Bricks Without Straw: The Battle for Your Focus
There are moments when God speaks clearly. A promise is given. A calling is clarified. Truth settles in your spirit. And almost immediately, life starts to get louder and more demanding. Responsibility multiplies. Circumstances tighten. Drama comes out of nowhere. The noise increases. What once felt steady suddenly feels so fragile.
Things were going well until the other shoe dropped. You start to wonder if you heard God wrong. Would following a divine assignment really feel like this? Maybe your priorities change. You’ll focus on what God has told you after you’ve gotten through whatever obstacle has come up…if you remember to.
And it’s not because we’re faithless—it’s because what’s happening in front of us is real. Tangible. Urgent. Bills are due. Relationships are strained. Bodies are tired. Fear has a way of demanding our full attention. It’s incredibly hard not to fixate on the hardship unfolding before our eyes rather than on the unseen promises and quiet promptings of God. One can be touched, measured, and felt. The other must be trusted.
When the visible pain is loud, faith can feel abstract—or even impractical. We don’t necessarily stop believing in God’s promises; we just struggle to see them through the weight of what’s pressing in.
The Exodus story of bricks and straw is about focus, and how quickly it can be stolen when the enemy turns up the noise.
God spoke to Moses through a burning bush, calling him to a dangerous and divine mission. The runaway-prince-turned-outcast-shepherd was instructed to stand before Pharaoh and demand the release of God’s people. Even with the promise of the Great I AM on his side, Moses made every excuse in the book (short of “my dog ate my homework”) for why he shouldn’t go. In the end, the Lord provided a partner—his brother Aaron (read more about this in the Lessons from a Burning Bush series!). And that’s where our story begins…
Moses and Aaron brought together all the elders of the Israelites, and Aaron told them everything the Lord had said to Moses. He also performed the signs before the people, and they believed. And when they heard that the Lord was concerned about them and had seen their misery, they bowed down and worshipped.
—Exodus 4:29-31
At the end of Exodus 4, there’s hope. For the first time in a long time, the Israelites felt seen and heard by God. He had spoken and promised an answer to their pain. Deliverance was no longer a distant idea. There was relief in believing, comfort in being noticed, and expectant excitement in the promise that God was about to act.
Afterward Moses and Aaron went to Pharaoh and said, “This is what the LORD, the God of Israel, says: ‘Let My people go, so that they may hold a festival to Me in the wilderness.’”
Pharaoh said, “Who is the LORD, that I should obey Him and let Israel go? I do not know the Lord and I will not let Israel go.”
They they said, “The God of the Hebrews has met with us. Now let us take a three-day journey into the wilderness to offer sacrifices to the LORD our God.” . . .
But the king of Egypt said, “Moses and Aaron, why are you taking the people away from their labor? Get back to your work!. . .You are stopping them from working.”
—Exodus 5:1-5
Moses and Aaron go to Pharaoh with a message straight from God: “Let My people go, so that they may hold a festival to Me in the wilderness.” This wasn’t an extreme or unreasonable request. Historically, pharaohs would sometimes allow slaves time away from labor to worship their gods. Religious observances were a normal part of ancient life. But as we go on to see, Pharaoh’s issue wasn’t about logistics—it was about authority. “Who is the Lord, that I should obey Him?”
Nothing about God’s Word changed in that moment. Only the response to it did. Truth had been spoken, and, immediately, resistance followed.
That same day Pharaoh gave this order to the slave drivers and overseers in charge of the people: “You are no longer to supply the people with straw for making bricks; let them go and gather their own straw. But require them to make the same number of bricks as before; don’t reduce the quota. They are lazy; that is why they are crying out, ‘Let us go and sacrifice to our God.’ Make the work harder for the people so that they keep working and pay no attention to lies.”
—Exodus 5:6-9, emphasis mine
In ancient Egypt, bricks were made from a mixture of mud, clay, water, and chopped straw. Straw wasn’t an optional filler—it was a binding agent, what gave the bricks strength and stability. Without straw, the bricks would become brittle and crumble.
Pharaoh doesn’t debate God’s commands. Instead, he applies pressure. He orders the Israelites to continue producing the same number of bricks, but removes the straw they need to make them. The work wasn’t just harder—it became discouraging and nearly impossible to do well. More than punishment, taking away straw was meant to manipulate their belief. Pharaoh says, “Make the work harder for the people so that they keep working and pay no attention to lies.” God spoke Truth to the Israelites, and immediately Pharaoh wanted them to believe it was a lie.
This is the enemy’s oldest tactic. Think back to the serpent in the Garden of Eden! He tried to distort God’s character, question His goodness, and distract from His promises. This is spiritual warfare! The enemy doesn’t want you to believe the truth about God, so he overwhelms you with what feels urgent, visible, and demanding. He uses busyness, pressure, and fatigue to blur your spiritual clarity. Satan doesn’t have the authority to remove your calling, so he interferes with what sustains you. Peace gives way to anxiety. Clarity to confusion. It’s like Mario Kart—he’s constantly throwing banana peels on your tack to throw you off balance and get you to spin out.
Then the slave drivers and the overseers went out and said to the people, “This is what Pharaoh says: ‘I will not give you any more straw. God and get your own straw wherever you can find it, but your work will not be reduced at all.’” So the people scattered all over Egypt to gather stubble to use for the straw. The slave drivers kept pressing them, saying, “Complete the work required of you for each day, just as when you had straw.” And Pharaoh’s slave drivers beat the Israelite overseers they had appointed, demanding, “Why haven’t you met your quota of bricks yesterday or today, as before?”
—Exodus 5:10-14
Bricks without straw became a weapon of forced exhaustion. Exhaustion narrows vision. Discouraged and overwhelmed people question truth. When survival becomes the focus, promises seem to fade into the background. The enemy doesn’t always attack truth directly. He distracts from it. Removing straw was never about efficiency. It was about breaking confidence.
Then the Israelite overseers went and appealed to Pharaoh: “Why have you treated your servants this way? Your servants are given no straw, yet we are told, ‘Make bricks!’ Your servants are being beaten, but the fault is with your own people.”
Pharaoh said, “Lazy, that’s what you are—lazy! That is why you keep saying, ‘Let us go and sacrifice to the LORD.’ Now get to work. You will not be given any straw, yet you must produce your full quota of bricks.
The Israelite overseers realized they were in trouble when they were told, “You are not to reduce the number of bricks required of you for each day.” When they left Pharaoh, they found Moses and Aaron waiting to meet them, and they said, “May the LORD look on you and judge you! You have made us obnoxious to Pharaoh and his officials and have put a sword in their hand to kill us.”
—Exodus 5:15-21, emphasis mine
The Israelites didn’t suddenly deny God’s promise. They just couldn’t see it anymore. Their focus shifted from what God said to what Pharaoh demands. What was once unseen but trusted becomes overshadowed by what is painfully visible. Moses and Aaron—once symbols of hope—become targets of blame. The deliverers are recast as destroyers. When focus fixes on circumstances, calling is reinterpreted as cruelty. Pressure reshapes perception.
Moses felt the weight, too. Leadership became isolating. God’s promise felt distant. He was called to lead these people out of captivity, and suddenly they turned on him. Imagine how much harder his job was going to be if the Israelites no longer trusted him. His straw was taken away as well.
Yet Moses responds differently.
Moses returned to the Lord and said, “Why, Lord, why have You brought trouble on this people? Is this why You sent me? Ever since I went to Pharaoh to speak in Your name, he has brought trouble on this people, and You have not rescued Your people at all.”
—Exodus 5:22-23, emphasis mine
He returned to the Lord with raw honesty. He questioned God, but he didn’t walk away from Him. Most importantly, he didn’t allow his circumstances to rewrite God’s character. By crying out to God, Moses shows that he still believes God sees and hears him.
Go back to the very beginning of this story. This is GROWTH! At the burning bush, Moses avoided his calling with excuses. Here, he brings honest prayer. Let me take this opportunity to remind you: we serve a big God who can handle big feelings. Moses doesn’t deny the distractions that the enemy has thrown at him. Instead, he comes to God to find out what he’s supposed to do next. Faith isn’t pretending hardship doesn’t exist. It’s choosing where you place your focus.
The enemy still works the same way. He rarely needs to erase faith outright; he simply redirects our attention. He magnifies what is visible, urgent, and exhausting until what is unseen begins to feel distant or unreal. Financial strain, relational conflict, anxiety, unanswered prayers—these all can become bricks without straw that demand our focus. And slowly, almost imperceptibly, our gaze shifts.
But Scripture reminds us, “We fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal” (2 Corinthians 4:18). Fixing our eyes on the unseen requires intention. What we can see presses in and demands reaction. Sometimes it simply makes us too tired to sustain our focus, or wears us down until we forget what God has already said..
So when you notice the banana peels littering the road—when you realize the straw is gone—pause and ask yourself:
What is the pressure tempting me to believe about God?
Pull out your Bible! Return to what God has actually said, not what your circumstances want you to believe.
Where has exhaustion started to speak louder than truth?
Refuse to let fatigue define your reality. Exhaustion only affects your perception, not the truth.
And like Moses, bring the noise to God instead of letting it pull us away from Him.
God’s promise didn’t fail then, and it hasn’t failed now. The Israelites’ deliverance wasn’t delayed by Pharaoh’s resistance—it was still unfolding. His oppression wasn’t the end of the story; it was just the beginning of God’s power on display. Your current hardship may actually be preparation. Just like Pharaoh, the enemy’s strategy reveals his fear, not his strength.
When the enemy turns up the noise, it’s often because truth is too close to ignore. And there is nothing more dangerous to him than a blood-bought, child of the King who believes every word God has spoken.
God, help us stay anchored in Your truth. When someone’s taken our straw and what we can see feels overwhelming, help us to trust what You have already spoken. When pressure demands our attention and exhaustion clouds our vision, turn our eyes back to You. Restore our confidence in Your character, steady our hearts in Your presence, and help us hold fast to truth until deliverance is fully revealed. Amen.