You have developed your dream, made it through the comfort zone, pushed the border bullies out of your way but wait, the land on the other side doesn’t quite look like much of a promise. Bruce Wilkinson, in his book The DreamGiver refers to this next stage of the dream as the wasteland—the graveyard of dreams.
A God sized dream does not come easy but the wasteland rising unexpectedly for dreamer, it comes at a time when you really want to see the dream fulfilled but now there is this lull when advancement is not taking place where you, the dreamer sense this might be a dead end, perhaps you are being punished for not staying back, perhaps you have gone the wrong direction, followed the wrong dream and now you stand in the stark landscape of the wasteland.
Listen, you are not alone, people who have pursued the dream of God and found success and fulfillment have made the same journey into this land of wilderness, this land which looks disappointing, this land of seemingly waste.
In Genesis 6:9 we read: This is the account of Noah. Noah was a righteous man, blameless among the people of his time, and he walked with God. 10 Noah had three sons: Shem, Ham and Japheth.
11 Now the earth was corrupt in God’s sight and was full of violence. 12 God saw how corrupt the earth had become, for all the people on earth had corrupted their ways. 13 So God said to Noah, "I am going to put an end to all people, for the earth is filled with violence because of them. I am surely going to destroy both them and the earth. 14 So make yourself an ark of cypress wood; make rooms in it and coat it with pitch inside and out.
Imagine the years of labor, the neighbors, the criticism, the wasteland Noah walked through the accomplish the dream God spoke to him. How many people would have quit along the way. “I am not going to saw one more board, I am not going to attach one more thing. I am not going to load one more animal, I am going to quit before someone has me committed.”
William Carey the great missionary to India said, “Expect great things from God; attempt great things for God.” That pushed his dream to reach India for Christ and in the wasteland of the dream, when he buried his wife, when he buried all his children in the soil of India, he never lost sight of the dream, he never packed it in and said I am going back because Carey knew what God had spoken to him.
We come to the wasteland with our presuppositions and presumptions of what we think we should expect, then we find it not as we thought. I am sure when Joshua and Caleb brought back a report of the promised land they thought everyone would rise up and say in the name of the Lord we will have victory. We know that didn’t happen because the people were looking at the danger and not the dream. They had other expectations of what should be over the next rise, and it should not have been giants they thought in their minds.
When the wasteland comes, and it will come to everyone who is serious about pursuing their dream, discouragement will also be knocking on the door trying to rob you of the courage and confidence which has brought you this far and doubts will rise up, uncertainty certainly brings doubts to our mind. “Am I doing the right thing?” “Wasn’t I better off before I got to this stage of life.”
It is in the wasteland one really begins to discover, is this what I was created for? And for some, they, like those in the wilderness journey with Moses, give up all hope and they die with an unfulfilled dream, with only the shell of a promise.
Tonight I want to help you make it through the wasteland. It will take a whole new view of this stage in your life. The wasteland does not exist to send you packing back to where you came, it exists to get you ready, to prepare you for what lies ahead. Remember, if you do not fulfill your God given dream, it goes unfulfilled. God gives a unique dream to every one of us, a dream that is not a second hand dream given to us because someone else failed to walk in the way they were designed, but a dream God designed for us.
Dreams take preparation. It is like school…from kindergarten through college, the preparation of the human experience is in motion. The things learned help to navigate through life and for the life choices we make.
My dad told me as a youth, the only way to the top is to start from the bottom or to buy the business. If you buy the business, you lose an understanding of what it took to make the business go and failure is a very real possibility.
The wasteland prepares by making sure how much you understand and how much you are willing to stand by the dream. Here you come face to face with the difficulties of fulfilling the dream. Here you gain an greater understanding of just how complex your dream really is, that it is not so simple.
Our natural tendency would be to rush through the wasteland, to get out on the other side and move forward to the dream’s final destination, the promise of God. Listen, that could be a real mistake. The longer you remain in the wasteland, working through the process, working through the dangers and difficulties of your dream, the bigger, the more significant the promise will be when you arrive at your destination.
I had a tape I gave to the leadership called the law of capacity. Each one of us have a certain capacity in our lives, a capacity which can be enlarged if we allow ourselves to be stretched, though most don’t like the stretching process which happens in the wasteland of journey.
How much do you really believe in the dream God has given you? Are you willing to be stretched? Are you willing to be pulled from all directions as you allow the dream to grow? If you are, get ready for an enlarged dream, a super-sized God capacity dream which is developing in what you considered to be a wasteland but God used as a place of enlargement.
Here is the place where some people stop trusting God, they think God will never make it happen or never really spoke it in their life. What is it that represents where you are at? The wasteland is a place of preparation. Wilkinson said, “Everything you want to do is dependent on who you become…God is preparing you.”
What kills the dream in the wasteland is when we lose faith in God and what God said He would accomplish in and through us. We begin to question ourselves, question God, question the people around us, question life. We wonder, will this testing ever end, will I move on or will I die with an empty, unfilled life?
The struggle becomes one of questioning, do I have what it takes to do what God has birthed in me? Am I really headed in the right direction? Has God left me in the dust and I missed my opportunity to fulfill the dream, has age has overtaken me? Is God really with me in this endeavor or is it just me?
We start to look at the failures instead of to the future. And the devil is right there to lead us into temptation to kill the dream and the dreamer.
The question is, what are you going to do, who are you going to listen to?
I wonder, right now, how many of you would say, pastor, right now I feel like I am in the wasteland, and my reserves are running low, and I am tempted to pack it in? Those who have made it through to the other side, who have come into the sanctuary, can relate. You are not alone in your thoughts, and you are not alone here tonight among people would want to see you through.
Let’s take time, before we close, to pray for those who are in the wasteland, asking God to strengthen them in this time, to held them as they learn the lessons of life which will enable them to walk in the largeness of the dream God has prepared for their lives.
altar
