Well, you know, it's rare in the Bible when God puts His people through a hard, painful, confusing period, and then actually explains to them why He chose it for them. But he does exactly that in Deuteronomy chapter 8. And wow, it is revealing. You know, this period of Exodus is really one of my favorites in all of the Bible. It's because God's people were freed from slavery in Egypt and then wandered the desert for 40 years. And I love it because the desert was physically difficult and a scary, dangerous place to dwell for 40 years. Did you see that picture in your booklet?

That photograph taken from around 1900 of shepherds with their flocks right at the foot of Mount Sinai. What an incredible photograph that is. And it really does paint the picture of what it was like for the Israelites wandering in that wilderness in that desert for 40 years. It was a physical desert, but God used it to create a spiritual bounty for them. Israel had nowhere else to go. And they became totally dependent on God for everything, which was God's point. The people resisted, they overreacted, they sinned, they panicked, but they also saw God up close and personally. So at the same time the Israelites were experiencing all that pain and all that heat, God was showing them who he was and what he's like.

So God reveals Himself in the desert. What we see in that in the book of Exodus and all the other books that talk about the desert, you see God's holiness in the stories, what He's like, His tender intervention, His discipline, all this character comes out for us to see. And that was intentional on God's part. So this oftentimes the desert is where we need to be sometimes in our lives, in a desert where we only have the Lord, and He's got our full attention.

You know, if we had time, we could go around the room and hear about everybody's desert periods. I'm confident that in a room this size and an age and stage that we have, we have all, if we're not even in one right now, have gone through a desert period, a time of physical discomfort and spiritual discomfort that goes on for a long period of time. So we can be sure that this period was not the Israelites' favorite period, but I'm also doubly sure that it was, in retrospect, something that they would say was necessary and life-changing.

So those desert experiences are difficult, but remember that very physical and real hardship, circumstantial hardship that we go through, it's also a spiritual experience that God uses. And for Christians, it's these spiritual deserts that are so important to navigate while we're in them, even if we don't understand why or how long they're going to go on. You know, I was first introduced to this concept of a spiritual desert back in the late 1970s with Pastor Chuck Swindoll. I bet some of you know who he is. Back then, I heard one of his sermons on the radio. He was going through the life of Moses and came across one particular episode of that series where he talked about the school of self-discovery for Moses.

And he described how Moses, at age 40, he had grown up in a bubble of Egyptian royalty with all the extravagance of comfort and privilege and education. But then he committed a grievous crime and he had to flee from Pharaoh's palace, and he became an outcast in the Midian desert. And that's when God began a 40-year period in Moses' life at age 40. And he became a shepherd working in the desert, working for his father-in-law in the wilderness, that desert. Moses had no idea that God was using that 40 years in the desert, being a nobody, as a time of preparation for him to lead God's people out of Egypt for another 40 years, beginning at age 80.

So let's make sure we understand. So Moses did lead the people of Israel out for 40 years, but before that, God had him 40 years as a shepherd working for his father-in-law. That it was that period that prepared him to lead Israel out. So that was, as Swindoll calls it, this the school of self-discovery for him. And I've been studying the desert for 50 years. I really have. And I love this. I've always wanted to teach this particular passage for years, because I've studied it in my own life over and over again. So on your booklet, and let me get to that page.

In your booklet, you can see I've shown you on the left-hand side of this chart some comments that Chuck Swindoll gave in that message that I heard. Also, there's a great author named Paul Miller who wrote a great book called A Praying Life, who talks a lot about deserts too. And let me just share what they both said. But first of all, the test of the desert is life in a spiritual desert, and it's an extended period of time without relief.

An extended period of time without relief. Swindoll says examples of that would be caring for the aged over an extended period of time without relief, or confinement, or an extended period with no end in sight. For example, ill health, a personal pain, hardship, heartache. It could be the loss of a loved one by death, could be a broken romance, divorce, moving where you know no one, away from all the ones you love. Could be a failure at school or work. It could be a boring, thankless job. It's a place of heat, barrenness, unproductivity. Paul Miller adds to that, and he says, you know, we come face to face in the desert with our inability to live, to have joy, do anything with lasting worth.

Life is crushing us. So the question here, as we endure a desert period, what are we supposed to do during this time? And what does God want from us? Is it is it just a waste? Well, Moses is going to explain it's not a waste. He will answer that question. Was this a waste for us? Was there any point in it? So near the end of the Israelites' 40 years in the desert, Moses was at the end of his life, and he would not be taking them into the promised land, as you remember.

But he did prepare a bunch of sermons written down in the book of Deuteronomy. Deuteronomy means second law. That means the law and the stories that are in this period are all repeated and summarized and reviewed. Deuteronomy is kind of like the highlights of Exodus and Numbers. It's great reading. It is so well written because the Lord wrote it. God has great purpose in allowing and ordaining these deserts. And what Moses is going to do is give them a rare debriefing about what God was up to and why. But there was great purpose in it.

Deserts always have spiritual value, and the result is a heart change. That's what the Lord does through desert. He changes our hearts, he changes our lives when we yield to Him. There are people that don't yield to the Lord and they don't get a heart change. They don't get a life change. But when we do, these deserts will glorify the Lord and we'll get changed by them at the same time.

All right, page eight of your booklet. Let's read this great passage in Deuteronomy 8, verse 1. The whole commandment that I command you today, you shall be careful to do, that you may live and multiply, and go in and possess the land that the Lord swore to give us to give to your fathers. Now here we go, verse 2. Here's the debriefing. And you shall remember the whole way that the Lord your God has led you these 40 years in the wilderness, that He might humble you, testing you to know what was in your heart, whether you would keep His commandments or not.

And he humbled you and let you hunger, and fed you with manna, which you did not know, nor did your fathers know, that he might make you know that man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord. Your clothing did not wear out on you, and your foot did not swell these forty years. Know then in your heart that as a man disciplines his son, the Lord your God disciplines you. All right.

Verse 2 says, And you shall remember the whole way that the Lord your God has led you these 40 years in the wilderness. So he's saying, look back and remember, and remember the whole way that he led you. It was going to have a lot of grace and care in there, but God would also actually use their sin and use their weakness for His glory. And yes, God can use anything or anybody for His purposes. We know that. So he put them on this wandering path filled with adversity.

And that adversity illuminated their sinful hearts. They were in the school of self-discovery. So every act of idolatry, every act of grumbling, every act of sin while in the desert, God used it all to do what? To show them their hearts. You know, before God could heal their hearts, Israel had to be shown their hearts. That's the same way with us. Before God can heal our hearts, He's got to show us our hearts. And the way that God led them, that whole way of leading, was to change them as they walked. Sometimes he used testing, sometimes he used healing, sometimes he spoke very tenderly to them, sometimes he disciplined them, sometimes he protected them.

And that's the whole way. When he says, consider the whole way, that's the kind of stuff he did. But not to destroy them, but to teach them and to heal them. So I wonder if you and I have been led this way in our deserts. You know, God uses the adversity and the heat and the discomfort of the desert to change us. So Moses gave three big reasons.

Did you catch them about why God put them through the desert? Let's see if we can recount them. So verse 2 says, to humble you. That's the first thing. The first big reason. Now, when God intervenes in our lives, He often begins by humbling us. We shouldn't have to keep relearning this principle, but it's one of the surest constants of walking with God. The Lord knows how to humble a man or a woman like no one else. So for our benefit, he knows just where to place his finger to change our lives.

His touch can be a wound to our heart, but God's wounds are always wise, they're always timely, and they're faithful. So through his, he's very thorough, and he'll kind of stop at nothing. When God does the humbling, we're going to be left in the end with a quiet contentment of who we are. And that striving will stop, and we can start enjoying living under God's lead instead of charting our own path. I've got a really good friend who was his spent his childhood kind of being brought up in poverty. And when he reached adulthood, got out of college,, he really excelled in his career.

And he really, in order to kind of counter what he had grown up with, accumulated and saved as much money as he could and kind of became fairly wealthy. And he was also a successful business person. He was at X, he had high-level executive positions in various companies, but and for probably two decades, things were going great. And then about 10 years ago, he started experiencing loss of jobs. Some were his fault, some weren't. There were mergers and and buyouts and some downsizing, but but he has struggled for 10 years with his career that he loved so much. And it it's he clearly says that he had gained a lot of his identity out of being a big shot executive.

And he lost that and has lost it for these last 10 years, on and off. And it's been very difficult for him. And I asked him just a couple of weeks ago because I was studying this passage. I said, Is it true with you that as God has put you through this desert, has it humbled you? And I meet with him every other week and have for a year or two. And he said, you know, no doubt he's been humbled. You know, he doesn't have a lot to brag about anymore. It's embarrassing. And but he said something interesting. He said, I've only experienced probably the first half of God's humbling.

I can I no longer cling to my identity as kind of a C-level executive, but He said, I've not yet experienced the peace and rest from God's presence alone in the desert. And I wish I could. You see, that's what I've been wanting from him. I've noticed he has been changing. This desert has worked on him. His heart is quite different than he was three years ago, quite different from two years ago, quite different from a year ago. But He has still not found rest and peace by letting God keep Him in this desert as long as He sees fit.

See, when we're truly humbled, and the Lord is behind this, we give up on self in a kind of a healthy way. But the first place that God works on is pride. And there's an author named A. W. Tozer that some of you may know. He's kind of the mid-century, 20th century author, and he wrote this back in 1955. It's in your book. It is doubtful whether God can bless a man greatly until he has hurt him deeply. Found that to be true? Bet you have. You know, the Holy Spirit works to refine us, but first, usually is our pride.

Okay, so the debriefing from Moses is the first reason that God put us through here is to humble us. The second thing was to test us, to test us to know what's in our heart. A test exposes what's really there. There's an old Native American saying that says a tree is best measured when it's fallen, when it's down. And that is how the Lord works with testing our hearts. So God used these desert hardships to reveal what was in the Israelites' heart, and it was not pretty.

So the harshness of the desert has got a purpose. God used this harsh desert like a crucible. Remember what a crucible is? It's it's this a container that's heat resistant, and it's used to melt metal in order to purify it. And so once you put metal in it and heat it, once liquefied, what happens to the impurities in there? They rise to the surface, they bubble up to the surface so that they can be skimmed off. Well, the Lord uses heat in the desert that we are in, the desert that the Israelites were in, to do the same thing. He used tools like days without water, challenges with food, threats from enemies, and discomfort in the wilderness and obscurity and a prolonged time frame.

And what bubbled to the surface? Distrust of him, bitterness, fear, suspicion, hatred, insecurity, all that. We see that in the stories. God uses that word, that crucible word in Proverbs 17. He says, The crucible is for silver, and the furnace is for gold. And the Lord tests hearts. So have you seen God doing this with you? Inserting a desert period into your life to get your attention. He knows how to humble us like no one else. And just as a warning, if you don't already know this, the Lord is very thorough. God in that desert bent down low and bore with these people and transformed their hearts for their sake, so that they would know what's in their hearts.

Okay, so he humbled them, he tested their hearts to see what was there. And then thirdly, in verse 3, he let you hunger and fed you with manna which you did not know, nor did your fathers know. God caused them to hunger. Did you hear that? God caused them to hunger. That was his idea. Causing them to hunger? Gee, that doesn't sound like God. Isn't God's main job to relieve pain? No, it's not. God's main job is to rescue His children by making us like Christ. To have a relationship with us. So he was going to create healthy spiritual dependence by giving them a new physical food to eat.

Manna. We'll talk about manna in week three of our conference. But God wanted to create a new spiritual appetite in the Israelites by using this physical manna as a as a way to give them a new rhythm for eating, which would translate into a new level of trust and dependence every day. So it would be hard, but he would purposely cause them to be hungry and confused.

I love that line in verse 3 that says, He gave you something which you did not know, nor did your fathers know. Very disorienting. And God was making a change, and then they would learn a new appetite for learning to depend on God every day. And so by learning to depend on God every day for every meal, they learned to depend on God entirely in life. See what he did? It was a physical thing to teach us a new dependence in our life, in our spiritual life. And over time, God was teaching them to stop feeding their souls on the things of this world, on bread alone.

Things like in our day, living on the things of this world to be living for power, career, influence, comfort, reputation, those kinds of things. And he says, instead of living your life depending on the things of this world, bread alone, instead, he wants us to feed our souls on him alone. And that's what He taught them to live every by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord. God wanted them to be satisfied by Him alone. That's the thing my friend that I just told you about is having trouble with. So we have no choice but to depend on him.

So under this new diet, they were going to discover a deep satisfaction on feeding on him alone. But God's not handing out indiscriminate hardship, He's targeting a relationship between us and Him. So he says in verse 5 of Deuteronomy, if you can go back there, you don't have to. He says, Know then in your heart that as a man disciplines his son, the Lord your God disciplines you. This is the loving, attentive discipline of a wise heavenly father. But you got to wonder, so how does God change us in this hard place?

What's he doing today? How does he exactly change us, give us a new heart? Well, let's look back to what Charles Swindoll said, and also Paul Miller said, about how God does this. So on the left-hand side of your chart, this is just golden. I have kept this in my desk drawer for 50 years. Swindoll says, in the school of self-discovery, what God does, how exactly he works in the desert, see if this doesn't sound familiar. He strips us from the things that keep us from hearing God, the things we normally cling to for comfort. That desert is a place where God speaks.

It's a place of preparation. God uses some tools to change our hearts. One of the tools God uses almost first, most of the time, is obscurity. He uses obscurity to remove pride from our heart. You know, Moses, living with Pharaoh and in the palace, had been a somebody all his life, but now he was a nobody in the Midian desert, shepherding sheep. He went from being a somebody to nobody. That obscurity over time removes pride. That you may have noticed that in your life. A second tool God uses is time. Whenever you're in the desert, you probably notice it goes on a lot longer than you ever expected.

Many times when we head into a season like that, we've got an expectation about how long this is going to last. And then when we reach the end of that and the time keeps going, that's when God really starts working. That time, a long extended period of time, removes fear. Fear is a big part of the desert, and God wants it taken from us. A third thing is solitude.

You know, you may go through a tough time, and you may have friends and family and the body of Christ around you to help you, and that's wonderful, wonderful stuff. But you just need to know that when God has you in a desert of His making, you walk through it just you and Him. That solitude was important because it will remove faulty crutches. You know, Moses needed to learn solitude. He would, in the next 40-year period, he would have to stand alone. He learned how to stand alone, and that solitude is what did that. Just you and the Lord. That's how you walk through a desert.

And then finally, discomfort. God makes it uncomfortable. And that removes over time our resistance to him and what he's doing. Is that ringing a bell? Bet it is., Paul Miller says some similar things about how God works. He says we slowly give up the fight. We yield and we stop caring about what people think of us. We realize that what used to be important, what brought us life, no longer matters. After a while, we read we notice our real thirsts. We realize we're helpless, and that being helpless is crucial for our prayer life. God makes sure that our idols die for a lack of food.

He gets our attention because he's the only game in town. A channel begins to open between him and us. The best gift of the desert is God's presence. When driving, we turn off the radio just to be with God. Without realizing it, we have learned to pray continuously. Page 10 of our booklets. Elisabeth Elliot, who knows quite a bit about the desert. She's been widowed twice, was widowed twice, and she's now in heaven with the Lord. But she wrote some principles in a book called Keep a Quiet Heart.

I've paraphrased them for you. She says, How God used the desert to teach and form Israel. God was Himself their provision. Himself was their provision. His presence mattered more than abundance. Look at that. His presence mattered more than abundance. Hardship created a new appetite for him. God deliberately allowed Israel to experience hunger so they would learn dependence on Him. Prosperity can dull our awareness of God. The wilderness teaches us that God Himself is the greatest gift more than the gifts He provides. The desert, when God places this in it, exposes false gods. False gods that we rely on, false gods that don't last.

And when those false gods or idols are removed, we know whether Christ alone is enough for us. I can remember when I was 30 years old, I was living in Houston, I was a single man, and I was I was struggling, I was frustrated with my life. You know, nothing seemed to be going right. And and so I was talking to this wise woman, this Christian counselor, and she asked me what I needed to be satisfied in life. Well, I said, okay, what I what I really want is to be married and to have a successful career. And while I'm at it, I'd I'd like to have a house someday.

And and her her response was curious. She said, Well, yeah, what about Christ? Oh, yeah, I said, yeah, sure. Jesus too. And she said, she looked at me and pointed her finger. She said, that is heresy, Mr. Bible study teacher. And I had to admit, sometimes Christ was not enough. I needed Christ plus a few other important things to be happy, to be content. So elsewhere in Deuteronomy, Moses is going to describe a word picture.

You're going to love this. A word picture of what it's like for God to care for His precious people, you and me, in the desert. In this case, he's going to talk about Israel, what he did, what it was like to care for them. Deuteronomy 32. He found him in a desert land. Now, let me just say, He is God. So God found Israel in a desert land and in the howling waste of the wilderness.

He encircled him. Look at all these things he's going to do. He encircled him. He cared for him. He kept him as the apple of his eye. Like an eagle that stirs up its nest, that flutters over its young, spreading out its wings, catching them, bearing them on his pinions. The Lord alone guided Him. No foreign God was with Him. Look at that howling waste of the wilderness. Isn't that descriptive? The howling waste of the wilderness. Maybe you know that right away what he's talking about. The fear, the terror, the howling waste of a wilderness. But what does God do when you and I are in that spot?

He says what he did for Israel. He encircled him. He cared for him. He kept him as the apple of his eye. Encircled? Sometimes it may not seem like God is encircling us. We may seem like we're alone. Just remember, give your desert some time, and you will. You'll start noticing how God is encircling you. And look at the level of care and attention. He will keep him as the apple of his eye. Apple of his eye is a, it means the pupil of your eye. Now you know that we don't let anyone touch our pupil unless we want it to happen.

That's how God cares for us in the desert. It seems like we're on our own. No, he's protecting us and circling us and protecting us like the pupil of his eye. Really something. Like an eagle that stirs up its nest. You're right there. There's a point in a baby eaglet's life where it's time for him to leave the nest. I've researched this. You can trust me on this. If the baby isn't interested in flying, when it's time to fly, researchers show that the mother will start making the nest very uncomfortable. She'll start laying sticks up on their side. She'll start removing feathers and material and tossing them over the side.

And then she'll do something that's that's stirring up the nest. That's what the Lord means by that. Have you had the Lord stir up your nest, make it uncomfortable for your benefit? And then he says, He flutters, that mother flutters over its young. Mothers really do when it's time for the babies to fly, they will go next to the nest and model, like a this in stationary flight, doing flapping those wings. They don't really flap, but soar somehow, but right next to the nest and modeling what it is. So and the Lord says spreading out its wings, catching them, bearing them on His pinions.

You've probably heard when the when the mother thinks it's the proper time, she will toss the eaglets out of the nest, and then will swoop down and catch them on their wings, on her wings, if they don't fly. And they'll go back up to the nest and they'll do it again. And I've read the research says, you know, it doesn't take that many times. You know, if it's time to leave, they're ready to fly. The mother knows that. And but the mother will do that. And the Lord says, I do that for you when you're in this desert. I will toss you out.

I heard an eagle expert once say, you know, the eaglets were meant to fly, but they don't know it. The mother does. Your heavenly father knows. And so it's verse 12 says, The Lord alone guided Him. No foreign god was with him. As we said, when you're when you're in the desert, you walk through it alone with the Lord. God is doing the guiding, and we follow Him because there's no other place to go. He makes sure of that, he puts us in a corner like that. And foreign gods, meaning false gods, the idols in our lives, are effectively vanquished and they're of no help.

He makes sure of that. So God has given us in Deuteronomy 32 reassurance that He knows how to handle us in this howling waste of a wilderness. It's tailor-made. And God is making it really clear to us, He's closer to us than we ever imagined. So back in Deuteronomy 8, you don't need to turn to it, but there's a verse 4 that says, Your clothing did not wear out on you, and your foot did not swell during these 40 years.

Do we think that God maybe isn't paying attention? God's making it clear to us when the Israelites were in that desert 40 years, he made sure their clothes did not wear out, their feet did not swell. That kind of detail. That's when the Lord is taking care of you and me, we see His fingerprints all over the place. Sometimes when we think of the desert experience, we can't help but think of Job. And I keep this other passage very close to me. In Job, it says about midway through the book, Job has had a rough time for a long time now.

And in verse in chapter 23, He's at His at His wit's end, and He does not see the Lord anywhere. It's hard for Him to kind of know that the Lord is with Him anymore. It's such a hard test. And look what he says in 23, verse 8. He says, Behold, I go forward, but he is not there. This is Job talking about himself. Behold, I go forward, but he is not there, and backward, but I do not perceive him. On the left hand, when he is working, I do not behold him. He turns to the right hand, but I do not see him.

You see what he's saying? He cannot perceive God in this season. He does not see him anywhere. But look at verse 10. But Job says, But he knows the way that I take. When he has tried me, I shall come out as gold. Isn't it comforting to know the Lord knows the way you take? He knows the way you take all your details, all the circumstances. He already knows them. Page 11.

A man named V. Raymond Edman, who is now with the Lord a long time ago, wrote a book called In Quietness and Confidence. He wrote this, and I treasure this. Something painful happened to me. This is how I met it. I was quiet for a while with the Lord, and then I wrote these words for myself. One, he brought me here. It is by his will I am in this straight place. In that fact, I will rest. Two, he will keep me here in his love, and give me grace to behave as his child. Then he will make the trial a blessing, teaching me the lessons he intends me to learn, and working in me the grace he means to bestow.

And thirdly, in his good time he can bring me out again. How and when only he knows. One of my daughters took this very thing and pasted it on her mirror in her bathroom when she was like about 12 years old. This warmed my heart to see this. Let's read this together. This is not together, but I'll read it to you. remember, this is for the children of God. It says, All those justified, Christians, all those justified enjoy the liberties and privileges of the children of God. They have his name put upon them. They receive the spirit of adoption. They have access to the throne of grace with boldness.

They are enabled to cry Abba, Father. They're pitied, they're protected, they're provided for, they're chastened by Him as by a Father, yet never cast off, but sealed to the day of redemption. They inherit the promises, they are heirs of everlasting salvation. These are astounding gifts to assure us that God's wise testing will bring us new life, never destruction, under His care. You might want to tear this out of your book and put it on your bathroom mirror. So what settles you down when you're in the desert?

Is it improved circumstances or is it God Himself? I had another friend years ago, he was in his 50s, and he lost his job suddenly, and he had a couple of those. He was in kind of a construction business that was on and off again. And this time he was absolutely distraught. He was losing weight, he was panicked. And I said, I was trying to lead him a little bit spiritually, and I said, you know, what would make you settle down? Is it is it the Lord Himself or is it getting a finding a job? And he said, Finding a job.

He said, I'm not, I wish I could say that the Lord is enough. But really, what it would what would make me better is a job. We've got to be better than that. And that's the reason the Lord puts us through a desert. So that we can taste what it's like to be alone with him. You've got nothing else, you've been stripped of everything else. Then you can start seeing it. We'll talk about this in the coming weeks of what it's like to be stripped of all that, how God actually says, I'm enough. And you'll and it will be, he will be enough.

So through the desert for us,,, we have to remember, let's just kind of summarize where we are as we wrap up. We've got to derive our security not on the things of this world, but on our heavenly father. And that's not an easy track to switch onto, I know. God had to close off the Israelites' default track. He was going to make it hard and disorienting for a while, but they would learn to depend on God for everyday things that they could not even provide for themselves, like food and water. He got their attention. He made it unmistakable of who was doing the providing.

They developed a new appetite for listening to God and obeying Him. And they learned the joy of being cared for. That's the thing about the desert. When you start seeing God's fingerprints all over the place, you start having joy that you are being taken care of. And God makes it clear He's doing it. That's how people can say, you are enough. So they started living by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.

And we can do that right now. God has handed us something, if He's handed you something unprecedented for your life, and it's scaring you. Also remember that when Moses told this debriefing to the Israelites, God took full responsibility for this desert. He said, I let you hunger, and then I fed you with manna which you did not know or your fathers knew. It was confusing. God did it. God admitted to it all. But this is the way the Lord chose to lead them these past 40 years.

That hunger and pain and discomfort had purpose. It wasn't random. That hunger and discomfort roused their attention every day. God prepared them for their promised land and He prepared them to walk with God alone. So let's let's be changed if we're in a desert period. Let's not just grit our teeth to get through it. The principle here is that when we know who, when we know who God is, we're going to find security and significance in Him. And then our lives start to change, and then we can finally start to rest, even though it's a desert. So God was really gracious in giving us this debriefing, wasn't He?

It really helps. We can hang on to this when we're in a desert.