When I was young, I was great at pretending. Maybe you were too. I could see myself as a princess, decked out in the finest royal robes, or as a great deliverer, like Joan of Arc, coming to the aid of the oppressed. What happens to our imagination as we grow older? We use it to picture the worst things that could happen. It becomes filled with negativity about what we don’t want to see in our lives because we have been beaten down by circumstances, afraid to get our hopes up.
I don’t believe God created us with an imagination so that we could use it to worry! Man is His unique creation, with the ability to picture a different circumstance than what he now finds himself in. It's time to consider how to use our imagination for its God-given purposes.
One place we can use our imagination is regarding what the word of God says about us. The promises of God may seem so far from our experience. How do they become real? It starts in our imagination. We can see ourselves the way God has declared us to be, and at first it may seem as though we are pretending, even as we did as children. It's OK to be like a child! Jesus told us to humble ourselves like little children if we wanted to experience God's kingdom. In obedience to Jesus’ command, we can humbly say, “What God's word says about me is the truth, so that’s what I can imagine I am.”
I don’t believe that Joshua, after learning about the death of the venerated leader Moses, felt equipped to fill the great prophet's shoes. Even this impressive leader was not able to bring the Israelites into the Promised Land; so who was Joshua to do so? God saw him as well able to accomplish the task:
“No man shall be able to stand before you all the days of your life; as I was with Moses, so I will be with you. I will not leave you nor forsake you. Be strong and of good courage, for to this people you shall divide as an inheritance the land which I swore to their fathers to give them.” (Joshua 1:5-6)
I have to believe there was a gap between how God saw Joshua and how Joshua saw Joshua. It was going to take Joshua’s imagination to start to fill that gap. He had to accept God’s view of him, allow it to begin filling his mind and heart, which would then allow him to begin acting as the great leader God had created him to be.
God gave Joshua (and us) the key to keeping the correct vision of himself within his imagination: “Only be strong and very courageous, that you may observe to do according to all the law which Moses My servant commanded you; do not turn from it to the right or to the left, that you may prosper wherever you go.” (Joshua 1:7)
We have to observe to do whatever God has said in order to experience God's success and "prosper wherever we go." It's not a strain or impossibility to be able to obey God, but the key is in meditating on what He has said and seeing ourselves doing it.
It’s God's will that picture ourselves as being who God says that we are! There is nothing dishonest about obeying God's word. In fact, we can "pretend" that what seems unreal to us from God's word is very truth -- because it is.
