Pilgrim Life

By T.M. Moore - Posted at The Fellowship of Ailbe:

Keep your eye on the end of our journey.

Guardian of Time (6)

Blessed is the man whose strength is in You,
Whose heart is set on pilgrimage.
As they pass through the Valley of Baca,
They make it a spring;
The rain also covers it with pools.
They go from strength to strength;
Each one appears before God in Zion. Psalm 84.5-7

The journey of faith

In his sermon, “The Christian Pilgrim,” Jonathan Edwards elaborated the idea of the Christian life as a journey. There is an end to the journey, and they travel most efficiently who keep that end in sight, so as not to become distracted along the way. We are travelers, pilgrims, and we must neither dawdle nor delay in making progress toward the vision of Christ and His Kingdom.

This message of Edwards dovetails nicely with his sermon on “The Preciousness of Time” and provides a framework for thinking about the life of faith that can help us in redeeming the time of our lives.

The idea of the life of faith as a journey has solid Biblical roots, for example, in Psalm 84. In this psalm, the sons of Korah anticipated the preaching of Jonathan Edwards by teaching us how to look at our lives in the Kingdom of God so that we don’t squander our time, but use it as God intends.

The psalm begins with a joyous exclamation concerning the destination of our journey: the courts of the living God (vv. 1, 2). The place where God dwells is exceedingly lovely, so much so that the psalmists’ soul longs and even faints to be there with the Lord in His glory. The vision of that great, eternal destination fills the psalmists with joy and leads them to sing to the Lord with all their strength and to turn even the hardships in their journey to opportunities for growth and progress.

Read more here.