Steadfast But Not Stuck
On the things you have been trying to resuscitate for twenty years.
There is something in your life that died.
You know what it is.
It is the ministry that fizzled.
It is the friendship that grew cold the year your spouse stopped getting invited.
It is the version of yourself you used to be.
It is the small business idea you have been telling people about for nine years.
It is the morning routine you kept trying to start until you stopped trying.
It died. And every couple of months, you go back and try to wake it up.
I have been doing this for two decades.
My pastor preached Wednesday night and dropped a sentence that cracked it open for me.
“We do not have to sit there and try to resuscitate something for twenty years that died twenty years ago.”
What Christ did when the room got hot
Matthew 4 verse 12. Jesus has just come out of the wilderness. He has been tempted forty days. The Father has spoken. The angels have come and ministered to Him.
Then He hears John the Baptist has been thrown in prison.
If you and I were running the script, we would have Jesus stay right there.
We would have him hold the line.
We would have him preach in the same town John was preaching in.
We would have him get arrested, too, because that would prove something.
The text says He moved.
“Now when Jesus had heard that John was cast into prison, he departed into Galilee.” — Matthew 4:12 (KJV)
He left. He went up north. He went to the place where they were not throwing preachers in prison yet.
My pastor said it like this Wednesday night.
“Christ did not have a martyr’s complex.”
The hard thing to do would have been staying. The right thing to do was moving. Most Christians do not separate the two.
The verb everyone skips
You have read this verse a hundred times.
“Therefore, my beloved brethren, be ye stedfast, unmoveable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, forasmuch as ye know that your labour is not in vain in the Lord.” — 1 Corinthians 15:58 (KJV)
Most of you stop at unmoveable.
The next word is abounding.
Abounding means moving. Increasing. Growing. Spreading. Overflowing into new soil.
Steadfast in what? Abounding in how.
Steadfast in the faith. Abounding in the work.
If your steadfastness has become an excuse to keep sitting at the corpse you have been mourning for ten years, that is not steadfastness. That is sentimentality with a Bible verse taped to it.
The most spiritual-sounding Christians I know are the ones who confuse the two.
The hard thing might be the stupid thing
I sat under this line for a long time after the sermon ended.
“The hard thing to do might be the stupid thing to do.”
Christian culture has trained us to believe that if it hurts, it must be God’s will. If it costs us, we must be on the narrow path. If everyone around us is telling us to stop, we must be the prophet.
Sometimes that is true.
Most of the time, you are just stubborn.
There is a difference between dying to self and dying to a decision that was never God’s in the first place.
I drove garbage trucks. I conducted trains. There were stretches where I told myself I was being faithful by staying. I was not being faithful. I was being afraid. The man who would have written the book was a different man, and the man on the truck was protecting himself from becoming him.
When God called me off the truck, the hard thing would have been to stay. I have friends who think I gave up. They are wrong. I obeyed.
The hard thing is sometimes the cowardly thing wearing the uniform of the brave thing.
The dead twenty-year project
Take an honest inventory.
Your spouse asks about it sometimes, and you change the subject.
You tell yourself you will pick it back up after the kids are older. After the move. After the next promotion. After the next election. After your father dies. After your mother forgives you. After the church changes pastors.
Twenty years.
The grave has grown grass.
You are still buying shovels.
Mark 6 says even Jesus did not raise everything that fell.
“And he could there do no mighty work, save that he laid his hands upon a few sick folk, and healed them.” — Mark 6:5 (KJV)
He went to his own country. They did not believe. He healed a few. He marveled at their unbelief. He sent the twelve out to other towns. He did not stand at the gates of Nazareth knocking until they let him in.
He moved.
If a town would not receive the disciples, he told them, shake the dust off your feet and go to the next town.
The shaking off is permission to leave.
Most Christians do not give themselves permission to leave anything.
That is not loyalty. That is paralysis.
The wife who could not leave
There is one woman in the Bible who heard the angels say to go and tried to take her old town with her anyway.
“But his wife looked back from behind him, and she became a pillar of salt.” — Genesis 19:26 (KJV)
She did not look back because she was sentimental. She looked back because her heart could not let the city die.
The body left Sodom.
The heart did not.
That is what most Christians do at the dead thing. The feet have moved. The mind has not. The grave still has a name on it.
If you cannot stop thinking about the thing that ended, the thing that ended has not ended in you.
God lets you make decisions
You are afraid that if you let it die, you will have to admit you were wrong about it.
You are afraid your wife will say I told you.
You are afraid the people you brought along on the dream will feel betrayed.
You are afraid that God might not have actually called you to it, and that means the last decade was your decision, not His.
You are afraid that walking away looks like quitting.
Walking away from a thing God told you to leave is not quitting.
It is obedience to the part of the path you have not stepped onto yet.
Saul was told in 1 Samuel 10:
“And let it be, when these signs are come unto thee, that thou do as occasion serve thee; for God is with thee.” — 1 Samuel 10:7 (KJV)
Do as occasion serves you. For God is with thee.
That is not a permission slip for laziness. That is a command to a believer who is walking in the Spirit to actually make a decision. Not wait for a sign that was already given.
If you have walked with God long enough to know His voice, He has already told you which thing on your shelf is dead.
You just have not put it in the ground yet.
What steadfast looks like the next morning
You will wake up tomorrow.
You will think about the dead thing.
You will reach for the shovel.
Put it back.
Open the Bible instead.
Pray over the actual living thing in front of you. The marriage. The kids. The job. The post you have not written. The conversation you have been avoiding. The brother or sister who needs to hear from you today.
That is what abounding looks like in the work of the Lord.
It does not look like holding the corpse.
It looks like turning your back on the grave and walking toward the next town.
You are not the gravedigger of your own dreams. You are the disciple of a Lord who moves.
“Therefore, my beloved brethren, be ye stedfast, unmoveable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, forasmuch as ye know that your labour is not in vain in the Lord.” — 1 Corinthians 15:58 (KJV)
Steadfast in the faith.
Steadfast in the marriage.
Steadfast in the Book.
But not stuck at a grave the Lord left ten years ago.
Adam
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“But his wife looked back from behind him, and she became a pillar of salt.”
Really enjoyed reading this post!
Let us heal from trauma, betrayal, abandonment, fear, paralysis, infatuazione.. lest we too become a petrified pillar in a wasteland, solid tears in the desert.
I’m so thankful Adam you obeyed.