Three simple lessons

As I've been reflecting on the year so far, there are three things that seem to have arisen from the teaching programme at church.

Lesson 1: How it feels is not how it is

I'm no sure where this came from, maybe it's just the simple truth in all that we've been through so far this year. I know it's only April, but we seemed to have lived a lifetime in four months. The tragic death of two teenagers can do that to you, but it's more profound than this. Jon Ortberg wrote a book called Everybody's normal 'til you get to know them. In he argued that what we experience now is usual but it isn't normal. Normal is defined by the Kingdom of God. 

Lesson 2: You can't rush God's promises

Abraham waited 25 years to have a son, and to become a nation, let alone the father of many nations, which was a far longer wait. Joseph spent 13 years in Egypt, Moses spent 40 years in training and then another 40 before he even saw the Promised Land. And even then he never set foot in the land until he joined Jesus on a mountain top. Daniel was in captivity for 70 years. The list goes on. You can't rush God's promises.

But even though you can't rush them, does that mean that all we do is sit back and wait for them to happen? There has to be a relationship between waiting for God to do what he promises and being active as we wait. The danger is that if we put activity first, we're in danger of doing the wrong thing. But doing nothing doesn't feel like the right thing either.

3. You can take the slave out of Egypt but it's much more difficult to take Egypt out of the slave.

The problem that Israel faced when they left Egypt was that although the location changed, who they were had not yet changed. God didn't do an overnight transformation. They were still slaves, they acted like slaves, they moaned and complained like slaves. Slavery was what they had known their whole lives, being slaves is what they were and moving into the desert didn't change that.

God was less interested in how long it was going to take to make the journey from Egypt to Canaan than he was in who the people would become along the way. The journey was not just a means to an end, it was an integral part of becoming the people of God.