“Yahweh our God said to us at Horeb, ‘You have stayed long enough at this mountain. Break camp and advance…go!’” Deuteronomy 1:6-7a
Have you ever noticed that we, as human beings, are prone to ruts? We are prone to finding a place that feels comfortable and staying there. We like the familiar, the easy, the known. This isn’t bad, mind you. God has designed us to find rest in the rhythms of life. That is part and parcel with the concept of working six days and finding rest on the seventh, the sabbath. The problem is, we never want to leave the sabbath, leave the rest, leave the comfort. We forget that there is also work to be done. Rest too easily devolves into lethargy, into inertia. It reminds me of the imagery in the movie Wall-e of the human race morphing into morbidly obese people who have lost the ability to even walk because of dis-use and are dependent upon robots and machines to get them around. This was Israel just after their release from Egypt, before their 40 years of wandering in the wilderness. They’d set up camp at Mount Horeb and called it home. Sure, it wasn’t the Promised Land, but it was passable. Then comes the word from Yahweh, “You’ve stayed long enough at this mountain. Get up! Advance! Go!” God reminds them that His dream for them is about more than just where they fled from, Egypt, but where He’s taking them to, the Promised Land. He reminds them that they are part of a bigger story. But if they would experience the blessings of His bigger story, they need to move. “See, I have given you this land. Go in and take possession of the land that the Lord swore he would give to your fathers—to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob—and to their descendants after them” Deuteronomy 1:8. Of course, we already know this story that Moses is rehearsing, God’s call to advance, Israel’s refusal to do so out of fear, the rebellion that led to these 40 years of wilderness wandering. Further in chapter 1, God takes them back and reminds them how they got into this mess…by listening to the majority report…ten of the twelve spies who said, “Hey, the Promised Land is great but the people are too strong for us.” Rather than trust in the God who’d redeemed them from slavery in Egypt, they trusted in what they could do, giving into fear and comfort. We are Israel. We are a people too easily contented with what we can do. We set up camp somewhere, settle in, and stay. As a result, we set aside God’s greater work, God’s greater story, for puny stories…what we feel comfortable that we can do, what we can get. It’s a temptation to which we too easily succumb not only as individuals, but as a group. In February of 2016, God put this message on the hearts of our elders at our annual elder retreat. We sensed God saying, “Renton Bible, you’ve stayed long enough at this mountain, it’s time to get up and go, time to advance.” What came out of this was a sermon series titled, God-Sized Dreams. This series was a call for our body to embrace God’s bigger story, His dream for us. What impelled us was the simple concept that, “From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked” Luke 12:48. We’d been given so much, as a church—a strong, healthy, Bible-based ministry. It was time for us to advance. It was time for us to expand our expectations for ourselves, to seek God for a greater Kingdom impact in our community and around the world. One of the concrete results of this sense that God was calling us to advance for the sake of the Kingdom was the continuation of our building expansion…an expansion that had been stalled for nearly a decade. God called us to dream beyond ourselves, to dream something only He could accomplish. And here we are, three and a half years later, just weeks away from moving into this new sanctuary. This 1.5-million-dollar project seemed insurmountable. Imagine how we’d have felt if we’d known it would cost closer to 3 million by this time, if we’d done it the conventional way (i.e., hiring a contractor). Yet, we looked to the God of the impossible to provide. We stepped out in faith in Him. And through sacrificial giving, countless volunteer hours, and divine provisions beyond counting, we are almost ready to enter our new sanctuary. But at this time, more than ever, we need to remember that the end is not a sanctuary, nor is the end even the completion of the remodel in the coming months. The end, the goal, the dream, is the Kingdom. It is seeing Christ’s kingly rule expand in and through our church, in Renton and, through our missionaries, around the world. It is playing our part in the epic Story of God bringing the hope and light of Christ into an ever-darkening world as we look to that day when He will return and His light will illuminate a new and redeemed world! Let us not lose heart, but let us continue to move ahead even in the face of “giants in the land.” Let us give and serve sacrificially, working together to complete this new church! But let us keep our focus on the goal: His redemptive purposes. And let us seek out every opportunity, every day, to proclaim to all who will listen the name of Jesus—the Savior of the World!
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Dan GannonDan has ministered at Renton Bible Church, with his wife Debbie, since 2003. Archives
June 2022
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