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When God Says Move

by James Barringer  
12/18/2009 / Christian Apologetics

I hate moving. It's one of my least favorite things about life, right up there with scraping ice off my windshield and playing with the kittens at the pet store knowing I can't take them home. I hate the feeling of packing almost everything I own into boxes, selling or throwing away the rest of it, and leaving some place in the rearview mirror. In spite of this, or maybe because of it, God has moved me around more than any person should ever be moved.

In the last three and a half years I moved from college to home for the summer, then to an apartment in McKinney, a house in Princeton, an apartment in Fort Worth, and finally a rented room in Kissimmee, Florida. That's six addresses since May of 2006 if you're counting. I think and hope that I'm done for a while, and I have to ask God: what is the point of all this?

I think that moving, geographically changing locations, is one of the most powerful and important things that a person can do. And I think our willingness to do it says a lot about whether we value God or something else in our lives.

God has a long and robust tradition of calling people to move, beginning with Abram. "Leave your family and go to the land that I will show you," God tells Abram. That was the start of Abram's walk with God. And God attached this command to a promise, the promise that Abram's obedience and faith would be rewarded. Abram's life only got more intense from there. God made him wait 25 years for a son and heir, then demanded that Abram sacrifice his son, then provided a sacrifice at the last second so that the child of promise could live.

The latter half of Genesis shows Joseph moving, in this case against his will, sold into slavery by his brothers only to use his position as a slave to (in a very roundabout way) become second in command over all Egypt. In the beginning of Exodus we see Moses move, taking the whole nation of Israel out of Egypt and toward the promised land. Ruth vows to stick with Naomi no matter what, and they both move from Moab back to Bethlehem. Jesus spends virtually his entire ministry on the road, tied down to nothing. Paul does the same, called by God to go on incredible missionary journeys, without which the Christian faith would have remained an odd quirk of a few misfit fishermen in Palestine.

Why is moving so difficult for us? The answer is pretty obvious: we become attached to a place, to people and belongings. We become comfortable with our lives. In a lot of ways I don't think this is a bad thing. Becoming attached to people is maybe the best definition of "Christian community" that anyone could write. If we were eager to leave the people close to us, it would mean they weren't very good friends and we weren't very close to them. But forget the people for now. What if we felt God telling us to move into a crummier house, or into a worse neighborhood, because that's where the people were who needed Jesus? Or what if he simply called us out away from our comfort zone, like he did Abram?

In every case in the Bible where a person moved, you could easily point to that move as the defining part of their life. That's where everything they knew changed. Abram had to stop relying on his family and his dad's money, and start relying on God. Joseph had to quit being a daddy's boy, and become a lover of his real Father. I can only guess at how leading Israel must have grown and matured Moses. And so the list goes on.

See, moving is one of the most terrifying things that we can do because it involves relying on God for everything, especially when it's a long move. We need a new job, a place to stay, a good church, new friends, and a million other things. If God doesn't deliver all of those things in time, we're completely sunk. That's a lot of faith. And I think that's the amount of faith we need to have in God. If we don't trust him for those things, then we don't trust him very much. If we're really honest, we'd have to admit that we trust our job and our house and our friends and our neighborhood, and if God were to demand that we give those things up, we'd be pretty upset.

There's a certain complacency that sets in when we're in a place for too long. Had he never been called away from his family, Abram would have been perfectly content to live an unremarkable life in Ur, because the lure of money and family ties was enough to pacify him. That should bother us, because Abram - later Abraham - has been held up throughout history as a great man of faith. Yet if he was so easily placated by a little money and a good family, isn't it possible, even probable, that we're settling in the same way?

I'm not necessarily saying that everyone who reads this needs to get up and move right this second. Staying put might be exactly what God wants from you. But think about yourself and your feelings, and ask yourself honestly: "If God really told me to give up all this stuff and move - anywhere - would I?" This question can be uncomfortable because it might reveal that we're more attached to our possessions or our home or our neighborhood than we thought. If those things are making us complacent, if we love them so much that we would be willing to disobey God so that we don't have to part with them, then we had best watch out, because God will probably strip us of them. By all means, if you feel that God has planted you where you are and that he is using you powerfully there, then don't you dare move. But you should know in your heart that, if he called you to move tomorrow, you would do it.

Would you?

Jim Barringer is a 38-year-old writer, musician, and teacher. More of his work can be found at facebook.com/jmbarringer. This work may be reprinted for any purpose so long as this bio and statement of copyright is included.

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