Hello there, all the way from Baja Mexico! :)
I am surrounded by desert and mountains, and I find that the Lord will often use my surroundings to teach me about Him.
Let's dive in...
___________________________________________________________________________________________
“I have been waiting 3 years for you to go deeper with Me…”
I love how blunt the Lord is.
I sit here thinking I have it all together, that my life is “on track,” that I know what the Lord wants…and with a few simple words, He wrecks me.
Thank God. Thank GOD.
I think sometimes we fear the rebuke of the Lord because we are used to harsh reprimands from our fathers and mothers. Yet, we forget Hebrews 12 – “They [your earthly fathers] disciplined you for a short time as seemed best to them, but He [our Heavenly Father] disciplines us for our good, that we may share in His holiness.”
Have we also forgotten this word? – “Without holiness [sanctification], no one will see God.” [Hebrews 12:14]
The punishments and rebukes of God directed toward believers is extremely interesting to me, because even in His wrath, His just anger toward our sin and rebellion, He never leaves us alone!
Consider what Moses wrote to the Israelites as he recounted their rebellious history with the Lord between their deliverance from Egypt and their conquests in the promised land:
“For the Lord your God has blessed you in all that you have done; He has known your wanderings through this great wilderness. These forty years the Lord your God has been with you; you have not lacked a thing.” [Deuteronomy 2:7]
Lest you think the Lord felt sorry for them, consider what Moses also says:
“Now the time it took for us to come from Kadesh-barnea until we crossed over the brook Zered was thirty-eight years, until the generation of the men of war perished from within the camp, as the Lord had sworn to them. Moreover, the hand of the Lord was against them, to destroy them from within the camp until they all perished.”
[Deuteronomy 2:14]
Throughout those forty years, the unrepentant died out, and the repentant/next generation lived before God, while still enduring His punishment.
Why do we assume His punishment means He is far from us, as believers? Yes, we are dealing with consequences, and for the record, sometimes they are consequences we deal with BECAUSE OF other people. But maybe He means those consequences to train us in righteousness so that we will NOT fall again, so that we will LEARN to fear Him, so that we will LISTEN and OBEY during our next test. Those that did not perish surely saw those who did – do we really think that was coincidental on the part of the Lord?
A perfectionist mindset says that all must be done perfectly or we are outcast, miserable, failures. Yes, our sin and rebellion will have consequences. But why do we run from Him when we are wrong instead of running to Him? Do we prefer to die in the wilderness, or live?
I like this line I heard once in a movie: “I’d rather be miserable with you than without you.” Haha – that sounds pleasant. But when facing the unknown, or perhaps when we see what we must now do because the Lord is disciplining us, it may seem miserable indeed. Hebrews 12 again says: “ALL discipline for the moment seems not to be joyful, but sorrowful; yet to those who have been trained by it, afterwards it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness.”
When we must turn and face the wilderness, let us determine we’d rather walk through it together with the Lord instead of apart from Him.
His “wilderness training” shatters our sin nature.
His grace is perfect; His training complete!
Let us follow our Shepherd, for He leads perfectly.
Amen.
