God's School of Wilderness

The Lord prompted me to pick up a book this past weekend that I had read several years ago. The book is written by Charles Swindoll and it is titled “Moses-A Man of Selfless Dedication.”

My eyes scanned the table of contents and saw the chapter titled “The Desert: School of Self-Discovery.” I turned to this chapter and began to read. Here are some of the paragraphs that grabbed my attention:

Apart from the desert experience, you and I might live out our lives without ever hearing or knowing what the God of the universe desires to tell us. The wilderness-like desert changes that. In that lonely place, you find
yourself stripped of all the things you hang on to for comfort – all the stuff you felt you needed through life but really didn’t need at all.

Why does God lead us through desert places? Let’s get the answer from Moses, who had advanced degrees from God’s School of Wilderness. It is so that He might humble us, that He might test us, and that the true condition of our heart might be revealed. Not that God might come to know you (He already does), but that you might come to know you. There’s nothing like the desert to help you discover the real you. When you strip away all the trappings, peel off the masks, and shed all the phony costumes, you begin to see a true
identity – a face that hasn’t emerged for years. Maybe never. That’s what the desert did for Moses. That is what it has done for me, in the wilderness sojourns of my own life. It will humble you. It will show you your strengths and weaknesses. It will help you discover yourself as never before.

God never puts us through the blast furnace in the desert to ruin us. He does it to refine us. And in the midst of that howling wilderness, through the process of time, the stinging sand bites through the rust and corrosion, and we become a usable tool in His hands.

There has been numerous times in my past when I have had the joyful experience of rubbing shoulders with men and women who have been tempered in such a desert. You can always tell – sometimes within moments – when you have met individuals so refined by God. They are some of the most secure, genuinely humble, gracious, honest individuals one can imagine. It took the desert to do it.

I don’t like being trained in God’s School of Wilderness, but I must agree with Charles it is a place where I discover conditions of my heart and allow God to show me things that need changing in my life. It is a place of self discovery for the very purposes of being refined so that God can use me to touch lives of others. And yes I want to have the fruit that results from being trained in God’s School of Wilderness: security, humbleness, graciousness, and honesty. For these reasons, I’ll keep going to God’s School of Wilderness when needed. How about you, will you go too? Just think, maybe we can be in some of the same classes and help each other out.