Walking the Path - Part 1
Over the next few days, I will write a 3-part series with focus on walking the path with God. it is God's desire to walk with us, it is so important to him that he sent Jesus to earth for this reason, to restore man’s relationship with God. To visualize this, I imagine God coming to take walks with Adam and Eve in garden paths before the fall in Eden. Many religious discussions (in my view) tend to focus on one part of why Jesus came which is eliminating sin, the veil that shields us from God. However, believers must transcend struggles with sin and start to walk with God – this is the point of salvation.
Our walking the path with God will be discussed through 3 topics:
Waiting on God
Hearing from God
Obeying till the end
Over the next couple of days, we will be discussing each of these concepts in a three part series.
Waiting on God
Isaiah 40:30 - 31
Even the youths shall faint and be weary, and the young men shall utterly fall: But they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint
As a younger man job-seeking, I would send job applications to about 10 companies every week working down a lengthy list I obtained from my college employment center. I got almost as many rejections as I applied for, but the ones that really hurt were those ones where I never got a response. Even today, I still wonder what happened to applications I sent to companies 8 years ago.
We have all gone through the painful experience of having to wait for something or someone to respond to our requests. Very often, that someone is God, but when it comes to waiting on God, there is a difference. We See through Jesus’ promise in Matthew 6:28 -34 and Daniel’s experience in Daniel 10:12, God knows our needs, and even before we pray, he has heard ours hearts. Therefore, our prayers are not like letters lost in transit. God does not just hear them, He knows them—He knows our needs. Unlike my failed applications, we have confidence that whenever we make requests to God a response will come, even if sometimes we must wait.
In the first place, while we often expect instant answers (like kids waiting on a magician to pull off the next trick), God usually takes us through a process (to transform and build us). Exodus, could God have airlifted a million Israelites from Egypt to Jericho (Canaan) rather than take them through a 40-year journey (losing an entire generation in the process)—maybe. But that journey was necessary, especially to transform the Israelites from murmurers with a mindset of slaves into warriors with absolute faith in God. This is what set Joshua and Caleb apart, unlike others their reality was simply based on the words of God. In Numbers 14:24, God reveals that the reason Caleb is allowed into the promised land is that he has a different “Spirit”. The contemporary bible puts this in perspective here: https://biblehub.com/cev/numbers/14.htm. The question for us “waiters” then is simple, are we undergoing the transformation that God expects (also see Romans 12:2).
In addition, sometimes God needs us to wait so we can renew our strength. You might need much more strength to handle that next phase you’ve been praying for than you imagined. God knows that and just needs you to take a rest before you set on the next phase of your journey. We all want to rush through life and have all answers and activities done today but remember Isaiah 40:30 -31...Waiting on God is not a bad thing. Get some rest, renew your mind, renew your strength —you’re going to need it for the next phase of your journey.
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