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Empowered in the Wilderness

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Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, left the Jordan and was led by the Spirit into the wilderness. Luke 4:1 NIV

I imagine the wilderness isn’t high on your list of places you’d like to visit. It certainly doesn’t top my list. Give me oceans, lakes, or mountains with bubbling streams any day.

Yep. I’m a water girl. Something about the way the light glistens atop it stirs my soul. I love its sound, the feel of it on my skin, even the coolness in the air as you get closer to it. Water refreshes in so many ways—which makes the wilderness pretty unappealing.

So I find it surprising that the very first place the Holy Spirit led Jesus after His baptism was the desert.

Does it surprise you too? I mean, Scripture teaches that we’re supposed to follow the Spirit to abundant life. So why would He lead Jesus straight into the desert?

Verse 2 tells us what happened there.

 Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, left the Jordan and was led by the Spirit into the wilderness, where for forty days he was tempted by the devil. He ate nothing during those days, and at the end of them he was hungry. Luke 4:1-2

I don’t know about you, but that doesn’t sound like a whole lot of fun to me. The wilderness offered Jesus confrontation from the evil one and an empty belly. Conditions like that tend to defeat most of us. We wallow in our misery and assume that God has abandoned us.

But that’s not what happened to Jesus. Verse 14 describes Jesus at the end of His wilderness adventure:

 Jesus returned to Galilee in the power of the Spirit, and news about him spread through the whole countryside.

Did you catch it, dear one? Jesus entered the wilderness under the leadership of the Holy Spirit, and He left that wilderness empowered by the Spirit. Notice the Spirit never left Him. But what happened in the wilderness moved Jesus from simply following the Spirit to operating in His power.

Could it be that our own treks into the desert hold that very same purpose? What if our testing in the wilderness holds the key to igniting the power of the Spirit within us?

Listen, dear one. God wastes nothing. Nor does He allow or ordain anything for our lives that He can’t bring great good from. Jesus needed His wilderness experience to fulfill His purpose. If He didn’t, God never would’ve led Him there.

You and I spend our lives trying to avoid the desert. We want to head straight into our Promised Land that flows with milk and honey, endless provision, and rest. But we fail to realize that we’ll never make it into our Promised Land without traveling through the desert. God uses the wilderness to strengthen us in His Spirit so that we can defeat the enemy camping out on our inheritance. We will need to conquer the enemy to take our ground.

So what must you and I do to become empowered in the wilderness instead of defeated by it? We do what Jesus did. We must choose to stand on truth when faced with the enemy’s temptations.

When Satan challenged Jesus to take the easy way out and turn a stone into bread to end His hunger, Jesus replied, “It is written: Man does not live on bread alone” (Luke 4:4).

Over and over, each time Satan tempted Him, Jesus quoted Scripture to refute him.

Beloved, you and I are not strong enough to defeat the enemy on our own. But when we choose to challenge him with God’s truth and stand on His Word, something beautiful happens. The Spirit within us perks up. He rises within us to give us the strength we need to remain standing.

Unfortunately most of us don’t exit our wilderness experiences victoriously. When the Spirit leads us into the desert, instead of drawing on His strength to stand against the enemy’s fiery darts, we succumb to them. We allow the enemy to govern our thinking instead of standing on truth. We feel defeated and remain that way because we haven’t ignited the Spirit within us by choosing to claim and believe the truth of God’s Word.

Many of us even prolong our stays in the wilderness by allowing the enemy’s lies to control our thoughts.

What if you and I learned to do what Jesus did? What if we chose to respond differently in the wilderness? What if we determined to stand on Truth instead of bowing to the enemy’s lies?

I think we’d find what Jesus found. Each time we exercise faith by standing on truth when we don’t feel like it, the Spirit will equip us in our need. We will become stronger and stronger in Him. And when it’s time to exit the wilderness and head toward our destiny, we won’t just follow the Spirit. We’ll go in the power of the Spirit. And we’ll be equipped to claim our ground.

Kind of sheds new light on James 1:2-4, doesn’t it?

 Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance.  Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything.

That’s the point of the wilderness, beloved. God doesn’t want you leaving any of your blessings behind.

Overcome by the Word of Your Testimony

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“I am sending you.”

The message penetrated my heart in the middle of worship on Saturday afternoon during our annual women’s conference. An image of my friend who is battling end stage colon cancer flooded my mind.

My lips stopped moving as everything faded, the presence of the Spirit commanding my attention. I knew without doubt He was asking me to go and pray healing over my friend.

I wanted desperately to comply. I would like nothing more than to be a vessel Jesus used to heal her. But in the same moment fear and doubt took hold. Who was I? Nobody. Just a friend…a soccer mom…a Bible teacher. Not a miracle worker.

Do you notice how we tend to focus our eyes on our own inability rather than God’s ability? When God calls us to exercise faith, we make everything about us. But the tasks He appoints have nothing to do with who we are and everything to do with who He is. And in those moments, He asks us to trust. “Will you believe I AM who I say I AM?”

It might be interesting to note the theme of the conference I attended: Empowered by the Spirit. The speaker challenged us to Feed on the Word, Believe the Word, and then Live the Word. What good, after all, is knowledge of the Word if we can’t live it in the everyday? What does Truth mean to us if we don’t believe it and put it into action?

“I am sending you.”

The moment passed and we all settled in to hear the final message from the speaker. I found myself challenged by Revelation 12:10-11,

Then I heard a loud voice in heaven say:

 “Now have come the salvation and the power

and the kingdom of our God, and the authority of his Messiah.

For the accuser of our brothers and sisters,

who accuses them before our God day and night,

has been hurled down.

 They triumphed over him by the blood of the Lamb

and by the word of their testimony;

they did not love their lives so much

as to shrink from death.”

You’ve probably felt the weight of Satan’s accusations against you. We deal with the burden of his lies every day. But do you see how these brothers and sisters in Christ triumphed over him? By the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony.

Hear me, beloved. Christ’s blood poured out on that cross guaranteed our victory over the enemy. But if you want to experience that victory—if you want to see the glory of God poured out— it isn’t enough to simply rest in the knowledge of what Christ accomplished. You’ve got to live it out. You and I have got to live like the enemy is the defeated foe he is and let the word of our testimony proclaim our victory.

That means we can’t allow Satan to fill our heads with doubt. When God speaks, we must simply believe and take action in faith. The rest is up to Him.

That night I prayed for God to increase my faith. I rose early the next morning and opened the Scriptures, determined to feed on the Word of God and fill myself with His presence. He confirmed His message to me, and I knew I was to go that day. For a moment, I allowed the doubt to creep into my thoughts again. What if it didn’t work? I can’t…

Immediately God spoke, this time bringing a familiar Scripture to remembrance.

 “Go in the strength you have … Am I not sending you?” Judges 6:14

I began to weep. I could not deny His message to me, and I determined to believe.

In worship at church that morning, I presented myself to God as a living sacrifice. I confessed my sin, received His forgiveness, and asked Him to anoint my lips with His Word.

After the service I shared my mission with two dear sisters and asked them to pray. One of them asked to accompany me, and we headed together to the home of my friend.

My heart hurt when I saw her lying on the couch. Breathing was difficult due to fluid filling her lungs from the cancer. I bent down to hug her and she began to cry, confessing she felt forgotten and abandoned by God.

I looked into her sweet face and was able to tell her, “He sent me to you. He loves you desperately, and He has not forgotten you.”

I knew in that moment it didn’t matter if I witnessed a miracle that day. God had already provided what my friend needed simply because I showed up. She needed hope. She needed to understand that she was not forsaken. She needed to grasp the height and depth of God’s love.

I read from Ephesians 3:16-21.

I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.

Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen.

I cannot adequately put into words what happened next. The Spirit led us in the sweetest time of prayer I have ever experienced. We laid hands on our friend and prayed as the Spirit moved us. We declared His glory and proclaimed His Truth, surrendering our wills to allow the Spirit in us to pray what she needed. We declared healing, praying for the fluid in her chest to recede. We proclaimed life and invited glory.

Minutes passed unnoticed, and nearly 2 hours had lapsed when we uttered the final amen. His presence was so thick I felt my hands going numb. I didn’t want to move, not wanting to sever the connection we had as we united our hearts in submission to His purpose.

I can’t tell you what the road ahead holds for my friend, dear one. God alone knows what happens next. But I did see Jesus touch her that day, and what a privilege to be the hand that He used.

When we left her, her breathing was less labored and there was pink in her cheeks we didn’t see when we arrived. But above all, she and her husband had hope.

I remain confident of this: I will see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.

Psalm 27:13