A Call to Worship When it Feels Impossible
“Then say to him, ‘The Lord, the God of the Hebrews, has sent me to say to you: Let my people go, so that they may worship me in the wilderness. . . ” Exodus 7: 16.
In this passage, God initiates the first of 10 plagues on Pharaoh and his Egypt for not letting God’s people go so they could worship Him in the wilderness. To read the passage for context, click here.
A Call to Worship Where?
God wanted worship from His people in the wilderness.
It doesn’t require any faith to worship God in the promise land. Any unbeliever can be grateful when things are going his way. But it does require faith to worship in the desert. The desert represents a contradiction of God’s promise. A place of barely enough. A trial that tests our faith.
It is here we learn to worship God as we learn to walk by faith and not sight. We worship because even though life is hard in the wilderness, it’s serving to prepare us for the promise land. We worship because without it, we will never inherit our promise land.
In order to do that, we must be mature or whole and complete. And this can only be accomplished in the desert. That’s why James exhorts us to:
“Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing” James 1: 2-4.
We worship in the desert because even though it’s hard, it’s as much an expression of God’s love as the promise land. So, in the dry places, we learn to believe God’s promises. We learn to walk by faith and not sight. And that’s what enables us to endure the contradictions to those promises.
And that endurance is what enables us to be whole and complete and thus prepared for preferred destiny.
EVERY Leg of the Journey is a Gift
But that’s not all. The desert is the place of unmet needs, but also of supernatural provision. It’s where we experience bread from heaven on a daily basis (Exodus 16). This represents the presence of the Holy Spirit bringing God’s word alive. It’s where we experience water from a rock and miraculous deliverances (Exodus 17: 6).
We experience an intimacy with God and power in prayer as we learn to lean on Him to meet our needs. The Lord wants to teach us to see every leg of our journey as a gift, an expression of His love and as a cause to worship. Each phase has experiences and opportunities that can only be gained in that phase.
The Lord makes us stay in the wilderness until we learn to appreciate its unique and very valuable blessings. Whether we realize it or not, if we don’t appreciate the desert and worship there, we wouldn’t appreciate the promise land and worship there either.
The Israelites never did learn to worship in the desert. And as a result, most of them died there. Because God loves us all the time, whether we’re in the desert or promise land, we must love Him all the time in both places as well.
Every Experience Is an Opportunity for Gain
EVERY experience is an opportunity for gain, either in the natural realm or in the spiritual. God’s intention for us is that we be blessed ALL the time, in every circumstance whether we’re abased or abounding (Philippians 4: 12).
The desert is a glorious opportunity to gain spiritual blessings, and the promise land is obviously a time of natural blessings. But if we refuse the wilderness blessings, which require faith to receive, we miss out on the promise land blessings too.
That’s because the wilderness blessings are necessary to prepare us for the promise land blessings. We don’t grow, gain strength and endurance, become whole and complete in the promise land. Only the desert has the necessary characteristics for that to happen.
You might think I don’t need to mature. I’ll just take the good life and forget about that growing thing. But as we’ve talked about, we must be prepared to handle the blessing of the promise land. The prerequisite to receiving our inheritance is that we be mature, whole and complete.
So, really, the wilderness is the doorway to the promise land. And that’s why it’s also call to worship.
To read another post related to A Call to Worship When it feels Impossible, see The Knowledge of Good and Evil: How Do We Get Wisdom?