This morning Abby and I were talking about this quarantine time. It seems like many believers are getting really antsy and feeling more and more cooped up. Patience is wearing thin and internal thoughts and emotions that never really felt like issues before are coming to the surface as doubts and fears and sins. actually, this response makes a lot of sense! Such a complete change of pace and lifestyle, as we are all experiencing, really has a way of shaking things up inside our souls!
These thoughts reminded me of a story about Jesus. In Matthew chapter 4, Jesus is led by the Holy Spirit to go spend some time alone in the wilderness. While he was there, Satan comes to him and tempts him three incredibly significant ways. The main storyline of these verses is for another time, but what I found really relevant to where we are right now is this: It is interesting to think of how many of God’s faithful believers throughout history had some kind of “wilderness” experience.
Now, I like the wilderness, and I like being alone sometimes. To me wilderness means solitude. But here we see a whole different kind of wilderness! A spiritual wilderness experience is an extended period of forced withdrawal from others. It is God saying “stay… until I tell you to move”. In the beginning most believers remain diligent and patient, and sometimes even feel refreshed; but when days turn into weeks, the wilderness is no longer our friend. We feel unfulfilled and unsatisfied to have “none but God as our companion”.
It turns out that this particular “wilderness” test is so important that Jesus deliberately put himself through that very same test for over a month! Jesus remains completely faithful through all trials, but we have to remember that it was really hard, even for Him! I find it so interesting that the first test Satan used on Jesus involved food of all things! Food! Jesus was so hungry that he was legitimately temped to sin over the issue of FOOD! I cannot imagine that being a difficult trial anywhere else, or at any other time in Jesus’ life. It took solitude to bring the real question to the surface, “Jesus, are you satisfied in God alone, or will you take matters into our own hands?” That is the power of the wilderness to bring each of us to the point of total weakness. And I think that, right there, is the purpose of the test.
To be honest I think that many of us are just starting to get a small taste of the difficulty of what men like Elijah or Jesus experienced when they were all alone for months at a time with nothing but their own thoughts and feelings to fester and grow. Even problems that we were avoiding or that are so small as to go unnoticed soon grow to fill our minds and hearts.
The truth is that TIME can be a real test of our faith! Confronting our own spiritual weakness makes us incredibly uncomfortable. It’s the worst! But God is so great to use little (or huge) “timeouts” to hep us grow and mature into a deeper, cleaner, more joyful way of living with him.
So here is my point” learn the lesson of the wilderness while you can. Is your hope and peace in God alone? Have your works of christian service been shown to contain a sliver of pride that you never realized? What has the social detox shown is most important to you? Have you found yourself feeling uncomfortable in your own skin? What has been your response to temptation? Food for thought…