3 A voice cries:
“In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord;
make straight in the desert a highway for our God.
The Holy Bible: English Standard Version (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Bibles, 2016), Is 40:3.
This is our 2nd in this series. In my meditation about how the messages are going to be written and published there has to be thorough research, meditation, and I also use Logos Bible Software, on my Macbook computer. It is a library of resources. In this I usually like to investigate the background, the meaning of the original languages, the context of the time of when Isaiah is writing. I remember preaching in Brixham in Devon, concerning Isaiah 6, the holiness of God, and over the years God has put layers and layers on the Scriptural image, that what I preached then, in 1988, I would not preach just on that level. It is progressive, our understanding of Scripture, and some err, and then God brings a correction. Whilst I value the role that some commentators play on Youtube to Biblical error, heresy, I think the process to establish what is heresy, and what determines one as a false prophet and teacher needs thorough defining. We need to establish what makes a minister false. We do have evidence that the Church at Ephesus from what the letter tells us concerning the tests they placed on the apostles who circulated the known Roman Empire. We need to understand that the tests need to return to the Church today especially as we ascertain that the Church is fragmented in terms of its leadership and the tests that leaders must place on ministry.
We come to the fact that “wilderness” and “desert” share the same Hebrew word. The dry place is the meaning. We must see that God is placing the importance of the dry places in terms of spirituality. We know from the Scripture that God chose the dry place to start something. The new thing of God needed to pass through the prophet God chose, vocationed. The mission in its efficacy is as much determined by the preparation of the vessel of the choosing of the Lord. We are not sure how long John the Baptist started his ministry, and maybe some of you reading this may shed better light on this than I. I would invite this feedback.
What strikes me is that the dry place represents also the state the person comes to, at the start of their preparation. I have been searching out some of my old books and my old course work, written sermons from my time at Hill Top Assemblies of God, Eastwood from 1989. It was an interesting insight to where I was then. When you consider I was 20, and very naiive regarding ministry, regarding my own person, very idealistic about others, thinking all had the same desire and passion for the Lord. I had no notion about what spirituality was like in a family context, about the restraints of time for prayer, for Bible study. Then the stresses of work, paying bills and educating children. Now 34 years on, I have lived through all this. And come out the other end, more focussed than ever.
I may have mentioned it here, that John’s first rejection, was to reject the expected call to Priesthood, his father being a priest of the incense, keeping the incense altar working, symbolizing intercession, yet his own intercession for children forgotten. When he is told that his prayer had been heard, it seems God’s hearing and ours are completely different. It took decades until he and Elisabeth, being already the age of being grandparents, now are greeted with the news of a conception and a son. So this same miraculous son rejects the family call to the priesthood by their own placing in the line of Levi. It is the obligation of Levi males to integrate to the Temple service. John, to reject this, not sure what the reaction was, or how he navigated that issue. In this dry place that he is led to, he is divested of all expectations, family ties. There is an essence of Joseph, being that Joseph was away over a decade and this prepares him to be governor and leader in his family.
We think of the ministry as a task of doing but in contrast God sees it as a life of being. And it is this misunderstanding in our thinking that the dry place of desert and wilderness that this principle is broken. We have more value in walking daily in God, discerning Him in our daily lives. I commented many times with a minister friend of mine, that it is more preferable in my heart to sit down in Costa Coffee to hear the Lord, open the Bible, and have a conversation with Him, than preaching in an arena with 10 thousand people. We have placed many times over the years that the sermons, rallies we have heard and been to are most important. The dry place cultivates the desire for fellowship rather than be content with ministry. Some get drunk on the apparent feeling of God’s inspiration and Presence than be content with the daily fellowship that is what God desires of us.
When you consider in all the examples in the Bible of men and women, who walked with God, you see their preparation and their obscurity, larger in proportion than the acts, the ministry they are known for. The fellowship leads us into mission, and mission leads us back to fellowship.
The nothingness of the desert place, the dry place, creates the thirst for what is priority in God. It places in our minds that the dreams of our teenage years, or our 20’s might need greater detail and small print. We approach spiritual objective with far more realism. This realism is not academic, or humanistic, but it is founded upon the moulding of the dry place. We ask for wisdom, discernment and detail. We are no longer looking for the high, for the thrill, but our pursuit is seeking out God in the minute details of our daily life.
The dry place eventually becomes a place of congregation and relationship, in that John seemed to empty the cities, and all went out to him there in that dry place. They all were spiritually and supernaturally drawn. They also followed John recognising that indeed God was doing something new. It is so much so that Jesus Himself comes into that place. He is part of this movement of rejecting the populist activity, rejecting what is conventionally where God is expected, to understanding something is happening in that place. Jesus appears, heavens open, the Voice of the Father is heard, the Spirit comes down.
I believe that Jesus is about to appear again, in this our pursuit. He is about to open heavens for us, we are about to hear the Voice of the Father, and His Spirit is going to come down. Could this not be a hidden pattern here for our pursuit? Yes, I believe so. So this preparation for Jesus is so important today, for us to reject the trends in our multitudes and majorities, going into the dry place, so that in that place Jesus comes into our midst! This is what all this is about. May we welcome Him!
Maranatha!
Leave a Reply