This morning I prayed to God asking for deliverance out of the situation I perceive myself to be having. For some reason, I feel trapped and strangled by it. I applied what all the Christian people tell you to do in situations like this, which is to pray like you never prayed before, asking God to deliver you from the hands and grips of your situation and then I realized I was wasting my time. I wasn’t wasting my time because I don’t believe God will deliver me. I was wasting my time because God has already delivered me and I was sitting there waiting to be delivered from something I was only perceiving to be a situation whereby I had no tools to escape. I know this is how we all feel when the stress is up, the deadlines are knocking and nothing that should have been safely assumed to go right actually goes right. So we pray and pray and then we get frustrated and sit there. Then we get dealt the final blow and it stings, it hurts, it paralyzes and we sit there wondering whether we even had enough faith to see this through. Only problem about this scenario is that the logic is all out of whack. It’s wrong and stupid to be thinking this. The Lord said to Moses, “Why do you cry to me? Tell the people of Israel to go forward. Lift up your staff, and stretch out your hand over the sea and divide it, that the people of Israel may go through the sea on dry ground. – Exodus 14:15-16 The Israelites had just left Egypt. The Bible says that they “ran away” from their Egyptian slave masters. Upon figuring out that the Israelites were not coming back and the slave labor force was now nonexistent, Pharaoh got 600 chariots and started the pursuit of escaped slaves across Egypt cornered them against the Red Sea. The Israelites, in fear and in desperation, cried out to God and blamed Moses for leading them into calamity. They would rather live as a slave, than die fighting for a chance at their freedom. This is a place most of us know all too well. We would rather be slave and be miserable, hating the rest of our long pathetic lives rather than take a shot and do something we find worthwhile. The Israelites wailed and became petrified despite seeing how far God took them out of Egypt. Then God says something funny, “Why do you cry to me? Tell the people of Israel to go forward.” Isn’t it obvious? They are crying because they don’t know what to do. They don’t see the potential escape. They can’t figure out what to do because they’re panicking and they only see death and demise! God then asks “why do you cry to me?” like He doesn’t know! He does know why they’re crying. God knows why we cry out to Him. But His answer is not, “sit tight and watch what I will do.” His answer is, “go forward!” There’s a reason God tells His people to go forward and it’s not to push them into a type of blind faith. This isn’t the occasion for that. God tells His people to go forward because He had already provided the tools for the solution and placed them within their grasp. You see God had already given them His power. God gave them power through Moses staff in this instance. The same staff that showed God’s power in Egypt was going to be the conduit for God’s power in this circumstance. They already had the answer, they just needed to creatively apply it. In the end, God told them what to do with the tools that they had, but it was up to them to actually do it. This same concept applies to us today. We are God’s people and He has already equipped us with the tools to face life’s most challenging circumstances. Unfortunately, we would rather cry to God about delivering us instead of finding the tools, skills and knowledge God had already given us and apply it. The question then becomes, if this is how we intend to live out a life of faith– what faith do we have when we’re not bothering to apply that which we know we already received in faith in terms of gifts from God? We have an imperative from God to go forward despite the circumstances. You have the tools from God to go forward, are you still crying to God, shaking without life or are you creatively applying His power already present in your life to watch miracles unfold? It’s time for us all to go forward.