Our Wilderness Journey

Can you imagine being an adult in 1900 and suddenly, you know, waking up in today's world?

There's no way to even comprehend what's going on. Cars, you know, an airplane. What's an airplane? You look up and you see these things in the sky. Electronics, washing machines.

Phones, computers. What is AI? What is a satellite? I mean, none of this would even make sense. The words wouldn't even make sense. They would come into a world so overwhelming that they could not comprehend it. You and I live in it all the time. But in this fast-paced world, I remember reading an article one time in the 1930s, they built a set of canals on the east coast, like the Erie Canal. So you could move now cargo from one city to another within a week. And there was an article in the newspaper, because newspapers were big in the big cities back then, claiming that the speed of life had gone up so fast because of this that people were going to basically go insane. Because now it took a week to get something from Boston to New York, or whatever. It was so fast.

Can you imagine coming into this world, you and I think this is normal, but it is so fast, and it is so complicated, that we cannot spiritually, emotionally, physically, mentally, totally adapt to this.

It's not God's way. It's brilliant what humanity can do, but this is Satan's way. And we rush through life. And the one thing that you find over and over and over again, in these where they get people together, and they ask them questions about their lives and what they're going through, and they take these surveys, is that people say they always have this vague sense of anxiety. A vague sense of anxiety they can't even explain. There's a stress the people have, and there's a sense of isolation, which is very interesting. This is why so many young people are so involved many times in really what becomes an addiction to video games, is because of isolation. And you play it with other people. I'm not saying playing a video game is wrong or playing with other people is wrong. I'm saying, I have counseled young men who have got kicked out of college because they play video games all night and failed every class.

Not because they weren't smart. They could not emotionally adapt to what the life they were living, and that's what they did. We as Christians don't want to admit that there are times when we too feel that isolation. We too feel these pressure, job pressures, money pressure.

What Dr. Green talked about ties into this, because sometimes we have such a drive in this nation to achieve and have status and make money that we're driven by that as one of our main forces of life. Now, it's not wrong to have things. It's not wrong to make money. But if we get to the place where that is our stress all the time, that's our driving force all the time, if that's the anxiety all the time, something's wrong. And we don't want to admit that we're conflicted. We don't want to admit that we're overwhelmed or we're isolated. I mean, right, that means we're not a good Christian. That means that I don't have faith. To live in this world as a Christian, there are times when you're going to feel isolated. There's times you're going to feel overwhelmed. There's times you're going to feel dysfunctional because you are. There's times when you're going to struggle. Today, I want to simply approach the struggle. To admit it, lay it out, and say, this is what life is.

Not only because we live in Satan's world, but because we live in, in some ways, the most exciting time to live in all of history. And other ways, it's the most crushing to humanity, in some ways, to live in the world that we live in. And we have to face it. We have to understand it. So, we say, oh, the simple, it's a simple answer to the problem, right? Someone comes up to you, I just feel crushed by life and I feel, I just feel anxiety. Well, you need to pray and study the Bible and fast more. And the person says, oh, more stress. Another list I can't complete. I don't know what to do. Because I am trying to pray, but I may have a hard time praying. And when I get on my knees and I pray after about five minutes, all I'm thinking about is this problem and that problem and this anxiety. What do I do? How do I break this? How can things change?

There's an interesting statement made about Rehoboam in the Bible. Rehoboam is a bad example. You know, he's a king who failed. And because of him, Israel was divided into two nations, Israel and Judah. But let's go to one verse that sums up his problem and maybe something we can learn from this. Not directly, because he was actually evil, but something we can learn about how we have to deal with life. 2 Chronicles 12.

And let's look at verse 14.

It says about him, and he did evil. Okay, so I'm not saying we're all going out and doing evil. I'm just saying the next part of the sentence is really important. Because he did not prepare his heart to seek the Lord.

You and I have to prepare our hearts to seek the Lord. Now, we all know, we talk about it all the time, that, you know, in Hebrew and Greek and in these time periods, heart just didn't mean romantic love. It didn't even mean entirely your emotions. Your heart was considered the core of who you are. It was your reasoning. It was your motivations. It was your emotions. But it included your character, your personality. This is the real person, not the persona. I mean, we all have a bit of persona that we put on when we're in public or with other people.

And that's not all wrong. That's not being a hypocrite. I mean, you see people that show up at Walmart in their pajamas, right? I went to a dollar store one time before noon, and it was amazing. I looked around, and over half the people were walking around in their pajamas. Okay. The persona should be a little standard higher than that, right? So we have this persona we put on, but we have to prepare and have God prepare the core of who we are.

And that's what's being constantly attacked. The stresses we live with within our families, within our friendships, within our jobs, within everything. I mean, you ever been... maybe I'm the only one who does this. Sometimes it's 11 o'clock at night. I can't... you know, I'm not tired enough to go to sleep, but my brain won't even read anything anymore. So I turn on YouTube, watch something like the BBC and the update of the Ukrainian War, because I like the reports they give.

And I'm watching that, and it's four minutes, and that's pretty good. And the next thing that pops up is... Kim walked in one night and said, why are you watching that? It was about... it was a police cam where a guy pulled someone over, and the person went nuts. You know, tried to fight the policeman.

She said, why are you watching that? And I said, it was on. So she goes to bed. The next one is... and this is literal... it was a moose that had jumped into traffic, and one of the babies couldn't get over the concrete wall. And a bunch of men jumped up and picked up the baby moose and put it over the wall. And I'm like cheering, and I'm thinking, what am I doing?

Okay. I'm not saying that's terribly wrong, which... you know what I mean? If I spend two hours doing that, I've crossed the line somewhere in there, right? Okay. After cheering for the moose being saved, I said, okay, probably I should move on now, right? With life. So I'm not saying it's all wrong, but when you understand what I'm saying, you can get so just sort of traumatized that you can find yourself spending large amounts of time doing nothing.

Doing nothing once in a while is good, by the way. So I'm not talking about, yes, in fact, we're going to talk about doing nothing in a way, a little bit here. I'm talking about the balance of life. If we find ourselves being controlled by just a need for constant entertainment, or mindless stuff all the time, or too much of the time, we have a problem. And it's because of the society we live in, and we're letting it affect us too much. So we have to prepare our hearts.

That means there's something we have to do. We have to prepare our hearts. There's something we have to do. And Jeroboam did not do that. He never prepared his heart to seek God, so what happened is he just failed. Everything he did failed. Let's look at an example for the life of Jesus. Let's go to Luke 5. Luke 5 and verse 16. We're going to start with some sort of a broad term here. We're going to break this down into smaller steps.

Luke 5. And I mean, it's just a verse. I'm not going to read all the verses before or after. It's just a verse, and it's such an important verse for us understanding Christ's relationship with the Father and this example he's setting for us.

Because everything before is all about him doing all these miracles and healings, and he's being mobbed by people all the time.

Verse 16 says, so he himself often withdrew into the wilderness and prayed. Jesus said, now this is God in the flesh, so he's now experiencing things like we do.

And on a regular basis, he says, that's enough. And he goes off, and he would go into the wilderness. I call this the wilderness journey. That's what we're going to talk about today. And you don't have to go into the literal wilderness to do this, although you can. But there's a wilderness journey where we step out of society to seek to be drawn to God.

And when you start doing this, it's hard because it goes against how we're programmed to push and push, or if we're not pushing ourselves. You know, we become workaholics. We're the other thing. We don't push at all. The other extreme. No, there's a point where we step back from it, and Christ set the example. He withdrew just to be with God.

You know, sometimes we can even do this sort of their own Bible study. Oh, yeah, I need to get my half hour Bible study in today. So you get up, and you do your Bible study thinking, oh, wow, okay, yeah, yeah, 15 minutes from now I got to make that phone call. You're not, you're doing your Bible study is another thing to mark off the list, in which case you're missing something. And once again, I want to ask for a show of hands. But I've done that. You know what's easy for me to do? Skip personal Bible study because I'm spending so much time preparing sermons and Bible studies and working on stuff for the council. And it's like, whoa! In fact, at the council recently, we discussed we cannot give up our personal Bible study just because we're in the Bible for church reasons. We have to go do our study before God to have Him teach us personally. If we forget that, we'll be in trouble. So we have to learn to go on some wilderness journeys, some wilderness journeys. You say, well, okay, you know, I can sort of see what you're saying here. The Bible is filled with examples of people that God put on a real wilderness journey. Now, you and I usually won't have to go through these kinds of things, but He sent them into the wilderness away from civilization, away from their lives. Abraham had to go three days into the wilderness to Mount Moriah to wrestle with God's asked me to kill my son, to sacrifice my son. God just didn't say, go do this. He had to reason through it. Of course, we know in Hebrews, in the New Testament, the conclusion he came to. God gave him three days to come to the conclusion. And of course, like I said before, Isaac was never going to be sacrificed. If Abraham said no, he wasn't sacrificed. If Abraham said, yes, God was going to stop him, either case, that wasn't the issue. It was Abraham discovering his relationship with God and the belief that God will fulfill his promise that even if the boy died, as it says in Hebrews, he would be resurrected so that he could have a child. Isaac was promised a child. And he then had to believe it. God was going to do that. No matter what I do here, God's going to do that. So he says, sacrificing my will. God said, no, you don't have to do that. But think of the three days. Think of the wilderness by himself. Sarah's not with him. Nobody else is with him. It's him and his son thinking, we're going to do a sacrifice to God in the wilderness. It's probably a grand adventure to him until he gets there and asks, where's the lamb? It wasn't an adventure anymore.

That's a wilderness journey right there. Think of Moses. You think, well, all the Israelites out in the wilderness for 40 years. Well, that was their fault. They got sent back in the wilderness because it wouldn't follow God. It was a one-year wilderness trip. But think of Moses.

He has to leave Egypt, give up all the riches, all the power, everything he had, and go out into the absolute wilderness to become a sheep herder. And after 40 years, God says, by the way, you're only 80, I have a job for you. That's a wilderness journey, 40 years of it. And thinking, this life is better. I like this life better than Egypt. I like it better than being rich. I like it better than having power. And God says, good, because I'm sending you back.

Think of Elijah running away. Wilderness journey because life had come out so hard. He couldn't take it. And God had done all these miracles, but He couldn't take anymore. And He ran away, and He ends up in a cave. And God shows up and says, tell me why you're here.

And He has a conversation with God. You know, God didn't yell at him. God wasn't angry with him. Okay, explain it to me. Because I'm the only one left. He says, no, you're not. I got 7,000 more people, but you're not the only one. Besides, I'm here. What do you want now? That's a fascinating wilderness journey right there. Because He ended up just like Moses did, just like Abraham did. They end up before God. They end up where they're supposed to be. But it's a traumatic event getting there. How about David? David has all kinds of psalms. We'll look at a couple of them. Where he's in the wilderness. He's in the wilderness because life has driven him there. And he's on a wilderness journey, and it focuses him in. This is what the wilderness journey does. And sometimes it's days. Sometimes it's short. But it's a point where everything else is shoved out, and we're with God. And that's the purpose of what God wants us to do. And sometimes a wilderness journey could be years. And sometimes it's 10 minutes.

But it is when we must strip everything away and come face to face, what is God wanting of me? And what am I supposed to do?

Let's go to James 4.

The wilderness journey forces you to turn off so much.

To turn off your job. To turn off the entertainment. To turn off the stress.

To turn off all the politics that's bouncing around in a crazy world. To turn off the fear and anxiety we have because of the violence we love the world.

It forces us to turn it all off. Not that you're going to stay. You have to connect to that stuff, right? You can't say, I'm going to give up my job and just go worship God 24 hours a day. That's fine until you go about the fifth meal without food, and it's not fine anymore. God expects us to work. God expects us to do things. But it's shoving that out so that you come into this point where God does something. What's amazing, and the ones we've looked at, Elijah, you know, Moses, Abraham, David, in every one of those cases, God did not respond immediately. The world in his journey took time.

Let's look at James 4.

He says something here that it's not directly related to what we're talking about, but then he gives a series of thoughts. He strings together here that does tie in, you know, to what we're talking about here. I'm not saying he was thinking about a wilderness journey when he wrote this, because James wasn't. But what you see is a process of, this is what we go through. This is what we go through. He starts with in verse 5. No, let me get to James. Verse 7. He says, therefore, we're missing everything that comes up to this. Therefore says, remember, therefore is always, this is sort of a conclusion of what I've been talking about. So we're missing all that, we're just jumping right to the conclusion here. Therefore, submit to God, resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Wilderness journeys begin with submitting to God.

Take your son and go to Mount Moriah.

Why? Well, this is what you're going to do.

It starts always with you submit to God. That means everything else has to be put aside. Well, you are now zeroing in your energy, your thoughts on God. So you got to have a Bible with you, because that's how he's going to talk back. God's not going to appear and talk to you like he did to Elijah. If a tornado comes into your house and a voice comes out of the tornado, you're probably in trouble. God is going to speak to us here, and in doing so, his Spirit is going to help us understand it. And it's going to internalize it. God's going to prompt us through his Spirit. So God's going to prompt us. We miss those prompts. You see, we miss so much what he's doing, because all the clutter and the chaos that's going on around us, and it gets into our heads. Right? I'll tell my wife every once in a while, I'm taking a break. There's too much clutter in my head. I've answered three phone calls, 15 emails, and now I'm writing some paper for the council, and I had to stop because there's too much clutter. I have to let that all sort of dissipate so I can zero in on what I'm going to do. We have to do that on a regular basis. And spiritually, when we do that, sometimes it's because we're already on a wilderness journey. It's because the stresses and the problems have already built up until it just, we can't even process it.

And sometimes we don't notice it, by the way. You say, well that doesn't happen to me. You're probably running too fast to notice it. You're probably running too fast to notice it.

So you have to step back, and you have to start drawing to God, drawing towards God. God's going to draw you to Him, but you must step into this, and you must start drawing yourself to God. So submit to God the devil. We can just say, the devil's world will flee from you. You have to move that stuff away, put it in its proper perspective, and say, this now, this time, is for me and for God, you to tell me, you to help me, you to comfort me, you to change me. The second thing he says is, draw near to God, and He will draw near to you.

Now that's interesting. Draw near to God. Lots of times in a crisis, we draw near to God, right? We start crying out to God. He's saying here, start your journey. Okay, whatever this journey, this wilderness you're in, start moving towards God. Not all the other solutions, but God first. Psalm chapter 10. We'll go to a number of Psalms, because David understood this at an incredibly deep level. Psalm 10, 17.

Once again, I'm just pulling up a sentence out of an entire passage here, but I usually don't like doing that. I like going through the entire passage, but this is just so profound. He says, Lord, you have heard the desire of the humble. You will prepare their heart, and you will cause your ear to hear. Now notice he says that because of this humility, the wilderness road is wilderness. That's why there's humility in it. It's not the high road where everything's going right. It's when things are tough, and in this humility, you go before God, and notice it says, He prepares your heart.

That's what we're submitting to at this point. We're submitting to what God does with us.

We have to go ask Him, prepare my heart, prepare my mind.

Do with me what I cannot do myself. The wilderness journey is, I can't do this. Abraham, I can't sacrifice my son. Moses, I can't go back to Egypt.

Elijah, no, Jezebel's going to kill me. I'm never going back. That's where they always start.

Prepare my heart. They all changed, and they all reached the point. Prepare me to do this. Prepare me on the journey that I am on. Prepare my heart.

It's interesting that the Jewish Publication Society translates this verse as, you will make their hearts firm. In other words, they won't be filled with anxiety and fear, and there will be a firmness to them that God does. What do I have to work myself up to? If I pray long enough, I'll work myself up. If I study long enough, I'll work myself up.

No, the whole point is, God, I can't. You must. I'm in the wilderness. I'm in the desert.

I'm in the middle of nowhere.

In the solitude of the wilderness journey, God does something with us.

Draw near to God, and He will draw near to you. We draw near to God because we go and we say, I can't do this. You're asking me to do what? And then He draws us to Him. Let's go back now to James, because he says then, the next, and he's just listing these almost like they're points. You know, here's, they're not steps, but there's these points of what's going on. Clunge your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. Okay, we have to cleanse our hands. In other words, what we have to do in this journey is we have to look at ourselves and say, what sins am I covering up here? What do I need to bring before God? What do I need to bring before God? Am I double-minded? Am I living, you know, two lives at the same time? My persona is really a persona that I can sin, I can do all kinds of things, but the inner person, or I don't do those things, but the inner person is I do those things, right? Now we all have sins, we all have difficulties, but the point that's being made here, he's making is we have to have now the ability in this wilderness, and being in a wilderness, Chris and I camped one time in Big Bend National Park. That's our wilderness.

That is an absolute wilderness. I remember after hiking in the desert for a while, we came across, there was a, out in the middle of nowhere, there was a little store because there was a campground. There was nobody in the campground. It's too hot. We went into the store, I don't remember how much it cost, I think it was 25 cents for a shower.

We both took a shower and we bought an ice cream cone, and I can remember sitting there on the porch, both of us giggling like little kids, eating an ice cream cone because we were so hot, we were so tired, we're so exhausted, and we just had a first shower in three or four days, and we're eating an ice cream cone, and it's like this, this wilderness journey had come to an end.

There were times I'm thinking, I know what Chris is thinking, why is dad dragging me on another one of these things? We hiked 7,000 feet up into the mountains, and hiking down. I know he was thinking, why did he do this to me? It was just your wilderness journey, that's all.

Because we have to do certain things. We learn, we grow from it.

Purify your hearts. We can't be double-minded. We're coming before God to say, I want to know who you are. I'm in the wilderness because I need you to draw me in so that I know who you are, and I know who Christ is. This is a personal, all of a sudden, religion isn't just what you do, it's a personal thing between you and God, and he's drawing you in.

And there's no easy way for us to get there. I mean, I've met people that live their whole lives following God, and it seems like they're drawn to God all the time. For the rest of us, we struggle. We struggle. But that's where we're supposed to be. He says, then lament and mourn and weep. Let your laughter be turned to sorrow and your joy to gloom. In other words, repent now. Repent before God. He's preparing our hearts to receive something, by the way. You see, well, that's pretty negative, right? We're on a wilderness journey to cry and mourn. Well, leave your marker there. Let's go to Psalm 32. Psalm 32.

Verse 1.

Blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered. Blessed is the man in whom the Lord does not impute iniquity, and in his spirit there is no deceit. He says, James saying, look, when you're in this, you're drawing to God and he's drawing you, there's a point in there where you do say, I recognize that I am very incomplete, that I still have evil in me, I still sin, and I still struggle. And why do you do that? So that God can beat you? No, it's so that God will forgive you. The journey is to come into a closer relationship with God.

And it's interesting that James puts that in this discussion. It seems a little bit out of place in a way, but the point is there's in this journey, this wilderness, this tough time, that we draw close to God and we understand we're forgiven. We understand there's a relationship there. We understand that we matter to him. Here's how David describes it. Verse 3, when I kept silent, my bones grew old through my groaning all the day long. He wasn't in a literal wilderness journey, which he was at times. He was in a spiritual wilderness journey. For day and night your hand was heavy upon me. My vitality was turned into the drought of summer.

He said, it's just I could feel the weight of God's hand on my shoulder. He didn't say God was beating him up and punishing him. The weight of sin that was not repetitive.

And the weight was there. The feeling that God, there was a distance between him and God. Verse 6, for this cause, everyone who is godly shall pray to you in a time when you may be found. Surely in a flood of great waters they shall not come near him. Verse 7 now, okay, in this journey, and in this one he said part of his journey was he had to acknowledge his sin. James says we have to acknowledge his sin. He says, we have to acknowledge his sin. He says, we have to acknowledge his sin. He says, we have to acknowledge his sin. Part of his journey was he had to acknowledge his sin. James says we have to acknowledge that we're not perfect yet. But it's not to feel bad about ourselves. It is to release the guilt so that we can be forgiven. It's to acknowledge I'm not perfect yet. And that's a wilderness that's hard to be in. He says, you are my hiding place. You shall preserve me from trouble. You shall surround me with songs of deliverance. He ends up singing. How does he end up singing?

When the weight of God has been upon him because the weight is taken off. God's hand is off of him now. And God says, you understand now. And the journey takes a different direction. This is what James is saying. Of course, what David does, being this warrior poet and king, he doesn't explain the process. He explains the experience. Totally different thought process than what James would have as a first century Jew writing in Greek. He's this warrior poet king. He's this warrior poet king, right? And so he's writing as experience. James is writing his process. He's telling us how we do it. So let's now go back to James and look at the last point he makes. He says, humble yourself in the sight of the Lord and he will lift you up. It's positive, just like what David said. In the wilderness experience, we are struggling. We're struggling with our own human nature. We're struggling with society around us. We're struggling with things that life throws at us. And we're wondering, God, why did you let that happen? Why is this happening to me? We've all asked it.

Why did this happen to my children? Why did this happen to my friends? Why is this happening in your church? Why is this? And we can keep asking in this wilderness journey that we're on.

And what? James says, okay, let's start by submitting to God. What is it you want me to do? But then it moves on through all these other things until finally we are humble before God and He's lifting us up because we've drawn close to Him and He's pulled us into Him. David explains what that experience is like in his journeys and in our journeys.

It's very interesting that this humility, you know, in Luke 18 where I won't go there, but Jesus gives the parable about, you know, the tax collector and the Pharisee and the temple praying.

And he makes the comment that the problem with the Pharisee—he was doing a lot of right things, by the way. I'd have probably been a Pharisee wanting to do everything perfect. But he trusted in himself and despised others. His trust wasn't in God, it was in himself.

And this is what humility is in the terms of what James is talking about here, is that we don't just trust ourselves, which is one of the most natural things for everything one of us to do. We trust our own feelings and our own thoughts. We just do.

And to be scripturally and spiritually critical of your own thoughts and feelings is a bit of a wilderness journey. It takes us on a road. It takes us on a path where we have to do that.

Now, I want to bring out just one point more, and then I'm going to go and give you an example of something. In the wilderness journey, because we're dealing with our anxieties and our fears, our own inner sins we're struggling with, that's what we're in this journey on these things. Dealing with these things, going to God, stripping ourselves of everything we can, maybe for an hour, maybe for a day, maybe for three days. Whatever time we can. You don't have 40 years a long time, but that's where Moses was in the wilderness for 40 years. You and I will be on a wilderness journey on a regular basis. Not every day. God gives us what David called a wide space. You know, we get claustrophobic, right, in life. Give me a wide space. Just open it up for me for a while. And God did. He gives us these wide spaces so that we're not constantly being crushed. He doesn't want us to feel crushed all the time. He does want us, to push back the world, push back what's happening to us, and simply seek the reality of time with Him. The Sabbath is forced on us, or we wouldn't do it. That's the shame. And sometimes we take the Sabbath and just make it, you know, coming to Sabbath services. And it's not. It's a whole day of seeking God and sharing that with other people. But let's remember Romans 8, because in your wilderness journey, you're going to have this at times. And if you've probably been here before, you're going to have this at times.

Verse 28. And we know that all things, we know this verse, right, work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose. They always work good. Oh, I skipped verses before. Let's go back up to verse 26. That's where I wanted to start. Likewise, the Spirit also hears, helps in our weaknesses. Okay? Remember, we're drawing close to God, but He has to prepare us. He has to bring us to Him. You can't go knock on the door and have a conversation with God unless He opens the door.

So, yes, we're drawing towards God, but He has to prepare us. We read that at the very beginning.

He says, the likewise of Spirit helps in our weaknesses. For we do not know what we should pray as we ought, but the Spirit Himself makes intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered. For now He who searches the hearts knows the mind of the Spirit because He makes intercession for the saints according to the will of God. Then we have that verse 28. God will work everything else what's best for us. Why? It is His Spirit that comes into us. And there are times when you can't communicate it. There are times when, how do you explain it? There are times when it's jumbled. There's times when the pressures of life and the pressures of the world we live in have drawn you away from God. And He says, God understands.

Think about that. You think God is mad. He might be. He gets angry with us.

Just like you should know better than that. Like I've said before, I think God is saying to us all the time, oh, that's going to hurt. Just like we do with our little kids, right? No, don't do that. That's going to hurt. God's doing that all the time.

But we can't. There's times we can't even break through. We're in the wilderness so bad. It's just desert. And God understands. Christ understands He's been here. Remember, it was He who got out away from people. And usually what you see is He was just overwhelmed by people's demands. He was at times overwhelmed by their hurts. It was just overwhelming.

God can deal in that state. He wasn't in the God state anymore. And having to deal with all the pain and the hurt, it was just overwhelming. He understands. Sometimes too, you can tell, He got a little annoyed with the disciples. I need to go walk in the water and talk to God.

So He understands. This is what's amazing about this. In these wilderness journeys, when it just seems like I'm alone and there's nothing and I'm abandoned, God understands. Now we can go read that to Him. You go read it to Him. He put it here and say, please, this is what you say. Show me. Show me. So I'm going to conclude by going to Psalm 63.

In a way, we're all in a wilderness journey every day of our lives. It's just sometimes it gets very real, doesn't it? Sometimes when it just seems like nothing works out or you're sick or you have, like I said, you've lost your job, you have no money, you're struggling.

Or you're just so overwhelmed with society that you don't even feel a connection to God. We're just overwhelmed. We're so locked up in our jobs, in our entertainment, in everything that we're doing that, you know, we're really not spending any real meaningful time with God. So we grab a little bit of Bible study. We say a little prayer once every day, morning in it, in the evening, but we're not connecting. And eventually you end up on... You either have to create it yourself or you still end up in a wilderness journey, because we end up having to draw close to God, right? That's the whole point of this. That's what that means. That's what God did every time He put somebody on one of those journeys.

Psalm 63. If you notice, there's a little heading. A Psalm of David when he was in the wilderness of Judah. When you put this together, what most of the Jewish people who are rabbis who look at this, they think that he wrote this, and it makes sense, when he was being pursued by Saul. His friend, the king of Israel, was going to kill him, and he had to go out into the wilderness to escape, and Saul chased him out into the wilderness.

He's out in some very hostile land.

He's out away from Jerusalem, where he loved Jerusalem. He's out away from everything, with just a few chosen men. And it's a bad place to be. He says, Oh God, you are my God. Early will I seek you. My soul thirsts for you, my flesh longs for you, in a dry and thirsty land where there is no water. He's looking at his surroundings and he's saying, just as I physically am stressed in the desert, very little water, very little food, I realize I am thirsty for you. I am hungry for you. You see what's happening here. The physical part of his life is now being zeroed in on the spiritual part of his life. God wants us to want him as much as he wants us. He wants us to want him more than anything. He wants to have a better marriage, have a better relationship with God. No matter what in life, if we want it to be better, have a better relationship with God. And so here is David in the wilderness saying, this is where I am spiritually also. I'm alone. I'm lost. I was supposed to be king. The king is trying to kill me.

I'm an outcast. I'm a nobody.

Next verse is interesting. So I have looked for you in the sanctuary to see your power and your glory. He says, I've looked for you in the tabernacle. Remember they still had the tabernacle then. The temple, of course, hadn't been built. He says, I would go there to search for you in the sanctuary. I can't even go to the temple or the tabernacle. I can't even go to the sanctuary. This desert is my sanctuary. You know, here's who I am. I can't go where I want to go to search for you. But notice where this has brought him. This wilderness journey. Because your loving kindness is better than life, my lips shall praise you.

It brought him face to face with God. He's now face to face with God. Not literally. He doesn't see God, but he has experience with God. This is what God wants us to go through. This is what we have to go through. This is why we will have wilderness journeys. Oh, a Christian never has anything like this. I don't know. You're a good company. From Abraham to John the Baptist to Jesus Christ. I mean, everybody has these. Those the closest to God. Because your loving kindness is better than life, my lips praise you. And I will bless you while I have, while I live. I will lift up my hands in your name. My soul shall be satisfied, and with the marrow and fatness, my mouth shall praise you with joyful lips. He says, I will now find my meaning in God.

And this really became driven home to him when he was down to nothing. That's when he got it. When I remembered you on my bed, I meditate you in the night watches. Sometimes on these journeys, these wilderness journeys, you're not sleeping well. You're struggling at night with things happening in your life. You're struggling with what does God want me to do? What about this? How am I going to fix this problem? What are we going to do? You're struggling. You're not sleeping at night. David wasn't sleeping well at night. He says, it's in the middle of the night that I think about this. And what did he do? He zeroed in on God. He doesn't zero in on Saul. He doesn't zero in all the friends that turned his back on him. He doesn't zero in all these things. He's zeroing in on God. Because you have been my help, therefore in the shadow of your wings I will rejoice. My soul follows close behind you. Your right hand upholds me.

He was drawing near to God. And notice what happens.

I'm just following you. God was drawing him. God, you have to ask God to draw you. You have to be prepared to have God draw you to him. So you draw close to him, but then he does that work. He pulls you. He prepares you for that. He was being prepared to be king of Israel by what?

By being a nobody, being considered a criminal, chased to be killed by the very people he was supposed to serve and hiding in the wilderness. That's a tough wilderness journey. He goes on and says I now realize that those who wanted to kill him, God was going to punish them.

And even that hurt him. You can see in other Psalms that hurt him. He didn't want Saul killed.

But he realized that's what was going to happen. God was going to take care of him.

That's a wilderness journey right there. You and I get on it. Fortunately, we're usually not out in the actual wilderness, but we're in a spiritual wilderness, and that's what we have to recognize. You and I at times are in a spiritual wilderness because the kingdom of God has not been established yet on the earth. Now we're citizens of that kingdom, living in a different world. Christ is coming back.

And so we are in a wilderness, it's one way or another every day, but we have these actual experiences, these actual journeys that we have to go through.

And remember when this happens, just go back and read James. Well, read some of the Psalms.

Submit to God and resist the devil, and he will flee far from you. Draw near to God, and he will draw you to him. He will prepare you. Clench your hands and purify your hearts.

Lament and weep. Repent. Admit before God. You're not perfect yet. You want to be. You're striving. You're trying, but I need forgiveness and I need help. And then humble yourself. When you do that, and you say that to God, and you cry out, how long does it take? That's a personal thing between you and God. I can't even, you know, I don't know, took Abraham three days. Took Moses 40 years. But the thing is, is that God will do this. And when he does, you will end up in the, spiritually, remarkably, in the place where David was in Psalm 63.