46: The Wilderness is Not a Detour: Why Does God Send Us Into the Wilderness?

Nobody signs up for the wilderness. One day you've got momentum, the thing is working, and the next you look up and the ground has changed. The green is gone. And the desert doesn't just make you tired. It makes you doubt. Because you start doing the math: if I were really walking with God, I wouldn't be out here.

This is part one of a new four-part arc on the wilderness. Not how to escape it. How to be formed in it.

We go back to Exodus 13:17-18, where the text says plainly that God led His people into the desert, on purpose, choosing the long road over the short one. To Matthew 4:1, where the Spirit drove Jesus into the wilderness immediately after the Father's audible approval. And we sit with a hard, honest question: what if the wilderness was never a wrong turn? What if, in the economy of God, the desert is not the detour off the path. The desert is the path.

With help from Kelly Brown Douglas on hope that lives in the middle of suffering, and Barbara Brown Taylor on why new life always starts in the dark, this episode is for anyone convinced their dry season is a punishment. It isn't. You are not lost. You are being led.

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Email us any questions or comments to yourpursuitpodcast@gmail.com

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Learn more about me at www.justindbelt.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Nobody signs up for the wilderness. That's the first thing to understand. Like, you don't wake up one morning and choose the dry season. It chooses you. One day you're moving, you've got momentum, the thing is working, and the next day you look up and the ground is changed under your feet. Literally shifted. The green is gone, the road you were on just stops, and in front of you is a whole lot of nothing stretching out further than you can see. And here's what the wilderness does to you. The cruelest part of it is that it doesn't just make you tired, it makes you doubt. Because you start doing the math. Like if I were really walking with God, I wouldn't be out here. If I'd heard him right, if I'd obeyed better, if I had more faith, I'd be somewhere green and lush in an oasis with a mocktail in my hand right now, right? I know you feel me. If I'd heard him right, if I'd obeyed better, if I had more faith, I'd be somewhere incredible. So then the desert becomes obvious. It becomes proof that you took a wrong turn somewhere. Proof that this is a detour or a punishment or some consequence for some mistake at some point in time that you can't even pinpoint, better yet, name. But detour, detour, okay? Let's hold on to that word right there. Because I think that it's the lie underneath most of our suffering in the dry seasons. Because we genuinely believe that the wilderness is a mistake. It's a place that we end up because we did something wrong, because we took a wrong turn. We we think that the wilderness is a stretch of road between where we are now and where we are, quote unquote, supposed to be. But what if it isn't? What if the wilderness was never a wrong turn? What if uh in the economy of God, the desert is not a detour of the path, but rather the desert is the path. I'm Justin Belt. This is Faith Formed, episode 46, and we're starting something new today. A four-part arc on the wilderness. But not how to escape it, how to be formed in it. Because if you're in a dry season right now, I don't want to hand you a map out. I think that would be detrimental to your to your development. Rather, I want to show you why God might have led you in. Now let me show you something in the text that should change how you read your whole dry season. Exodus. The people of Israel have just come out of Egypt, 400 years of slavery. God cracks it open, splits a sea, drowns an army, and sets them free. That sounds like a song. And now they're free. And where does God take them? Not into the promised land. Like they don't leave Egypt and head straight into the promised land. Not straight, you know, from the dust and the dryness into the milk and the honey. He takes them into the wilderness. 40 years of wilderness. Now let's here's the phrase that I need you to catch. Because I think we skip over it. Look at Exodus 13, verse 18. It says, God led the people around by the way of the wilderness. God led them. This was not Israel getting lost. This was not a choice. Siri didn't give them a navigational error or a wrong turn, or this wasn't even the consequence of somebody misreading a map because they probably would have strung him up and he wouldn't have been the navigator anymore. But the same God who parted the sea is the same one who pointed them toward the desert and said, okay, this way, the pillar of cloud by day, the pillar of fire by night, the visible presence of God Himself led them straight into the sand. Now, if we really let that land, I think it wrecks the detour lie. Because if God is the one leading, then the wilderness is not evidence that you got lost. It's evidence that you're being led. The desert was not Israel's punishment for leaving Egypt, right? God is not punishing them for being slaves. God is lovingly forming them on the way to the promise. God had a whole nation of freed slaves who still thought like slaves, and you cannot bring a slavery-shaped mentality, a shavery-slaved people, into a land of promise and expect them to be able to live free, right? So they had to be unformed and then reformed. And that kind of work doesn't happen in the green places. That couldn't have happened by the pool with a Mai Tai. It has to happen in the dry spaces. And here's the thing that I don't think people will often tell you. So I'm going to tell you because I'm I'm your boy, you know. Let's go back one verse to verse 17. See, God could have taken them the short way because there was a shorter road to the promised land along the coast through Philistine country. And the text even tells us plainly that God deliberately did not take them on it. He chose the long way. He chose the wilderness on purpose, which means for some of you, the dry season you're in is not because God couldn't find a faster route between A and B. It's because there's something the fast route could never do in you. And he loves you too much to rush it. So you're not lost. You're being led. Those feel identical from the inside, but in reality, they're not the same thing. If it were just Israel, you might just be able to write it off, like as a one-off, right? Old Testament, different covenant, one nation story. Yeah, okay, amen. But then you get to Jesus, and the pattern doesn't break, rather, it intensifies. And you know where I'm going with this, right? Yeah, Matthew 4. Jesus has just been baptized, and this is a mountaintop moment. If there ever, if there ever was one, I mean, go back to the end of chapter 3, Matthew 3, uh verse 13. The heavens tear open, the spirit descends like a dove, and the father says out loud, This is my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased. It's my God voice. So you you literally cannot get to a higher spiritual moment than that. This audible approval from God, this great commissioning, the anointing, right? And then what happens in Matthew chapter 4, verse 1? Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into Hawaii. No, into the wilderness. Read that again. Led by the Spirit. Aren't we supposed to be spirit-led? What about when the Spirit leads us into the wilderness? Oh my gosh. Oh my goodness. See, Mark's Mark's gospel is even more violent about it. Mark 1, verse 12 says, the spirit drove him into the wilderness. The word there is the same word used for casting out demons, which is crazy. The spirit didn't suggest the desert. The spirit literally propelled Jesus into it. Like immediately after the highest form of affirmation that there is. Now there's a pattern here that I need you to see. Do you see it? For for Israel and for Jesus, the wilderness came right after the high point. And in both cases, God Himself did the leading. Family, this is not the enemy dragging them off course. This is the Spirit literally setting the course. So what can we infer from this? We can infer that the desert is not the interruption of the calling. The desert is a part of the calling. Matter of fact, it's where the calling gets tested and proven and made real. And here's what I think should also undo the detour lie completely. If the sinless son of God, at the very start of his ministry, fresh off of the Father's audible approval, was led by the wilderness, was led by the Spirit, sorry, into the wilderness, then the wilderness cannot be a sign of God's disapproval or his displeasure. It cannot be a punishment for sin because Jesus had no sin. The desert is not where God sends you when you failed. The desert is where God forms who he is about to use. Who names something about why we hate the wilderness so much. And it's not why, it's not what you think. Barbara Brown Taylor wrote a book called Learning to Walk in the Dark. And she says something in it that I think is really apt and relevant here. She says, Most of us practice what she calls solar spirituality, a faith that only knows how to value the light. We've decided that everything good is bright, sunny, visible, up, and everything to fear is dark, low, hidden, and night. And so we build a whole Christianity around staying in the light and avoiding the dark at all costs. And Taylor says the problem with solar spirituality is that it leaves you helpless when the sun goes down. And the sun always eventually does what? It goes down. And so she argues we need to recover what she calls lunar spirituality, a faith that knows, like the moon, that our experience of the light waxes and wanes. That's so good. And that God is just as present in the dark phase as the full one. And then she says this, and this rocked me. She says, New life always starts in the dark. Whether it's a seed in the ground, a baby in the womb, or Jesus in the tomb, it starts in the dark. Can we just digest that for a second? Having a solar spirituality who associates everything good with the light, while associating everything dark with everything bad with the dark, while not stopping to think that life always starts in the dark. Every living thing you can name begins in a place with no light. The seed doesn't germinate on the kitchen counter in the sun, it germinates buried in the cold, dark soil where you can't see a thing that's happening. The baby isn't formed in the open air. It's formed in the hidden dark of the womb for nine months before anybody lays eyes on it. And the single most important event in human history, the resurrection, happened in the pitch black of a sealed tomb in the ground, where not a one could witness or watch it occur. And so here's what it means for you in your wilderness. If new life starts in the dark, then the darkness of your dry season is not the absence of God works in it, rather, it is the proof. It's the exact location of it. You're not in the dark because God stopped growing you. You might be in the dark because that's the only place that the particular thing, whatever that is, that he's growing can actually take root. Barbara Brown Taylor says that there are things you learn sleeping in the wilderness that those who sleep in comfortable houses will never know. Some lessons only come in the dark. And a faith that only knows how to praise God in the daylight was never going to survive the night anyway. Basically, Barbara Brown Taylor is telling us to get our faith up and to understand that there are measurable spiritual things that demonstrate God's favor and his anointing that can only happen in the dark. Now, I have to be careful because I'm not gonna romanticize the wilderness. I'm not gonna do it because there's nothing we can't romanticize it. Because it is hunger, it's thirst, it's the ache of a road that won't end, dust in your mouth, dust on your clothes, the sun beating down on you, it is scorpions walking around, and spiders and bugs and cacti and all these things. And I refuse to hand you a tidy bow that says, if you just wait, it'll all be worth it. Because I think that's shallow and it doesn't really tell us anything, right? It does nothing to help you when you're spitting sand out of your mouth and being beaten down by a harsh sun on your head. So I want to bring in another theologian, I think, who can speak to this. Uh, the suffering that comes from the inside, not the outside. Her name is Kelly Brown Douglas. She is a uh a womanist theologian trained under James Cohn. We've we've quoted him a lot on this podcast, and her whole body of work wrestles with the question the comfortable will never have to ask. How do you hope while you're still suffering? Not after it's over. She writes out of the black experience in America, uh, of a people, my people, who have known long generational wilderness, who have had every reason to believe the desert was permanent, and who have nonetheless held on to a hope that did not require the suffering to end first. And that's the kind of hope that the wilderness demands of us. Not the cheap kind that says, you know, don't worry about a thing, every little thing's gonna be alright. No. No, the wilderness does not demand that kind of hope. It doesn't demand the it's gonna be over soon kind of hope. It doesn't demand the keep smiling kind of hope. It doesn't demand the keep praying, you know, God's with you kind of hope. It doesn't require the Christianese platitudes that we're so often eager and willing to dole out like we keep a utility belt like Batman around our waist full of these one-liners that we can give people who were suffering, who were struggling just to get them out of our faces so that we can keep going about our unbothered lives. No. Douglas points to a hope that is grounded in the character of God and in the reality of resurrection. It's a hope that can look the wilderness dead in the eye, refuse to pretend it isn't real, and still declare that God is present and God is faithful, and the desert does not, does not get the last word. She insists that faith doesn't ask you to deny what's crushing you, it asks you to trust the God who is with you even as you're being crushed. And that's the difference between denial and hope, I think. And I think the wilderness will teach you how to tell those two things apart. Denial will say that there is no desert. But hope says there is a desert and my God is in it. And he's the same God who led Israel through it and raised his son out in the dark of a tomb. Denial needs the wilderness to disappear before it can rest, but hope rests in the middle of the wilderness because its confidence was never in the circumstances changing to begin with. Its confidence was in the one who leads. And if you're in the dry place right now, you don't need denial. Denial will collapse the second the wind picks up. You need the harder, deeper, truer thing. A hope that has looked at the whole desert and decided to trust God anyway. So let me pull this together and tell you what the wilderness is actually for. Because if it's not for a detour, then it has a purpose. And I think you, listener of faith formed, deserve to know what that purpose is. Number one, the wilderness strips you. That's the first thing. In Egypt, Israel had a lot of things, but they were slaves. In the wilderness, they had almost nothing, but they were being made into God's people. See, the desert takes away everything you were leaning on that wasn't God. And it and it does it not to punish you, but to show you what you were actually standing on. Some of you built your faith on your circumstances, on the momentum, on the winds, on the sense that things were working. And the wilderness took all of that from you so that you could find out whether there was actually anything underneath it. And that sounds cruel, but it's not cruelty. I think it's a deep form of love, and it's an even deeper form of mercy. Because it's better to find out now that the foundation is thin while there's still time to build it up, than to keep going with a foundationless faith and be crushed because you have nothing, no pillars to hold you up later on. The wilderness also teaches dependence. In Exodus 16, Israel learned in the desert that they couldn't feed themselves. Every morning there was manna, and it came one day at a time, and they could not store it up, and they had to trust God for it again the next morning. That's the part that I'm convinced that we hate. We hate being dependent. If I uh I hate being dependent like that, not feeling helpless to care for my myself, having to, you know, feel like I have to ask God, where's our next meal coming from? How are we gonna pay this next bill, God? How are we gonna put you know a second kid through college? How how this God? How that God? Don't you get sick of me asking you how God? And every time God comes back to me, it's like, no, you might get sick of your kids asking you what's for dinner every day, or asking you for money for this every day. You might get sick of them asking you for the same thing every day, but I don't. I delight in your dependence, and I believe that is a word for someone right now. God delights in your dependence. So you don't have to figure it out on your own, you don't have to shut God out of it, you don't have to look independent for anybody else. God delights in your dependence. Because the wilderness is where you learn that the God who led you in is the God who will sustain you through. The wilderness is where you learn that you cannot do it on your own, and that this is not a weakness to overcome. But the whole point of this is that you can't do it on your own. And then number three, the wilderness prepares you. Everything that made Israel a nation, the law given at Sinai, the tabernacle, the covenant, the identity, all of it was given in the wilderness. They walked in as a mob of freed slaves, but they walked out as the people of God. So in turn, that makes the desert a forge. Jesus walked into the wilderness fresh off of his baptism and walked out of the wilderness in the power of the Spirit, ready for everything that came next. Notice the wilderness did not delay his ministry, it launched it. Jesus came out of the wilderness like a rocket. So whatever you're being stripped of right now, whatever dependence you're being forced into right now, whatever is being forged in you in the dark, hear me. It's not wasted. It's not a detour, it is the road. And the God who was walking you through it right now has done this before with the whole nation, with his own son, and he's never once led anyone into a wilderness that he did not intend to lead them through, that he did not intend to lead them out of. Do you hear me? Do you hear me? I I pray, I pray that these words are just jazzing your hope. I pray right now that if you're in the wilderness, that this is just giving you so much hope, that you're smiling, that you're feeling the presence and the spirit of God upon you, saying, Man, just trust me, I got this. Just trust me, I've done this before. This isn't my first rodeo. You're not the first one that I've ushered through this. I've got you. Just trust me, depend on me, let it strip you. I know it hurts, but let it strip you so you can be dependent upon me and understand that you're not in this alone. Y'all, the number of times God has come to me lately and said, brother, why do you keep living like you don't have a father who loves you? Son, why do you keep living and and and why do you keep living and believing that you don't have a father who is 10 toes down with you? And I need you to hear me, daughter, son. Why do you insist on living like you don't have a father who loves you and is ushering through you, uh walk ushering you through this and walking you through this? God sees how lonely the wilderness has made you. God sees how broken down your perspectives and your faith has become, and yet he's still your father, your loving father who is with you in this and through this. So here's your charge. And I want you to carry this charge out into the sand with you. Stop reading the wilderness as the wrong turn. Because you're not lost. You're exactly where you need to be because God led you there. The same God who went before Israel in the fire and the cloud, the same spirit who drove Jesus into the desert, brought him out in power. It's the same God who is with you in your dry season right now. And it was not a mistake, and he didn't lead you there to abandon you. So stop trying to sprint out of the very place God is trying to form you. Stop despising the dark as if nothing holy can grow there when the whole testament of Scripture is that new life starts in that kind of darkness. Let the desert do its work. Let it strip what needs stripping. Let it teach you what dependence you'd never learn in the green. And hold on. Not to the hope that it ends tomorrow, but to the God who is faithful whether it ends tomorrow or 10 years later. It is your preparation. Walk it like you're being led. Because you are. Father, we come to you from the dry places. Some of us have been in the wilderness for so long, we've started to believe that we did something to deserve it. That we took a wrong turn somewhere, that if we had just been better at faithing, at praying, at fasting, at appearing to be a Christian, if we'd just been better, then we'd be somewhere green by now. And so, God, for the one who is convinced the desert is a detour, a punishment, a mistake, would you help them see the pillar of fire? Would you show them that they were led here and not lost here? And that being led by you is never the same as being abandoned by you? Because you said you'd never abandon us. For the one who's exhausted, who's hungry for a provision that only ever seems to come one day at a time, teach them the manna. Teach them that daily dependence on you is not a curse, is not some lesser life. It is in fact the life you designed them for. And for the one sitting in the dark, certain that nothing good could possibly be growing in a place this hidden and this hard. Remind them that seeds start in the dark, that babies start in the dark, that your own son rose in the dark of a sealed tomb, and that you've never wasted a wilderness in the history of your people. And for all of us, give us a hope that doesn't need the desert to disappear first. Give us a hope that's anchored in you, in your character, in your resurrection, and that uh that can rest in the middle of the sand because it was never resting on the circumstances to begin with. Lead us through. Lead us through. We trust that you're leading. And so we're following your fire. In Jesus' name. Amen. Family, if you found, if this episode found you in a dry season, good. If it found you in a lush season, good, because at some point you're gonna head into a dry season. But if this found you in a dry season, then you already know somebody else who's in a dry season. You know somebody who's walking through a wilderness, convinced that they're just lost. Send them this episode, will you, please? Sometimes the most healing thing you can tell a person in the desert is simply that you're not lost, you're being led. So would you be that voice for somebody today? And if Faithformed is meeting you where you actually live, then the best way to help me get this message out is to leave a rating and a review wherever you listen. It only takes a minute, and genuinely it helps new people to not just discover this podcast, but also to trust it. It's social proof. Then follow and subscribe because this is a four-part arc, and I don't want you to miss a single moment of it. I don't want you to miss where we go next, actually, because in part two next week we talk about the mana, about what it means to live on provision that only comes one day at a time. So keep walking because you're being led, and I'll see you next week. Be blessed.