The following is a sample chapter from my recently published book entitled,
Wanted: Workers for the Work of God: Prepare to be Sent. A Renewed Call for Apostolic Ministry.
Those who have heard and responded to the call will have travelled through their own wilderness experience and may have done so more than once throughout their preparation. It is a vital leg of the journey.
Many have forsaken this way because of the unknown and the glaring cost. Some have started and ventured so far, only to turn back to the comforts of the familiar. However, for those who have courageously forged on, the wilderness and its lonely trails have produced a far richer reward on the other side.
You shall remember all the way which the LORD your God has led you in the wilderness these forty years, that He might humble you, testing you, to know what was in your heart, whether you would keep His commandments or not. (Deuteronomy 8:2 NASB)
What value does the wilderness hold for us? Why would we want to go there in the first place? The simple answer is the Master entered the wilderness, and we are not greater than He. We will follow in His footsteps if we belong to Him. Furthermore, the wilderness experience is inseparably connected to God’s eternal purpose.
Recall Jesus, when after His baptism, Scripture says the Spirit led Him into the wilderness (Matthew 4:1). In the wilderness of testing, Jesus walked alone. He had no companions to walk out this scrutinising trial with Him, this fiery crucible. As the Son of Man, this tested everything in Him. He did, however, have the Holy Spirit, who was the One who intentionally led Him into the wilderness. Wherever the Spirit leads, there can only ever be tremendous blessings, right?
For the Israelites enslaved in Egypt, God used Moses to lead them out of their bondage and into the wilderness on their way to the promised land (Exodus 13:17-18). God promised Israel a land flowing with milk and honey. If this was a sign of the new promised land’s blessing for them and all the generations afterwards, then who wouldn’t travel through a little bit of wilderness to get there?
And let’s not forget those taken away into captivity to Babylon. After 70 years, Cyrus, moved by God, released them to return and rebuild the temple (Ezra 1:1-2). The ones travelling back to Jerusalem from Babylon were heading back to God’s own house, His home, where He intended to dwell with His people. Now, who wouldn’t want to live there?
The stories of Israel’s two wilderness journeys reveal several key lessons. They are hugely indispensable for any wanting to see God’s kingdom established and have a significant bearing on those who will eventually be called to His work.
God initiated and orchestrated the Israelites’ journey through the wilderness on both occasions. This reveals our first key learning: We cannot take ourselves into the wilderness.
God takes us there; only He can open that door (Revelation 3:7). He leads us into the wilderness, and we take the trek with Him because hope for something greater has entered our hearts. We have begun to see God’s higher and superior way, Christ and God’s eternal purpose in Him, the true Promised Land.
A stark and shocking realisation can often result after such a revelation. The fact that we have spent years or even decades of our lives in a religious system that was anything but God’s best can be devastating for some. Walking through this painful phase is a necessary part of our wilderness journey.
Remember Paul’s three days of blindness before the scales fell from his eyes? One can only imagine the shock and grief he must have experienced when he realised the One he loved and served all his life was the very One he had been persecuting. Those three days of blindness would have been dark indeed.
Our wilderness experience can equally begin in utter shock and grief, yet strangely mingled with a great sense of joy and expectation. This joy arises from seeing that God has something far more magnificent in mind than what we have previously known.
What Happens in the Wilderness?
Let us not lose sight of the fact that the Holy Ground of Mount Sinai, the place of God’s revelation and Moses’ commission, was located in the wilderness not the Promised Land! (Exodus 3 & 4). Yet we act like the ‘wilderness’ is a God-forsaken place reserved for backsliders and those who miss the will of God – and accordingly, we can’t get out of there quick enough! NO! The ‘wilderness’ is a place where revelations are given and commissions are received; where miracles take place and character is formed; where God turns our ‘shepherd’s staff’ into His ‘Rod of Power’.- Bruce Reekie
The wilderness is a transitional phase in which God moves us from one spiritual state to another. This is another key learning: He takes us onward and upward into higher places. In this process, He unloads a lot of baggage from our lives, both worldly and religious. The wilderness strips, removes, scrubs, and unshackles us from religious weights, exposing our expectations of God, others and man-made institutions. When faced with the heat of the desert trial, we can no longer use the religious props we have constructed to support our faith. This can be a little unnerving or downright devastating, but it is all very intentional on God’s part.
In the wilderness, our theology of God and self are sorely tested. Our self-conceptions and self-efforts to be a ‘good Christian’ are also exposed to the broad light of day. Who we really are becomes apparent when in the wilderness. What we claim to be, who we think we are, and what we think we know are all unravelled in that barren place. These and many other false positions come crashing down in a wilderness experience, bringing a much-needed reality and honesty check on many fronts.
‘Well, all that doesn’t sound like much of a blessing to me’, you might say. This, however, is all part of the cost of knowing our Lord in deeper and broader ways. Humans are adept at self-belief, having self-confidence and trust in our piety and purity. This is the religious self. After a time in the wilderness, we understand we are not as spiritual as we first thought. This is God’s love and mercy towards us.
Most, if not all, venture into the wilderness because of a deepening dissatisfaction with the spiritual routines of the modern Christian life. We start to feel there must be more to this life than what we experience in a Sunday morning service. Our eyes open to the humdrum of religious routine. However, many begin to question whether they should be thinking this way, potentially disturbing the status quo, instead of keeping things the way they are, ‘keeping the faith’, you know. Besides, it’s how we do things in church, right? This routine is safe. Doing the same thing week in, week out. The same stuff each month, each year, year on year. Right?
More often than not, if we seek to go deeper with God, this disquiet and dissatisfaction will be the first sign that the Lord is calling us on, drawing us out of our current situation to take us further with Him.
When Israel was a youth I loved him, And out of Egypt I called My son. (Hosea 11:1 NASB)
God does both the bringing out and the bringing in. God brought Israel out of Egypt to bring them into the land. He also brought Israel out of Babylon to bring them back to Jerusalem. This is another key learning: God leads us out so He might lead us in.
He brought us out from there in order to bring us in, to give us the land which He had sworn to our fathers. (Deuteronomy 6:23 NASB)
God is like the mother eagle who stirs up the nest, so the fledglings are no longer comfortable there. She removes all the soft down and other materials that had kept the chicks warm and comfortable, only now to expose the sharp, broken sticks with which the nest is built. She does this to stir up the young eaglets to entice them to a higher life and to live as she lives. She brings them out of the nest so the eaglets discover their true identity experientially; no longer nest dwellers but lofty eagles – ones living the ascendant life.
God uses the same process to move us beyond the comforts of familiar environments to stimulate our faith, desire and trust so we can soar with Him.
God called Israel out of the environments that were man-made. Egypt is a type of the world system; its governments, values, practices and ways of living represent bondage, or the house of slavery (Exodus 20:2). Babylon represents the religious system set up by the Jewish people, where they established the synagogue for the first time, which was not authorised by God as the means for serving and worshipping Him.
Both were systems independent of God and opposed Him and His ways. They were a vacuum to true freedom. It is worth noting that Babylon also means confusion (Genesis 11:7).
If we are serious about following God, He will inevitably lead us out of the world and the religious system. However, His desire is to lead us through the wilderness, not for us to remain and die there. He has higher things in mind.
Shadows and types in the Bible are like pictures of spiritual realities. The promised land is the most considerable shadow and type in the Old Testament. The land contained abounding natural resources, minerals, and various elements like gold, silver, copper, and iron, as well as abundant food sources. Scripture depicted it as a land flowing with milk and honey, shadowing Christ’s abounding life. In contrast, the wilderness was a desert flowing with bread and water!
The Lord will meet our needs by sustaining us with Himself in the wilderness, but only until we get to the promised land. The wilderness diet was temporary; it was never designed to sustain a desert lifestyle. When the Israelites first tasted the produce of the land, the supply of wilderness manna ceased.
The manna ceased on the day after they had eaten some of the produce of the land, so that the sons of Israel no longer had manna, but they ate some of the yield of the land of Canaan during that year. (Joshua 5:12 NASB)
In the same way, the Christ we experience in the wilderness will no longer sustain us (Exodus 16). Everything about the wilderness is transitional. We can get stuck there if we are unwilling to keep moving. It will cost us to get into the wilderness and to get out. What are we willing to pay to see the Lord get what He is after?
In the wilderness, the God you thought you knew will become the God you’re now getting to know! The wilderness challenges our perception of God. This is another key learning: Our Lord is always moving on and wants to take us with Him if we will go. We will either go on and learn Christ in new and more profound ways, or we will hold on to what we have gathered, as the Israelites did with the manna (Exodus 16:19-20). What we have known before the wilderness is insufficient for what’s ahead.
There is a TV Drama by Paramount called 1883. It is a loose historical depiction based on the American Westward expansion that peaked in the 1880s. At that time, America was experiencing significant prosperity. Located north of the landmass that America acquired through the Louisiana Purchase, many viewed Montana as a bountiful promised land, far from the violence and turmoil that plagued the rest of the nation.
German emigration to America began in the early 1600s and continued until the late 1800s. Despite the dangers, Germans escaping war and persecution in Europe sought greater opportunities on the American frontier. Travelling through the wilderness to reach the ‘promised land’ of Montana meant facing many dangers, hardships and trials. Yet they endured, determined to settle upon the fairer and greener pastures of the new land. Tragically, many died along the way, but the few who survived were rewarded. An insatiable hunger and an unquenchable thirst for a better life drove their pioneering spirit.
Those seeking what God is after will need the same kind of spirit that drove those early pioneers. God’s eternal dream is to dwell in His own house, built on His land (Christ), along with His sons and daughters, to enjoy its wide open spaces. Do you want to reach that promised land? These historical pioneers of the Old West gave everything, even their lives, for something far less. It comes down to our hunger and thirst, our desperation.
We can only take others as far as we have gone ourselves. There is always more to this Christ, more than what our church traditions have given us. In our wilderness experience, the Lord will bring new life. He will turn our dry ground into springs of fresh water. He will feed us with bread from heavenly places and lead us by day and by night. He will always keep us. He will eventually lead us out of the wilderness and into the breathtaking vistas of the promised land – but only if we are willing to pay the price.
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