Wilderness Consecration!

If any thing a Christian learns in their faith walk, that their souls will end up in the wilderness eventually. It is the very place where our faith is tested to its limits and where our view of God is reworked and redefined.  It is a painful and a very lonely place.  You cry out for God to speak and move on your behalf, but oftentimes it is also the time when God is most silent.  I have found myself there over the past few months.  I am learning to be still and know He is God, even when He has been silent.  It has been here in the desert that I have relied on God's word and taken it to heart.  To believe it beyond my circumstances and my feelings.  I cling to it like a drowning man clings to a life preserver in the middle of rough seas.

In today's reading in 2 Chronicles 30 I read how King Hezekiah called for the people to consecrate themselves and submit to the Lord.  My question to the Lord then what does consecration look like for us today?  God had an answer and boy what an AHA moment it was!  In James 4:7-10 James writes:  "Submit yourselves then to God. Resist the devil and He will flee from you. Come near to God and He will come near to you.  Wash your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double minded.  Grieve, mourn, wail. Change your laughter to mourning; your joy to gloom. Humble yourselves before the Lord and He will lift you up."

Do you know where this is done?  In the Wilderness Place!!!!!   All this time I have been fighting railing against being in the wilderness, and all the time it has been a place of consecration to the Lord I have been going through!  This was God's leading and doing and I am so grateful!  Then today the Lord reminded me of the promise He gave me at the beginning of the year:   Forget the former things, do not dwell on the past. See I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?  I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland...Because I provide water in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland to give drink to my people, my chosen, the people I formed for myself that they may proclaim my praise.  Isaiah 43: 18-21.     WOW!!  WOW!!   I can rely on God to give me the water I thirst for when all seems to have dried up in this wandering.

  So this is encouragement to those of you that are wandering in the desert.  God is consecrating you, setting you apart for His purposes.  Do not rail against where you are.  Be still and know He is God.  He is making a way where there seems to be no way.  He is good and his promise to never leave us nor forsake us is true, and even in the desert and the dark night of the soul He holds you with His right hand and is walking through it with you!  Take heart and allow Him to do what He needs to do in you!  It is so worth it.   Lots of love to you my fellow desert dwellers!