On 20th August 1860, Robert O’Hara Burke left
Melbourne with 18 others on an expedition to cross Australia from South to
North. The journey was to blaze the trail for a telegraph line to link the burgeoning
new city of Melbourne with the rest of the world. It was an ambitious,
visionary quest. But there was one problem: Burke had zero experience in
exploration.

Not surprisingly, the whole expedition
was plagued with almost farcical tragedies. Their preparations were a joke. For
food, they took dried meat instead of live cattle, which created three extra
wagonloads. On other wagons, they brought such essentials as cedar and oak
dinner tables and chairs, rockets, flags, a Chinese gong, a large bathtub, twelve
sets of dandruff brushes, and (allegedly) four enema kits. When they got
partway to Cooper Creek, they dumped most of the gear and food and left most of
the men with it all. But Burke, along with his second-in-command William John Wills
and two others, soldiered on—with not enough food, and still not much of an idea
about what they were doing. Amazingly, they made it to the Gulf of Carpentaria.
But on the way back, they were plagued by monsoon rains. They had to shoot and
eat their horse. When they arrived back at Cooper Creek, they discovered that
the remaining men had left just hours before. And not long after, by the end of
June 1861, Burke and Wills were both dead.[1]
Still, their monumentally tragic trip has gone down in history as a touchstone
of Aussie bravery and battling against the odds.

Booth (1873). The Return of Burke and Wills to Cooper’s Creek (Public Domain)

Is this how we’re supposed to live our
Christian lives? In other words, is the Christian life all about setting
outrageous and ambitious goals to glorify God, then setting off into the spiritual
wilderness, assuming it’ll all be right in the end, because we have God on our
side and we just need to have faith that he will make our plans all work out
fine in the end? Putting it that way sounds a little crazy, doesn’t it? But sometimes
we can act a little like that is the way to live the Christian life. We can
live our Christian life—walk our Christian walk—with big goals, but without
thinking properly about how we’re going to achieve the goals, what it’s going
to cost, and how we might need to prepare and plan for the long haul. Is this
really what God wants us to do?

Of course, it’s not wrong to have big
goals for our Christian walk. Paul spells out some pretty huge aspirations in
his letter to the Ephesians. He urges
believers to “become imitators of God” (Ephesians 5:1), to “walk in love”,
imitating Christ’s costly sacrifice for others (Ephesians 5:2), and to “walk as children
of light” (Ephesians 5:8), so that Christ shines
through us and transforms the darkness. Paul has big ambitions for the
Christian walk, and it’s right for us to consider how these aspirations should play
out in our own lives. It’s good to have ambitious goals for ourselves. But as
we do, we mustn’t be naïve or unprepared. Because Paul doesn’t just lay out big
ambitions and leave it there. In Ephesians 5:15–17, Paul goes on to tell his
readers:

Watch carefully, then, how you walk, not as unwise but as wise people, reclaiming the time, because the days are evil. So don’t be foolish, but grasp what the Lord’s will is.