The Stripping

Following on from yesterday’s post, I just felt led to share the three or four scriptures that have been central to this season and that I cannot get past (nor do I want to).

It started with the verse I shared yesterday, from Mk 6:31 – “Let us go out into the wilderness for a while and rest ourselves” (VOICE translation)
It’s an echo of the verse that God was speaking to many of us throughout lockdown, from Songs 2:10 – “My beloved calls to me, ‘Arise, My darling. Come away with Me, My beautiful one‘.”
But the verse in Mark has an emphasis on accompanying Jesus into the wilderness (also translated as lonely place, desert place, isolated place – you get the picture).

Why is this important?
Well, the next verse that has been burning in me for over a year is from Jer 2:2 – “I remember the unfailing loyalty of your youth, the love you had for Me as a bride.  I remember how you followed Me into the desert, into a land that couldn’t be farmed”

We often think of the wilderness as being a hostile, barren place, but to God it is a place of deepest intimacy and trust. It’s where Israel were stripped of slavery but also everything they had depended on for life. They had to rely on God for everything: water, food, clothes, guidance and protection – and He lavished it all on them in endless miracles as an demonstration of His love and commitment to them.

It’s a place where I believe God is inviting us. I don’t mean the enforced physical isolation brought by successive lockdowns, though that was a big hint. No, I believe the invitation is to lay everything we are carrying aside. Resting in a ‘land which can’t be farmed’ is a picture of resting from trying to figure everything out or trying to make things grow, resting free from the work of ministry – ie just being on our own with Him for His own sake, not for whatever results we want to gain in ministry/ revival/ answers to prayer. 
It’s an invitation that just as a young married couple only have eyes for each other, so He wants our gaze to be fully, lovingly on Him, receiving His even more devoted love.

The final verse echoing in my spirit is from Songs 8:5 – “Who is this coming up from the wilderness, leaning on her beloved?”

This season is about stripping everything away as we rest from striving, and learn to lean entirely on Him. 
Even after the past couple of years, even among those who have committed to surrendering everything to God, we still find ourselves with that human tendency to try to “do” – we can’t sit still for long, and reassure ourselves that we have surrendered while overlooking the fact that we are still running the minutiae of our everyday lives. And our ‘doings’ are getting in the way. Where God directs us to act, of course we must obey, but there is still an awful lot of busy-ness going on that is just not necessary or currently required of us.
The desire to advance the Kingdom is a good and godly one, but we have to be able to follow the Spirit’s leading and trust Him when He calls us to barren places to rest.

When Jesus called the disciples to come away and rest in the wilderness they had just returned from a successful ministry trip. Things had gone well. Then immediately after the call to rest we find the account of Jesus’ miraculous feeding of the five thousand. I have a distinct feeling that as we surrender our success in ministry as well as everyday life – whatever is working well or just keeping us going – and willingly head into the wilderness where all is stripped away, that we will emerge into a grace for miraculous multiplication. But that’s not why we embrace the wilderness. We do it because we want to fall more in love with Jesus and to learn to lean on Him fully there.

I pray we would all hear the invitation and respond as God desires, to become more fully His own.

PS As I shared this with a group I know, a friend sent me the following verse:
Hosea 2:14-16 –
Therefore I am now going to allure her; I will lead her into the wilderness and speak tenderly to her.
There I will give her back her vineyards, and will make the Valley of Achor a door of hope.
There she will respond as in the days of her youth, as in the day she came up out of Egypt.

Thank You Jesus!