What is your Red Sea? Where have you seen God move mightily in your narrative? How often do you recall His miraculous intervention in your life? Does this experience reframe your belief about what an Almighty God can accomplish? I encourage you today to recall the raging waters, name that moment, and revise the memory often. Let your Red Sea miracle remind You what God is capable of again today.
Category: Devotions
We affirm our identity as farmers and shepherds, as stewards and nurturers, not mercenaries or brawlers. We are here: saved and being sanctified for the Kingdom purpose of growing something good. And that good begins in us. We start in the four small chambers in our own chest and then we branch out from there. We are asked to approach this fallen firmament with an agrarian mindset: we are planters not combatants.
God was inviting His people to live at a high level of differentiation and experience a great benefit: His nearness. He wanted His people to be secure in their sense of belonging to a a holy God and dramatic in their outward witness. Differentiation has everything to do with identity and purpose: God had given them both.
Often times we grumble instead of asking God because we aren’t living close to Him to begin with. We think His arms are too short because we haven’t fallen into them.
By the time we’ve hit middle age, though, we have somehow become wildly opposed to change. We’ve created routines and we cling to them like life rafts. They are soothing and safe. Most of us won’t change jobs or move across the street (let alone across the country). We don’t even want to alter our coffee order if we can help it. Is this really God’s best intention for us?
These feel like clear instructions to the pastor: stay about the Father’s business and keep leading His flock toward to the mountain of God.
We look at Jochebed and remember that the faith required for mothering never lessons, it only enlarges as our kids take stronger and stronger flight from the proverbial nest. We trust God for our children over and over again until we all arrive safe at Home.
This is a core memory for me. I was not quite four and certainly not allowed to sit in the beautiful pink velvet armchair that had belonged to my great-grandmother. I was pretty certain it was reserved for princesses; I had never seen another soul sit in said chair. Yet my mother had directed me and my brother to perch in the throne of pink velvet and I obliged. Then my baby sister was settled between us like sapphire in open prongs.
When we begin to follow Jesus, we can adopt a higher level of thinking. What God desires can eclipse what we desire. We are able to move from ‘What do I want?’ to ‘What does God want?’. A simple exchange of nouns opens up an entire new world to us!