The Israelites dreamed of the Promise Land. They heard the word of the Lord tell them that the Promise Land was their destiny. Yet they stayed in the wilderness for 40 years. Amazingly, what would have been an 11 day journey took a lifetime for some of those who left the slavery of Egypt and followed Moses into the desert.
I was thinking about this story the other day and something dawned on me. How is that any different from what many of us do today? God delivers us from the bondage of sin and lays before us our destiny and purpose. We are excited initially and we shout for joy at our release. Then, the wilderness. The frustration of something new happening in our lives takes over. We can’t see far enough ahead and so we fall back on what we know. We begin to think that, while our past kept us bound, it was a bondage we knew. The unknown wilderness is a scary place to be sometimes because we have to trust God to lead us.
The fact of the matter is, we will have to travel through the wilderness (hard times, trials, and tribulations) in order to get to our destiny. However, the amount of time we stay there is determined by our countenance in the midst of it. If we complain about what we don’t have and moan about these unfamiliar circumstances we find ourselves in; if we act like the Israelites did in the wilderness, then we may spend most of our lifetime trying to reach our promise…but never getting there. Why? It’s not because God doesn’t want us to have our promise (job, man, woman, career, ministry). He does. He wants us to have it fully…but the trials are designed to prepare us for the work that is required to maintain what he has entrusted us with and to remind us of who gave it to us. Unfortunately, we cry and complain ourselves right out of our promise; and after a time we could force ourselves to forgo that destiny, passing it down to the next generation.
The journey to your promise is shorter than you think but remember… as you make moves toward your destiny, there is a relationship between the time it takes for you to get there and your attitude along the way.
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