09 Feb When Christ-Following Gets Hard

I won’t sugarcoat it: the six weeks of mid-December through January were challenging for me as a pastor. There was church drama/trauma, lots of it, involving various people. I will also confess that I reached a point (very briefly), where I had thoughts of retiring. They were brief because I instantly knew that they were mine and not God’s. I fell into the all-too-common trap of forgetting what God had done for me in the past nine years and focused instead on my immediate troubles. It reminds me of the Israelites after God freed them from slavery in Egypt.

In Exodus Chapter 15, Moses and his sister Miriam sing a folk song about God drowning the Egyptian Army in the Red Sea. At the end of that chapter, they are at the oasis of Elim. But things turn ugly quickly. Just 45 days into freedom the Israelites began grumbling about their conditions and began to long for the days of enslavement they left behind:

The whole Israelite community set out from Elim and came to the Desert of Sin, which is between Elim and Sinai, on the fifteenth day of the second month after they had come out of Egypt. 2 In the desert the whole community grumbled against Moses and Aaron. 3 The Israelites said to them, “If only we had died by the Lord’s hand in Egypt! There we sat around pots of meat and ate all the food we wanted, but you have brought us out into this desert to starve this entire assembly to death.” Exodus 16:1-3 (NIV)

There are two important lessons here. First, the Israelites saw astounding miracles; the 10 plagues, the parting of the Red Sea, yet less than two months later, they have stopped trusting God. Second, as Pastor Brian Trent recently put it, when God frees us from slavery, it’s not through a revolving door. The exit closes behind us and there is no going back.

As soon as the going got tough, they engaged in revisionist history about where they had been. I too can fool myself into believing that life was easier before Jesus rescued me from sin, before He called me to ministry. The truth is anytime we engage in self-pity we are ceasing to be grateful for what God has done. Exodus 16:2 says the whole community grumbled against Moses and Aaron, but they were just the messengers. The Israelites were grumbling against God. When I fall into that trap, this is my go-to verse:

Lord, you are my God; I will exalt you and praise your name, for in perfect faithfulness you have done wonderful things, things planned long ago. Isaiah 25:1 (NIV)

When we forget what God has done for us, we can be tempted to go back to a prison whose door He has locked on us. Christ-following gets tough sometimes. Ministry gets tough sometimes. Jesus told us it would be that way. Whatever you’re going through today, I pray that you remember God’s faithfulness and know that He wants you to keep eyes forward to the future he has planned for you and eyes laser locked on Him!

Pastor Jerry Bader