Sunday Recap @ da Chapel
Pastor Joshua Goodin
Genesis 12:1 (NIV)
“Getting the House in Order: The Struggle in Moving Forward” Pt. 6
*There is a difference between moving on and moving forward. Moving on isn’t about healing, growth or perseverance. Moving on reduces relationships and emotional availability. When you move forward you take as much time as needed to understand who or what caused your pain and grow from it. Are you moving forward or are you just moving on? Think about the experiences and encounters in your life, or did you tell yourself you are moving forward, but in actuality, you moved on? You look like you moved forward, but one little trigger reminds you that you’ve only moved on. How do you know if you just moved on? If you keep experiencing the same thing or are attracted to the same types of individuals over and over again, that’s a sign that you have moved on. That’s problematic because you didn’t get the lesson you were supposed to learn from the situation and you are repeating the same problem, the same situation, the same relationship because you want to keep moving on. At some point moving on will catch up to you, will lead you to a place where you are depressed, lead you to a place where you rather be isolated and give up on everything, because it seems like the safest place to be. That’s not what God wants for you, that is not his plan, God is calling you to move forward.
*The struggle in moving forward is because you’re listening to the wrong voice. You only come to know God’s voice when you spend time with him. Who you spend time with the most is who you will listen to. Maybe you need to figure out who you spend the most time with. When you think about the problems and issues you have in life, you will realize and see a correlation between the problems you have and the voices you listen to.
*The struggle in moving forward is not knowing where God is taking you. Change sometimes costs so much, feels invasive and seems like God is pushing you into uninvited, unexpected events, and forcing you to let go of things that you have become comfortable with. You’ve become reliant on things and you feel like you can’t exist without them. It’s a struggle to leave a place you’re familiar with and go to a place you’re not familiar. God is always calling you to unfamiliar places whenever he wants to do a new work. God hasn’t fully revealed what he wants to do in your life where he’s trying to take you, because you haven’t moved beyond the place where you are wrestling with what God has requested of you. God is always up to something, even when you don’t understand. You can’t be satisfied where you are and you keep asking for more. What more can you give God? Think about the areas in your life where you have been slacking and giving God the bare minimum. Where can you give God more? You’ll know when you are at a place where you want to give God more when you get tired of getting what you've been getting. When you get tired of it, you will ask the Lord how to get out of that place. You are a master of insanity, doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results.
Aren’t you tired of bringing the same thing to the altar every week? You’ve been praying about the same thing for so long, God is trying to figure out if you know any other words. You keep praying to God to move on, but God is saying there are some things you’re trying to live with that he has not called you to live with. God is calling you to move forward, to get what you were supposed to get from here and move to the next. You have become so familiar and comfortable that you feel like there’s nothing else you can do, and nothing more you can give, so you decide to be complacent right where you are. It’s an issue when you see people around you prosper, and you ask yourself why you didn’t get what they have. You didn’t get it because you want to stay stuck. If God got you to the place where you’re at, what makes you think he can’t take you further? You’re so afraid to walk away, that you are willing to sacrifice forever. When God calls you to move forward you start counting up the cost of what you will leave behind. Once you count up the cost you decide that it’s too much for you to walk away. You invested so much time, but you are still miserable. You develop your greatest relationship with God in the unknown. It causes you to increase your trust and faith in God's ability. You don’t have to know the whole plan. You’re afraid to take the next step because you don’t want to fail in the next place you’re going to, especially when you are comfortable with the current success that you have.
*God was calling you to something, but you settled for what you first encountered, thinking you couldn’t get better than that. You started thinking this must be it and you got comfortable, and you can’t move forward because where God is calling you to visit, you keep living there every day expecting things will get better, there will be a change, and you will get more. You can’t get more until you get to the place God is calling you to. If you want to get what God has for you, you have to answer this question: are you moving on or moving forward? You keep making the same mistakes, experiencing the same issues because you are content with moving on. God has more in store for you, but it requires you to leave the place where you are at.