Kingdom HeroesSýnishorn

“By faith Abraham, when called to go to a place he would later receive as his inheritance, obeyed and went, even though he did not know where he was going.” (Hebrews 11:8)

Your life of faith as a kingdom hero will also involve how you choose to live. We read in Hebrews 11:9 that “by faith [Abraham] lived as an alien in the land of promise, as in a foreign land, dwelling in tents with Isaac and Jacob, fellow heirs of the same promise.” Abraham made it to the area promised to him, but it was not yet his.

Perhaps no discipline in the kingdom hero’s toolbox of faith is greater than the discipline of waiting well. While you’re waiting, God is doing two things related to your life at once. First, He’s preparing the promise for you, and second, He’s preparing you for the promise. Most people delay the promise they’re waiting for because they choose not to cooperate with the learning of the lessons and the spiritual growth God has for them in the interim.

That’s what happened to Abraham. He ended up in the Hall of Heroes, but not every decision he made was heroic. He delayed his breakthrough to his first promise by some 25 years. Abraham wasn’t ready. He was still lying, cheating, and even sleeping with his wife’s handmaiden, resulting in a baby born outside God’s will. Before he got his inheritance, Abraham first needed to come to his senses, grow in his faith, and trust God fully—even when it didn’t look like anything was happening.

God never wants to give someone a destiny that will cause them to forget Him when they get it. When God delivers on those promises, we often praise Him and then just as quickly forget He did. We forget because we lack the kind of commitment that’s tied to more than what we see and what we get.

Like Abraham, we are also to live as foreigners in a strange land. 1 Peter 2:11-12 puts it like this:

Beloved, I urge you as aliens and strangers to abstain from fleshly lusts which wage war against the soul. Keep your behavior excellent among the Gentiles, so that in the thing in which they slander you as evildoers, they may because of your good deeds, as they observe them, glorify God in the day of visitation.

God doesn’t want any of us to get too attached to the world we live in now. We aren’t to adopt the culture so much that our behavior begins to reflect the common behaviors of the culture. Not only that, but remaining mobile frees us to pursue His plan more fully. If you’re going to walk by faith, you better have on loafers or comfortable shoes, because God can take you on some long and winding paths. Staying tied too closely to your comfort zone will limit what God is able to do both in and through you.