Men and women go to nearly heroic lengths to climb mountains – but why? Learn how God desires us to climb new spiritual mountains, and how by his grace and following biblical principles we can grow to new heights!

<p>Men and women go to nearly heroic lengths to climb mountains – but why? Learn how God desires us to climb new spiritual mountains, and how by his grace and following biblical principles we can grow to new heights!</p>

<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

Dalton SDA Church

Chester Clark

Climbing New Mountains

Well, 36-year-old Adam Potter was training for an attempt to climb Mount Everest.

He and his friends were hiking 1 day in the Scottish Highlands.

And as they were climbing in the Scottish Highlands, they came to a ridge.

They were near the top of this peak and literally they had just stopped to rest for a few minutes when they, Adam said, you know it's getting a little icy, it's getting a little bit hard and crusted here so we better stop and put on our ice shoes.

And he started walking across the slope to a stone that was just a little ways away, about 15 feet away.

And there he was going to sit down and take off his backpack and get his shoes and take his ice axe and so forth off.

Well, as he starts walking towards that boulder, just a few feet away, his feet suddenly slipped and Adam began sliding towards the edge of the precipice.

His ice axe securely tied to the pack behind his back, his ice shoes still tied to his backpack, Adam began clawing and digging and trying to stop his descent, but it was of no use.

He continued as his horrified companions watched to pick up speed until he reached a rocky outcropping at the top of a sheer cliff, and he sailed over it and out of sight.

That was the first of 3 cliffs that Adam would sail over.

The last 1 he was head first, and as he went over the cliff, he thought, this is the end.

Head first, he continued down the mountain until he came to a large stone.

Now his companions on top were horrified, of course, as they watched him disappear.

They called emergency services and there just so happened that a Royal Navy rescue helicopter was on a training mission not too far away.

Usually it would be 100 miles away from its base.

And so that helicopter was diverted over to the area where these men and women were climbing, and they triangulated.

They came to the GPS coordinates which they were given and they began slow hovering down the mountainside from the group up above and when they came down to the bottom, they saw a climber that was standing reading a map and they said, well, that's not who we're looking for.

And they went back up the mountain, but there the group was pointing down the mountain where they just came from, so they went back down the mountain again and followed a trail of debris and clothing and gear from the backpack and pieces of the backpack through each of those 3 steps until they found Adam standing, trying to orient himself to figure out where he was.

Eventually, he had come to a stop, been knocked unconscious by that rock that he hit, but he was winched up into the helicopter and taken to the hospital and the rescuers couldn't believe, since we were looking for a body, They couldn't believe that Adam had gone down that mountain, fallen off of those cliffs, and somehow survived and was talking to them as they flew him to the hospital.

Here he is a couple of days later, A little banged up as you can see, holding the map that the rescuers found him trying to figure out as he was there below the mountain.

He had bangs and bruises and scrapes and cuts, but he still had no intention of not climbing Mount Everest some 3 months later.

You might ask the question, why do people climb mountains anyway?

What is it that gives people the motivation to take such daring risks, to go to such extremes, to just try to stand on top of the mountain.

Here's a climber crossing a crevasse on Mount Everest.

We find that many people are trying to climb mountains on a regular basis and they go to these links just to reach the top.

Why do they do it, we might ask the question.

Why do they go to such lengths just to see such a beautiful view?

I mean, it would take a pretty amazing view for me to climb across that crevasse, I have to say.

I would love to be up there, but I think it's easier just to get your POTS license.

And you can see those views without those terrifying risks of falling and so forth.

But here we ask the question, why do people go to these lengths?

I just want to share with you some of them.

Reaching the top provides a sense of mastery and accomplishment.

There's just something that feels good about looking at a mountain in the beginning of the day or maybe the evening before, because often you have to start early in the morning before the daylight comes out, but looking at that mountain and knowing that tomorrow I'm going to be on top of that mountain, Tomorrow I'm going to conquer that slope.

Tomorrow I'm going to navigate that trail.

Great men and women have gone before me and I'm going to follow in their steps.

There's something about reaching the top of the mountain that gives a new perspective on the world.

As you climb that mountain, the hills around you begin to shrink.

And you know how it is, if you've ever been in the Rockies or if you've ever been in the, you know, the great mountains of the world.

You look at a nearby peak and you think, wow, that looks so high, but as you climb it and you get to the top of that 1, pretty soon you realize that was just a little peak and the big peak's still up there and by the time you go a peak after peak after peak all the way to the very top, those mountains that looked so large at the beginning, they begin looking very small, don't they?

They begin looking so very insignificant.

So, reaching the top makes smaller mountains less imposing.

And by the way, it inspires us to climb even greater mountains.

I don't find very many mountain climbers who said, yeah, I climbed a mountain and then that's enough.

No, once you climb 1 mountain it sort of gets in your blood.

You want to climb more, you want to see more, you want to conquer more.

And so Mountain climbing inspires greater mountain climbing.

It's 1 of those things that I believe it's not always easy to understand unless it's in your blood.

Unless you've experienced it yourself, you wouldn't understand what a mountain climber might have, the purpose they might have in climbing mountains.

But today I'm not here talking about mountaineering, something that I know fairly little about.

I've had a chance to climb on a few mountains and major mountains in the world, but never climbed Mount Everest or anything like that, but I am here to talk about climbing spiritual mountains, right?

Because as we learn in God's Word, as we continue studying God's Word, we begin to see that there are things that God asks us to do that are things we're not used to doing.

Have you ever felt that there were changes in your life that God's word would call you to make that you just don't understand exactly how or how you're going to be able to make those types of changes?

I've felt that way, and I think it's helpful for me at least to be able to say, look, look, is there a way that I can climb these mountains spiritually?

Does God have a plan for me to be able to conquer new heights if I'm growing?

Now there may be different mountains that we have to face in our life at different points in our lives, right?

Some of us have to face the challenge of addictions.

At some point we realize that God is calling us to be set free from the things that would addict us.

In fact, I believe that if something is physically addictive it's not God's will for your life.

Because physically addictive substances tend to weaken our willpower.

We don't want to do it, but we do it anyway.

Even though we know it's not good for us, we're going to do it anyway.

So whether it's alcohol, tobacco, or narcotics, or some other drugs, we find ourselves enslaved to this thing that we don't want.

It's not God's will for us, and yet we don't have power.

You see, I believe God's goal for the human being, for our souls.

God's goal for us is that He would restore us into the image of God that He made us in.

He would restore us to where we can have will powers that are strengthened by His mighty power to be able to accomplish what we know is His will.

And the devil's goal, on the other hand, the devil's goal is to have us so weakened by our habits, by our addictions, that We can't do what we know we should do, that we're enslaved, that we can't conquer what we think we should conquer.

And so God would have us climb new mountains.

Now I don't know what your mountains are.

I don't know what you face in your own life, Whether it's a substance, whether it's an addiction to the internet or to pornography, whether it's an addiction to simply some things, you know, they're sort of sanctified addictions.

Some of us are addicted to judging other people.

People don't see that as such a wrong sin because it doesn't, it sort of flies under the radar, right?

But we can be addicted to gossiping and talking about other people and criticizing.

We might even think that we're better than other people Because we don't do certain things.

No matter who you are, listen to me carefully, beloved, listen to me carefully, no matter who you are this morning, no matter, I'm even talking to myself, if you don't have a mountain that God is calling you to conquer, It's because you're right where the devil wants you.

If you're growing in Jesus, you're going to have something you're struggling against.

Until this mortal shall take on immortality and this corruptible shall put on corruption.

When we're given new bodies and new natures, this fleshly nature is replaced with an unfallen nature.

Until then, we are at war against the flesh.

We have something that The Bible says that we should set aside, lay aside the sins which so easily beset us.

And sometimes I think that verse may be talking about the fact that each and every 1 of us has something that God is calling us to gain victory in.

I don't know what it is for you, but I think that if you're growing in Jesus, if you're wanting to grow in Jesus, if you're asking the Father to let you grow in Jesus, there's going to be something that comes right before you and you realize, you know what?

I hope that that's your experience because we're either growing or we're dead.

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Climbing New Mountains

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