I remember watching a DVD of the Mormon anthem, Come, Come Ye Saints, in which the Mormon pioneers were shown in a series of covered wagon caravans moving from Missouri out to Utah. In one scene, a covered wagon tipped over in a river and the wife of one pilgrim and her two boys had to join another caravan. The concluding scene showed a joyful reunion with their father as the Mormon Tabernacle Choir sang the strains. The way, or that way was the term the early apostles described our spiritual journey, spiritual pilgrimage, or perhaps our wilderness wanderings. I replied that although we all seemed to end up in different campsites, we are all travelling the same spiritual journey and that if we travel into one another's campsite, we should make sure that we make one another welcome. In our current state of splintership or perhaps, I should say bobbing around in life rafts we should keep our docking mechanisms in good shape, offering help to lost fellow travelers whether they stay with us 24 hours, 2 years, or 10 years. Having lived in the Big Sandy area, I can assure you that floating has always taken place ever since the Church of God was blown apart. We cannot go into the mindset of our brothers and sisters who are with us on this journey, probing their comfort levels or motivations. Let us take comfort in the fact that the Lord knows who are His, and who the tares are. Remembering that Jesus washed Judas Iscariot's feet, we need to be kind even to those we suspect as tares. We should regard the Bible (inspired and designed by God Almighty) as more accurate and trustworthy for our spiritual pilgrimage than any GPS devised by man. God's Word illuminates the path of our lives. If we keep God's Word shining along the way, then we will be far less likely to trip. We will not be easily deceived. Because we are following the light, we will see what the light reveals in the path ahead of us. It is only when we turn the light off (before we have actually arrived at our destination) that something could spring up in the dark and trip us. Therefore, if we keep the light of God's truth shining brightly ahead of us, then we have a greater chance of avoiding deception. As we continue on our spiritual journey through a trackless wilderness, we need to learn that the process of sanctification could be described as a process of reinforcing positive spiritual habit patterns through making life choices and then interpreting the consequences of these life choices. If we look up over the sun, updating our maps and satellites through continuous prayer, study, and meditation, God promises us that He will put His Laws into the midst of our nervous systems leading us right into the promised land.

Mostly, its topic is in regard to God's judgments made during the course of Israel's pilgrimage after being freed from their bondage in Egypt. God made a great number of judgments during those forty years of journeying of the Israelites in the wilderness. Literally, thousands of Israelites died as a result of their stubborn forgetfulness, their faithlessness to God's commands, their careless self-centeredness, and their lack of gratitude. Their conduct is in full display in the Bible's pages. How quickly they overlooked that they were freed from slavery! And despite being out in the wilderness and on their way to the Promised Land, their physical needs like food and water and other things were obviously miraculously supplied nonstop every day forty years worth. That is incredible! And yet their almost nonstop complaining also rarely stopped. I do not want to treat the hardships that God put them through on occasions to have not been worth all the efforts because forty years in those circumstances was not like a Sunday afternoon walk in a local park. Despite having lived through the hardships of their bondage, it still was not easy for those hardy people to live huge sections of their lives never dreaming that their liberty from bondage would never be spent experiencing living like they were having to do. Salvation does not come cheap. Jesus' investment alone is priceless. But we have to invest our lives in it as His subjects in order to experience what the speech was about. This portion of this message covers an overview of some of God's judgments of Israel during the 40 years in the wilderness. It is not a detailed covering of them, but is intended as a reminder of the few principles important to us at this time. And I think it is very interesting that He preserved the incidents that He did for all time in the Bible. Remember they were out there for 40 years. How many judgments did He make that were not recorded by Moses and put into the the books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy? There were an awful lot of them. But He chose five particular sins out of the 40-year wilderness journey. I know when I was putting this particular sermon together, I got to thinking, Why these five? Why not the other five? Maybe He saved them (of course They saved, preserved, the Bible right on through all this time) because these are sins that the Israelitish people might be subject to, because we follow into them quite easily. These are five specific sins He saved from the wilderness journey, and what His judgments were regarding what those people did, complained about. The times that we are living in within these nations, the United States and Britain, combines two elements important to our lives under God. One we touched on in an earlier message (that was a sermon or two ago). It is that whether we realize it or not, we are a people on the move. We are on the move with our lives within God's creative program, as the Israelites were on the move in the wilderness trip. And as we learned towards the beginning of that previous sermon, we are on a journey to a holy place. We are going somewhere toward a very definite location, destination, and pointed to that destination by God Himself. In fact, that might be the very reason He called us at this time. In one sense, we had no choice in the matter because God chose us before we chose Him. And like the Israelites, we do not even know the specific route that we are to follow. As a simple overview of what God chose us to do is, first of all, overall, is to be a follower of Jesus Christ and to prepare for the Kingdom of God regardless of where we are or the circumstance we are in. The second element has to do with gaining experiences within the subject of judging. One of the major things that God is teaching us. Kings and priests judge. I mean, it is that simple. That is what we are headed for in a position in the Kingdom of God. And so we are traveling to a holy place and that holy