Cast Out Many Nations: Complacency

“When the LORD your God brings you into the land which you go to possess, and has cast out many nations before you, the Hittites and the Girgashites and the Amorites and the Canaanites and the Perizzites and the Hivites and the Jebusites, seven nations greater and mightier than you,
and when the LORD your God delivers them over to you, you shall conquer them and utterly destroy them. You shall make no covenant with them nor show mercy to them.
[Deuteronomy 7:1-2 NKJV]

The Girgashites

I must admit that I struggled with this. By that I mean finding the words to express it. ‘Complacency’ is only a part of this ‘nation’ that is stronger than we are and we need a close relationship with The Lord to help us overcome it, for all these ‘nations’ have no intention of releasing us; but The Lord wants to set us free.

Girgashite means 'clay dwellers'. Those who are governed by the things of the earth – who look down to the dust and dirt and see nothing of the heavenly realms, or even if they do know Him, prefer to look down at the ground instead of up to the heavenlies. It begins with compromise - one eye on heaven, the other on earth (double-minded) - until it grows and becomes those of us who are indeed complacent, stuck in our own old ways. Stuck in the clay, and quite happy where we are. No need to ‘come up higher’ or ‘know Him more dearly’.

We know the expression to be a ‘stick-in-the mud’. ‘Stubborn’; ‘unyielding’. In a sense it is unbelief, but more than that, a profession of belief but without the desire to do anything about it. Instead we must sing with the Psalmist ...

He brought me up also out of an horrible pit, out of the miry clay, and set my feet upon a rock, and established my goings..
[Psalm 40:2 KJV]

He takes this clay of ours and fashions it as He would. Our LORD wants us to know Him; be like Him; to know Him as He really is; to be in close relationship with Him, but we cannot be in that place if we persist in our ‘iniquity’; a word that the Bible uses it a lot and means to ‘go our own way’. And if God is going His way, and we are on a different track, neither of us are going to meet up at any time. So He wants to turn us around to follow in His way... but we must let Him.

But now, O LORD, thou art our father; we are the clay, and thou our potter; and we all are the work of thy hand.
[Isaiah 64:8 KJV]

---

“He brought me out of the miry clay” - VBFA Church
[This is not the song The Lord inspired us to put here, but our one is not available on ‘You Tube’. This however is a good substitute and we will try to find a recording of our inspiration song]

---

OSWALD CHAMBERS - RUN TODAY’S RACE
Saturday 13th June 2020
The habit of ejaculatory prayer ought to be the persistent habit of each one of us.

---