It's Time to Take the Promised Land // It's Time to Take the Promised Land, Part 4

Sometimes, we can be walking in the promises of God, and things start getting tough.  Opposition.  Battles.  What’s going on?  Is it time to give up? What happened to all those promises?

 

THE SPIRITUAL BATTLEFIELD

Well over these last weeks on the program we've been looking at the fact that it's time to take the Promised Land. God makes so many promises of peace and of joy and His protection and forgiveness and eternal life, the list goes on and on and you know you and I can come up with so many excuses in our lives as to why those promises couldn't possibly ever be for us. It's true, we do. In a sense those excuses are completely natural and understandable.

There was a young woman who wrote recently in response to a program, I want to share with you what she wrote because it's kind of a road we all travel sometimes, this is what she said:

For a while now I've been getting negative thoughts and saying negative things, I know the devil's doing it and not God but it won't stop. I want so much to do Gods will and to walk in His ways, am I going mad? Will this wreck my relationship with God? I so much want to do His will for His glory and not mine. I want to be a serving and faithful servant for Him.

I have all these problems; I say bad and negative things. I can say things without thinking, I tell lies and other unchristian things, what does it mean for me? Is it going to ruin my relationship with God?

See this young woman is struggling with the realities of life. She wants to live in that Promised Land but somehow she's just, she just can't see how it's for her, she just can't seem to get there. We all struggle with these things, we struggle with doubt, we struggle with our failings, will this wreck everything with God? We go over that over and over again. Listen to me, it is time to take the Promised land.

Over the last three weeks on the program we've been looking at Israel. God promised to Abraham, the father of Israel, this land of the Canaanites, the Promised Land. And centuries later, centuries, after Israel had grown into a large and mighty nation in slavery in Egypt God brought Moses and through a series of miracles he brought the nation of Israel, His chosen people, out of Egypt, through the Red Sea and they wandered in the desert for forty years as God purified them.

And then one day under the leadership of Joshua because Moses had just died, they're standing on the banks of the Jordan River and finally ready to cross into the Promised Land. And what they discover is that there's already a whole bunch of other people living there, the Canaanites and the Jebusites and the Amorites and all those other little vegemites were already there.

And even though this was Gods Promised Land it wasn't going to be delivered to them on a platter like a pizza, they had to go out and take it, they were on a war footing. They had to fight battle after battle beginning with Jericho, they went through a lot of battles to take the Promised Land.

You know something, it's the same with you and with me and with that young woman, we live on a spiritual battlefield. That is the reality of life. And the moment we step out and we believe in Jesus, the moment we step out and say, "Lord, I'm going to follow you in your promises", we step onto that spiritual battlefield.

John Eldridge in his book Waking The Dead makes this powerful statement, he says:

Things are not what they seem, this is a world at war.

And then he goes on to explain what he means, he writes this:

The world in which we live is a combat zone. A violent clash of kingdoms, a bitter struggle unto the death. You were born into a world at war and you will live all your days in the mid