Survivorman Part 2

SurvivorMan

Pt. 2

I. Introduction

One of the lessons that I won’t spend any time on but want to mention to you after that clip is that are times in the dry moments of your life that you have to do things you wouldn’t normally do. There is a flip side to that as well. There are times in the dry moments of your life that you will want to do things you wouldn’t normally do so you have to be on guard. We will talk more about that next week.

Anyone hungry this morning? How does a nice, crunchy scorpion sound?

As much as we would like to avoid dry and desperate seasons as I mentioned to you last week they are inevitable. If you haven’t experienced a dry season in your spiritual journey then I can probably say that you aren’t very spiritually mature. Dry times are a part of the path to spiritual maturity. You can’t avoid it. You must learn to survive these dry moments and not only survive but embrace them and become stronger because of them. In fact, according to David in Psalms 63:10 the dry times should only increase our hunger, thirst, and desire for God rather than diminish that desire!

Psalms 63:10

1O God, thou art my God; earnestly will I seek thee:

My soul thirsteth for thee, my flesh longeth for thee,

In a dry and weary land, where no water is.

Message - 1God—you’re my God!

I can’t get enough of you!

I’ve worked up such hunger and thirst for God,

traveling across dry and weary deserts.

That is a novel concept. Instead of the dry times making us angry, bitter, depressed, or hateful if we will allow them to the dry times can actually make us want more of God. That is a change of mentality for most of us. I know too many people who went through a dry season and instead of following David’s path they throw in the towel and run away from God rather than too Him. I want us to learn the survival lessons necessary to survive the dry seasons so that we will run to God!

Let me refresh your memory. We learned 3 very important Survival Lessons last week.

1. The wilderness is not a location, but a condition. If you just try to change locations to end the dry times the dry times will follow you.

2. The wilderness is common to everyone. No one, despite how spiritual you may be, is exempt.

3. If you stay in the wilderness too long you will die there. The wilderness is supposed to be a season not a permanent dwelling!

You will also remember that we are using the 3 great wilderness stories from the Bible (Moses, David, and Jesus) to learn these lessons.

So let’s look at lesson #4.

II. Lessons

Survival Lesson # 4 – The wilderness keeps our desires from outrunning our development.

We all have the desire. We won’t admit it. It is the dirty little secret that we don’t want others to know about. We lie in our beds at night and think about it. We desire to do something and to be something significant. For those of us in ministry we desire to be great at what we do. We secretly desire to preach the greatest sermon ever heard. We desire to have more young people in our ministry than anyone else in our town, area, or denomination. We are driven to be a success. The same is true for those in business. I want to be the best salesman. I want to out sale everyone in my company. I want to be the best doctor. I want to find the cure for a disease and have that cure named after me.

I submit to you that this desire is normal, natural, and actually healthy.

Who would want to sit under someone’s ministry who had the mindset of “I don’t want to be anyone or do anything? I want to be mediocre at best.” None of us would want to go to a doctor that didn’t want to be the best in his arena. None of us would want to be around that type of person, nor do we want to be that type of person.

But our desire to succeed and to make a name for ourselves forces us to join a race. This is a race that everyone runs. There is nothing wrong with having the race, but it is extremely important that we fix the race so that the right runner wins. What race is common to all of us? It is the race between our desire and our development.

TD Jakes is correct when he says, "Success can be as painful as failure if you are not equipped for it."