Your Comfort Zone Is the Wilderness

Every one of us is created for a specific purpose. There is something we were made for — an assignment as unique as a thumbprint. You can see it in the great names of Scripture. John had an assignment. Moses had an assignment. Joshua had an assignment. We know it from the names they were given at birth and from everything their lives went on to accomplish. Their whole life became a witness to their calling.

At some point, every one of us hears it too — a still, small voice calling us forward. Some of us hide the way Adam hid. Some of us run the way Jonah ran. And some surrender and stay obedient, even unto death, the way Christ did.

That voice rarely hands us a finished map. More often it hands us a commandment.

The commandments written on our hearts

We tend to shrink "the commandments" down to ten lines on two tablets of stone. But read the whole of Scripture and you'll find God commanding people all the way through — giving each person a word built for the exact thing standing in front of them.

For Joshua, the man who would lead Israel out of the wilderness and into the Promised Land, the commandment was this: be strong, be of good courage, and do not be afraid. It met him before he led. It carried him while he led. And he left it behind for the people at the end of his life. That one word gave him everything he needed to finish his assignment, and his whole life became the proof of his obedience to it.

God knew what was waiting on the other side of the Jordan. He knew that the thing capable of keeping Joshua — and everyone following him — out of the inheritance was the very thing that had kept them wandering for forty years: fear, and the lack of confidence that came with it.

And thou shalt remember all the way which the Lord thy God led thee these forty years in the wilderness, to humble thee, and to prove thee, to know what was in thine heart, whether thou wouldest keep his commandments, or no. — Deuteronomy 8:2

So the commandment didn't address the battles directly. It addressed the man who would have to fight them. Sometimes we keep asking for the external word — Lord, just tell me what to do. But often God is after something deeper. He wants to make us into the kind of people who can actually hold everything He has for us. So the commandment turns inward. It starts developing character before it ever assigns a task.

Righteousness is equity between who we are and what we do

There's a word for that inward work. In the New Testament, righteousness carries the sense of equity — and I want to suggest that the righteous life is the place where two things come into agreement: who we are, and what we do. It's almost as if we carry two commandments: the one quietly transforming us on the inside, so that we can faithfully keep the one waiting for us on the outside.

That was Joshua exactly. Be strong, be of good courage, do not be afraid was the inner commandment — the becoming. Lead the people in to possess their inheritance was the outer one — the doing. And the promise — the inheritance itself — was the having. Notice the order God chose. He didn't command Joshua to have courage or to have strength as if they were possessions to pick up. He commanded him to be strong, to be of good courage. What Joshua could have was tied directly to who he was willing to become.

We often get this backward. We want to have the thing without committing to be the kind of person who could carry it.

The land was never only milk and honey

We picture the Promised Land as a place simply flowing with milk and honey, and it was. But it was also where Israel had to fight. Where enemies used deception as a strategy of war. Where people inside their own camp did things that compromised the mission and put everything at risk. I imagine that, to some, the wilderness behind them started to look the way Egypt had once looked to the generation before — strangely safe.

And isn't that exactly how comfort works on us? We stay in the marriage we never thought to bring before God until we were already deep in it and quietly misaligned. We keep climbing the career that was only ever meant to be a stepping stone, until we've built an altar on it and started to worship the climb. We say, every year, that this is the year we write the book — while somehow finding ten hours a day to scroll. Whatever direction your heart has been pulling you, there is usually a comfortable place you've chosen instead, because the comfortable place doesn't ask you to become anyone new. That is the wilderness. Not the absence of comfort — the presence of it, in a place you were always meant to leave.

That is the shape of every real season. We are called forward and, in the same breath, asked to leave something behind and to face challenges harder than the last ones. And in every season we are handed a commandment designed to make us into people of promise, so that we can finally possess the promise. There is no separation between the two. We don't always get to know our assignment — what to do — until we've shown, through obedience, that we're willing to be the kind of person who could accomplish it.

The one who already lived it

Here is what moves me most. The clearest picture of this equity is Christ Himself. Hebrews 1, speaking of the Son, reaches back and quotes Psalm 45: Thou hast loved righteousness, and hated iniquity. It is said of the One whose being and doing were never once out of agreement — the One who was obedient even unto death. In Him, character and action were in perfect equity. The verse we're standing in already embodies the very alignment we're being called into.

So when we're asked to be before we do, we're not being asked to manufacture something from nothing. We're being conformed to a pattern that already walked the earth.