Pilgrimage by Lynn Austin Read Free Book Online Page B

the promises yet to come, even if I seem to be waiting in a barren place.
We have heard with our ears, O God; our fathers have told us what you did in their days, in days long ago. . . . It was not by their sword that they won the land, nor did their arm bring them victory; it was your right hand, your arm, and the light of your face, for you loved them.
Psalm 44:1, 3
A N EW P RAYER FOR THE J OURNEY
Sovereign Lord,
Nothing is impossible for You. You are a promise-keeping God, able to do so much more for Your children than we could ever ask or imagine. I confess that I have ignored the symptoms of my spiritual thirst for too long and failed to acknowledge my need for You. Forgive me for indulging in self-pity as I have waited, and for turning to my own solutions instead of trusting Your perfect timing. Please use this time of change in my life to teach me Your faithfulness and Your love. Thank You for your promise to rescue me and my loved ones whenever we wander away from You like lost sheep. Breathe life into my dry bones, Lord, so that I may truly live again.
Amen

4
Crossing the Jordan
Now then, you and all these people, get ready to cross the Jordan River into the land I am about to give to them . . . Be strong and very courageous. Be careful to obey all the law my servant Moses gave you; do not turn from it to the right or to the left, that you may be successful wherever you go.
Joshua 1: 2, 7
    T he Jordan River is not impressive. Like most tourists who envision a river of Mississippi proportions, I was disappointed when I saw it for the first time. From where I’m looking at it now, near a popular baptismal spot, an average swimmer could paddle across the sluggish green water and back again without much trouble. I’m guessing that the river was much wider and more imposing in biblical times, before modern Israelis began tapping into it for drinking water and irrigation.
    But the Jordan River doesn’t need to be impressive in order to fulfill its role as a dividing line, a place of demarcation between old and new. Just as crossing the Red Sea represented freedom from the past for Israel and a way out of slavery in Egypt, crossing the Jordan meant the end of their desert wanderings and the beginning of their new life in the Promised Land. For Christians, our life-changing boundary is our baptism into a new life with Christ. We’re no longer condemned to wander through life, aimless and thirsty, or to live enslaved to the taskmaster of sin. It was no coincidence that Jesus’ baptism took place here in the Jordan River.
    As Moses and the Israelites camped on the Jordan River’s opposite shore, excitement must have prickled through the community like electricity. Their dreary desert journey had come to an end; they were crossing over into a new life. But Moses was about to die, and before he did, he stood before the people to deliver a final, pleading sermon. He recalled Israel’s experience of salvation and provision in the wilderness and enumerated God’s promised blessings in the future if the people obeyed Him. Moses concluded with these impassioned words: “See, I set before you today life and prosperity, death and destruction. . . . Now choose life, so that you and your children may live and that you may love the Lord your God, listen to his voice, and hold fast to him. For the Lord is your life” (Deuteronomy 30:15, 19–20). It was the same choice that God gave Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden: They could choose to obey God and live, or choose the forbidden tree and die.
    We make the same choice when we decide to follow Christ, leaving behind disobedience and death and entering into new life. “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!”(2 Corinthians 5:17).“I have come that they may have life,” Jesus said, “and have it to the full” (John 10:10). And so we choose life and cross over through baptism to plant our feet firmly in the