Day 2642 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Exodus 14:12 NIV

In yesterday's post we discussed the fact that sin has enslaved the hearts and minds of every single person who has taken a breath of this temporal air. Sin has been a part of every person's story since Adam and Eve chose to go against God's instruction. And as our world has progressed and grown and found more ways to do wrong, sin has only grown more prominent and widespread. But, thanks to the gift of Christ there is freedom. There is hope. There is change. But humans can always find a way to complain about even most amazing of gifts.

As I mentioned yesterday, I've been reading in Exodus for a few nights, and this one jumped out at me night before last. The Israelites had been in bondage in Egypt. They had been forced to hard labor and kept beaten down by those in power in a foreign country. And they cried out to God. They obviously wanted something better than being slaves. They wanted their freedom. God heard their prayers. He listened to their cries. And He acted.

He sent Moses and his brother Aaron to obtain the people's freedom from their enslavement in Egypt. And after all those plagues, Pharaoh finally gave up and sent the Israelites away. They finally got to take those first steps of freedom. They finally had those prayers answered when they got to leave the place of their slavery. They got to start moving toward a better life in another place. But even then, sin and selfishness managed to stay with them. They cried out for this amazing gift of freedom, and yet when they finally got it, it didn't necessarily look like they wanted it to look.

How many times have we lived out that story? We pray for something. We cry out to God to deliver us from some trial or struggle. We find ourselves in these places of desperation just begging for something better, begging for freedom. And then God acts. He steps in and offers to lead us to that freedom or that deliverance. He hears our prayers and answers when we cry out to Him. But that doesn't always mean that His answers and His deliverance look like we expect them to look.

As God led the people away from Egypt, they entered the desert. A land of nothing. Empty. Desolate. Seemingly hopeless. No water. No food. No relief. And before long the people found themselves missing what they'd left behind. They missed their old lives of being slaves in Egypt! They were angry that they were set free from their enslavement only to have it replaced with this desolate wasteland that seemed completely void of hope. Their answered prayer led them away from everything they’d ever known into a world that seemed to have nothing but death and despair.

Again, tell me you haven't been there. We ask God to take something away from our lives, or to help us find a better path to a better place, and He does it. We reach this point where all of the sudden we realize that He actually did it. He cleared things out of our hearts. He removed things from our lives. He changed our surroundings and did exactly what we had been praying for. And yet, His path seems more barren and strange and difficult than we ever would have imagined. And we may even find ourselves longing for the comfort and the appeal of what we've left behind because at least it was something and something seems better than what we asked for when suddenly what we asked for seems empty and hopeless.

We want freedom from the things that have held us captive, but we don't want the change that it often requires. We want to stop feeling so badly about our sins, but we don't necessarily want to stop committing them. We want a change of scenery, but we still crave the comfortable complacency that we've always known. Friends, freedom brings change with it. If we're so desperate to break away from our sins and the shame that they bring, we need to understand that we're going to have to lose things and leave things behind. It just doesn't work any other way.

So when God steps in and brings the salvation and deliverance that we've been praying for, it should come as no surprise when our lives suddenly look and feel very different. And as He leads us further away from the miserable lives we've been so desperate to leave behind, we're going to be led into a place that seems scary. Scary because it’s different. Scary because it seems to be lacking many of the things we've grown accustomed to having around us. God's path will lead us into the desert where we have absolutely nothing to do but hope in His promises. And that's not easy.

You see, we think that freedom and salvation and changing our sinful ways is just some quick and painless process. But we've spent years being slaves to sin and we've grown used to the lives we've always known under sin's constant control. God will help us. He will save us. He will set us free and lead us to the Promised Land. But we're going to have to go through some dry spots and rough patches and scary times along the way. It's always easy to think that the grass is greener on the other side of the fence. But in our faith, that fence may be a million miles away and impossible to see. All we can do is ask God to lead us there and trust Him when it seems like we're lost.

My point is that we have to stop complaining when God's salvation and help and guidance look differently than we want them to look. We have to stop looking behind us at the lives we're leaving behind and remembering how great some of those old ways were. When we ask God to lead us to something better, we can trust that it will be better. But it may take some time. It may mean losing nearly every aspect of life as we’ve known it and going through the long and arduous task of learning a completely new way of living. But looking back and worrying about what we lose or leave behind along the way only makes it that much harder. It only creates these stumbling blocks that lead to us doubting in God's plans, and that’s never going to help us in any way whatsoever!

It will feel strange when we suddenly find our lives have been emptied of all that we’ve known and the comfort that comes in the mundanity of it all. It may seem desolate and hopeless. It might feel like God is leading us away from everything only to drag us out into the desert and leave us for dead, completely miserable the whole way. But we need to realize that we've had a lot of evil in our lives, and that has to be left behind if we're truly going to enter the freedom that God promises us. It may take some time. It will feel awkward and scary and uncertain. But God will get us where He has promised to take us. Allowing anger or doubt or regret or anything else to come along for the ride will only make it more miserable along the way, and may very well lead us to giving up and running back to the comforts of the slavery that we've left behind.

Don’t let the growing pains of faith and the necessity of leaving things behind cause you to doubt in what God’s doing. His path may be hard, but it’s better to trust in Him promise than to simply run back to the life that you asked Him to help you leave behind.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold