My mind had drifted for a moment during the sermon, when I heard these words and snapped back to attention, “Advent pilgrims on the way to the manger must pass through the desert where John is preaching. Are we preparing a straight path to our hearts by resolving to trust Jesus alone . . . ?”
These words hit me in the heart as if attached
to an arrow with my name on them.
Jerry had been preaching about John the
Baptist and his words in Luke 3, “A voice of one calling in the wilderness, ‘Prepare
the way of the Lord . . .’” John was in a literal desert when he said these
words, but we can often find ourselves in a metaphorical desert. Providentially, we had recently been listening to Ray Vander Laan’s teaching on desert.
In my notes, I’d drawn a big box around this statement, “Desert is a place to shape
people for the next chapter of their story.”
If we find ourselves in that metaphorical
desert, it can feel the opposite of preparing for the next chapter. It
sometimes feels like the end—dry, hot, and dusty. No water, and only a
scorching sun beating down, seemingly no way out. It’s hard to remember that if
God has allowed it, he desires we call out to him and wholeheartedly submit. So
often, we’re just thinking about relief.
The way of the Lord is in the humbled
heart and the bowed knee, a reckoning with all that would stand in the way of absolutely
trusting the One who humbled himself to become like us.
The next chapter after the desert is often
going to involve a pivot and a redirection if we are open to it. Life won’t be
the same. How could it be? But who would want it to be? We are looking for more
of what God would want to do because we want to be part of His story.
When Jesus met up with John in the desert
for baptism, it was the beginning of all God had sent Him to do.
The Psalmist writes in chapter 107, “Let
the redeemed of the Lord tell their story—those he redeemed from the hand of
the foe . . . Some wandered in desert wastelands . . . then they cried out to the
Lord in their trouble, and he delivered them from their distress.”
In Streams in the Desert, we find these words referring to desert-like times, "It is a period which always ends in certain triumph for those who have committed the keeping of their souls to Him, a period of marvelous 'nevertheless afterward ' of abundant usefulness, the sixty-fold that surely follows."
As the redeemed of the Lord, let’s tell the story of God’s faithfulness even when we’re in the desert. That next chapter is going to be amazing.