Long and Winding Road // It's Time to Take the Promised Land, Part 4

Dear Lord, give me patience NOW! When it comes to God and His promises, boy, it sometimes feels like He takes forever to deliver. When is God finally going to show up?

I don't know about you but patience is not something that comes naturally to me. I just want things to happen and I want them to happen now. It's kind of the same when it comes to my relationship with God, "Well God, if you're going to promise me this stuff I want it now."

I was devastated when I read that bit in the Bible, a thousand years is like a day to God. No! You don't understand, God you promise all sorts of stuff, I want it now! I'm praying about this person’s health or that relationship or this financial need or this feeling of fear or whatever it is. Okay, I've prayed about it, it's been five minutes, let's go God.

And over the last 12 years I have discovered He doesn't work that way. Often it's a long and winding road and not everything along the way always makes sense. Have you found that or is it just me?

Remember that old song, "The Long and Winding Road". Sometimes that’s how if feels when we're travelling in the Promised Land. Yesterday we looked briefly at how it was for Israel, I mean it was centuries between when God first promised this land to Abraham and when Israel, under it's new leader Joshua, finally crossed over into the Promised Land and poor Abraham, you know he believed in God’s promise but he still made plenty of mistakes along the way.

You can read about it in Genesis, chapter 12 and the next few chapters but the Promised Land was written by God on Abraham’s heart and ultimately he had this son Isaac and that’s the only part of the promise he ever saw.

Isaac had Jacob. Jacob had 12 sons, one of whom was Joseph and those 12 sons were the heads of the 12 tribes of Israel and Israel ultimately ended up as a large nation but in slavery in Egypt and of course God sends Moses to tell Pharaoh, "Let my people go".

And he does a whole bunch of miracles and ultimately they pass through the Red Sea and they spend 40 years in the desert on this exodus, on this journey and all of a sudden one day, this mighty nation of Israel is standing on the banks of the Jordan River ready to cross over into the Promised Land.

Now for Israel it was a long journey, it was a long wait, hundreds of years from when God first spoke to Abraham until when they stood on the banks of the Jordan ready to cross over.

How do you think the promise that God made to Abraham was known to the Israelites in slavery in Egypt? Well, like everything else it was handed down from generation to generation. It was part of the nations psyche, one day, one day God will lead us into the Promised Land, meanwhile we'll do the brutal slavery thing.

Does that sound familiar? I mean Egypt was this world power, pharaoh had unbelievable power, the power of life and death, they were the dominant world power a bit like the U.S. today I guess and Israel were slaves in this place and God sends them Moses, this 80 year old burnt out wreck that God found out the back of the desert 'cause as a young man Moses murdered an Egyptian and fled to Midian in the back of the desert and uses Moses to talk to Pharaoh and then God sends these 10 plagues, you know, locusts and the frogs and the boils and turning the Nile into blood and ultimately, in killing the first born of all the Egyptians.

And so Pharaoh goes, "I've had enough, yes let the people go". And then he changes his mind and pursues them. There was this miracle at the Red Sea where Moses went down and God parted the waters of the Red Sea and the whole Israelite nation passed through the Red Sea, they got to the other side and then as pharaohs army came chasing them they went into the Red Sea and the water came back and the whole mighty Egyptian army was drowned! What a journey!

Can I ask, why didn't God just give them the Promised Land? I mean there th