The other side of the Jordan…

At the end of our last week’s walking (31st July) the team took a break for a week for various personal reasons. I went on a Christian teacher training course with Christian Schools’ Trust and while I was away, was re-reading yet another(!) Brueggeman book - The Land. It describes the land as gift, promise and challenge to our faith and explores how the Israelites handled the gift, the promise and the challenge it brought. I felt the Lord asked me to read chapter four which describes crossing the Jordan. I felt it relevant to the place in which we, as the Body of Christ, find ourselves in and thus, was motivated to link it to my own walk, both literal and prophetic.

I have definitely moved across a boundary and am learning to live in a new place. I am no longer in a wilderness where God has fed and watered me. I am at the early stages of being at a place where I must ‘work’ to make the promised land produce. It is indeed a land flowing with milk and honey, a pleasant place, but it takes hard work to maintain it and the temptation in the midst of such work is to run after other gods. It’s much easier to run after other gods when we are tired and contending for fruit than when we are pushing for the boundary. The idols of this world (rewards) are much easier to run after in that situation than in the wilderness because in the wilderness, they don’t exist!

If the land (by which I mean destiny, fullness, completion) is given as a gift from God, it is a product of his grace. It is important that as a person under gift, I don’t forget his grace. It is a new way of living, a new consciousness. My involvement with Jesus requires me to be both with the fullness and with Jesus. They need to come together – one cannot be without the other.

The gifted land the other side of the Jordan is indeed the place of fulfilment but we must find the Lord anew there and cling to him so we don’t break covenant. It is not a safe place, this place of fulfilment. Once the euphoria is over and we are satisfied, we must keep listening for God’s word as without it we could lose both memory and identity. We need to keep listening and stay in celebration of his grace.

The ‘land fullness’ that we receive is a temptation – our new identity in fullness has a ‘seductive power’ and can itself draw us away from dependency on Jesus and covenant with God and his grace. Our memories help us to remember and prevent us being seduced into believing that this is how it will always be with fulfilment. We need to remember that the fullness is a gift from God and given by his grace.

Secondly, with this gift of fullness comes responsibility. It is important to recognise this and accept its weight. We partner with Jesus and his yoke is easy and his burden light, but it is still a yoke. Our modern Christian mindset is so often to reach fulfilment for ourselves and find our calling – the books point us that way – but when we reach it, we must accept its burden. Mostly, we lose sight of what it means through excitement about arriving in the land, so we rush about doing everything at once or we don’t listen to the call of the Lord to make him our strength, because in our initial zeal, we think we can do it on our own.

The memory of who we were helps us to resist the tendency to think this is how it will always be. If we seek fullness for the land too, rather than just ourselves, we cannot be complacent – we must keep after the Lord – it is after all, his gift and he can remove it. There is a multiplicity of needs to be met, so we need to choose our calling carefully as we grow up into the fullness the Lord desires for each of us. It is a place of covenant and requires stepping up to a high calling. Can we stay in the ‘fullness’ of our destiny and keep listening to God? Brueggeman calls it a bold question as yet unresolved. Some have done it but we all need to recognise we do it only by God’s grace and in no other way. The temptations abound – temptation to believe in ourselves, temptation to stop listening, temptation to be un-dependent upon God. It is perhaps because of this that many debate the readiness of the Body to move into her destiny.

Meditating on Brueggeman’s words suggests to me our protections are:

- To remember where we came from – the dependency of wilderness.
- Not to forget we came out of that wilderness; that our situation was not always one of fullness.
- To be willing, at the moment of fullness – at the very pinnacle of our destiny - to do what Jesus did and give it all away for God’s glory.
- To recall how and what God did for us in the place of un-fullness and un-fulfilment and how much we needed his grace then.

Can we, in the place of our own fullness, call more effectively for the land to break through? Perhaps. It is lazy of us to be too secure in our destiny; so secure we start to build something to our own glory and our own legacy. This life is not about us but about dwelling with God and being his people.

Unlike the Israelites, however, we live under a new covenant of grace – as we are this side of the cross. We are yoked, nevertheless, in that covenant to a life of sacrifice, responsibility and task as his people. We are also linked inextricably to the people of God – and it is our responsibility to work it out carefully and righteously with the correct degree of loving confrontation. I know I want to be always loving, if not always correct!

Our mandate is to do more than prophesy to the land – we must engage with the ‘Canaanites’ by being part of the exile as well as part of the solution. It is important we don’t avoid confrontation with the powers by staying only in the place of prayer. We entered the land with our confidence in the word released by the living God – he will not fail us. The prophetic has not always gone into the darkness experienced by those at the sharp end - sometimes it has, but not known why. Everything must cross this bridge - it is the bridge that leads to real fullness.

Once we enter the land, we don’t want to lose what we’ve gained and we must devise new methods of management and organisation for the new situation we find ourselves in. We no longer strive to enter the land but to walk in the fullness without forgetting how to listen to the Lord as we do so. It is a new place and a new way of being in it.