Out on the Wild Frontier: Let's Get Wild
From Grounded to Wild: Stepping Into the Life God Has Promised
Have you ever found yourself in a day to day routine of going nowhere?. You wake up, you get through the hours, you go to sleep, and then you do it all again. The wild frontier of a God-directed life feels like something that belongs to other people, to bolder people, to people who somehow have it more together than you do.
But what if the problem is not your ability? What if the problem is simply that you have forgotten you were made to soar?
The Holding Pattern
Think about what it feels like to be on an airplane that cannot take off. The engines are running. The destination is real. Everyone on board knows where they are supposed to be going. But for reasons outside your control, you are not moving. You are just sitting there, inching forward, waiting, growing more restless by the hour.
That image captures something deeply true about the human experience. Many of us are living in a spiritual holding pattern. We believe in God. We know there is a promised land of purpose, abundance, and meaning that He has spoken over our lives. But for some reason, we cannot seem to get off the ground. The joy of liftoff feels like a distant memory, or maybe something we have never experienced at all.
The ancient people of Israel knew this feeling well. For forty years, they wandered in the desert, circling, repeating, surviving without truly living. An entire generation came and went without ever setting foot in the land God had promised them. And then, in the opening verses of the book of Joshua, everything changed.
A New Day Requires a New Decision
Joshua 1 opens at a moment of profound transition. Moses, the towering leader who had guided Israel through the wilderness, was dead. The man Joshua had served, followed, and mourned was gone. And into that grief, into that silence, God spoke directly and personally to Joshua.
What God said is striking. He told Joshua twice that Moses was dead. That repetition is not accidental. Grief has a way of anchoring us to the past. When we lose someone or something significant, the natural tendency is to sit in the memory of what was, to replay the glory days, to live in the land of "remember when." God was not being callous. He was being kind. He was drawing a line in the sand and saying, that chapter has closed, and there is life beyond it.
That word is for anyone today who is sitting in grief, heartache, or disappointment. There is life beyond what you have lost. The story is not over. God knows your name, He knows your history, and He has a personal plan and purpose that is still very much alive.
Get Up and Get After It
The command God gave Joshua was simple and urgent: Arise. Cross the Jordan. Move.
There is no wavering in those words, and there is no vagueness. God was telling Joshua that the time for waiting was finished. The wilderness season had run its course. Now was the moment for movement.
This is where many of us get stuck in a different way. We are not grieving the past so much as we are simply comfortable in the present. We have settled. We have found a routine that feels safe, and the idea of stepping into something new and unknown feels like far more risk than we are willing to take. But the hard truth is this: if you stay somewhere long enough, you will die there. That is true for individuals, for organizations, and for churches. Comfort, left unchallenged, becomes a slow kind of spiritual death.
God is not calling you to a life of safety. He is calling you to a life of soaring.
When the Wild Gets Woolly
Here is what nobody likes to talk about: when God calls you forward, something will always be in the way. For Joshua and the people of Israel, that something was the Jordan River. And when they arrived at its banks, they did not find a peaceful stream. According to Joshua 3:15, the river was at flood stage, overflowing its banks, wild and turbulent.
God said cross it anyway.
The waters did not part from a distance. They parted as the priests put their feet into the current. The miracle came in the moment of commitment, not before it. That is almost always how God works. He does not remove every obstacle before you step forward. He meets you in the stepping.
There is a profound truth tucked inside that reality. The place of your greatest discomfort is often exactly where your defining moment lives. The scary thing in front of you, the turbulent river, the costly decision, the uncomfortable change, is not a sign that you are going the wrong direction. It may be the very confirmation that you are going the right one.
Living Wild on the Promises of God
What makes it possible to step into the wild is not courage manufactured from within. It is confidence rooted in the promises of God. In Joshua 1, verses 2 through 6, God stacked promise upon promise before Joshua ever took a single step. The land was already given. Every place the foot would tread was already claimed. No enemy would be able to stand against him. God would be present. God would not desert or abandon him. The land was already sworn.
Those promises were not dependent on Joshua's resume or his track record or his feelings on any given morning. They rested entirely on the credibility and faithfulness of God Himself.
The same is true for you. You do not move forward into the wild on the strength of your own qualifications. You move forward on the sworn promises of a Father who does not lie, who does not leave, and who does not abandon the people He has called.
The question is not whether God has promised. He has. The question is whether you are willing to get your feet wet.
The wild is waiting. And He is already there.
Have you ever found yourself in a day to day routine of going nowhere?. You wake up, you get through the hours, you go to sleep, and then you do it all again. The wild frontier of a God-directed life feels like something that belongs to other people, to bolder people, to people who somehow have it more together than you do.
But what if the problem is not your ability? What if the problem is simply that you have forgotten you were made to soar?
The Holding Pattern
Think about what it feels like to be on an airplane that cannot take off. The engines are running. The destination is real. Everyone on board knows where they are supposed to be going. But for reasons outside your control, you are not moving. You are just sitting there, inching forward, waiting, growing more restless by the hour.
That image captures something deeply true about the human experience. Many of us are living in a spiritual holding pattern. We believe in God. We know there is a promised land of purpose, abundance, and meaning that He has spoken over our lives. But for some reason, we cannot seem to get off the ground. The joy of liftoff feels like a distant memory, or maybe something we have never experienced at all.
The ancient people of Israel knew this feeling well. For forty years, they wandered in the desert, circling, repeating, surviving without truly living. An entire generation came and went without ever setting foot in the land God had promised them. And then, in the opening verses of the book of Joshua, everything changed.
A New Day Requires a New Decision
Joshua 1 opens at a moment of profound transition. Moses, the towering leader who had guided Israel through the wilderness, was dead. The man Joshua had served, followed, and mourned was gone. And into that grief, into that silence, God spoke directly and personally to Joshua.
What God said is striking. He told Joshua twice that Moses was dead. That repetition is not accidental. Grief has a way of anchoring us to the past. When we lose someone or something significant, the natural tendency is to sit in the memory of what was, to replay the glory days, to live in the land of "remember when." God was not being callous. He was being kind. He was drawing a line in the sand and saying, that chapter has closed, and there is life beyond it.
That word is for anyone today who is sitting in grief, heartache, or disappointment. There is life beyond what you have lost. The story is not over. God knows your name, He knows your history, and He has a personal plan and purpose that is still very much alive.
Get Up and Get After It
The command God gave Joshua was simple and urgent: Arise. Cross the Jordan. Move.
There is no wavering in those words, and there is no vagueness. God was telling Joshua that the time for waiting was finished. The wilderness season had run its course. Now was the moment for movement.
This is where many of us get stuck in a different way. We are not grieving the past so much as we are simply comfortable in the present. We have settled. We have found a routine that feels safe, and the idea of stepping into something new and unknown feels like far more risk than we are willing to take. But the hard truth is this: if you stay somewhere long enough, you will die there. That is true for individuals, for organizations, and for churches. Comfort, left unchallenged, becomes a slow kind of spiritual death.
God is not calling you to a life of safety. He is calling you to a life of soaring.
When the Wild Gets Woolly
Here is what nobody likes to talk about: when God calls you forward, something will always be in the way. For Joshua and the people of Israel, that something was the Jordan River. And when they arrived at its banks, they did not find a peaceful stream. According to Joshua 3:15, the river was at flood stage, overflowing its banks, wild and turbulent.
God said cross it anyway.
The waters did not part from a distance. They parted as the priests put their feet into the current. The miracle came in the moment of commitment, not before it. That is almost always how God works. He does not remove every obstacle before you step forward. He meets you in the stepping.
There is a profound truth tucked inside that reality. The place of your greatest discomfort is often exactly where your defining moment lives. The scary thing in front of you, the turbulent river, the costly decision, the uncomfortable change, is not a sign that you are going the wrong direction. It may be the very confirmation that you are going the right one.
Living Wild on the Promises of God
What makes it possible to step into the wild is not courage manufactured from within. It is confidence rooted in the promises of God. In Joshua 1, verses 2 through 6, God stacked promise upon promise before Joshua ever took a single step. The land was already given. Every place the foot would tread was already claimed. No enemy would be able to stand against him. God would be present. God would not desert or abandon him. The land was already sworn.
Those promises were not dependent on Joshua's resume or his track record or his feelings on any given morning. They rested entirely on the credibility and faithfulness of God Himself.
The same is true for you. You do not move forward into the wild on the strength of your own qualifications. You move forward on the sworn promises of a Father who does not lie, who does not leave, and who does not abandon the people He has called.
The question is not whether God has promised. He has. The question is whether you are willing to get your feet wet.
The wild is waiting. And He is already there.
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