One in a Million: Journey to Your Promised Land

by Priscilla Shirer

Confidence—the sweet assurance that you’ve been anchored in right standing with God.

Joy—not because your trials and difficulties have necessarily let up but just because you’ve been graciously relieved of needing to wallow in worry or to fret incessantly over the details. Discernment—being so saturated in the truth of His Word and with spiritual senses increasingly tuned to recognize His voice, you can be clear on His direction, even if it’s not the easiest path to take. Anticipation—an excitement that no circumstance can dull, no setback can silence, no doubt can quench. You just know that God is actively working and is up to something miraculously special, right where you live. Power—a life filled to the overflow with supernatural evidence of God’s Spirit alive and at work in you, around you, and through you.

If God has something for me that I’m in any way resisting or missing out on, I’m stopping what I’m doing, and I’m going with Him.

Why don’t we as the people of God—with so much divine power and enablement inside—tear down the boundaries that keep us from experiencing the fullness of an abundant relationship with Him? What keeps us from breaking through to freedom?

You read such powerful promises in the Word, you make one commitment after another to apply them to your life, but it always seems like you’re stopping short of seeing them through to completion. What is it? Too afraid? Too risky? Too hard? Too unfamiliar? Why do you remain behind the fence line when everything you want your Christian life to be is waiting for you on the other side? What keeps you from breaking through to freedom?

Not yet strong enough to pull free of their shackles, they eventually get tired of trying, slowly learning to adapt to a life confined by limitations.

They’d become like the circus elephant—big enough in body to resist but too weak in mind and spirit to do much about it.

we were each born with a double-bolted chain that held us back from any opportunity to experience freedom and abundant living. The bolts are a person and a place

For if by the transgression of the one, death reigned through the one, much more those who receive the abundance of grace and of the gift of righteousness will reign in life through the One, Jesus Christ. (Rom. 5:17)

So if we choose to accept Christ’s gracious gift by placing faith in Him and His finished work on the cross, we can now enjoy total freedom, satisfaction, and abundance on a daily basis.

Turns out there’s a big difference between being free and living free.

The first requires our acceptance of God’s gracious gift to undo the power of sin in our lives, the curse it held over us from the moment we were conceived. But the other requires an ongoing reliance on the Holy Spirit to help us live in obedience to the Lord.

Deliverance from bolt number two doesn’t just happen. You’ve got to make the hard call. You’ve got to be radical about yielding to God’s spirit so you can be free from the places where Satan rules.

Search me, O God, and know my heart; try me and know my anxious thoughts; and see if there be any hurtful way in me, and lead me in the everlasting way” (Ps. 139:23–24).

The New International Version’s take on Hebrews 12:1 instructs us not only to eradicate the sin from our lives but also to “throw off everything that hinders.”

So it would be inappropriate and limiting for anyone to define God solely on what they’ve learned in one setting, and yet this is precisely what I had unknowingly done. So when the complacency settled in, and I immediately tried thinking of how to deal with this matter at “home,” for the first time in my life I found myself bumping up against the sides of that box. Suddenly part of me wasn’t so sure that trying to fight this feeling was worth the risk. I didn’t know what the Lord would require of me for this complacency to be removed; and, honestly, as the pastor’s daughter, I felt too many eyes were pointed my direction as I tried figuring out how to tear it off and reach for new life. Others might misunderstand. People might lose respect for me. I might just end up making myself look foolish or be too uncomfortable to go where God might lead. But as God orchestrated my meeting with other believers whose views of Him were in many ways different from mine, I felt compelled to explore what they were bringing to the table. Unfamiliar? Yes. Unusual? Sometimes.

The Spirit spoke. “This is what My people do, Priscilla. They pray for rain, and when it pours, they run back home.”

Yes, we want God to move. We ask Him to. We pray with boldness that the cloak of complacency will be removed, that the windows of heaven will open and He will display His glory and power to us and through us. We anxiously await His wonders in our everyday living, but when His move ends up moving us, we aren’t too sure anymore. Running in the rain is a tad uncomfortable. When He calls us down a path we’ve not traveled before, around people we’ve not fellowshipped with before, we become concerned and cautious. This new, unfamiliar path under the rain of heaven stretches our limited view of His majesty, breaking open the narrow boundaries of our religious habits and belief systems. His Spirit quickens our own spirit to His fruit, His gifts, and His overwhelmingly abundant power available to us. We’ve not felt this before, and we’re not sure we like it—especially when others are passing by, peering out from their own pious safe havens with sullen expressions that reveal the way they really feel about believers caught up in the surge of the unusual. It’s easier to remain in the safety of where we’ve always been, doing the things we’ve always done. When the heavens open, when the wind of God’s Spirit and the rain of His presence shower down upon us, we’re uncomfortable beneath the torrent of the unfamiliar. And so we run for cover—back to the comfort zone that has kept us from really experiencing God as He now wants to be experienced.

Take a look around you and consider the company you keep. As you think of your closest relationships—even those who share a pew with you on Sunday mornings—do they largely consist of the “rabble,” the riffraff—people who are saved, people who are freed from the enemy’s hold, but who are pursuing God’s fullness with only a halfhearted interest? Are they mere churchgoers, Christians in name only, people who are along for the journey but mainly just riding on the coattails of others? Make no mistake about it, their attitude will inevitably affect yours.

Until we know release, we will never know freedom.

Until we turn away from Egypt, and refuse to look back, we can never truly set our sights on Canaan. Deliverance comes first, or destiny never comes at all.

Freedom on its own is not enough to get us to the land of promise and make us into the people God wants us to be. And make no mistake about it, His goal is to make us over even more than it is to take us over to Canaan. If we’re to know what victory feels like, not just what it looks like, we need His help in ways we’d never think to ask. Unexpected ways. Sometimes even hard ways.

So perhaps like Seabiscuit, as you look to either side, you see challenges in your life you’d just as soon not be encountering out here. Maybe you’re dealing with a physical condition that’s potentially frightening if not just daily frustrating. Maybe you’re battling some relationship issues that are keeping things stirred up and incessantly unresolved. Maybe you’ve been slammed by a sudden, life-altering circumstance or tragedy that’s affected you in deep, profound ways you don’t think you’ll ever understand. Or maybe you’re just traveling through a season of life that isn’t agreeing with you.

You can’t imagine this is what God had in mind for you when He brought you out of Egypt. In fact, it’s pretty much what you’ve been praying against. No way could He have thrust you into this kind of situation unless you’re being punished for some reason. I mean, doesn’t He know you do your best running without all these obstacles in your way, without being constantly hounded by one problem after another? Seems like there should be a more d...

Then again, maybe He knows, like Seabiscuit’s trainers knew, that challenges bring out the potential in you—potential you never knew was there. It’s not enough for you to be out o...

Now when Pharaoh had let the people go, God did not lead them by the way of the land of the Philistines, even though it was near; for God said, “The people might change their minds when they see war, and return to Egypt.” Hence God led the people around by the way of the wilderness to the Red Sea; and the sons of Israel went up in martial array from the land of Egypt. (vv. 17–18) Apparently, God didn’t have his Google Earth turned on. But you can be sure He had the Hebrews in sight. And He knew if His people were to receive the fullness of this milk-and-honey experience, they needed to have a few things in their sight as well—things they’d never have gone out looking for on their own but things that convince a Canaan traveler abundant life can happen in real life. God wanted them eye to eye with some heavyweight challenges so they could learn how to apply His power in any situation. What good are freed children of God who want to go back to Egypt “in their hearts” (Acts 7:39)?

the wilderness is not a necessity to reaching spiritual abundance.

“God is love” first and foremost (1 John 4:16), and “the Lord is righteous in all His ways and kind in all His deeds” (Ps. 145:17, italics mine). No, He’s not above using the wilderness when He knows we need it, when it’s part of His purpose for how He desires to grow us and use us. But He’s not One to sling us into tight situations just for fun. Nor is it just a matter of time before our number comes up. Bottom line, you needn’t be terrified of God, always wondering when or how He’s going to allow a season of trouble. Neither, on the other hand, should you be terrified of tragedy, as though you could never endure it. Yet each of us does need to consider how we’ll respond if we indeed discover that a wilderness experience—for us, for now—has become His will.

The wilderness, strange as it may seem, is often just (listen closely now)—it is often God’s will. It’s His chosen plan for us.

from the Word of God that the road He chooses (yes, chooses) to lead us on as we travel into a life of abundance is often more challenging, more tedious, more lonely, more indirect, and more costly than we ever expected. Not always, but often.

He wanted them to “know that I am the Lord your God, who brought you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians” (Exod. 6:7). He wanted them to know—to know—that He would be faithful to bring them to the land He had sworn “to give to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob” (v. 8). He wanted His people to know Him . . . by experience.

It’s awfully easy to get disillusioned with God out here in the wilderness. It’s easy to think He’s forgotten you, doesn’t care about you, doesn’t love you. It’s easy to start asking why your best isn’t good enough to earn you at least a little bit of relief from this constant upset and turmoil, from the choking dryness and dustiness. But listen, you don’t have to figure out the wilderness. You don’t have to fix the wilderness. You don’t have to be able to explain to your church friends why you’re going through the wilderness. Your job as a much loved, highly treasured child of God is simply to yield to the wilderness because it’s often only in the wilderness where our runaway desires can finally be boiled down to this: “One thing I have asked from the Lord, that I shall seek: that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the Lord and to meditate in His temple” (Ps. 27:4). The wilderness is God’s way of making us want the only thing that’s really worth having. The wilderness, my friend, is worth it.

Part of the reason the wilderness makes spiritual sense is because it enables us to know Him more intimately than we would if left to our own desires and devices. In an unusual, unexpected, even unwanted fashion, the wilderness is God’s way of doing us a favor we don’t even know we need.

If it troubles you to think of God allowing you to travel through a rough patch just so you can know Him better—if that sounds incredibly heavy-handed, borderline heartless—consider that the wilderness is often safer than the alternative.

God was using the wilderness way to protect them, whether His people knew it or not.

All we know for sure is what we see in our own situation. From that grass-is-greener vantage point, it’s easy to dress up our imaginary fantasy lands in colors to match the rainbow. But we can’t know, as God does, the harsh realities we’d have faced in places we’ve never been. So in order to shelter us from danger, He sometimes hedges us inside areas that, although perhaps extremely uncomfortable and unwanted, are much safer than we realize, much less painful than what we could be experiencing.

For not only is He protecting us from dangerous outsiders and situations, but He’s also protecting us from ourselves.

From the dry, dusty middle of our wilderness, we may not be able to see any good reason for it or any good intentions on God’s part for bringing us here. But again, figuring out the wilderness is not our job. If we’ll just yield to God’s purposes for us in the wilderness, He will protect us from ourselves and prepare us for our destiny.

What had become clear from their forty years of wandering in the wilderness was that God had used it to “humble” them. Not to humiliate them as Egypt’s Pharaoh had done but rather to strip away the pride that would keep them from being submissive, teachable people who could handle abundant living with gratitude and perspective. By humbling them, the true intentions of their hearts and their level of commitment to obedience would be revealed.

Wilderness travel causes us never to wake up to a day when we’re not totally in need of His love, provision, and care. It reminds us of the reality that even when we’re the most healthy, the most self-disciplined, the most on top of our daily schedule, we’re still living off His blessings.

We’re here because of Him. Sometimes the wilderness is what it takes to help us remember that. And the Lord knows that being humbled will inevitably reveal to us who we really are and what’s in the depths of our hearts. The wilderness is designed “to test you to know what is in your heart,”

And the Lord knows that being humbled will inevitably reveal to us who we really are and what’s in the depths of our hearts. The wilderness is designed “to test you to know what is in your heart,” which is a g...

Do we want the Promise Giver, or do we just want the Promised Land?

God employed the wilderness to see “whether or not you would keep His commands.”

the wilderness increases the opportunities to see God work miracles,

There was a rock. There was a hard place. And now an unjust, unfair place. But still, this is God’s place. God’s goal for our journey is not only that we see His power at work in our experiences, as He proved at the Red Sea, as He’s proven in your own life when things looked black and He brought them to life again. He also wants us to see His miraculous power at work in our emotions. That’s why when Moses cried out to God, and God showed him a tree, Moses “threw it into the waters, and the waters became sweet” (v. 25). In one swift move of vulnerability and obedience, Moses found God ready to act, relieving both the peoples’ thirst and their tired emotions. That which was bitter had been made sweet.

My spiritual disciplines became more of a chore, a duty, an effort. When I did make the time to be quiet before Him, I was much more anxious to cut the whole thing short.

Sometimes God goes silent. But that’s no reason to start making so much noise.

Each time we see the Israelites murmuring and complaining, it’s worse than the time before. At first it’s just the “people” doing the fussing (Exod. 15:24). Then it’s “all the congregation of the sons of Israel” (16:1). They go from just grousing to Moses alone, to taking their complaint to both Moses and Aaron. That’s the pattern of complaining—always intensifying, always escalating. It starts with a few minor, incidental frustrations, then builds over time into a wildfire, whipped into flame by every available draft of oxygen.

But make no mistake: a grumbling spirit will rob you and me of the treasures God is seeking to refine in us out here in the wilderness.