How God Prepares Us in the Wilderness

Sometimes I think that's how we feel about wilderness seasons. That a wilderness season, those seasons, those those times in life that are difficult, that are hard. Uh I I think we often they often feel like setting up for a game of risk. They're they're tedious, maybe even painful, and it can feel like wasted time. But as we're going to see in the life of Israel, God uses the wilderness to prepare us. [00:02:46]

Scarcity in our lives today is those seasons where money is tight, where we don't feel like we have enough to even pay our bills. Our relationships are strained. You find yourself fighting with your spouse more often than normal. We feel scarcity when our health takes a turn for the worse or a loved one is struggling or passes away. [00:05:49]

Scarcity is when God feels distant. When you feel aimless or purposeless, that is what scarcity feels like. And scarcity is what you experience in the wilderness. Both the literal location, the the rocky desert, dry, barren place is a place of scarcity, but also the metaphorical season of life. [00:06:16]

Abundance is when all your bills are paid and there's still some money left over in the bank. When your relationship with your kids and your spouse just is easy and it's good. When you have a great job. When you're living a life of purpose. You've got a great community around you. Whether it be at church, your family, your friends. That is what abundance feels like. [00:06:47]

We would all rather have more than we need than having not enough. And so it can be easy when we find ourselves in a wilderness season. When we find ourselves in a season of scarcity, whether it be physical, emotional, spiritual scarcity. It can be easy to become upset with God because we want abundance, but it feels like all he's giving us is scarcity. [00:08:39]

For the Lord your God is bringing you into a good land of flowing streams and pools of water with fountains and springs that gush out into the valleys and hills. It is a land of wheat and barley, of grape vines, fig trees and pomegranates, of olive oil and honey. It is a land where food is plentiful and nothing is lacking. [00:09:33]

Abundance can be more dangerous than scarcity. Abundance can be more dangerous than scarcity. We've been saying for 3 weeks now that the wilderness is this dry, dangerous place. No food, no water, dangerous animals, scarcity. And yet Moses is warning them that the place they're about to enter, this land of abundance, while appearing and feeling much better, might actually be more dangerous. [00:14:32]

Because a life of no hardship, a life of just constant and continual abundance seems to be dangerous to us. Because in abundance, we all have this tendency due to our own sin, our sin nature, to forget about God. To claim that the reason we're experiencing abundance is because of our own effort, our own cleverness, our own hard work, not because God has been good to us and blessed us. [00:16:13]

Everything you have is ultimately given to you by God. You might be a hard worker. You might be smart. You might have made some good choices along the way. But God is the one who gave you the ability to work hard. And he gave you your intelligence. And he helped you make those good decisions. Al everything you have is a gift from God. [00:16:48]

See, we all have this tendency in wilderness seasons, in moments of scarcity, when life gets hard to cry out to God. In fact, if you've made the decision to follow Jesus, chances are it happened in a moment of wilderness. Chances are it happened in a moment or in a season where life was hard and you recognized your own need for a savior that you could not do this yourself. [00:19:40]

Because in the wilderness, God prepares us for abundance. God being the loving father that he is, wants to give us abundance. He wants us to prosper. He wants us to experience the goodness of the world that he's made. He wants us to experience the riches of his love and his grace. But he also knows that in abundance, we tend to disconnect from him. [00:20:46]

So, he lovingly leads us into the wilderness because there's something about scarcity. There's something about when life gets hard, when we don't have enough, when we're stretched thin that causes us to to to snap out of our forgetfulness and cry out to God. But that's not all because God doesn't just seek to reconnect with us in the wilderness, although that's critical. [00:21:15]

He also wants to equip us to reenter abundance, to reenter the promised land. He wants to give us the tools that we need to be able to better handle abundance without forgetting about it. He wants to shape our our character to be the kind of people who don't let good things turn us into bad people. [00:21:40]

I believe this is why he lets us lose our job so that when the new job comes, we have we work that new job with a deeper sense of gratitude. That we know it's not just us that got it, it's God who gave it to us. This is why I believe he lets us experience financial hardship so that we can become better stewards of the little that we have, which in turn prepares us for handling more in a godly way. [00:22:06]

See, in scarcity, in wilderness, God is preparing us to step into the next chapter. He is preparing us to step into abundance, but to do so in a way that does not endanger our souls. To do so without becoming proud to do so without forgetting about him. Because it is better ultimately it's better to be in the wilderness with God than in the promised land without him, having forgotten him. [00:23:00]

If you are in a wilderness season right now, or if you're going through uh or if you're going to experience a wilderness season in the future, which is just like all of us, right? Remember this. God lovingly leads us into the wilderness to uh or allows us to enter into a wilderness of our own making. And he does this for our good. [00:26:07]