The Israelites are stuck. They’re at a mountain. No doubt, many of us feel this way or have felt this way at some time or another. Stuck in the same place we’ve been, with limited to no progress. The Israelites appeared to be stuck. They had been in Horeb for about a year — in the same place for an entire year. And what makes matters even more discouraging is that what God promised them was on the other side of the mountain. Can you imagine how frustrating this must have been for them? To know where they were “supposed” to be, but to be camped out on the other side? To know what God said, but for that not to be what you see? To have a mountain, obstacle, or hindrance blocking your view? But see, many times we convince ourselves that we’re stuck because of something else; when the truth is, we’ve chosen to be stuck. We’ve become complacent and comfortable. We’ve turned a momentary situation into forever, when it was never meant to be forever.

Have you ever faced a time where things didn’t go how you expected? Have you ever had a plan, but nothing went how you planned it? In those moments, it’s difficult to see how our wrecked plans could ever be a good thing. In Luke 24, Mary and Mary expected to pay their respects to Jesus in the tomb where He had been laid. They expected Jesus to still be dead. They expected the tomb to be closed. Instead — the tomb was open, and Jesus was gone. But as they found out — when Jesus is involved, what looks bad becomes good.

Palm Sunday teaches us that God doesn’t always show up in our lives the way that we expected Him to. And while it’s easy to say we understand that, it’s difficult to live out. We all have expectations of how we want Jesus to show up in our lives and what we are believing for Him to do. The tension comes when He doesn’t do it how we wanted. In those moments, we often begin to doubt and reject what God is doing. We begin to question and quit on God’s plan and purpose simply because we don’t understand it. What we must remember is this: God never said we had to understand everything in the beginning, He just promised it will be revealed to us in His time.

For the most part, we acknowledge that God has the ability to use us in significant ways, even though we may have a flawed past before knowing Him. However, what happens when we make mistakes after deciding to follow Him? We often feel like our present imperfections, rather than our actions before following Jesus, disqualify us. We may start to doubt that God can still use us after we've "messed it up." Nonetheless, God isn't restricted to only empowering us once; He can continue to do so over and over again. Just as He did it before, He can do it again.

When it comes to being used by God or having a purpose, we expect it to go perfectly. God is perfect; so if we’re following Him, we think our lives will be perfect. Then, once things go differently than we thought they would, we begin to doubt God’s ability to use us. Once we fail, make a mistake, end up in a different direction than we thought — we view our purpose as over. However, God never said that our lives had to flow smoothly to be used by Him (just look at Moses, David, Abraham, JESUS). He will still use us, as long as we don’t get stuck and frustrated when things don’t go according to plan. God has a plan; but by the time it’s all said and done, it won’t look perfect.

Rahab was not living what most would call a “morally-pure” life when the Israelite spies met her. In fact, many would claim that disqualified her from being used by God. However, she was the one God used to protect the Israelite spies and help them escape Jericho. Her history didn’t disqualify her as most would think; but rather, it prepared her. You may think that what you’ve done has disqualified you or counted you out from being used by God; but if you’ll flip the perspective, you’ll often find that it prepared you.

The enemy of our lives knows that we are weakest when we’re on our own. Because of this, he tries to keep us from community — to keep us from going through life together. He’ll use betrayal, unforgiveness, jealousy, and whatever else he has to in order to keep us separated from others. However, God’s desire is for us to go through life together. Although it’s tempting to go through life alone, our strength comes from going through it together.

When we hear the stories of David and Saul, we often forget that they weren’t always enemies. David was first a psalmist for Saul. Saul loved David. Saul’s son was David’s best friend. However, comparison, insecurity, and jealousy led to Saul creating an enemy out of David. We, too, must be careful not to do the same thing in our relationships. Many times, we self sabotage our own relationships out of comparison, insecurity, and jealously. We allow relationships to be broken apart by made up enemies.

Love is a word that we through around without much thought. We say we love people, things, and even ideas. But that word carries less and less weight the more than we fail to put actions behind it. Jesus never instructed us to SAY we love one another, He just told us TO love one another. In other words, the love we profess doesn’t matter at all, if it’s not lived out and shown through our actions. It’s not telling people you love them that matters most — it’s showing them.