Our New Birthright...

To me, the concept of living out those things which I was born to do is an important one.

I want to lay hold of everything I was created to do, and when I reach the end of my life, I want the joy of knowing that I did precisely what I was supposed to do.

Recently, several things have really pierced my thinking on this topic.

First THIS:
"For everyone who has been born of God overcomes the world."  -1 John 5:4

When I was first born in a natural way, there were perhaps things I was born to do that were different from what I am born to do now because I was given a brand new start when I was reborn of God through faith in His Son.  So the concept of what I've been born to do takes on a whole new form with that thinking.

"If I am reborn of God, what am I now born to do?"  
I don't want to define it for anyone with a close-ended theological answer that we might all know.  I want to leave it open to the specifics of what God will tell us and roll with that answer.

But I can't stop considering how epic, how vast and how wonderful it is to be reborn of God and to have a birthright that is beyond all current belief I have.


Second THIS:
"By faith he [Abraham] went to live in the land of promise, as in a foreign land, living in tents with Isaac and Jacob, heirs with him of the same promise." -Hebrews 11:9.

Abraham was given a promise that he would inherit the land of Canaan.  Unlike his famous descendants who lived in Egypt, were delivered and then died in the desert seeking to enter the Promised Land, Abraham actually got to live there his entire adult life.  He LIVED in the place of God's promises!

But here's the painful part: each and every day that he lived in the place that he was called by God to inherit he was reminded that the promise was not yet fulfilled.  It was still a foreign country.  Imagine being surrounded by your dream, your calling, your life's purpose EVERY DAY and never seeing it accomplished or fulfilled!!!

As for descendants vast and numerous from God: he only had a few at the time of his death.  Had he not faith, he would have died considering his whole life a failure.  Had he truly considered his life a failure, he might have gone on to have many more children with the slave woman Hagar-trying out of his own strength to populate the Land of Promise.  But instead he counted on God and His character in truly amazing fashion.

Tying together First THIS and Second THIS: what I am born to do, I might not see all the fruits of in this lifetime-in fact, no matter how much I attain to, I cannot measure my success by what should be the tip of the iceberg.  By God's grace, we'll set in motion, through the course of our lives, the transformation of entire nations as Abraham did through the actions and faith that we have in our brief sojourn on this earth.  It is our new birthright.