When It’s Time To Move Forward Series

When It’s Time to Move Forward

Series: Moving Forward: Choices that Free Us

Brad Bailey – January 28, 2018

Intro: This first month of this new year we have been hearing the call to keep moving forward.

The first week I noted that no year is just a new year because God always has something he wants to do in my life and through my life. What he desires… I’m know that I haven’t reached yet. I haven’t accomplished all that God has for me; And you haven’t either. The fact that we’re still alive means God has more for us. So I asked each of us to consider:

What does God want to be different about your life?

What does God, the Creator of the universe who loves you and has great plans for you, what does God want to be different in your life?

In this final week of considering the nature of going forward…I invite us to hear the words which God spoke to those He first called… the people who became the nation of Israel. It is a point during what is called the Exodus…in which the people of Israel has been enslaved in Egypt for 400 years…and God brought forth their freedom…liberation… and they were now free to continue towards the Promised Land…the destination that God had promised and prepared for the. Near the border of the Promised Land they camp… and begin to get a bit too settled.

At which point, the Scriptures record…

Deuteronomy 1:6-8 (NLT)

“The LORD our God said to us, ‘You have stayed at this mountain long enough. It is time to break camp and move on. … Look, I am giving all this land to you! Go in and occupy it...”

Many of us may sense a similar word to us…

You have stayed at this mountain long enough.

It is time to break camp and move on.

I believe these words can speak to something that each of us may face…. When we have stayed in the same place long enough. It’s a time when what we accepted as temporary is becoming permanent. We might describe it as feeling stuck…or stagnant.

You may feel you going through the motions… less alive inside.

You may wonder…why you don’t feel what you use to.

When you first met the reality of God you recall feeling wonder, expectancy, and moments of deep joy.

You felt life was an open road…but now you’ve moved into a cul-de-sac.

Your life that was once marked by some passion… seems to have “morphed into the safe confines of a predictable, domesticated belief system.”

It may come with a quiet loss of aspirations… passions…we just put on hold for a bit…but now they seem faint…lost… we feel the loss of focus…loss of any aspiration.

It may feel like a slump. Maybe we we had felt our life was really progressing… but then we had some bad times up at bat …we haven’t felt like playing any more…. so we just took a break….and now it’s been so long it’s become more like an unplanned retirement.

At some point most of us are going to face a time in which we need to face the truth that …

We’ve stopped moving forward.

We’ve been making peace with passivity.

We stopped focusing on where you are going… and have become more fixated on where you are and perhaps where you’ve been.

Fresh movement doesn’t come just from the start of a new year…it doesn’t come from discovering some new novel “it.” It comes when we allow ourselves to hear God calling us…

“It is time to break camp and move on. … Look, I am giving all this land to you! Go in and occupy it...”

Notice God how calls them to focus on what is ahead…still to come… not yet reached…says…”Look”…look where I have called you…where you are meant to go.

• If someone got into a car with you…and you start driving and you block out the windshield and just focus on the little rear view mirror… I see a horrible end. Yet that is how some of us are driving our lives.

• To be fair….the further in years in one’s earthly life-span…the more the past is a source of memories …influence…warmth… BUT…God is focused on where we are going.

• God always is always at work…always redeeming what was lost. If today was just another day…we wouldn’t not be here. If today exists with us in it…it’s because God is still fulfilling His purposes. [1]

What matters is what is ahead.

When we feel stuck… it’s hard to identify what has happened and how to get out of it. So let me offer what God has pointed to as what is needed to move forward. I want to help us identify with five steps that can help us…