Hebrews 6:12

Hebrews 6:12

“…that you do not become sluggish, but imitate those who through faith and patience inherit the promises.”

I am extremely impatient when it comes to just about everything. I don’t want to wait until April to be in Costa Rica, I want to be there now. I don’t want to wait another 30 minutes until breakfast, I want to eat now. I don’t want to wait on the Lord for Him to strengthen my heart, I want to be strengthened now. I don’t want to wait until I die for Jesus’ work in me to be completed, I want it to be finished now. The list could go on forever, but you get the idea. Unfortunately for my very American, instant gratification mentality, the Lord puts us in seasons of waiting in order to teach us something we couldn’t learn if He was a vending machine of blessings. The season of waiting that He has called me to right now is not a season of relaxing before the next thing but one of actively pursuing Him in order to be ready for the next step. Moses had a similar season in Exodus 4. God had taken Moses out of His homeland, Egypt, and brought him to the land of Midian. As a parallel, God took me out of Bakersfield and brought me to Antigua. It was in Midian that Moses’ identity was changed from the inside out and he became a man who knew the Lord. For 40 years he lived as a shepherd serving his father-in-law and Exodus 2:21 tells us he “was content to live with the man.” It took 40 years for God to finish teaching Moses what he needed to know before the next step, and yet here I am struggling to patiently wait through the next 2 months. After 40 years God called Moses back to Egypt, not to go back to his old life but in order to proclaim that the great I AM is God alone. That is my job, my reasonable act of service, here in Ignite, once I am back in Bakersfield, and wherever God calls me after that. There is no greater purpose than to proclaim who the Savior is. Moses knew the promise. He knew that God had promised to bring His people “up out of the affliction of Egypt… to a land flowing with milk and honey (Exodus 3:17).” It was not Moses’ job to rush the fulfillment of the promise or convince everyone that it was true, his job was to be a willing servant of the Lord and speak truth to Pharaoh and the Israelites. It is not my job to rush God’s promises, either. They will be completed in His timing and not a second sooner. So I have a choice. I can sit here and waste a good portion of my time here not being content to sit and learn or I can be thankful for this time of preparation before the next step. We all know what the right answer is, but actually living it out is difficult.