Leaving the Wilderness Season

If you’ve been feeling weary and dry in your spiritual life, I believe the Lord wants to strengthen you. Here are a few tools that can help you escape this wilderness season.

6 Things to Remember

1. A dry place is usually in between your deliverance and your dominion.

The in-between places are often wilderness places. We see the people of Israel went through the wilderness before they arrived at the Promised Land. Jesus also went to the wilderness right before his ministry began.

Often, the in-between seasons can feel dry and confusing. They may even follow after a spiritual high where you were experiencing God tangibly. The first step in overcoming this wilderness season is understanding that what you are experiencing is normal.

2. The dry season can be lengthened by complaining or shortened by confessing God’s Word.

We see that the complaint of the Israelites caused the 40 days to become 40 years (Num 14:26-45). Now, all complaining is not bad. It’s good to do it in prayer once in a while. The problem arises when that becomes your lifestyle.

When that happens, we can expand the season of dryness we are going through.

God is trying to build your faith during this process but God can’t build your faith until your feelings fail. You need to take time to consciously ignore your feelings and choose to live by God’s Word.

3. During the dry season, know that God is with you even when you don’t feel Him.

When things are dry, it’s common to not feel God, but that doesn’t mean He has abandoned you. He is with you. He promises to be with us (Deut 2:7).

In John 9:1, we see that there was a blind man who couldn’t see Jesus, but Jesus saw Him. Similarly, when you can’t see Jesus, rest assured that He sees you.

Hagar said similar words when she was in the wilderness. She said, “You are the God who sees me” (Gen 16:13). God sees you and knows what situation you find yourself in. Don’t allow your feelings to betray you. They may be true, but they are not the truth.

4. In a dry place, you may not see God working, but He is working behind the scenes.

I like to use a church service as an example of this. On a Sunday morning, you’ll see the beautiful service, but often, there are so many people behind the scenes who are making it beautiful. Similarly, God may not be visible in your wilderness season, but He is working behind the scenes (Deut 2:7).

For instance, when you look at the story of the Israelites in the wilderness, you see that God provided for them. In fact, there were approximately 3.5 million whom God provided food and water for. The actual amount of food needed to feed that amount of people is about 1,500 tons of food twice a day. That’s equivalent to two freight trains spanning a mile long each. For water, they would need about 11 million gallons to be able to drink, wash themselves, and cook.

When look at this story, we don’t see all the ways God was working to provide and protect them, we just see that God showed up.

I want to encourage you that God is at work in your life.

5. In a dry place, refuse to live by your feelings and choose to live by faith.

You can’t make it through the dry season if you live by your feelings. You have to live by faith. And you can’t live by faith if you’re not ruled by God’s Word.

To do this, you must divorce your feelings. Think about the Samaritan woman who had five husbands. Jesus meets her and changes her. I think many of us are more similar to her than we think. We are entangled by our five senses. Many of us need to divorce our emotions and feelings and allow God to encounter us.

This decision is crucial in deciding if you will continue to live in this state or if you will take God’s Word and allow it to change you.

6. Worship is your water in the dry place.

And lastly, worship is your water when you’re going through this. If you don’t worship during your dry season, you will get spiritually dehydrated.

What many people do is whine and complain instead of worshipping. Don’t allow your desires, desperation, and questions to cloud your worship.

Worship is the water that quenches the thirsty soul, but it’s not just your water in the wilderness; it’s also your weapon (Ps 149:6-9). We see in the Bible that David played music and the evil spirit left Saul (1 Samuel 16:23), and Paul and Silas sang songs in prison, and the doors flew open (Acts 16:25-32).

Worship and the Word is how you will get out of the wilderness season.

I want to encourage you to bring worship back into your house. Bring the presence of Jesus back into your house. Walk by faith because God is with you.

Read: Is There a Wrong Way to Pray?