The the challenge that every generation and person faces if the lure of living our lives out of the past. Instead of encountering our own experience with God, we live off of someone else’s faith, someone else’s stories, and someone else’s relationship with God. I think that church leaders are primarily susceptible to this. Because our history is so rich, we can rely solely of that and not on where God wants to take us next.

It’s so easy for this to happen. We start making decisions like this:

– “What did they do back then?”
– “How would they do it?”
– “Well _________ never did it like that.”
– “If _____ never did it like that, then that’s not how God works!”

And we never ask the most important question: “What does God want me to do?”

As I’m reading through Judges, the children of Israel followed the Lord until a generation arose who didn’t see His miraculous works and provision. Because they didn’t have their own relationship with God, they ended up straying from the Lord because you can’t live off of someone else’s faith forever. We’ve got to get our own faith. We need to appreciate our past and how we are linked to it, and then see how God is leading us into the future…