Lessons From the WildernessVoorbeeld

The Enemies In The Wilderness While the wilderness is tailor-made for each one of us by a loving God, it’s easy to misunderstand the hard moments as attacks from the pit of hell. Interestingly, the Holy Spirit led Jesus into the wilderness, where the Devil tempted him. The wilderness is a season filled with potential pitfalls, dead-ends, and many upheavals but all of these will be allowed by God to draw us closer to him and greater dependence on him. The enemy will do everything he can to discourage, upset and capture our attention this season. He is a vicious enemy whose motto is stealing, killing, and destroying. He will use all the weapons in his arsenal to make this happen. The key thing to experiencing victory is finding peace amid the multitude of emotions we feel in this season. It is also important to identify the enemy’s schemes operating in hyperdrive to topple our faith, lose our endurance and burn us out. We read in 1 Peter that the Devil is like a roaring lion looking to devour anyone. The apostle James calls us to be humble so that we can resist him. The promise in this situation is that he will flee. Most often, the trouble intensifies because we are unwise to the schemes of the Devil in the midst of the wilderness. His modus operandi is primarily to cause us to doubt God’s goodness and presence, to be fearful and anxious about what’s to come and to grumble about how things are at present compared to how they were. To combat these attacks, we need to find our way closer to the God who has led us thus far and pull out every bit of fear, doubt, and discontent from the roots by identifying our struggle and calling it out. We do not need to cower before the enemy, but we can stand bold and confident in our victory in Jesus. Use the word of God as a sword and keep praying at all times in the Spirit, all the while believing that victory is yours.