To Restart Requires Taking the Time to Worship...

Yesterday, we continued to look at a story in the Bible where the Jewish people seemed to hit pause in order to worship God through the outward act or circumcision, which was an act of worship that publicly identified their covenant relationship with Him. Instead of pressing the advantage that the Jewish people had over their enemies; instead of being focused on what they needed to do in order to restart their lives; the entire Jewish nation was left vulnerable and incapacitated.

And as the men recovered from the circumcision they had received, we see the Jewish people follow a second command from God as the story continues in Joshua 5:10:

While the sons of Israel camped at Gilgal they observed the Passover on the evening of the fourteenth day of the month on the desert plains of Jericho.

Instead of preparing to attack the nations that inhabited the Promised Land; instead of preparing to defend themselves from a counter attack; the Jewish nation prepared and observed the Passover. Imagine yourself as a member of the Jewish nation. You have waited your whole life to enter into the Promised Land. And now once you are here, you are not taking care of what you should be doing; you are not taking possession of the land. Instead you are celebrating Passover. What would you be thinking: "What are we doing? Why are we wasting time? Why are we not focused on what we should be doing?"

To understand what was happening in this story, we first need to understand Passover and its significance to the Jewish people. The Passover feast commemorated God’s deliverance from slavery in the land of Egypt. During Passover, every Jewish family took an unblemished lamb and killed it at twilight. They would then take the blood of the lamb and put it on the two doorposts and the lintel, which was the piece of wood that formed the top of the door frame. That first Passover, the Lord went through the land of Egypt and struck down all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, but He passed over all of the Jewish homes who had marked their doors with the blood of the lamb.

Celebrating Passover was an act of worship that responded to what God had done to deliver the Jewish people. Just as circumcision was an act of worship that celebrated who God was and the identity that the Jewish people had with Him, by celebrating Passover the Jewish nation was responding in worship to what God had done.

Now imagine yourself in this story. Instead of focusing on moving forward to restart your life in the Promised Land, you have paused so that the nation could identify themselves in covenant relationship with God for at least a week. And then, instead of focusing on moving forward to restart your life in the Promised Land, you hit pause again in order to respond in worship to what God had done in the past to deliver your people. Surely now you are going to begin to focus forward to get things going and to restart your life, right. Not exactly, as we see as the story continues:

On the day after the Passover, on that very day, they ate some of the produce of the land, unleavened cakes and parched grain. The manna ceased on the day after they had eaten some of the produce of the land, so that the sons of Israel no longer had manna, but they ate some of the yield of the land of Canaan during that year.

After spending up to two weeks pausing to worship God, guess what the Jewish people did? No, they did not begin to attack; instead we read that they ate some of the produce of the land. Now in reading that, we could simply assume that they took time to have a picnic before they moved forward. But actually, the Jewish people were doings something far more significant.

You see, the Jewish people were not having a picnic; the Jewish people were celebrating the festival of first fruits. For seven days, beginning the day after Passover, the Jewish nation was to respond in worship to what God had done as their provider. So, in essence, the Jewish people spent three weeks after entering the Promised Land worshipping God. The act of circumcision was a response of worship that demonstrated their identification with God as His people. The act of Passover was a response of worship that demonstrated their identification with God as their deliverer. The act of the feast of unleavened bread was a response of worship that demonstrated their identification with God as their provider.

And it is in this story that we see God reveal to us another timeless principle that is necessary when it comes to restarting our lives. And that timeless principle is that to restart requires taking the time to worship. Just as it was during the book of Joshua, it is in our efforts to restart our lives that we can find ourselves focused so intensely on what we should be doing to move forwards that we forget to spend time focused on who God is and what God has done to bring us forward.

Worship, simply put, is a response. Worship is a response that is focused on who God is, what God has done, and what God has promised to do. Worship is not simply singing, although it can involve singing. Worship is not simply reading your Bible and prayer, although it can involve prayer and Bible reading. Worship is a lifestyle; worship is a life that is lived in a way that is focused on and that responds to God’s character and activity in the world.

What can tend to happen, however, is that we can lose our focus from God and onto our circumstances or activities when it comes to restarting our lives. And when we do that, we can end up stumbling and falling in our attempts to restart our life. We stumble and fall because we tend to follow what we are focused on. So when we become too focused on what we should be doing to move forward that we forget to spend time focused on who God is and what God has done to bring us forward, we can end up off track and in the desert of hurt, pain, disappointment and frustration that comes from failing to restart.

Just as with the Jewish nation, restarting requires that we regularly take time to respond to who God, his activity in our lives, and His desires for our lives to make sure we have the right focus and the right perspective.

So do you regularly and consistently take time to respond to God in worship? Do you regularly take the time to pause to remember who God is, what He has done, and what He has promised to do, so that you can respond with a life that is focused on God? Or do you get so focused on what needs to be done, what you need to do to restart your life that you forget to focus your life on the one who enables you to restart your life?