Spiritually Dry? Your God Will Come
Isaiah 35
Pastor Jim Luthy
A song by the late 70’s, early 80’s rock group Styx describes the place many people find themselves spiritually these days. Listen to the words and see if any of these words or phrases correlate with your spiritual experience:
Another year has passed me by, still I look at myself and cry What kind of man have I become?
All of the years I’ve spent in search of myself, and I’m still in the dark ‘cause I can’t seem to find the light alone
Sometimes I feel like a man in the wilderness. I’m a lonely soldier off to war.
Sent away to die—never quite knowing why. Sometimes it makes no sense at all.
Ten Thousand people look my way, but they can’t see the way that I feel. Nobody even cares to try.
I spend my life and sell my soul on the road, and I’m still in the dark ‘cause I can’t seem to find the light alone
Sometimes I feel like a man in the wilderness. I’m a lonely soldier lost at sea.
Drifting with the tide—never quite knowing why. Sometimes it makes no sense at all.
(I’m alive) Looking for love, I’m a man with emotion
(And my hearts on fire) I’m dying of thirst in the middle of the ocean.
I’m alive!
Truth be told, we all have times when we feel like we are lost in the wilderness. We have a sense for spiritual things. We believe in God. But when we look, we cannot see God; when we listen, we cannot hear him; when we try to walk in his ways, we stumble like the lame; and when we try to declare his name, we can make no sound at all. Have you ever been there? Do you sometimes feel like a man in the wilderness? Are you there today?
Isaiah 35 speaks to the man in the wilderness. The words of this chapter provide a truck load of hope for the person who feels like they are in a spiritual wasteland. Are you lacking vigor? Does God seem distant and unresponsive to you? Have you tried going your own way for awhile and discovered that you can’t dig your way out of the pit? Listen carefully. Isaiah has good news for you. You will see the glory of the Lord. Are you spiritually dry? Your God will come.
The desert and the parched land will be glad; the wilderness will rejoice and blossom. Like the crocus, it will burst into bloom; it will rejoice greatly and shout for joy. The glory of Lebanon will be given to it, the splendor of Carmel and Sharon; they will see the glory of the Lord, the splendor of our God. – Isaiah 35:1-2.
Isaiah is summarizing revival for us. In these few words, he was assuring the divided nation of Israel that God would take them from desert to glory.
You’ve heard people say, "God works in mysterious ways," and he does. He is Spirit and he is sovereign and he is unfathomable in his holiness. We cannot fully understand him, and nothing limits the way that he works. Even though there is a bit of mystery about our God, though, he is not completely unpredictable. He is consistently faithful and he is consistently good and loving toward all that are his. We can take the entire text of Isaiah 35 and stretch it out like a template over any portion of history, whether it be the whole of human history or the tiniest portion of your very life, and see that God consistently brings people from desert to glory. It is his modus operandi. Even if his timing and his methods are unpredictable, his compassion and his love and his initiative are consistent throughout history. His compassion and his love and his initiative will be consistent in your life. By his faithfulness and consistency, I am assured that his compassion and his love and his action can be counted on in the future and for our eternity. To understand this template, let me point out four landmarks on the journey from desert to glory.
The starting point is the desert. Isaiah describes it here in verse 1 as a parched land. In order for any type of restoration or revival to occur, there has to be a thirst for it.
The second landmark in God’s work is presence. The promise proven in the whole of history and from time to time throughout history is that our God will come. In verses 3-4, Isaiah prepares the people:
Strengthen the feeble hands, steady the knees that give way; say to those with fearful hearts, "Be strong, do not fear; your God will come, he will come with vengeance; with divine retribution he will come to save you."
The third landmark is the pathway. Once God comes into the scene, he always provides a way. That pathway is holiness. Holiness is the bridge between God’s coming and the glory. Hebrews 12:14 says "without holiness, nobody will see the Lord." In Isaiah 35:8, Isaiah pronounces that there will be a path leading out from the intervention of the Lord:
"And a highway will be there; it will be called the Way of Holiness. The unclean will not journey on it; it will be for those who walk in that Way; wicked fools will not go about on it."
The final destination of this journey is glory. There will come a day when we see in full. We shall behold his glory. Those who have put their trust in Jesus Christ will enter into heaven, referred to by Isaiah as Zion, with singing. Everlasting joy will crown our heads. In every case, this is the promise of heaven.
(v.10) Gladness and joy will overtake them, and sorrow and sighing will flee away."
From desert to presence to pathway to glory, God is in the business of reviving our souls and renewing our lives. Jesus said, "Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled." He told the woman at the well, "If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water." And later, "Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life." Take the whole of history or any segment in between, and you will see this is how God works in his compassion and his love for man.
Consider God’s interaction in the story of man. God created man and placed him in the garden and said it was good. Sin entered the world when Adam and Eve ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and, from that time on, man has found himself wandering into the wilderness apart from God. God chose his people and gave them a pathway known as the Law only so man could discover he could not walk on it. Unable to cross over to glory on his own efforts, man was left to flounder in the wilderness.
Then comes God like a scene from a Superman movie. With man in the most dire condition, unable to walk out of the desert of despair, God the Father sent Jesus his only Son onto the scene. By his death and resurrection, Jesus came to conquer the sin that has kept man defeated and wandering through the ages. "God demonstrated his own love in this: while we were still sinners, Christ died for us." (Romans 5:8).
After he burst onto the scene, Jesus became our Way. He said, "I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me." Jesus is our highway of holiness. If we don’t have him, we don’t have holiness, and without holiness we will not see glory. But if we have him, his holiness is sufficient to secure our glory. When we are "in Christ," the Father does not see our unholiness, great as it may be, but he sees the holiness of Jesus. When we walk in that way, remaining in Christ and Christ remaining in us, we are assured of reaching our final destination, which is glory.
Let me point out here, though, that we must desire to be holy. We cannot just claim holiness and assume the reigns of our lives. We must desire Jesus, nothing but Jesus, and make Jesus our everything. We cannot choose our path. We cannot follow God half-heartedly. That’s why Jesus said we cannot serve both God and money. That’s why John wrote that we cannot love the world or anything in the world. We have to love Jesus and pursue him as the lover and caretaker of our souls.
I saw a woman yesterday who wanted to catch a bus. She sat on one side of the street wanting to cross to the other side. The bus was on the other side of the intersection, about to cross through to where she needed to catch it. When she realized that the bus was going to get to her stop before she was, all safety and self-preservation went out the window. Leaving the crosswalk behind, she ran up and across the street in front of the bus. It was cold outside, and the last thing she wanted was to be left outside in the wind. That’s how we journey on the Way of Holiness. We have to pursue Jesus like nothing else matters. We give up our feeble sense of self-preservation. We give up our rights to do what is permissible for what is beneficial. All that matters to the person on the Way is Jesus. How can I know him more? How can I serve him? Let me worship him.
Titus 2:13 speaks to our response when we are met with the grace of Christ:
"(The grace of God) teaches us to say ‘no’ to ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright and godly lives in this present age, while we wait for the blessed hope—the glorious appearing of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ."
That appearing is the day when the renewal will be absolutely complete. Jesus will return again as King and will take us into a place he is preparing for us even today. That place will be filled with great joy. We’ll enter in and sing with glad hearts and the singing will never stop. The restoration will be complete, and we’ll never know the desert again.
Consider the work of God in my story--and perhaps in your story—in the story of all who have a relationship with God through Jesus Christ. Every one of us has come out of a desert. In our youth, and in some cases into our adulthood, we wandered around in the desert. We chose our own way and found ourselves unfulfilled and spiritually empty. Then Jesus burst into our scene. Someone told us about Christ—about that moment in history that would forever be a turning point for anyone who would believe it. When Jesus came into our lives, he forgave us our sin, cleansing us from our past and pointing us to the highway of holiness. He became our holiness. By faith we believe that he is the way to see the glory of the Lord. We have seen in part, and we live to see in full. So we walk along the pathway of holiness thirsting for our Holy Lord. And that day will come when we will drink fully of that glory. Knowing that keeps us along the path.
Is that not your story? Has Christ not met you in the desert or wilderness of your life and brought you into a place of peace and hope? Do you rest in his holiness to be sufficient to raise you to glory? Do you see how he works in your life in the very same way he has worked with man throughout history?
That means he will operate in the same way in your current circumstances. Whatever your desert—whatever has caused you to wander into the wilderness—your God will come. He will come and save you. He will burst onto the scene of your troubles and not only show you the way, but become your Way. He invites you to walk in him, with endurance, on the highway of holiness, until that day when you will fully see the splendor of our God.
Scott and Daina are experiencing him in that way. Scott came to our church a couple of years ago as a man in the wilderness. He was going through a divorce and was seeking deliverance from drug and alcohol addiction. Jesus came in to rescue him, radically delivered him, and set him on the Way. He encountered the Presence and began along the pathway. He came to church regularly, opened himself up to others in a small group, and testified to the goodness of God intervening in his life. He pressed on with confidence that he would some day enter into Zion and be given the crown of joy.
But along the way he stepped off the path. He chose his way instead of the Way of Holiness. When he re-connected with Daina, an old friend who had never come out of the wilderness herself, they admittedly were more committed to living together outside of marriage than discovering and choosing the will of God. Eventually they were married, but were far off the path. Scott had stepped off the path and found himself in the wilderness again. He turned again to drugs and alcohol, straining their marriage horrifically.
That’s when God came again. He came first to Daina. He showed her his love for her and assured her that Scott’s troubles were not about her. The reassurance she received from the Lord set her on the pathway, and she began praying for Scott. Just when the despair of his desert became too great for Scott, God came to him too. Scott entered a detox center and God began to set him on the Way of Holiness again. Through their treatment, Scott and Daina were discovering just how desperate their relationship had become. Trust was broken. Scars were forming. Then, after a day of great tension and anger, God met them in their wilderness again. Scott and Daina went to church unaware of how God was going to meet them. The message that evening was on marriage. The speaker seemed to be talking about them when he pointed out the foolishness of trying to take the speck of sawdust out of your spouse’s eye when you have a plank in your own eye. The Holy Spirit of God was giving them a spirit of revelation so they could see God and themselves clearly.
He met them. He set them on the pathway again and he has promised them glory. They are delighting in him like never before. For the first time in his life, Scott is experiencing unconditional love and forgiveness from someone he has greatly wronged. He sees Jesus in that, and it satisfies him completely. Daina has also experienced the peace of belonging to the Way of Holiness. Together, they are anxious to tell the world that God came to them, he set them on the Way, and one day they will enter into heaven with singing. Everlasting joy will be upon their heads. Sorrow and sighing will flee away. They are tasting it now. One day they will feast on it.
Will you let God come to you in your desert and lead you to glory? As he comes to you, respond to him with faith. Allow him to be your Lord and lead you along the Way of Holiness. That Way is the road to glory.
