Over and Back

Psalm 85:1 Lord, You have been favorable to Your land; You have brought back the captivity of Jacob. 2 You have forgiven the iniquity of Your people; You have covered all their sin. Selah 3 You have taken away all Your wrath; You have turned from the fierceness of Your anger. 4 Restore us, O God of our salvation, And cause Your anger toward us to cease. 5 Will You be angry with us forever? Will You prolong Your anger to all generations? 6 Will You not revive us again, That Your people may rejoice in You? 7 Show us Your mercy, Lord, And grant us Your salvation. 8 I will hear what God the Lord will speak, For He will speak peace To His people and to His saints; But let them not turn back to folly. 9 Surely His salvation is near to those who fear Him, That glory may dwell in our land. 10 Mercy and truth have met together; Righteousness and peace have kissed. 11 Truth shall spring out of the earth, And righteousness shall look down from heaven. 12 Yes, the Lord will give what is good; And our land will yield its increase. 13 Righteousness will go before Him, And shall make His footsteps our pathway.

In elementary school, we used to play a game called ‘Red Rover.’ (I never liked that game very much.) Two parallel lines would form as the class was equally divided. Then one side, (whose turn it was,) would call out, “Red rover, red rover, send Bill right over!”

And then, upon hearing your name, you would run across the open space between the lines and attempt to bust through the line which was now holding hands with all their might. If I remember correctly, you got a point if you broke through the line, and you had to stay on their side if you didn’t.

Israel had returned from exile. They had been away from the Promised Land for 70 years, exactly as the Lord had declared they would be – as a result of not keeping the Sabbath years for the land. Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar had come and completely decimated the land, killed hundreds of thousands, and hauled the rest away into exile in Babylon. This was an extremely cruel season in the life of the nation, and to be honest it took a miracle for Israel, (nee Judah,) to survive this.

They had come back to the land now, by God’s direction, but they couldn’t quite break through. It was going to take a Spiritual as well as a physical revolution…

You have recently come back to the Lord. You sensed the calling in your heart. Yet you are finding it hard to make that break-through you desire. There is a lot of rubble in your life to get rid of, and it just seems so overwhelming. Impossible, really. All that was happening in your heart seems so difficult to live out. And so you begin to look back. The line of the world is constraining you.

Now you need the power of the Holy Spirit to empower you to break through, to keep your eyes on the prize of the upward call of Christ Jesus, to keep your eyes forward and never looking back…Call on His power today.

-  Pastor Bill