“The LORD, our God, said to us at Horeb, “You have stayed long enough at this mountain.” Deuteronomy 1:6.
Life is a journey! So is our spiritual life.
We have to be on the move constantly. We either obey God and keep perfecting that obedience or obey our fleshly nature and become stagnant while standing the risk of falling deeper into the works of unrighteousness.
The scripture never gave room to stagnancy; it talks about obeying the truth or unrighteousness.
In this journey, we need a daily and progressive yielding to Jesus. It’s about consistent decisions. We either decide for God daily, or we decide for something less than the perfect will of God.
We are called in this journey to keep pressing away from all things fleshly to spiritual.
We either keep moving to trust the atoning work of Jesus or camp along the wayside, trusting in our works of the flesh and refusing to move ahead to God’s desired destination for our soul.
Camping on the wayside is the easiest thing to do because it is the place where our logic, our fears, and our comfort prevails over our desire to keep pressing for the authentic nature of Jesus.
Abraham, the father of faith, once camped at this same point, succumbing to Sarah’s impatience, temporarily taking his eyes off the promise of God in Isaac. At this point in his spiritual journey, he allowed his logic to help work out the equation of God’s promise, birthing Ishmael instead of the spiritual promise God gave him in Isaac.
Many of us can see in Abraham our futile effort to keep working out the things of God through logic and not by the simple act of faith in God through Jesus Christ. We see in Abraham, at this point in his spiritual life, the craving for the comfort zone of our camps.
Considering the more profound journey ahead is too risky or too good to be true, we settle for less.
Because we are coming from a place of sin and self-will to a place of faith, logic and the works of the flesh often sway us as we settle for a camping site instead of moving on to God’s desired haven for us.
It will therefore take our deliberate trust in Jesus to lead us on, or we will keep navigating our journey through the compass of the flesh, which the Bible calls the old nature of sin.
While the new nature wants to please Jesus and be led by Him at whatever cost, the old nature only seeks the things that belong to the flesh, which opposes all spiritual things.
Avoid camping for too long in our comfort zone, which the flesh loves. It will serve us well to keep reminding ourselves about the fundamentals.
This fundamental entails a constant understanding that it only takes an abiding faith in God through Jesus Christ to secure God’s promise for our souls and well-being. These promises have been freely given to us in Jesus through the Holy Spirit in us.
Now abiding faith will require patience and perseverance, and since the journey requires these two factors, we, therefore, need to be strong in faith by exercising the promises of God daily through his word and prayer.
Without the constant appeal to the word of God in scripture, accompanied by prayer, men will take up permanent residence in a camping site on their life’s journey, believing they have arrived at a divine destination.
Ours is to believe, and God’s part is to perform his promises to us, but we must stretch our faith daily through his words to receive strength to relocate from our fleshly camping site to the desired path of life, of the spirit, which is peace.
Reading
Genesis 17: 9-21
