A Drama Free Promised Land!

Greetings All,

It is relatively early Monday morning, or at least early for the kids.  I've been up a while, treadmilling, drinking coffee and reading The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and loving it, frankly I had trouble setting it down to jump into some quiet time with the Lord, but when you have five children you learn to take advantage of the silence.  The men's group has started a new devotional for 2011, This Day with the Master by Dr. Dennis Kinlaw, and I started my quiet time with this reading.  He was commenting on the Joshua passage about "whom will you serve," but as I read I couldn't help but think about the Exodus as a whole from enslavement to Promised Land entry.  The more I thought about it the more I recognized a metaphorical example of our journey of salvation.

The Israelites were enslaved in Egypt, in the same way that we are enslaved in the pits of our lives.  Enslaved to sin, but more importantly enslaved to masters other than the Lord.  They built monuments to empty gods, pyramid tombs, Sphinxes and obelisks all to honor something, someone other than their God, Yahweh.  We build monuments to empty, dead gods ourselves.  Theirs were the Pharaohs or the Egyptian pantheon of Gods, ours are our careers, our children's social lives, our bank accounts, the car we drive, the clothes we wear and the list goes on.  From their torment and ours we all cry out to God and He hears and responds.

For the Israelites He sent Moses, for us He sends a friend or a family member, or even a total stranger that exposes us to the love of God.  They come with a message of hope, not without its commitments, but a hope that there is more than this and that God actually does love us and is with us.  The Israelites trusted and followed and went from enslavement to a wilderness journey, not from enslavement to Sabbath rest.  From what could be construed as "out of the frying pan and into the fire."  One could argue that the wilderness was a tougher life than enslavement in Egypt and scripture will testify to that as we read many accounts where Israel begged Moses to just take them back.  They had to learn to trust God not just for the moment, not just in the crisis, but in the everyday events of life.  They needed to trust Him for their daily bread rather than cry out for rescue.  The wilderness is where they should have learned that trust. 

The same is true for us, while many have this idea that life is tough so I accept Jesus and life will be without trouble, but that is simply not the case.  Just as the Israelites entered the wilderness, we too have to spend our time learning to trust God for our daily bread.  We are enslaved by life then we trust God and are justified, forgiven of our sins and counted righteous before God, but the tough stuff in life that was fully present on Monday is still present on Tuesday even though we accepted Christ as our Savior.  The difference is that we are fully aware that the Lord God is with us now and that we are empowered, forgiven and hopeful that in Him things will get better.  Rather than simply cry out to Him from our crises we begin to spend time with Him daily, trusting Him to provide our simple needs and to be still our hearts from the frenzy of the world.  Wesley would have called our wilderness time, sanctification.  That time and grace where God moves us towards becoming perfect in love.

Ultimately a couple of Israelites trusted God, Joshua and Caleb to be exact, and Israel was allowed to move from the wilderness into the Promised Land.  Now this was never meant to be some paradise where no one worked and where they just sat around on their lazy butts all day waiting for an angel to bring them breakfast, lunch and dinner.  It was envisioned as a place where they could work, strife and drama free; a place where they could work without the toil that has come before; a place where they would be surrounded daily by the blessings of God where they could constantly give thanks.  Was it envisioned as Sabbath Rest?  Yes, but not in the way we might think, more along the lines of our will aligning with God and fully trusting in Him there by giving us that rest that comes from a life free of strife, fear and "drama" to use a more modern vernacular.

Isn't that where our life in Christ is headed as well?  A Promised Land that isn't so much fluffy clouds, wings and harps; but a life free of strife, fear and drama.  A life where we have learned to fully trust God in all aspects of our life, where our love has become so perfect that we have set aside greed, pride and lust that directly impacts our relationships and frees us to just be together.  In my experience I have gotten glimpses of this, not that my life in Christ has been drama free, as clearly for those that know me, it has not been; but the longer I walk in His love, the longer I focus on Him, the longer I seek a deeper and deeper relationship with Him, the more content and strife and drama free my life seems.  I think that could actually be a sort of heaven on earth, life without drama....yes that would be heaven on earth!

Continuing the journey towards perfect love,
Your brother in Christ,
Faron