When we caught in heavy traffic, we usually go to a shortcut. But sometimes shortcut is suddenly sabotage by constructions, a roadblock and then detour that leads multiple turns and end up back we started, forced to return to the traffic jam and go through it to get home.
Shortcuts are always shortsighted. It will only get off track. It will distract us from what God wants us to do in our life, eventually eating up our time, energy, resources, and creativity. God wants us to stop being “absorbed with the things right in front of us. Look up, and be alert to what is going on around Christ — that's where the action is. See things from his perspective” (Colossians 3:2 MSG).
It’s the same journey on our way to our promised land. Despite our best efforts to find alternate routes, there’s only one way to get there through.
Even the children of Israel could have shaved some serious time off their trip. Going through was essential for them, but their trek through the wilderness was actually only an eleven-day journey. It didn’t have to take forty years, but in essence they chose that for themselves by fighting the process grumbling, complaining, resisting the work God wanted to do in them.
We all have some version of the wilderness to go through. It’s a season that exposes how vulnerable we are, how defenseless we feel, how small we are in comparison to the wide expanse of this world. It’s how God prepares us to be well able to overcome the giants in our lives. It’s a place we cycle through over and over again in our lives but in different areas. It’s never a place we go looking for.
But God is changing our thinking. He is leading, transforming, delivering, and freeing us. We just have to decide that where He leads, we will follow.
God’s goal for us is freedom, true spiritual freedom a life no longer bound by the weights of shame’s false guilt and relentless regret, no longer haunted by shame’s fears and worries, no longer captive to shame’s old habits and self-protective responses that keep us repeating those same old shame filled patterns.
God’s goal for us is not merely to change our circumstances. it is to change us! That is the evidence of His unconditional love for you and me.
“saying, "If you will diligently listen to the voice of the Lord your God, and do that which is right in his eyes, and give ear to his commandments and keep all his statutes, I will put none of the diseases on you that I put on the Egyptians, for I am the Lord, your healer."”Exodus 15:26 ESV
“Behold, I am doing a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.”
Isaiah 43:19 ESV
“Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.”
Romans 12:2 ESV
