My perspective on spiritual wildernesses has completely upended.
I had no perspective on wildernesses as a child. I grew up in a spiritual river, surrounded by family who lived and breathed revival. Our conversations revolved around church, Christ, Christ's work, Scripture, gifts of the Holy Spirit, and fruit of the Holy Spirit. Our family and most of our extended family deeply pursued Christ and spent our daily lives building the Kingdom of God. This is not to say we didn't ever talk about normal things or study normal books, it's just that those things had a ribbon of Heavenly purpose woven through them.
Over the years, I thought rivers equalled revival and wilderness equalled disobedience, disconnection, and were certainly to be avoided at all cost! I was wrong. I had deserts and wildernesses mixed up.
There certainly is a barren desert in which you can twist away in disobedience and rebellion to God's will. Deserts are lifeless places where God's presence no longer dwells. They occur when we fail to esteem Him as our first love (Revelation 2:4) or when we become more consumed with our tasks than we are with our love for God. The resulting disconnection eventually makes our lives brittle and desolate.
But the spiritual wilderness is a necessary part of God's plan for our lives in this fallen world. As such, it should be embraced for what it accomplishes in us.
In the Bible, almost every great leader spends an inordinate amount of time in actual wilderness and spiritual wilderness. Abraham explores the wilderness for most of his life, Isaac never leaves it, and Lot loses himself because he leaves it for the riches of a city. Jacob traverses it, encounters God's angels, and wrestles with the pre-incarnate Christ in it, then he and his sons return to prosper in it. Joseph refused to be buried anywhere else. Moses finds God in it. The Israelites who escape Egypt find refuge in it as it hardens their grandchildren into warriors who will dispossess squatters on the land promised by God to Abraham's descendants. Prophets like Elijah spend years in the most remote parts. God's throne descends by a river flowing through it. The tribes of Israel are either taming it, being exiled from it, or returning from exile to it.
Just like the Israelites, as a Christian, if you aren't currently in a spiritual wilderness then you are likely heading into one or just come out of one.
That statement is not meant to wish you ill. It's meant to bring attention to the work that God is doing in your life or purposes to do in your life and to help you embrace the wilderness rather than avoid it! In the Bible, the wilderness is an incredible place because it contains the Mountain of God—the place where He descends to make Himself known, however He chooses to make Himself known.
"We should not be surprised if God calls us to pass through our own Horeb (Mt. Sinai). For it is at Horeb (Mt. Sinai) that He brings us deeper into Himself. The purpose of our brokenness: our desolation is, in fact, a time of preparation." - Francis Frangipane, The Shelter of the Most High
In the Bible, the words for desert and the wilderness are sometimes interchangeable just as it's sometimes hard to tell which one you are in! But the wilderness always borders the Promised Land. The borderlands are necessary preparation for entering in. For those who choose to love God first, the wilderness is transformational.
The wilderness has many functions: 1) to cut off or kill off flesh in preparation for battle, 2) a place of barrenness and hunger as well as the source of nourishment from God, 3) a location for God’s testing, 4) a context for the revelation of God that transforms us.
Only in the wilderness can we allow ourselves to express our real feelings and evaluate our true spiritual condition. It allows us to ask: Is this current existence that I now live the abundant life promised me from Christ?
God is revealed in the wilderness. We are revealed in the light of His revelation. And He draws us deeper into Himself.
The problem is that the wilderness is the opposite of what the flesh wants. It's the opposite of what the American dream markets. It's ignored and disparaged by the prosperity gospel of comfort. In a world that measures our days in pursuit and acquisition of comfort, the wilderness is suffering and we'd like to avoid that, if at all possible.
But our clearest indication that God is calling us to spend at least some of our Christian journey in the wilderness is that Christ spent an enormous amount of time in the wilderness, much of it preparatory. As we follow Christ, it is inevitable that we're going to follow Him into the desert to be with Him.
"...it is imperative that we who have set our hearts on Christ learn how to abide in the living presence of God. For it is only in Him that we find the place of safety from the increasing darkness." - Francis Frangipane, The Shelter of the Most High
In Him we find safety—and victory to the end. Since we know that we heading into a future described in the bleakest of terms in Revelation, the discipline of abiding in Christ must become our primary focus in life. This is how the remnant remains.
Regardless of the the future, though, our journey with Christ is divinely designed to be too difficult for us. The Lord has no plan where we succeed without Him. It is the grace of God that life will drive us to Christ so we become like Christ. When we learn to abide in Christ—letting His character and His spirit transform us—nothing we encounter in life can permanently defeat us. God Himself promises to preserve us.
In the wilderness, we can, like David, become the leader dependent on the God who speaks to us in the lonely night watches. Like him, we can learn how to defeat our enemies in preparation for facing our giants. In the wilderness, we can, like John the Baptist grow strong in the Spirit “until the day of his manifestation to Israel" (Luke 1:80). Or, like Jesus, be led by the Spirit into the wilderness to defeat the enemy (Matthew 4:1).
"He guides us into the wilderness to return us to the simpler realities of prayer, time in the Word, and worship. He reminds us that, of all He calls us to accomplish, His greatest commandment is to love Him with all our heart...soul...mind...and... strength (Mark 12:30). Without this focus, we lose touch with God's presence—we are outside the shelter of the Most High." - Francis Frangipane, The Shelter of the Most High
Does God call us to the wilderness or does He gently guide us in? I see both happening when revival calls me deeper still. Or when I discover that yesterday's anointing will not suffice for today's battles. So I lean in, embracing the transformation if not the circumstances. The wilderness draws me into intimacy with Christ. And intimacy is both the current and the currency of authority in the Kingdom of God.
Grace teaches us to measure our day in intimacy.