Year 6, Day 172: Ezekiel 46

Theological Commentary: Click Here

Discipleship Focus: Challenge

• Challenge: God does not merely wish us to be in relationship with Him as we are.  He challenges us to grow, stretch, and transform as we take on the mantle of being His representatives to this world.

Where do we get challenge out of a passage that talks about how to enter the temple, how to give sacrifices, and how to keep from transmitting holiness to the people?  {For more information on that last point, see my blog post from 3 years ago to which I link above.}  It’s really quite simple.  It’s also really quite hard to see without help.  I remember the first time someone taught me about this idea.  I remember thinking that it was a really cool understanding of this passage that I never would have gotten on my own.

Do you notice how the people who come from the north are told to go out the south and not go out how they came?  The same is true for the people from the south.  They go out the north.  The question is, why is this important?

The answer to this is really cool.  When we come to God, we don’t go back to where we were.  In other words, coming to God changes us!  When we come to God, we leave different than when we came.  Isn’t that a really cool understanding?

This is the challenge of God.  When we come to God, we shouldn’t be looking for ways to justify who we are.  When we come to God, we look for ways that God can make up more like Him.  Yes, we do want to celebrate those ways that we are already like God.  But we also want to always be on the lookout for the ways that we can become more like Him.  That’s the challenge of coming to God.

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