We’re wrapping up our last leg of the journey that we began in September of 2016, and to be honest the difficulty for me is in finding somewhere to land.
Pressure is high, and I still don’t have a feeling of having finished or arrived where I need to be or want to be in my life.
Growth has happened, but I want more.
Accomplishment can set in with how many steps we have accumulated on our journey, but discouragement immediately overtakes that sense when we find out that the road has not taken us where we wanted. Instead of taking a straight shot towards where we wanted to go, God led us zig-zagging and circling about the whole way, and now we are no closer to the where we wanted to go than when we began.
Israel had a similar experience walking in the wilderness:
“And you shall remember the whole way that the Lord your God has led you these forty years in the wilderness, that he might humble you, testing you to know what was in your heart, whether you would keep his commandments or not.” Deuteronomy 8:2
God didn’t let Israel enter the promised land until they were humbled and conformed to His image. The trip to the promised land wasn’t 40 years, but a couple of weeks. Still, God wanted the people’s love and affection, so that their hearts wouldn’t be far from Him when He gave them what they wanted. In order to see their hearts, He gave them small responsibilities, and was able to gauge where their hearts were. Because the people were not with God in their hearts, that generation never entered the promises of God, even though they were no longer slaves.
For me, this truth terrifies me.
In one of our most famous Hymns we sing the words, “Prone to wander, Lord I feel it, Prone to leave the God I love” It’s a universal Christian struggle that leaves me frustrated, and empty. My walk with God has matured over the years, from being a leader in a youth group, to a leader in a campus ministry, to traveling the world for a year as a missionary, and now I’m here in Gainesville, GA in a discipleship school—I understand what it is to wrestle with God and grab hold of Him until He blesses me, however, many times, I want the blessing more than God.
It’s demoralizing to see that the 8 miles you just trekked at your full speed was in a circle, because you were deceived by your own heart. I wasn’t running towards God at all, I wasn’t putting my faith in the unseen, and I wasn’t getting a treasure where moth and rust don’t corrupt, instead, I gunned for the perishable, missed, and still remained insatiably thirsty. Christ’s message to us is that He is the bread of life, and that if anyone hungers we should come to Him that we should not be hungry anymore. The crowds followed Him, because He multiplied food. When He asked that they get their sustenance from the God-Man Himself, they said, “this is a hard teaching”
Yet, Jesus claims that His yoke is easy and His burden is light.
The hard part is the dying though. Jesus says that if any man come after me, he must take up his cross and follow him. Not easy words either. It would be easy if God said that if I, “Delight in myself He would give me the desires of my heart” However, He said:
“Delight yourself in the Lord,
and he will give you the desires of your heart.” Psalm 34:7
This is the shift:
To “delight in the Lord” requires my desires to be for the Lord, so for “delighting in the Lord” God gives me the Lord. Which outwardly sounds like a semantic trick, but truly that means that He wants to bless us…with money, with a wife, with children, with a house, with a promised land. God is Spirit, but He knows the worldly desires are of value to us. He’s not afraid to give them to us if we can be trusted with them.
Unravelling the human heart is a long and difficult road, but necessary, so that God can really do with it what He wants. It’s painful, and the process generally isn’t quick. However, there is reward greater than gold—worth selling all you have to buy it.
