Day 2925 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Deuteronomy 8:2 NIV

It only took one day to get the Israelites out of Egypt. But it took forty years to get Egypt out of the Israelites.

I heard that the other day and it's just one of those statements that hits impossibly close to home. It's a reality that each of us can fully understand, because it's one that each of us either have or are currently living out within our own walk. Each of us have fought against God's efforts to lead us toward something better than whatever He asks us to leave behind. Each of us have doubted and debated and tried our best to deny that His plans are better than ours.

Each of us have been those stubborn Israelites desperately craving the known comfort of the enslavement that we've always known rather than the trials and testings found along the desert road to what is in our minds only a distant hope that we can't help but question as to whether or not it may be worth the hardships found in finding it.

I was thinking about all of this as I lay in bed this morning waiting for my eyes to accept the fact that it was once again light outside. Yesterday we talked about the faith of Moses and how he chose the cold path of trial over the warm welcome into Egypt's riches. He chose to fight for a freedom that even his own people didn't really even care to have. He chose to follow God into the desert, leading a stubborn and rebellious people for forty years toward something that they just kept saying wasn't worth what they'd left behind.

How many times have we raged against God for asking us to leave behind what to us was good enough? How many times have we doubted in His ability to replace our 'good enough' with something altogether better? How many times have we looked back over our shoulder at the comforts afforded by our life of enslavement and found ourselves wishing only to return to what was decent?

Why do we still find ourselves so incredibly willing to settle for that which is only decent?

I think it’s because we allow ourselves, and more specifically our faith to become lost in the flood of doubt and complacency that we tend to lean into in order to allow ourselves to remain convinced that what we have is good enough all so that we don't have to either change it or lose it. And no matter how many people we may have around us telling us that there is something better, our aversion to change or pruning or being rebuked causes us to keep arguing against that hope.

Instead, we keep looking back to the Egypts in our lives. We keep running back into the cages that we've come to see as home. We keep embracing the stubbornness of our hearts rather than allowing them to trust that God not only can do something better in us and for us and with us, but that He in fact will if only we would humble ourselves to admitting what we have right now is not as great as we've made it out to be.

He will lead us to His promises, but we have to let go of the comforts of what we've known. And the only way to do that is found in the seemingly impossible concept of allowing ourselves to admit that those promises are better than what we've already known.

Personally speaking, I know I’ve been one to look back at what I’ve felt the call to leave behind and wonder if it’s worth the nothingness that has at times seemed to replace it. I've wrestled with God and the letting go of things that I've allowed to take up residence within my mind for 20+ years. I’ve felt the whispers of regret start speaking louder as I get further from the way of life I was more than comfortable living. I’ve even ran back to the chains I’d many times cried out to be free from carrying.

It's truly amazing this struggle that we bring upon ourselves out of our refusal to accept that we've been wrong. It's amazing that we'll seemingly find a way to live in death rather than accepting the gift that is the chance to die in order to live. It’s amazing that we can manage to doubt in the freedoms that we’ve begged God to work in our lives, just because we didn’t quite realize the comfort we’d found in being held captive.

And I wager that's something all of us could agree upon if we allowed ourselves a moment of honesty. All of us have just wanted to stay put. All of us have found ourselves willing to trade what may be a beautiful promise for what's an okay assurance. All of us have embraced enslavement to all manner of worldly vices and victories. And in our minute and miniscule modicums of success and comfort found within the illusions of those hollow victories, we find more than enough reason to thank God for the opportunity, but to still turn away from it back toward what we don't have to fight to find.

Will it take us forty years to get the Egypt out of us? Will we allow ourselves the monotony of arguing with God all along the road toward a promise we don't deserve? Will we allow the memories of the fleeting comforts we've known keep us chained to the world in which we experienced them? Will we allow those past memories to be all the joy that we find in life?

Sadly, that's exactly what we do every single time that we turn our backs on God and run back into our cozy little cages. We do it every time that we allow doubt a foothold in our hearts that makes us question why we're doing this faith thing. We do it every time we choose to remember what we've had rather than imagining what He has for us up ahead.

We allow the past such worth in our minds, and that is one of our biggest issues when it comes to this life of faith we're called to live. Even though it wasn't perfect, it was easy. Even though it wasn't ideal, it was comfortable. Even though we didn't have much, we had something. And this desert road strips it all away and asks us to hold onto the faith that tells us that God is doing something good that we may not see the fulfillment of for a while still.

God leads us away from all we've had not because He doesn't want us to have anything, but because He doesn’t want anything to have us. He needs us to be able to see that what we've had isn't all we made it out to be so that we can finally agree to let it go. It’s like we see our chains holding hostage as incredibly inconvenient, but we live as if they’re made of gold and therefore somewhat valuable and in turn hard to walk away from even though we want away from them.

We are truly complex and often irrational people, guess not much has actually changed in all these millennia after the Israelites hightailed out of Egypt. We still do things, say things, believe things in sadly much the manner.

Which is exactly why He leads us away from everything into a barren wilderness where we’re forced to learn to lean on Him, because it’s only when we’re no longer distracted by the comforts of a status quo than we can finally see the value in His promises. After all, it’s hard for a shortsighted people to see the worth in a distant promise when surrounded by what seem passing and acceptable replacements that while maybe not as great, they are much easier and arrive much faster.

If only we actually had the faith we claim to have. If only we could actually trust in His faithfulness to the promises that He’s proven well capable of fulfilling. We just might be able to see that He tests us and prunes us and rebukes us not to punish us, but to help us see that we have more inside than we've ever allowed ourselves to see before. That He leads us out of the world and into the desert not to make us miserable, but only to help us see the misery in lowering ourselves to accepting the passing comforts of a world that's passing away.

So often we think that God's just being mean in all of this asking us to leave things behind and make these difficult changes and endure all these trying tribulations. But we don't realize just how much of this world has been allowed to become our paradise. We don't realize that we've made this earth our promised land. And we can't admit that we've made gods of all these hollow hopes and comfortable commonalities that we've settled for so far.

And being the stubborn and rebellious people we still are, it just takes time to get all of the foolishness out of us so that we can see we were made to be so much more than foolish and stubborn and rebellious.

If we could only bring ourselves to admit just how much of this world is in our hearts then we may be able to finally see exactly why God leads us away from all of it. It's not that He doesn't want us to enjoy His creation or these lives we're living or this time that we've been given to live them. It's just that He doesn't want all of this temporary stuff to become the only goal, the only hope, the only promise we hope to find.

He wants us to reach His promises, and He's simply not as willing to stop short or settle for good enough just as we usually are.

I think we've fallen for this foolish assumption that salvation takes a long time only because He is slow in keeping His promises. We think that it's a promise to be found later on. But in truth, God can lead us out of our current predicaments immediately. But it takes so long because we just keep holding onto those chains afraid that if we let go of them we'll find nothing else to hold onto.

Friends, this process only takes as long as we allow it to take. Humbling ourselves can be done in a moment, or it can take a millennium. Allowing God to be God in our lives can either be a choice made in a single day, or it can be something we fight against for forty years. It is completely up to us.

God has shown that He will lead us through the desert and do this the hard way if that's how we want it. He will send the floods if it helps us learn to build boats. He will call us out of the boat if that's what it takes for us to learn to keep our eyes on Him. And He will toss us to the lions if that's where we finally learn that He's even stronger than they. However hard we want to make this is exactly how hard it will be.

So do we want this to take forty years of fighting and arguing only to end up causing ourselves to fall short in the end? Or are we willing to embrace the process that rips away all of the Egypt that's been allowed to be seen as our home so that we can finally see that our Promised Land is not in this land but in the One who formed it?

While what we've had has been seen as good enough, we have to ask ourselves if that's truly all we want out of life. All the glitter and gold and trophies and treasures and comforts and complacent courses we've already followed are what they are, and that's all they'll ever be. Is it all we ever want? Because it is not all that we've been offered. We have been offered eternal life. If we choose to try and find reasons to make this temporary version just as good so that we don't have to trust in the road that leads us home, then that's on us.

Just know that it doesn't have to be anywhere near as hard as we apparently like to make it. The desert only has to last as long as we choose to take to let go of all the life we've already known in exchange for the new life we've been offered in Christ.

It doesn't have to forty years to find His promises. They're right where they've always been. We just have to stop looking everywhere else for everything else that seems easier to find. Because while something else may be easier, just because something is easier or more comfortable or a little quicker doesn't mean it's what's best. In fact, that which is easy is often only easy because it doesn't ask us to fight for what's obviously far superior.

So that’s why this road is often hard and usually long. Not because He chooses to make it so, but because we do. Simply put, it takes us awhile to realize all the things that we need to let go of because they’re the ones we’re used to holding onto. And until we stop finding reasons to hold them so tightly, we can’t possibly take hold of the promises He has offered us, let alone actually expect to find them.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold