WILDERNESS EXPERIENCES

Today's reading: Luke 3-4

"Then Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, left the Jordan River. He was led by the Spirit to go out into the wilderness, where the Devil temped him for forty days. He ate nothing all that time and was very hungry." Luke 4:1-2 NLT

Friend, our enemy would like us to think that as God's children, we're going to skip merrily from one mountaintop experience to the next.

That every morning we're going to wake up to a well lit path lined with rosebushes removed of thorns.

That there will never be rainy days or stormy nights.

But as we see in today's text--that's just not life. That's not how we will best discover how deep our relationship with God is. Those kinds of days are not where our faith will grow deep roots.

We will sometimes be led by God into circumstances that seem to require more than we have to offer.

We will sometimes be taken into valleys so dark we cannot see our own hands in front of our faces.

We will at times be in boats surrounded by whitecaps and gale-force winds.

We will find ourselves, full of the Holy Spirit and serving wholeheartedly where He has asked us to serve, smack dab in the middle of a wilderness situation--without food.

But we will have God.

We will always have God.

I believe that's the point of those kinds of lessons.