Back in our home town of thirty years, spring is lush, abloom, and dinner with dear friends a feast. I read in Leviticus 18, “You shall not do as they do in Egypt, where you lived, and you shall not do as they do in Canaan, to which I am bringing you. You shall not walk in their statutes. You shall follow my rules and keep my statutes and walk in them. If a person does them, he shall live by them. I am the LORD your God.”
I hear God say, “You are not to be identified by your place, where you lived, nor where you are now living, but by Me. You are not to be ‘like’ either people, but ‘like Me.’
This reminds me of Joshua, approaching Jericho and asking the man with drawn sword before him, “‘Are you for us or for our adversaries?’ And he said, ‘No; but I am the commander of the army of the LORD. Now I have come.’ And Joshua fell on his face to the earth and worshiped and said to him, ‘What does my lord say to his servant?’ And the commander of the LORD’s army said to Joshua, ‘Take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy.'” (Joshua 5:13-15)
My identity, my call, is to be my Redeemer’s, and while He places me in a new community and culture, He is the One I am to be marked by, the One I am to reflect. O Lord, thank You for this!
Following Jesus requires inverted thinking, taking on a heavenly, eternal, other-worldly perspective. When presented with different human viewpoints, we need to seek God’s.
Lord, when I am tangled in choosing this or that, cause me to look up and choose Thee.
As the rain and snow 