Day 2773 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Psalm 119:82 NIV

Our hearts long for an oasis in this desert where we can find a moment's relief from the sun beating down on our dry and weary bones and maybe even find a drop to quench our parched mouths. Sounds like a rather poetic depiction of life down here in this land of the lost. That's really been something that's been on my mind for a while now. The correlation between faith and the desert. I just think that we've managed to get the wrong idea of how this is all meant to go.

One of our biggest problems when it comes to faith is that our minds get in our way. We allow ourselves to sit around and daydream of these perfect outcomes and lavish ideals where we never suffer from want or need. We plan these perfect lives that always go our way and are completely free from struggle and strife. And yet, we're still stuck in this reality where we're handed new trials and temptations and turmoil every single day.

Eventually we get to this point where our ideals clash with God's reality. That's what we've been talking about for several days now. God's path does lead to Heaven, but that doesn't mean that it happens right away. His path holds some truly incredible promises, but we'd be fools to think that He's not going to make sure our faith is true through trial and testing. He will lead us through the fire to see whether or not we mean what we say we believe.

And we shouldn't expect anything different. But the problem is that we do.

We expect things to happen right away. We expect healing overnight. We expect miracles to break through in our timing. We expect God to simply scoop us out of our worldly struggles and set us down in Heaven so that we don't have to actually walk the narrow road that leads there. We want Him to just hurry up and get us to the destination, completely skipping over the hardships and tribulations that we actually need to go through in order to learn what faith really is and discover how badly we need to nurture it so that it grows.

But I've seen so many people talking about how Christianity brings health, wealth, and prosperity. They treat our Savior as some kind of bank that's filled with blessings and provision where all we have to do is withdraw whatever we want and He will send it right away. That's just not how this works. Scripture is loaded with people who went through some things we can't even begin to imagine. So where does this whole lie of a life of ease and worldly comfort come from?

It comes from us and our inability to let go of this place. It comes from our innate impatience. It comes when we become so focused on the promised destination that we grow unwilling to endure the path that leads us to it. It comes from us wanting something we don’t actually deserve and not being interested in learning the difference.

You know, we read the story of Sodom and Gomorrah and how Lot's wife looked back and was turned into a pillar of salt as if it were a one-time deal. The problem is that we've all been Lot's wife. We've all taken our eyes off of God's path and looked back at the world and everything we're leaving behind us. We've all failed to shake this dust off our feet and move forward down the path of faith. All because this doubt in our hearts tells us that we're leaving behind something special and may not find anything to replace it up ahead.

We're all called to fix our eyes on Christ and keep following His footsteps. But they lead us in a direction that is completely foreign and uncomfortable and scary and barren. Faith strips away everything we have, everything we've known because it has to be able to reach our hearts without all the worldly junk and selfish plans getting in the way. God wants our whole heart, our whole mind, our whole life, not just what's left after we've given most of them away to the world and our personal desires.

So He prunes us. He refines us. He leads us away from the alleys we've existed in and drags us away from the comforts we're used to where we have nothing to rely on but Him and Him alone. And enduring that pruning process where God starts ripping away everything that doesn't belong is painful. Because we humans hate getting rid of things. We hate leaving things behind because we've simply bought this idea that we need all this stuff to make our lives meaningful and to bring us joy.

That's the lie that must be put to death in order for us to ever start to understand what we have in Jesus. That’s the lie that keeps us from walking into the desert completely forsaking every creature comfort we’ve long enjoyed. But unfortunately, it's not an easy lie to get rid of, which is why God does drastic things to help us cut it loose.

I was thinking about this last night after reading through Psalm 119. I bet the most common question that God hears from us is 'Why?' Why am I going through this trial? Why am I suffering so badly? Why does this have to be so hard? Why is it taking this long? Why can't I just get my way? Why don't you want me to be happy? Why do your plans take so long and seem so far away? Why do I have to change? Why do I need to lay down my plans? Why can't this all just be over? Why?

We ask Him so many questions trying to find out why His plans are so much different than ours and why His promises seem to always be just out of reach. We wear ourselves out trying to either understand what He's doing or to try and convince Him to change His mind and do it our way. And along this desert road we slowly allow doubt to overrule our trust and we give into this self-focused complaint about how hard it is to keep going through the misery of it all.

What if we stopped looking only at the promise and tried instead to understand the purpose for the path that leads to it? What if we stopped expecting our faith to be easy and learned to find joy in the fact that God will do whatever it takes to help us break away from the world that's held us enslaved? What if we could simply understand that it’s so hard to follow Jesus because we’re really used to running away from Him? What if we could realize that it hurts so bad to let all this worldly stuff go because all this worldly stuff has been holding us tighter than we ever knew?

What if we just allowed ourselves to trust that His promise is there and that His path will get us to that beautiful destination and simply allowed ourselves to enjoy the journey of faith that leads us to a life we'd never be able to find doing things our way?

I get it, we want proof. We find comfort in having a ticket that says we're on our way to the Promised Land. We want an overnight flight instead of long and winding road that takes a lifetime. But friends, the whole point of this journey is that it takes us a lifetime to finally realize we're not right. It takes us all this time to discover our plans are pointless. It takes us forever to finally get it through our thick skulls that everything we want is worthless.

That's why we need the desert.

It's not because God wants to see how much we can take. It's not so that He can punish us for our sins and mistakes. It's not about making us suffer a little bit so that we lose every ounce of joy or peace that we think we've found in this world. It's about helping us see that our joy and peace and hope should be in Him alone because He is in fact all we truly have to lean on, both in this world and to get us through those gates to eternal life.

But instead of trusting in His path, however long and difficult it may be, we just keep sitting around expecting today to be the day that everything hard is over and we never have to face another challenge again. We just keep assuming that our faith will make our lives easy while unknowingly setting ourselves up for disappointment when they're not. We keep asking Him why we're not there yet when we should be asking ourselves why we keep doubting in His ability to lead us.

Friends, I think the issue is that we've completely gotten the idea of comfort horribly wrong. We find comfort in knowing the answers and being able to understand things and having a life free from struggle and pain. But maybe our comfort is meant to be found in the fact that God knows what He's doing even when we don't see the reasons. Maybe our comfort is meant to be found in the promise of what's to come, not what we're seeing or feeling at the moment. Maybe our lives in a broken world aren’t meant to be comfortable!

Maybe our comfort is in Jesus and not ourselves or our plans or our dreams or our circumstances.

We ask God to comfort us by taking away all the things we don't like and giving us everything we want. Maybe His comfort comes in taking away everything that’s killing us but that we can’t see doing it. Maybe He comforts us by giving us the chance to let go of trying to figure out what our future may be and how the road there may go and what we need to do to get there. He has all that figured out, and that's where we find our comfort. Not in the destination, but in the promise that the journey there has a reason and that He's walking it with us.

My point is that we will not see His promise unfold in our lives on this earth. And we can wear our eyes out looking for it to show up only to be disappointed when it doesn't. We can keep asking Him why it's taking so long and why it has to be so hard. Or we can let it all go and actually let our hearts trust. Granted, that's not easy. But friends, faith isn't meant to be easy! It's meant to lead us through everything that's hard by offering us the hope that it's all going to be worth it one day.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold