Introduction
The first question every believer must answer is not “What is God’s will for my life?” but “Where am I right now?”
Before you can hear the next instruction, you have to know the coordinates of your present place. The children of Israel did not receive the blueprint for the Promised Land while they were still in Egypt; they received instructions for how to leave Egypt while they were in Egypt. God never speaks to us about a destination without first speaking to us from our location. Your calling does not begin when you arrive somewhere else. It begins the moment you realize where you are.
So let us ask the question honestly: How do I navigate my location?
1. Name Your Egypt
Every significant calling in Scripture begins with an accurate naming of the present bondage.
Moses was in Midian, but he knew he had been born in Egypt. Joseph was in prison, but he never forgot he had been sold into slavery. David was in the wilderness, but he carried the memory of being anointed in Bethlehem. Until you can name the place you are in, you cannot receive directions out of it.
Ask yourself:
- What is the dominant atmosphere around me right now? (fear, confusion, comfort, complacency, grief, betrayal, waiting, fruitfulness, dryness?)
- What role have I been assigned by others that is not the role God assigned me?
- Which relationships, habits, or environments keep reinforcing the old name instead of the new name God has spoken over me?
Write it down. Be brutally specific. “I am in a job that pays my bills but starves my soul.” “I am in a church that celebrates gifts but does not release them.” “I am in a season of waiting that feels like abandonment.” Naming is not complaining; it is orienting. The Holy Spirit cannot navigate you out of a country you refuse to admit you are in.
2. Recognize the Burning That Will Not Consume
Exodus 3 is the classic text for location-navigation. Moses is on the back side of the desert—literally the place you go when every door has closed—when he sees a bush that burns but is not consumed. That is the first sign that God is about to speak to a person’s present location.
The burning bush moments in our lives are the tensions that refuse to go away:
- The marriage that is difficult but will not break.
- The gift that keeps rising in you even though no one makes room for it.
- The holy discontent that wakes you up at 3 a.m.
- The dream that keeps returning after you buried it.
Most of us try to put the fire out. We medicate it with entertainment, numb it with busyness, or explain it away with theology (“God is testing me”). But the fire that will not consume you is the fire God is using to get your attention. Moses turned aside to see why the bush was not burnt. The Hebrew literally says he “turned aside to see this great sight.” Turning aside is the first movement of navigation. You will never hear the voice saying “I AM” until you turn aside from the ordinary explanation of your pain.
3. Remove the Sandals: This Ground Is Holy
God’s second word to Moses is “Take off your shoes.” Why? Because the ground you have been cursing as wilderness is the same ground God has chosen as sanctuary. The place you have called “nowhere” is the place God calls “here.” Holiness is not about the absence of difficulty; it is about the presence of God in the difficulty.
Many of us are trying to run away from our location before we have allowed God to sanctify it. We think, “As soon as I get out of this job, this city, this marriage, this church, then I will serve God.” But God almost never extracts us before He reveals Himself to us. He meets Gideon while he is threshing wheat in a winepress hiding from the Midianites. He meets Jacob while he is running from Esau with nothing but a staff. He meets the woman at the well in the middle of her shame at high noon.
Taking off your sandals means:
- Stop treating your present circumstance as something to escape and start treating it as something to encounter God in.
- Begin to speak to the difficulty instead of about it. (“Lord, what are You saying in this financial shortage? What are You building in me through this closed door?”)
- Refuse to let bitterness rename your location. The wilderness is only wilderness if God is not in it.
4. Receive a New Name for the Same Place
When God truly locates you, He renames both you and your location. Abram becomes Abraham while still living among the Canaanites. Jacob becomes Israel after wrestling all night in the middle of nowhere. Simon becomes Peter on an ordinary fishing day that ended in failure.
Watch what God does with Moses:
- The man who fled Egypt as a murderer is now sent back to Egypt as a deliverer.
- The wilderness that was exile becomes the wilderness that is seminary.
- The staff that was just a tool for tending sheep becomes the rod of God that will split the Red Sea.
Your location does not change; your interpretation of it does. The prison becomes Paul and Silas’s worship center. The belly of the whale becomes Jonah’s prayer closet. The tomb becomes the disciples’ upper room of resurrection power.
Ask God for the new name of your present place. “God, what do You call this season I have been calling ‘delay’?” “What do You call this relationship I have been calling ‘toxic’?” “What do You call this failure I have been calling ‘the end’?” When God renames something, He redeems it.
5. Accept the Assignment That Begins Where Your Feet Are
God never gives a five-year plan at the burning bush. He gives a next step. For Moses, the next step was: “Go back to Egypt and tell Pharaoh to let My people go.” The terrifying thing is that the next step almost always requires you to return to the place you just escaped from. Moses has to go back to the palace where he is a wanted man. Joseph has to interpret dreams for the same butler who forgot him. Jesus has to go back to Nazareth where they said, “Is this not the carpenter’s son?”
Your calling will almost certainly require you to re-engage the place you wanted to forget. The people who hurt you. The church that rejected you. The family that does not understand you. The gift you laid down in discouragement. God is not wasteful. He will use the very ground that bruised you to birth the next thing through you.
6. Learn the Difference Between a Map and a Compass
A map tells you exactly where to go. A compass only tells you which direction is north. God rarely gives maps to people who are being formed for greatness; He gives a compass. Why? Because maps create experts. Compasses create followers.
The compass God gives you in your present location is usually one or more of the following:
- An internal knowing (“I will never be at peace if I don’t obey this.”)
- A scriptural promise that keeps burning in you
- The counsel of godly people who see what you cannot yet see
- A door that no man can shut (and a thousand others that do)
- The peace that comes when you take a step of obedience, even a terrified one
You will rarely feel certainty. You will almost always feel conflict. That is why the compass is more reliable than the map. Certainty belongs to people who already know where they are going. Faith belongs to people who are willing to move when they only know Who they are following.
7. Refuse to Move Until the Cloud Moves
There is a peculiar cruelty in spiritual impatience: we leave the place God is speaking because we are tired of the way He is speaking. The Israelites learned the hard way that moving without the cloud is more dangerous than staying in the wilderness with the cloud.
Sometimes the most spiritual thing you can do is stay exactly where you are and keep listening. Ruth stayed in Bethlehem when it made no sense. Elijah stayed by the brook Cherith until it dried up. Jesus stayed in Nazareth thirty years before one public day.
Staying is not stagnation when God is the one who told you to stay. The cloud is not always moving forward; sometimes it hovers so you can be healed, delivered, instructed, or simply loved in your present location.
8. Carry the Testimony of Your Location Into Your Destination
When Israel finally crossed the Jordan, they were commanded to take twelve stones from the middle of the river and set them up as a memorial. Why? Because the generation that entered the Promised Land needed to remember that their parents met God in the wilderness. The place you are leaving is the place that taught you the character of God.
Never despise your Egypt. Never be ashamed of your prison. Never apologize for your wilderness. The location you are navigating right now is writing the testimony you will carry for the rest of your life. One day you will stand in your promised land and tell a generation that has never known bondage, “I met God when the brook dried up. I heard His voice when the bush was burning. I learned His name when I had nothing left but His name.”
Conclusion: The God Who Is Here
The great lie the enemy tells us in difficult locations is that God is somewhere else. He is in the next job, the next relationship, the next ministry opportunity, the next season. But the burning bush declares the opposite: the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is the God who is here. Right here in your cubicle. Right here in your hospital room. Right here in your singleness. Right here in your failure.
So stop trying to get out before you have let God get in. Stop trying to arrive before you have learned to abide. The same voice that spoke the world into existence is whispering over your present chaos, “I AM HERE.”
Take off your shoes.
The ground you are standing on is not cursed.
It is consecrated.
And the God who located you here has already calculated how this very place will launch you into everything He has spoken.
You are not lost.
You are being located.
And once you know where you are, the next word you hear will be:
“Now go.”
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