“There’s value in the Journey”

by Jason Davis

In my office I have an inspirational picture that my parents bought me when I accepted my first full-time employment after graduating college. On the picture it reads “Success is a journey, not a destination.” Some fourteen years later, and having traveled along my own journey thus far, I am starting to see the wisdom presented to me by this simple phrase. But the success I am thinking about today is not that of earthly success. I am thinking about the spiritual success of a life spent in service to Christ. We all think fondly to the final destination of Heaven and being with Him, but perhaps there is a hidden value in walking with him in the here and now that we should explore.

Walking with the Lord is not an easy task. It requires discipline, commitment, sacrifice of self, and trust in Him. When we examine the life of Christ, it can be seen as a journey from the cradle to the cross. Each step he took, starting with the first unsteady toddler waddles, through to the final anguished steps up Golgotha, were taken with purpose and service in mind. Have you ever considered that Jesus could have come to earth as a grown man? He could have come down and made himself a sacrifice the very same day. But he did not! Why? I believe it is for the sake of the journey.

Early on we see a pattern emerge in God calling men and women to a journey. God’s call of Abram: “Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father’s house, unto a land that I will show thee” (Gen. 12:1). God could have blessed him in his own land. Made a mighty nation of Abram there in the land of Ur, but He did not. Why? Because somewhere in the journey with the Lord Abram, the exalted father, became Abraham, a friend of God. Later in Genesis we read where God, through the family of Jacob, brings His people out of the chosen land and saves them with the wealth of Egypt. Their journey there was facilitated by their brother Joseph, a slave who became ruler by walking with the Lord in all circumstances. In Exodus we witness a group of slaves become a nation through a forty year journey through the desert. A journey that was preceded by God’s spirit manifested both day and night. His presence was with them, and they were changed because of it.

In the New Testament we read about Jesus calling his disciples: “Come. Follow me” he says. For three years he travels, eats, sleeps, laughs, and weeps with them. He teaches them, admonishes them, and prepares them for his departure. The journey with Christ can lead to the Mount of Transfiguration, to the feeding of the multitudes with scraps, to walking on water, and seeing numerous healings and resurrections of the dead! It also means no place to lay your head. No earthly certainty of provision for tomorrow. It certainly means persecution, ridicule, and alienation by friends and family. But it was the journey that made his twelve disciples such effective evangelists when he left them to their task of making “disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit” (Matthew 28:19).

And now it is our turn. The journey is still available. The Lord waits at the door of our life to take that first step down a path that leads where we don’t know. But we can go with Him because we have faith in Him. And that faith is based on “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1). The hope and conviction comes from the testimony of those who have gone before us; those who have trusted in the call to come and follow to a place not known yet. They were men and women who experienced the journey and found success. Not always earthly success, but a greater success: “Be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life” (Revelation 2:10). God alone can give true life, and that life is worth the journey!