Episode Transcript
PRAYER OF CONSECRATION
Wake up, sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.
Jesus, I belong to you.
I lift up my heart to you.
I set my mind on you.
I fix my eyes on you.
I offer my body to you as a living sacrifice.
Jesus, we belong to you.
Praying in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, amen.
Exodus 15:22–25
Then Moses led Israel from the Red Sea and they went into the Desert of Shur. For three days they traveled in the desert without finding water.
When they came to Marah, they could not drink its water because it was bitter. (That is why the place is called Marah.) So the people grumbled against Moses, saying, “What are we to drink?”
Then Moses cried out to the Lord, and the Lord showed him a piece of wood. He threw it into the water, and the water became fit to drink.
There the Lord issued a ruling and instruction for them and put them to the test.
CONSIDER THIS
We’ve all heard and said the sayings, haven’t we? “It’s always something!” “If it’s not one thing, it’s another.” At the same time, we always seem surprised at the next problem or challenge—like it was not supposed to happen. Yet, it always happens. Things break. Tires go flat. Bones get broken. The wine runs out. Marriages collapse. Cancer strikes. Heart is attacked. Job lost. Hard drive crashes.
I remember, as a kid, riding out to the farm with my dad after a big rain. A rain in the midst of a drought is Christmas in July for a farmer. But Dad had to know exactly how much it rained—in every rain gauge! Per usual, after about the third rain gauge check, we would get the truck stuck in the thick, black, buckshot mud. Dad and I would walk a mile through the mud to get a tractor to pull the truck out, and what do you know—we would get the tractor stuck and walk another mile back to get yet another tractor. But it rained, which was good news! And you see where this is going. I would learn lots of choice new vocabulary words on those outings. This is life.
This is wilderness.
For three days they traveled in the desert without finding water.
A week ago, the problem was Pharaoh. Three days ago, the Red Sea was the obstacle. Now, they can’t find water to drink. Then the miracle happens, and they find water, but there’s a problem with the water—it was bitter and undrinkable. It’s always something! If it’s not one thing, it’s another.
So the people grumbled against Moses, saying, “What are we to drink?”
Here’s my question. These people knew how to cry out to the Lord. That’s how they got out of Egypt. So why are they now grumbling at Moses? It brings us to Wilderness Lesson #1: While it’s always easier to grumble at our leaders in the wilderness, the secret to success is crying out to God.
Watch Moses.
Then Moses cried out to the Lord, and the Lord showed him a piece of wood. He threw it into the water, and the water became fit to drink.
Moses is starting to look more than a little Eagle Scout-ish here. Something tells me Moses knew a thing or two because he’d seen a thing or two. Here’s what I love, though: Moses was not confident in himself but in God. Even better, I have a sense that Moses had learned to become confident in himself in God. This is my early hypothesis on Moses I would like to test with you as we move along on this journey.
There is a progressive journey of maturity in the ways and means of God. We begin with a lack of self-confidence. We grow to master something and become self-confident. Still, the world has a way of beating the confidence out of us. Through the grace of our brokenness, we meet God and gain a whole new kind of confidence anchored in him.
People try to affirm us and we deflect. We say things like, “That was not me. It was all God.” At this stage, it is a zero-sum game. Either God gets the glory or I do, so I give it to God. We know it is not a “me and God thing,” as though we were somehow partners. A lot of people want to believe this (I call it braunschweiger theology—think really nasty sausage in a paste form)—that God actually needs people to accomplish his will and is bereft without them. It’s the sentiment behind those cute little poems that say things like, “God has no hands but our hands.”
The next phase of maturity is the God-in-me phase, where I know it’s not me but God in me doing the stuff. Here is where confidence in God flourishes. At this point, a willingness to descend into hiddenness will lead to the me-in-God phase, a sanctified confidence in ourselves, anchored not in ourselves but in our union with God. This is rarified air, and we see far too little of it. This is the place where he teaches us to stretch out our hand only to find it is his hand stretching out beyond us.
Finally, we come to the we-in-God phase, where we begin to find a kind of union with other people wholly anchored in union with God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This is what the terribly misunderstood word “church” actually means. It is the deep and abiding trinitarian mystery of friendship. This is where the magic happens, where we participate in the answer to Jesus’s prayer, “That all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me” (John 17:21).
Where can we learn such things but in the wilderness, where the Holy Spirit transforms our grumbling and complaining into outcries of prayer—where God shows us a piece of wood and gives us the sense to throw it in the bitter water, where he makes it fit to drink? And then we get this ponderous word:
There the Lord issued a ruling and instruction for them and put them to the test.
Now, what could this be about? Keep walking.
THE PRAYER FOR DELIVERANCE
Lord Jesus, you are my Deliverer.
Thank you for the classroom of the wilderness. You are delivering me from seeing the wilderness as a place to escape to the place where I am learning to embrace you and depend on you, to the place where desperation for relief transforms into delight in your nearness.
For starters, today, I receive your deliverance from grumbling to prayer.
Thank you that you and your ways are the curriculum, and all I need to do is behold you, and as we behold you—we are “being transformed from one degree of glory to the next” (see 2 Corinthians 3:17–ff). Keep moving us further on and deeper in until our confidence is unshakable in you in me and me in you. This is the true holiness—when I am wholly yours, and you are wholly mine. Here I am, Lord.
All of this for my good, for others’ gain, for your glory.
Glory to the Father, and to the Son and to the Holy Ghost
As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be. World without end, amen! Amen!
