Called to Wander?

But also some of the Jewish exorcists, who went from place to place, attempted to name over those who had the evil spirits that name of the Lord Jesus, saying Acts 19:13

Went From Place To Place – The single Greek word perierchomenon covers the entire thought “wandered from place to place”. Some translations use the word “itinerant” to describe this activity. We wouldn’t think anything unusual about this except for one important fact: this word is never used to describe Jesus’ journey. We need to ask why.

So many times we hear Jesus described as an itinerant prophet. Without thinking about the implications, we accept the fact that Jesus wandered from place to place during His years of ministry. But once we see that the Greek word for wandering is never used of Jesus, the light dawns. Jesus never wandered anywhere. He did not live by the trial and error method. He told us that He only did what the Father told Him to do and He only said what the Father told Him to say. That should have been a clue. Jesus’ decisions were all deliberate. He was a man under authority and He was merely following orders from the Father.

The goal of life is not wandering around until you find the right fit. Wandering is not an appropriate description of a follower in the Way. Wandering implies randomness and confusion. “Should I do this or that?” “Should I go here or there?” Jesus never made a single decision based on the flip of a coin. He learned life’s most important lesson – listening before acting. The secret to successful spiritual living is not doing things. It is hearing God and obeying Him. That’s why the Hebrew word for “hear” is also the word for “obey” (shama). As far as God is concerned, there is no difference between hearing and obeying. Once I hear what God has to say, I am compelled to perform His will.

These days we struggle with the “wandering syndrome”. We have been convinced by two hundred years of theological and scientific tripe that the world is essentially random. We have been seduced into believing that God is stoically silent. We expect to wander. And with that mindset, we have stopped listening before we act. We think that just doing something, anything, is better than waiting for His word because we no longer believe that waiting is what God wants. If God is silent, then the decision is up to us.

What better way to keep you from performing God’s will in your life than to submerge you in the preoccupation of wandering activity, constantly looking for the next clue to God’s will instead of calling a halt to all the trial and error. God speaks to those who wait and listen. All the rest of us drown out the whisper by running around searching for Him.

Wandering or waiting. Which will it be for you? Only one is a spiritual discipline. It’s the harder one, by the way.