authorities. And God is the authority over all of the authorities.

We've tried to demonstrate that in different ways. Now from this hiding, I think that we should recognize that courage and wisdom are our brother and sister, they're companions. You find courage and wisdom in the hiding of Moses. The Proverbs say discretion will preserve you or guard you. Discretion is critical and I think that's what we see in Moses' parents is that they had a faith that was knowledgeable and it was rational and it was practical.

It took into account the situation. So their fear, their faith was not reckless, their faith was not presumptuous, And I think they demonstrate the principle that Christians should be very careful not to recklessly expose themselves to harm. Christians should be careful not to recklessly, brashly, proudly, unknowledgably, insensitively expose themselves to harm. And, You know, every missionary knows this, that you might not say everything about what you're doing but you're going to try to properly represent some of what you're doing. There's a former missionary in China told me that they didn't use the word missionary when they went to China.

They used different words. Was that fear, was that an ungodly fear? I don't believe so. I think it's consistent with the wise fearlessness of discretion and responsibility as opposed to reckless, brash fearlessness. So I think it's important that we understand that there is a reckless way that we can exercise our freedoms.

You know, one of the challenges that families have had to grapple with in different states, in some degree here, is the matter of the use of the rod. It's very clear from the Word of God that parents are obligated upon divine command to use the rod in the discipline of their children. And at the same time, we have recognized that it's actually illegal in several states. And parents have to think differently about it in those different states, they have to operate differently. My advice to parents when they come to me and ask in our church is very consistent.

Here's the advice. You should be very, very reluctant to use the rod with your children anywhere in public in the United States of America. You should be very careful. You might lose your children. You don't, you have no idea who's around you.

You should use discretion. My advice goes like this. This is something you should solve in the privacy of your home, not in public. And even in a church, even in our church, I would just say it's far wiser to solve these problems at home and not use the rod on your children here. By the way, you have no idea who's here, and you have no idea how sensitive or insensitive they might be to the kind of things that you're doing, and they don't know you.

And so you should be very careful. I'm not in favor of people carrying around, you know, some of these manufactured, you know, rods that people use and exposing them. I'm just not in favor of it. I counsel people to not do that because I think they're unwisely exposing themselves. Christians are obligated to obey God in the raising of their children and to use and have a wise and loving use of the rod.

Absolutely, you should do that. But in the environment we live in right now, my view is that you should be careful when and where you do that. Be very careful. There you have it. That's my view.

Now Moses, by the way, he was hidden as a baby, but in many ways Moses was always a hidden man. He was always a protected man. He of course was hidden in infancy and then he was hidden in Pharaoh's house for 40 years, protected in Pharaoh's house. And then he was hidden again in Midian for another 40 years and protected there, you know, in the wilderness as he had a family. And then when he came back to Egypt, he was also protected again.

And when you When you look at this narrative, I think one of the encouraging things that you should consider for your own life is the hiddenness of the true believer. God is in complete control of your life. He knows you're goings out and you're coming in. He said, I will never leave you or forsake you. Never.

He'll never leave your side. And so there's this hiddenness. In Psalm 27, David says, You will hide me in your pavilion in the secret place of the tabernacle. He shall hide me. And then he says he shall set me high upon a rock.

And now I shall be lifted up above all my enemies all around me. And what's his response? He says, I will sing. I will sing praises to the Lord. That's a picture of a free man who understands the hiddenness of the believer under the mighty hand of God.

God hides his children and cares for them. And I think it's very interesting the means that Moses' parents selected to deal with him as he got bigger and they decided to build an ark. It seems strange to me that they did this. You know, I don't know if Deborah and I would have done this, but they did it. They did it by faith.

It's not too far out of the realm of possibility that this husband and wife were talking one day and they said, you remember how God saved our ancestors in the ark? Let's build an ark. And if you look at the way that they built that basket, the word ark is used, it's the exact same word that's used in Noah's flood. The arc that Moses' parents built is described by the exact same word as Noah's arc. And if you look at what they did in constructing it, they constructed it just like the Ark of Noah with pitch and all the materials that Noah used.

And you know, this is just a demonstration of their faith. And this word basket is just the same name for the ark. Now, Notice how the husband and wife were united in the building of the ark. I think that's really interesting. To be united in marriage, to be united in all of life, to share all of life's decisions, the very, very difficult ones.

Some of you are considering getting married soon or maybe you've just been married and you're on this wonderful journey of walking together and the unity of the husband and wife is such a critical thing. You are fellow heirs of the grace of life which throws you together in times of trial, times of real difficulty. You know, you who just got married or are thinking about getting married, here's a little newsflash. Everything isn't going to be smooth. You might face unspeakable sorrows, but facing them together is such a blessing.

To be united and to face the trials of life is such a huge blessing. And God created marriage partly for that reason, so that you would shoulder and bear the burdens of life together. And it really is a joy. I often think of Priscilla and Aquila, that great couple that you read about in the book of Acts. You know they risked their necks for the Apostle Paul.

They had a church in their house. They were doing all these things. They were they were kind of a theological couple and they were instructing Apollos with greater clarity on the message of the gospel. But marriage is a labor of love together. Marriage is a way that you make your way through life together.

For those of you who aren't married, here's the most important thing you need to recognize. Marry a holy person. Marry a holy person. Marry a person who wants to be holy. And that's gonna fix 99% of your problems.

Okay, enough of that. So Moses is exercising fearless wisdom. His wife, Jochebed explicitly says that she hid him. It's interesting. She hid him and they did not fear.

Now we probably shouldn't make too much about that, but here you have you have a fearless mama here, you know you've heard about the trim healthy mama, how about the fearless mama? That's what you got right here. And she is not afraid of the future. She's smiling on the future and she's using discernment and godly wisdom in the midst of an incredibly threatening situation. It's hard to find a more threatening situation than this one, than the prospect of your baby being killed at birth.

So and then of course we have how God worked with this. Moses is put in the ark in verse 5, the daughter of Pharaoh came down to bathe at the river. Now I haven't searched this out but there was one Hebrew scholar who asserted that the word bathe actually indicated that she was coming down to the river to wash off the impurities of Egyptian religion. I don't know if that's true or not, but she obviously had something good in her heart and she she took this child and and cared for this child. She said this is one of the Hebrew's children.

And when she recognized that, she did not have a bad attitude toward this child. She had a sweet, preserving, nurturing attitude toward this child. Who knows what was going on with her. So now, the boy that Pharaoh wants to murder is now being fed by Pharaoh's own resources. How about that?

God has a sense of humor. You might fear something out there and find out that there's a whole another way God is working this out. And that's exactly what happened with Moses. He had remarkable support by the government that wanted to put him to death. So we shouldn't fear these kinds of things.

Hebrews 11, 23, by faith, Moses, when he was born, was hidden three months by his parents because they saw he was a beautiful child and they were not afraid of the king's command. Is there anything that you're afraid of? Is there anything that the government might do? Is there anything that the economy might do to you? Is there anything that a relative, a landlord might do to you, a friend, is there anything, any great threat against your life that's bothering you right now that you might not get this or you might get that?

I think this story is for all of us. Strengthen your faith. Faith makes the heart strong. If you want to prevent a heart attack over some threat, you prevent that heart attack by faith and the fearlessness that comes from that faith. What faith does, it puts you thinking about things unseen and that's really important.

Faith, not only does it make your heart strong, but it changes the way you look at the whole world. And faith makes you look through the terrors, through the threats, and pass them to the living God. That's what faith does. If your faith is flagging, if your fear is rising, then build your faith. Faith comes by hearing the word of God.

And this is a tremendous help to us. Faith is the great regulator of the heart. You know sometimes the heart needs a regulator. You know my own mother has had a pacemaker for almost three decades I believe and that pacemaker tells her heart when to beat, beat, beat, beat and it's still beating And now my Father has one. But there is a regulator for the human heart, and that is faith.

Faith adheres the Word of God. If you want to regulate the beats of your heart so that you're not frightened by any fear, so that you're not having a heart attack over some of the things that are happening in your life, it's really clear what you should do. You should build your faith and maybe you haven't been building your faith and that's exactly why you're in this condition that you're in right now. You have not been filling your heart with songs of deliverance that God has out there for you. You know, we have a cardiologist in our church who installs pacemakers that regulate the beats of the heart.

And it's always a joy to talk to him about heart surgery and heart regulation. But faith is the best pacemaker you will ever get. So you have this courage and boldness and confidence. It's a little bit like what David referred to in Psalm 56 when he said, when I am afraid I will trust in you. That's looking through the problem and to the God behind the whole problem because He is the one behind the whole problem.

God is the one that's pulling all the strains and if you can look through the problem and beyond it to God and all of His promises you'll have no fear of that kind of heart attack. And so God has given us these marvelous things. Looking through the storm and past the storm to the creator of the storm is maybe something that some of you need to do. I don't know, but if you do, you've now received some instruction about what you ought to do. Well, Moses' parents' legacy and Moses' legacy himself was a legacy of fearlessness.

Psalm 15 four says that he who honors, that God honors those who fear him. And I think that's all part of the scenario here. So as we find ourselves in an environment where Satan is waging war against the church, Satan is always waging war also against the family. He hates the fruitfulness and multiplication of the church. He hates the truth of the church.

He hates families that are biblically ordered and tries to do every possible thing he can to dissuade them and discourage them from the path of fearless faith. And, but I want to just leave you with six qualities that I see here in these passages of scripture. In both the Hebrew midwives and in Moses' parents. Now of course the first is obvious, fearlessness. They were a fearless people.

Let's not be a fearless church in the midst of a fearless nation. One of the ways that you can glorify God and shine as lights to the world is not to be frightened by any fear, just like Sarah. Second, wise. Not just fearless, but wise. Discerning, careful.

The Proverb says, do what is right in the sight of all men. What that means is that there are cultural and social things that are just important for you to understand, to understand what's going on in the world in that sense, and then to live both graciously and wisely in the midst of a wicked and a perverse generation. And I think the midwives and Moses' parents are such exemplary testimonies of walking in wisdom, not recklessly, not presumptuously, but carefully in a wicked and perverse generation. Third, united. You have a husband and wife who are working through something and they did probably the hardest thing they ever did in their life by building that arc but they were trying to think rightly and biblically about it.

They were thinking about the deliverance that God gave his people through Noah. And they wanted to follow in that same line as Noah. The fourth word, persevering, Persevering. The fifth word, weak. God uses the weak things of this world to confound the wise.

God could have pulled out multitudes of angels. God could have caused earthquakes and fire to fall from heaven, but he used mamas and midwives and moms and dads to save the world. He uses the weak to confound the wise. Sixth, preserved, preserved. This is an illustration for how God preserves his own church from cradle to the grave, from the birth stool through the Nile and onward to heaven.

Do you remember how Moses died? He always wanted to go into the promised land. And God said, you can't go into the promised land because you became so infuriated and you struck the rock. I'm not letting you go into the promised land. And Moses asks multiple times, God, could I please go in?

And God says, nope, you're not going in. So then, on the very last day of Moses' life, God tells him to write a song. And he says, write the song and teach it to the children of Israel. So he writes the song, it's the song of Moses, it's beautiful, you should go read it. He writes the song and then God tells him to go up Mount Pisgah.

And he goes up to the top of Mount Pisgah and he overlooks the promised land. He always wanted to go into the promised land and what happened next? God took him to the promised land. He took him to heaven. He took him straight to heaven to experience the promised land.

Moses walked by faith and God gave him delights beyond imagination. God subjected him to tremendous pressure, tremendous threat all his life long, but there was that day when he walked up to the top of Mount Pisgah he was an old man and his strength hadn't faded yet how about that and he looked over the promised land and He was transported to heaven right away. What a beautiful thing. He was preserved. Without faith, It is impossible to please God.

Oh, fear the Lord, you his saints. There is no want to those who fear him. Build your faith. Would you pray with me? Lord, we thank you for the remarkable beauty and help, encouragement of your word, how you call us to the most exciting life that ever could be lived by faith, hearing and then finding our hearts fortified and built up by faith.

Lord we're just so grateful that you've given us everything for life and godliness in this world and I pray for all of us that we would have wise discretionary, careful, not presumptuous and yet humble navigation of all these things that are upon us. Lord, make us a wise and discerning people as you promised that you would. Amen.