Where Are You Pitching Your Tent

Some of you have been pitching your tents toward work, trying to find significance there through a title or a salary or hourly wage. Sure it satisfies for a while, but it is never lasting, and before you know it you’ve moved right into town, spending more and more time there, selling out on your family, neglecting your duties at home, making your wife pull your load too, always giving excuses to your kids and your church and your God, and you never saw how that decision has led you so far away from where you began.

Now your wife seems so cold and distant, your kids don’t respond to you like they used to, other women begin to appeal to you, or any number of things can occur, so let me just say this – you’d better think through what you’re doing and look farther down the road than where you’re looking, because it’s not going to take you where you thought it would.

I get to watch a lot of "tent pitching." Somebody puts their kid in some kind of program that makes them miss mid-week or Sunday services, never thinking about where it might lead. Somebody moves in with a man, never thinking about the values that she is passing along. Somebody likes to enjoy a drink or two after work, "After all," he says, "There’s nothing wrong with drinking a beer or two in the privacy of my own home." But he never thinks down the road about where he has pitched his tent. Somebody takes a sporadic, hit and miss attitude toward church attendance, toward family devotions, toward corporate worship, and where will that lead? It’ll lead to raising children who do what they want when they want and when they are adults they’ll not take the Lord or church seriously.

This could go on and on. Where are you pitching your tent in your search for fun? In your search for contentment? I am today the sum of the decisions I made yesterday, both good and bad. My family today is the result of decisions we made yesterday and what my family will be tomorrow will be the direct result of where we pitch our tent today. This church is the sum of what it chose to do in years past, it has been molded by years of decisions and attitudes, and you and your families are too.

Listen, if you are a child of God, then you have a wonderful future ahead of you. I’m not just talking about heaven, I’m talking about the rest of your life. God has a future prepared for you that is greater than you’ll ever know so long as you’re content with making camp according to what you can see and figure out. Do you want what God has prepared for you? Do you want to enjoy the blessings of the abundant life God has in store for you? If so, then you need to learn to pitch your tents in the right place and settle down with the Lord. Now there are many choices you and I have to make that are obvious, but I know as well as you do that some choices and decisions are not so clear.

Even Lot’s decision to settle in the Jordan valley appears from the outside to have been a sound decision, so how can you know if you are making the right decisions? How can you know if you are pitching your tent in the right direction? I think there are three questions that you need to ask yourself.