With anything in life, it is natural for us to want to go to a new level. It would be ridiculous to join the track team but not want to improve your time, or to work diligently in school and not desire to graduate. Even in a video game, your goal is often to get to the next level.
As Christians, we also desire to go to a new level. This is why we join Bible studies or community groups, so we can grow in our knowledge and in our relationship with God. We come to church each week expecting to learn something new and become stronger in our faith. We search out a mentor to help aid us in becoming more Christlike. All of these things are for the goal of going deeper, of getting to that next level in the Lord.
God wants us to go to a new level, but he doesn’t tell us upfront how much it will require to get there. If he told you when you first got saved how much self sacrifice it was going to require you probably wouldn’t sign up! He takes us by the hand, slowly and gently demanding a little more of us each day and giving us the grace and strength to give up things we never thought we could.
Going to the next level always requires sacrifice. If you want to improve your time as a runner, you need to practice more and work harder. You may even need to change your diet. Yet, you would do all this with the knowledge that you are replacing all the things you are giving up with something more desirable.
To go the next level in the Lord, it requires us to be sacrificially obedient to his leadings. Anytime he tells us to give up something, it is because he wants to replace it with more of Him. He wants to take your pride and replace it with joy. He wants to take your addiction and replace it with true life. He wants to take the thing you don’t have the strength to give up and turn it into a testimony of HIS grace and strength working through you.
Most of the time, we know what he is telling us to do, we just don’t want to do it. How do you know that it is God speaking? There is a battle within you. Your flesh doesn’t want to do it.
The Isrealites had many opportunities to go to the next level and reach their promise land. God was speaking to them, but their was a battle within them. Rather than yielding to God, they hardened their hearts. Hebrews 3 reminds us to learn from their mistakes:
7 So, as the Holy Spirit says:
“Today, if you hear his voice,
8 do not harden your hearts
as you did in the rebellion,
during the time of testing in the desert,
Don’t circle around the same mountain all your life like the Israelites did. Go to the next level through sacrificial obedience to God. Trust that He will replace your sacrifice with something far greater.
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