Your Spiritual Journey and Mine

I  believe one way or another, our spiritual journeys look very similar to that of the Israelites as recorded in Exodus.

• In Egypt the Israelites were held captive and, although they were God's children, they lived as slaves for 430 years.   We are all created as God's children, but are born slaves to our sinful nature.
• God heard the cry of the Israelites. He sent Moses to rescue them and deliver them from slavery, taking them through the Red Sea and crushing their oppressors and enemies behind them. We cry out to God and by faith in Jesus Christ, we are rescued and delivered from slavery to sin.  We are brought through the water in baptism and God destroys our enemy's authority to rule over us ever again.
• The Israelites were led through the desert by their God and provider to the Promised Land, a place of rest and abundance.  We are invited to experience the abundant life and rest found in and made available to us through Jesus Christ's life.
• The Israelites saw the inhabitants of the promised land as giants and the challenges of occupation insurmountable.  They saw their situation through the eyes of slaves rather than through the eyes of sons and daughters of the God who saved them.  They longed for the life they had in Egypt even though they had been slaves. Although our reality is that we are saved and are co-heirs with Christ, we still do not fully walk into the Promised Land of life and abundance "in Christ."  We still are left with a slave mentality and are often drawn back to the temporal, counterfeit substitutes for true life.
• God took the Israelites back into the wilderness for 40 years where they had no choice but to trust Him as provider. The old, slave mentality was collectively destroyed as He took them through a process of renewing their minds.  The next time the Israelites were invited to occupy the Promised Land, they did exactly what their Father told them  to do, even when it made no sense to them.  We must be taken through a process where our old slave mentality is put away, where we are weaned off of trusting anything but our Father to provide for us, and where we grow in learning how, like Jesus, to rest in doing only what we see our Father doing.

How I hunger for the promised rest of the Promised Land.  I know it's available to me now, because I've gotten a taste of it.  Oh, to eat at that table every meal of every day....