The Wilderness

Today I’d like to talk to you about one of the most difficult and yet also most rewarding seasons of human life: the wilderness.

Many of you have experienced this season - probably more than once - but you may not have known exactly what it was. More importantly, you may not have realized what its purpose was. So I’d like to clear that up today so that those of you who have been through - or maybe are currently going through - this difficult season can have hope that it was for a reason and it will all be worth it in the end.

What Is the Wilderness?

The wilderness season has a few characteristics that, when combined, differentiate it from any other season of your life.

The Wilderness Is Difficult

The wilderness season is never easy, and that’s part of the point. The obstacles and hardships that we face in the wilderness season often grind us to the bone and bring us to rock bottom. We come to the end of ourselves and realize that we have nothing left to stand on, not even our own two legs.

Everyone’s time in the wilderness is different, and it is always a very personal experience. For some people, this may look like losing everything financially. For others it may be the implosion of a marriage, the inability to continue denying an addiction, a hopeless diagnosis, or the consequences of a crime.

In my own life one of my first major and most life-changing wilderness seasons occurred when someone I loved very much died suddenly. We had grown up together, his family was like my second family, and he had always been a faithful friend. His support and counsel had become invaluable to me, and he understood me in ways no one else ever had. Even if love hadn’t been a factor in my thinking - although it was - there was no future I could possibly imagine in which he wasn’t there to offer me advice, direction, and reassurance.

Then one night he was just gone, forever, and all my hopes went with him. Not a single plan I’d made for my future was still valid. It was worse than a blank slate - it was like the canvas I’d been sketching on had just been ripped away from me before I’d even finished mixing up the paint.

The Wilderness Strips Away All Pretense

Things become so difficult during the wilderness that you no longer see the point in lying just to please others. In the good seasons, you may not find it hard to trust in God or have faith in the inherent goodness of humanity. But in the wilderness everything that you believe is tested - and it becomes impossible to continue believing something unless you see the proof of it.

For many people, this comes in the form of horrendous betrayal or a terrible letdown. This may be the moment when the chronically-ill patient can no longer praise God because He has had every chance to heal but hasn’t yet, or when the parents who did everything right are forced to mourn the early death of one of their beloved children. How can God be good? How can we believe Him when the true reality is harrowing like this?

In my case, I stopped lying to God, and I stopped caring what other people thought.

I had been raised by Christian parents and had a pretty heavy reverence for God. I didn’t ever want to think or say something negative about Him. After all, He was God. He knew what He was doing, right? But when my friend died, I was sure that God had made some kind of terrible mistake. It was too soon. We had had plans together. Surely God would raise him from the dead and fix this error that had somehow slipped through His fingers, right?

He didn’t.

I fell into a kind of passive suicidalness. I didn’t want to kill myself outright, but I did want to see God face to face and ask Him why on earth He let this happen when He could have stopped it or undone it, and if dying was the only way to meet with God, then so be it. But since I didn’t want to accept the guilt of having killed myself, I figured I would just stop trying to prevent death instead of actively pursuing it. I got pretty good at fast, overly-assertive driving, but it was really just because in my rebellion I was daring God: “Well, if it’s okay for him to die, then it must be okay for me to die, too! And if You really don’t want me to die, then You’re gonna have to prove it!”

God already knew that all these feelings towards Him were lurking in my heart, but going through the wilderness exposed them and made me aware of them. I was finally willing to be honest with Him and tell Him what I really thought. I could no longer live by what other people had told me about Him. I had no choice but to live based on my own experience.

And I stopped pretending to be happy around other people. It was a waste of time. My dear friend was dead, my future had been ripped away from me, and I was going to cry if I wanted to.

I used to feel responsible for other people’s happiness. I used to feel like I had to be happy all the time and other people always worried the moment I showed any hint of feeling anything but joy, or of not feeling anything at all. But I no longer cared. So what if people thought I was emotionally unstable? Wouldn’t there be something worse wrong with me if I didn’t feel sad when my friend died?

The Wilderness Is Lonely

In the wilderness, everyone you thought that you could trust or count on disappears. Their departure may come in many forms: death, distance, betrayal.

I already lost one of my best friends to sudden death, but I lost another one in the months afterwards because I was still grieving past the time that other people thought I should have gotten over everything.

If there’s anything I’ve learned about friendship, it’s that true friends try their best to be supportive for a time, but they are only human, and eventually they’ll reach their limit. This is not their fault - we are meant to share each other’s burdens, but we were never meant to fully carry them. It is unfair for me to expect my friends on earth to carry something only God is strong enough to carry.

All of you, at some point or another, will probably experience a similar situation when your earthly relationships will bottom out and even people who meant well will fade out of your life or be unable to give you what you need.

The Wilderness Is Transformative

All this sounds incredibly depressing, right? But there is a silver lining.

After the harrowing trials of the wilderness, you will never be the same. The wilderness profoundly changes you and you emerge a different person than you were when you went in.

But so what? Why should you care when you’re in the midst of so much suffering?

Let me tell you why.

The Purpose of the Wilderness

The wilderness is not a pointless season. Jesus says that unless a seed falls to the ground and dies, it will remain alone and be unable to produce fruit (John 12:24). God loves you very much, and He refuses to let you live an empty, “happy” life. He knows the plans He has for you, and they are infinitely better than anything you can imagine. But even if you didn’t care about all that, care about this:

All your suffering will be WORTH IT.

Even Jesus, Who set a perfect example for us here on earth by dying on a cross in obedience to His father, did it for the joy set before Him. He knew He would receive a reward for all His suffering, and He knew that it was worth it.

We, too, will receive something far greater than we can imagine, but nothing good is really free. The best things have a high cost. We are fortunate in that Jesus Christ already paid the highest price for us so we can reap the greatest blessing. But if we want true satisfaction, there is only one Way, and it is narrow.

The wilderness strips away everything we thought we believed and leaves us only with what we really believe.

It offers us the chance to recognize the huge discrepancy between who we think we are and who we really are. And, because it seems like every other person has abandoned us, we are finally faced with the fact that no one can save us but God.

This season of harrowing trials and suffering is actually a blessing, because God is giving us the chance to recognize our need for Him, get honest with Him, and let Him fix the problems we otherwise never would have recognized we had inside of us.

Once we see things as they are—the good, the the bad, the ugly, and everything in between—we can allow God to heal us unflinchingly.

It also deepens our relationship with Him because we realize that He really is the only One Who will not leave us. We come to a place where we realize that His ways are best and He is absolutely trustworthy and faithful. We see at last that even though we cannot always understand His ways they are still perfect and they benefit us.

In my own life, the season of hardship following my good friend’s death was also the season where I finally came into myself and God made me alive. Before he died, I was too timid even to acknowledge what I liked or didn’t like. When I was around other people I felt obligated to produce some kind of happiness for them. I had grown accustomed to the lie that everything other people thought or said was absolutely valid and everything I thought or said must therefore be inferior if it was different.

But after my friend died I realized how pointless it is to live your life attempting to please others. I felt like nothing mattered anymore so I wasn’t going to waste my time living a lie. But the result was not a terrible thing like I thought it would turn out to be. I ended up doing things I never would have done before. I started learning who I was and what I liked. I started making changes in my life that made me a better person. I started realizing that I was a valid person, too, and it was not my job to erase myself in order to make others happy.

But best of all I started loving God with all my heart. Before I had been holding back in every area of my life because I was afraid of failing. I was afraid of what people would think if I gave my all to something and then failed. I was used to being put down constantly for never being good enough and was weary of the constant shame that came from wanting things it seemed that I would never be allowed to have.

But one day after my friend died I was in the kitchen washing dishes and I was singing to the Lord. And I suddenly had such a stark impression of how much I would actually be capable of if I finally stopped holding back. I believe that was the Holy Spirit impressing that upon me.

So I decided to try it. I decided to stop holding back and I began to throw myself whole-heartedly into pursuits. The results were astounding. Every area of my life was changed and I became ALIVE. I was RADIANT.

Before my friend died, he once told me, “Everyone is beautiful when they’re alive.” I finally began to realize what he meant. I became alive on the inside, and it changed me into a healthy, vibrant person that radiated life.

But none of that would have happened if my friend hadn’t died, because if he were still around, I would have kept deferring to him and everybody else, because I would have kept on thinking that they mattered and I didn’t. I would have kept on making sure that everything I thought was carefully in line with what he and other people I respected would agree with. I would have been afraid to rock the boat and believe in something radical.

But as it turns out, God is very radical, and He loves to rock the boat.

And I wouldn’t have been able to accept that as long as I was still believing what other people said about Him. I had to know Him for myself, and the only way to do that was to go through the season of the wilderness.

So, let me reiterate for you the beautiful purposes of the wilderness:

The Wilderness Season in the Bible

The Bible is full of examples of the wilderness.

I’d like to mention the importance of that last example. Even Jesus Christ, Who was absolutely perfect in every way, was led by God’s Spirit out into the wilderness. He didn’t do that just as an example to us. Notice what it says about His return from the wilderness (Luke 4:14, emphasis mine):

Then Jesus returned to Galilee, filled with the Holy Spirit’s power.

The wilderness prepares you for your future glory.

Jesus began His ministry AFTER being filled with the power of the Holy Spirit, which happened as a result of His time in the wilderness.

We, too, cannot walk in the astonishingly awesome plans God has for us unless we have first been prepared for them.

God has given us His glory and wants us to be radiant like He is radiant. His plans for you are so astounding and amazing you can’t even imagine their beginnings right now. But when you see the good things He’s prepared for you your jaw will drop and His goodness will blow you away.

God has planted good seeds in your heart, but work must be done to ensure the harvest.

The wilderness season is difficult, but it is necessary, and ultimately it is a blessing, both for you and for the world - because God’s plan is always bigger than just us and you WILL change the world someday.

God didn’t make you to hide. He made you to shine.

The crucible is painful, but it has a purpose that outweighs the suffering.

Job, the man who famously lost everything, understood the value of trusting in the Lord and believing that God does know what He’s doing.

In Job 23:10 he says,

But he knows where I am going.
   And when he tests me, I will come out as pure as gold.

So don’t fear the wilderness—God is using it to make you perfect.