As a shepherd of sheep I learned many things that transferred into my life and walk with God. One thing is that sheep need boundaries to feel secure and safe. Within these restrictions placed on them they thrived and experienced happiness and contentment. The reason is simple: they could live life.

We as humans need limits and boundaries as well. We thrive within them and perish without them. These usually fought against limits, provide us with an arena to express ourselves, explore our creativity, and see who we were really made to be. We, by design of the Creator, are created to function with parameters.

As children grow, parents who fail to place supports against their will and uphold a set of limits, it is abuse of children. The child never really develops into his or her true potential. We often feel that restrictions and limits stunt our growth and creativity, squelch our individuality. The opposite is true. Limits define zones of safety. Safety as the guide wire on a trapeze artist gives him space to test the limits, develop fully, shine brightest. The more secure we feel in this zone, the more daring we will be to explore our world and personhood.

Other that Christ Himself, one who exemplifies this to me is John the Baptist. He was a rarity who knew his limits and somehow made friends with them.

John's embrace of God's constrictions didn't confine him
but catapulted him into the heavenlies.

He might have felt like a prisoner in the wilderness, an incomplete man without family or home. Abused by the questioning religious authorities, some who had to have been priests serving with his father Zachariah. Luke 1:5-25 His very own friends and disciples left him for another; "He must be greater, I must be lesser." John 3:30 His clothes, his food, his daily activity, all were confined within what some of us would feel to be abusive limits. His God narrowed the path and he shined on it.

Jesus said of him, "I assure you, of all who have ever lived, none is greater than John the Baptist." Matthew 11:11 He was a pinnacle of the Old Testament prophet and a pivot into a new era. I contend that without his full embrace of limitations, of his God imposed restrictions, he would have just been another voice in the wilderness rather that The Voice of One Calling in the Wilderness, making straight the way for the Eternal Bridegroom. John 1:19-34, 3:22-36

As we view our lives seeing the restrictive walls, the limiting confinements, and the controlling borders do we see them as punitive demands or as a focusing Force to hone, refine, define and liberate us from the superfluous actions that will amount to nothing. Are these limits simply to save us from wasting what we were given? Is it a directing nudge to keep us from making mounds of wood, hay and stubble? Is it the very saving of our destiny for the day of God's accounting? You and He will have to be the judge. But I will defend against myself that I am not imprisoned by boundaries. I am empowered by them.

"From one man He created all the nations throughout the earth. He decided beforehand which should rise and fall and he determined their boundaries."

Acts 17:26 NLT

Deuteronomy 32:8, Psalms 74:17

Copyright ©  John Enslow