In short
- Delayed obedience is still a door you can walk through. It is not too late to do what God said.
- Forty days in Scripture sits at the edge of something new: testing, preparation, and seeing what is ahead.
- A sojourn is not a trip. It is a season you live in and then leave, and you don't come out of it the same.
No, new wine must be poured into new wineskins.
The Lord told me to write this book seven years ago. I gave myself one year to write it, and I did write it. However, I never published it.
Seven years later, I made a commitment to the Lord to stop waiting, and to do what He said to do many years ago. And when I returned to this book and found that it was a forty day devotional, I finally understood why.
Forty Days
Forty is not a random number. Noah, Moses, the spies, Elijah, Jesus, and the disciples all passed through forty days. Some were being tested, some were being prepared, some were surveying what was ahead. But in each case, forty days sat at the edge of something. This is the way that God replaces our old wineskins with something new.
The Sojourn
This book is named The Sojourn. A sojourn is not a trip. It is a season you live in and then leave, and you do not come out of it the same.
Each section carries an image drawn from the landscape of a place in the Bible: Bethel, Horeb, Shiloh, and Gethsemane. Each of these places signifies something powerful, and represents something we will take along in our journey as well.
These four ascents are invitations to new pathways with God in search of a new way of living in the Kingdom.
An Invitation
I pray that everyone who takes this journey meets Jesus deeper than they ever thought possible, and that they find their first love again.
So this is my personal invitation to you. Take the Sojourn. And don't walk it alone: join us in Dwelling Place, where we go through the forty days together.
