From the Wilderness........

A few years ago, my husband Steven and I found ourselves in the midst of a struggle that surprised both of us. After being raised in church and spending our adult, married lives in places of service to the church, we were suddenly faced with an uncomfortable effort to fit in at church and with fellow Christians. The weekly messages began to seem trite and even gimmicky on occasion. Most of the time the church service left us feeling restless and hungry to participate in the exaltation of the Lord. We found ourselves learning and deepening our faith through our own personal pursuits of Bible study and reading everything we could get our hands on concerning the Body of Christ (something that I do not think was God’s intention for His people – more on that in a future post). We began begging God to show us what sin had infested our hearts that would breed such dissatisfaction.

Through those continued personal pursuits mentioned above, God lovingly revealed to us that instead of sin (while we all know there is plenty of it in us) causing our struggle; it was a new desire being born in our hearts to see Jesus high and lifted up and His Bride to take her rightful place at His side; His Body to function with Him as the Head; His House to be built by living stones instead of stones made of mortar and by His blueprint and not man’s; and His Family to truly be united under our basis for fellowship which is Christ alone. We caught a glimpse of the heart of God and nothing else will satisfy our deep longing to see His purpose fulfilled. We must know Christ, and Him crucified.

God has been using these years in much the same way He used the “wilderness” in the lives of the Israelites (although their disbelief extended the experience), the followers of John the Baptist, and even the apostle Paul.

As Frank Viola states in his book From Eternity to Here, “the wilderness has but one goal: to sift us, to reduce us, and to strip us down to Christ alone. Those of us who have left Egypt and Babylon need to be emptied of a great deal of religious baggage. The wilderness experience is designed to do just that. It’s the place of religious detox.”

“Shortly after Paul’s conversion from being a racist, sectarian, self-righteous, bigoted, highly religious Pharisee to a disciple of the Lord Jesus Christ, God led him to an Arabian desert for three years (Gal. 1:17-18). What was he doing there? Detoxing.”

“Undoubtedly, he was allowing years of human religiosity to drain out of his veins. Everything that Paul knew as a zealous Pharisee had bled out of him in the desert. Paul was beyond being reformed. He had to have a spiritual lobotomy. And that’s what the wilderness is for.”

He goes on to say that “there are essentially four ways you can spend your life. You can waste it in Egypt by living for worldly pleasures and material success (all of which are temporal and fleeting). You can waste it in Babylon by living for the growth and success of organized religion. You can waste it in the wilderness by living your life in transition. Or you can spend it on Jesus Christ in a building site in Jerusalem.”

While we both firmly believe our time in the wilderness has been ordained and orchestrated by God in order to bring us up to ground zero and to make us empty wineskins for the Lord to pour his new wine into, we do not wish to remain there forever and thereby waste our new beginning. It’s a detour, not a home.

In our search for home, God has now seen fit to bring us out of the wilderness and into the healing pools of Bethesda. But that is a story for another day. Until then, may we truly be in Christ alone.