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Way Maker

It’s so easy to drive along our highways and take for granted that we are no longer battling with rocky dirt roads. We are mindlessly enjoying the progress of centuries past that has given us (relatively) uninhibited access between villages, towns and cities. We have the benefit of standing on the shoulders of our predecessors who sweat, fought and worked not only for better infrastructure, easier trade, but for voting rights, free education and many other advantages we take for granted today. 
The story of the Israelites escape from Egyptian slavery is a renowned account of plagues and miraculous liberation. The Israelites were finally commanded to leave by their slave owners. What seeming victory. Yet as they journeyed from Egypt, it appeared that they had to face their greatest impossibility yet. A whole community of men, women, children and livestock faced a body of water with no ferry passing or other means of transport. And their captors were hard on their heals. 
Under God’s instruction, Moses placed his staff over the red sea and it parted. The Israelites had a safe and dry access way through impossibility. 
The sea is a powerful image of the sin the separates us from God. Because of our wrongdoing, and rejection of God’s ways, there stands between us a barrier of impossibility, that we could never hope to conquer or cross by our own efforts or good works. Yet God had a plan to be reunited with us, to set us free from slavery. He sent a way maker. One who went before and broke the divide, enabling us to pass through to access a perfect pure God. 
Because of Jesus’s sacrificial death, I can go freely to church every Sunday and meet with God. I can encounter him every day in my home. I can talk to him anywhere, any time. Despite my past I can come before a pure and perfect God. I can enter into his radiant and perfect presence. The Way Maker bought my free access. I can benefit today in 2019 from the One who years ago went before me and made a way where there seemed to be no way. 
May I never take for granted, and every day rejoice in the One who chose to lose his life, to make a way for me.

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