The following is a sample chapter from my recently published book entitled,
Wanted: Workers for the Work of God: Prepare to be Sent.
Trekking through the wilderness is another vital leg of the journey for a worker in training. Those who have heard and responded to the call must travel through their own wilderness experience and may even do so more than once during their preparation. However, many have forsaken this way because of the glaring cost and the fear of the unknown. 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)
What value does the wilderness hold for us? Why would we want to go there in the first place? It is a place of freedom, discovery and incredible learning! The wilderness experience is an inseparable part of pursuing God’s eternal purpose and must be traversed!
Recall Jesus, who, after His baptism, was led into the wilderness by the Spirit (Matt. 4:1). In this wilderness of testing, Jesus walked alone. He had no companions to walk with Him whilst in this fiery crucible. As the Son of Man, this tested everything in Him. He did, however, have the Holy Spirit, 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 (Exod. 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 that followed, 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). Those travelling back to Jerusalem through the wilderness from Babylon were heading to God’s own house, His home, with the hope that He would once again dwell with His people. Now, who wouldn’t suffer some wilderness experience to live there?
The stories of Israel’s two wilderness journeys reveal four key lessons, indispensable for anyone wanting to see God’s kingdom established by joining Him in His quest. It seems that these lessons are necessary if we want to go on in the Lord, for Him to have His way. On both occasions, God initiated and orchestrated the Israelites’ journey through the wilderness, which reveals our first key lesson:
Lesson #1. We Cannot Take Ourselves into the Wilderness
What takes us into the wilderness? 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 maintaining the way things are, you know…‘keeping the faith’. Besides, it’s how we do things in church, right? This routine is safe, doing the same thing week after week. The same stuff each month, each year, year on year. Right? Yet, 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)
God takes us into the wilderness; only He can open that door (Rev. 3:7). We find ourselves taking the trek with Him because hope for something greater has entered our hearts. We have begun to see God’s higher way, which is all Christ and nothing but Christ, and God’s eternal purpose in Him. Such a revelation will draw most of us into the wilderness, and while there, we may suffer a shocking realisation that challenges almost everything we have known and grown familiar with. 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. Navigating this challenging phase is a necessary part of our spiritual 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 also begin in utter shock and grief, yet be 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 could ever have imagined.
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’.11. Bruce Reekie, Preparing the Way of the Lord (Presence Ministries, 1991), 24.
Bruce Reekie
The wilderness is a transitional phase in which God moves us from one spiritual state to another. Here is another key lesson:
Lesson #2. He Takes us Onward and Upward into Higher Places
The wilderness may not appear to be an onward-and-upward place, but its transformative value is high. Through the wilderness experience, God unloads a great deal of baggage from our lives, both worldly and religious. The wilderness strips, uproots and unshackles us from religious weights, exposing misguided expectations or beliefs concerning God, others and church life as many of us have known it.
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 unnerving or downright devastating, but it is very intentional on God’s part. In the wilderness, our theology of God and self is 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, 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 own piety and purity is nothing short of the religious self. After time in the wilderness, we realise we are not as spiritual as we first thought. This is the outworking of God’s love and mercy towards us.
God does both the bringing out and the bringing in. He brought Israel out of Egypt to bring them into the land, and He also brought them out of Babylon to bring them back to Jerusalem. You cannot live in both Babylon and Jerusalem. This brings us to another key lesson:
Lesson #3. God Leads Us Out So He Might Lead Us In
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 cozy, exposing the sharp, broken sticks that form the nest. She does this to stir up the young eaglets, enticing them toward a higher life and prompting them to begin living as she does. 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, stimulating our faith, desire, and trust so we can soar with Him.
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)
God called Israel out of the man-made environments. Egypt is a type of the world system; its governments, values, practices and ways of living represent bondage, or the house of slavery (Exod. 20:2). Babylon represents the religious system set in place by the Jewish people, where they established the synagogue for the first time as the means for worshipping and serving God. The synagogue, however, was never authorised by God.
Both were systems independent of God and, in many ways, opposed Him and His ways. They were a vacuum to true freedom. It is worth noting that Babylon also means ‘confusion’ (Gen. 11:7). If we are serious about following God, He will inevitably lead us out of the world and the religious system. However, He desires to lead us through the wilderness, not for us to remain and die there. He has higher things in mind.
The end goal of the wilderness for Israel was to lead them to their destination, the promised land. The promised land is the most significant shadow and type in the Old Testament, pointing to Christ and the new creation. The land was rich in natural resources, including minerals and elements such as 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 abundant life. In contrast, the wilderness was a desert flowing with bread and water! The wilderness diet was temporary; it was never designed to maintain permanent residency. When the Israelites first tasted the produce of the promised land, the supply of manna abruptly came to an end. The Lord will meet our needs by sustaining us with Himself in the wilderness, but only until we reach the promised land (John 6:48-50).
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)
In the same way, the Christ we experience in the wilderness will no longer sustain us in the new land (Exod. 16). There, we will need to learn Christ anew. Of course, He is the same Christ; He has not changed, but we have, and He wants to show us more of Himself. Everything about the wilderness is transitional, but we can get stuck there if we are unwilling to keep moving. It will cost us something to enter the wilderness and to exit. What price are we willing to pay to come into the reality of what the Lord has always been after? This brings us to the next key lesson:
Lesson #4. Our Lord is Always Moving on and Wants to Take Us with Him
In the wilderness, the God we thought we knew will become the God we’re now getting to know, because the wilderness challenges our perception of God. 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 (Exod. 16:19-20). But what we have known before while in the wilderness is insufficient for what’s ahead.
There is a TV Drama by Paramount called 1883 that offers a great analogy for this topic. It is a loose historical depiction of the American Westward expansion, which peaked in the 1880s. At that time, America was experiencing significant prosperity. Located north of the landmass that America acquired through the Louisiana Purchase, Montana was viewed by many 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 with His sons and daughters, built on His land (Christ), where all can enjoy the 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. Our willingness to go with God into the wilderness to be transformed there and come out the other side into His promised land will boil down to the degree of our hunger, thirst, and desperation. 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. However, He longs to 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. We can only take others as far as we have gone ourselves.
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