The Sacrificial Walk

[Heirloom Promises] On what the enemy fears most...

“This is the account of Noah and his family. Noah was a righteous man, blameless among the people of his time, and he walked faithfully with God.”

- Genesis 6:9 NIV

Noah walked with God. In his walking with God, God revealed to him the coming flood and the ark blueprints that would save himself and his family from it. Later, we know what happens with Ham, one of Noah’s sons. Ham operates in ungodly perversion of the type that God eliminated through the flood. Even though God knew what was in Ham’s heart, because of the righteousness of Noah, Ham was saved from the flood.

By walking with God in righteousness, those in your family, in your sphere of influence, will receive an extension of grace from God to make the choice to walk in righteousness. Unfortunately, after seeing the miracles brought about by God saving his family, Ham decided to continue to live out of darkness instead of in light. Because of this, he is cursed, and it calls Ham in Genesis 9:22 “the father of Canaan,” meaning the father of the tribes that would operate in ungodliness and would have to be eliminated later by God using the Israelites.

Noah’s righteous walk with God allowed for God to give him vision that would save his family and himself, but he didn’t just get the vision. He implemented it. He build the ark. Through this endeavor he sacrificed time and resources to the Lord to fulfill the desires of the Lord’s heart. He battled ridicule from the ungodly all around. He suffered to walk a path fundamentally different from most in his generation. To those around him at the time, his God-given vision made no sense. They mocked him because they themselves did not know God the way that Noah knew him.

In the minds of those around you who do not know Christ or do not know him as well as you do, your actions may not make any sense when you’re following the direction of God. They do not make sense with regards to the standards of the world and to the carnal mind. Across scripture, none of the actions by biblical leaders make much sense to the natural/carnal mind of the flesh. We frequently forget this as Followers of Christ, so when God leads us off the well-worn path of the world, we begin to be filled with fear and doubt, a detriment to our walk with God.

We often desire to feel accepted by those around us, those that we’ve walked with in past seasons, but sometimes, what God leads us to do will not make sense to our closest friend from the previous season. That doesn’t mean your relationship is over, but it does mean that there is some distance between you and them in the new season that you are walking in. The walk is sacrificial. It requires a total trust in God to complete. When those you love and care for fall by the wayside, through the storms brought by the enemy to stop your advance, you must continue to go forward. There are always those that God will bring to walk with you, but there are still parts of the journey that you may face with God alone.

The sacrificial walk can be painful because it requires a stripping away of the supports and scaffolding of the last season or seasons. For hundreds of years, Noah walked with God. He knew the Father better than anyone in his generation, and it save himself and saved his family, but the cost was alienation from his twisted and corrupted generation. However, the victory was greater than he could ever imagine on the other side. Instead of being drowned in a flood, his line continued humanity beyond the flood. He grasped the most ultimate of victories. The sacrificial walk cost him time and alienation from those of his generation, and much more was restored to him than what was lost by carrying out God’s plan to save himself, his family, and the appointed animals that God desired to be in the after-flood world.

On the “before the flood” side of the story, things can seem murky. Our hearing God could be laced with fears and doubts and confusion on whether or not to step out, but on the other side of the flood, we are filled with the understanding that God was truly speaking to us on how to prepare for the future he desired for us. On the other side of the flood, we are secure in the knowledge that what we were hearing in the Spirit was true and that, by abiding and implementing what we heard, we were saved. The sacrificial walk yields far more than we can understand on the other side of whatever situations plague us in our daily lives. On the other side, we know that God is who he says he is. He is the Great “I AM.”

On the other side, we know that God was speaking clearly to us, that he walked with us, that he carried us, and that he knew more than we ourselves thought we knew about the situations that we were walking through. On the other side of the valley of the shadow of death is an inconceivable victory that could only be brought by following Christ.

The way in the wilderness and the streams in the desert are made by God as we walk sacrificially in accordance and obedience to what he has asked of us. The enemy’s attack on our lives is undeserving of our focus. Our focus should always be on where God is leading us. It is there that the saving grace of the Lord is allowed entrance to rebuke the hand of the enemy in our life. The sacrificial walk is the answer to our sufferings of today.

Though it challenges us and presses us, it is the beginning of the new wine, the new revelation, that we need to rebuke the attack of the enemy in our lives.

And, remember, all followers of Christ are part of a holy lineage that will never die.