You know how you know that you are doing the right thing? If things line up and it seems as if God is providing for you in this season. This was my philosophy and part of how I tried to discern God’s will early on in my walk with Christ. If things came easy and smooth then I figured that was the path of God’s blessing. When I ran into closed doors and difficulty then I figured it was God sovereignly hedging up my way.
You see, I’d always considered God’s provision as a sign of God’s approval. May that was a remnant of my days swallowing the damnable prosperity non-gospel. Or perhaps its from places like Psalm 34:10, “The young lions suffer want and hunger; but those who seek the LORD lack no good thing.”
But then Psalm 95:10 smacked me upside the face:
“For forty years I loathed that generation…” Psalm 95:10
That verse caught my attention. Especially as I thought about how it related to these verses:
For the Lord your God has blessed you in all the work of your hands. He knows your going through this great wilderness. These forty years the Lord your God has been with you. You have lacked nothing. –Dt. 2:7
What? “Lacked nothing”? I thought he loathed them. You mean he is still providing for them and making sure that they “lack nothing”? Weird. God even cared for things like clothes and shoes:
I have led you forty years in the wilderness. Your clothes have not worn out on you, and your sandals have not worn off your feet. –Dt. 29:5
His Provision Doesn’t Equal His Pleasure
God wasn’t providing for the wilderness generation because he was pleased with them. In fact he loathed them. But he was providing for them because He is God and He is good. He’s still their Father. So he cares for them; and somehow I think He still loves them—even while He loathes them.
This leads me to conclude that just because God is providing it doesn’t necessarily mean you are being obedient and pleasing to Him. It might just mean that while you are being a complete goober God is still faithful. Manna isn’t milk and honey, or wheat and barley, or vines and fig trees and pomegranates. And water from a rock isn’t brooks of water or fountains and springs, flowing out in the valley and hills.
Conviction
Here is something that I wrote in a prayer journal (otherwise known as a diary for a dude):
Lord, I want to pursue your pleasure and not merely your provision. I want more than shoes. I want You. I don’t want wilderness provisions because of my disobedience. I want your rest. I want your smile.
I’ve grown less passionate about the Lord’s pleasure. I’ve contented myself with His provisions (which are awesome)—but I’ve assumed that His provision means that He is pleased with me. I know that He’s ultimately pleased with me because I am covered in Christ. And I know that I don’t pursue the Lord’s pleasure by performance. But I don’t pursue it by passive disobedience either (James 4:17).
It’s this:
“God is delighted with our obedience when it is the fruit of our delight in him. Our obedience is God’s pleasure when it proves that God is our treasure.
The Israelites wandered 40 years in the desert because they didn’t trust in the Lord. They didn’t believe he could spread a table for them in the wilderness. My heart has grown similarly jaded and that scares me. I’ve been a fool that has contented myself on lesser things. So, I’m praying today that the Lord will remind me of this and stir up my heart to passionately pursue His pleasure.
It’s time I shed my wilderness sandals…
—
I wrote most of this almost five years ago. God used this, I believe, to stir up in my heart a desire for not settling for the comfort I had in being an associate pastor but to pursue the uncertain waters of being a lead pastor.
If I’m being honest I miss the heart with which I wrote this. I find myself so busy these days that I don’t even look at the shoes I’m wearing. Are they wilderness sandals or something else? I don’t know, but I’ve got another sermon to write, another meeting to prepare for, another fire to put out.
Week in and week out I see God provide. The sermon gets done. I survive another meeting. We plod along a bit more. We continue to pursue faithfulness. But, oh this too easily contented heart of mine. I’m surviving and mostly managing to keep my head above water in pastoral ministry, but am I pursuing the Father’s pleasure? Or am I once again content with his provisions—this time the provision of just enough energy to get through my week.
I want His pleasure…
I don’t think it’s an accident that this song (which I’d never heard, came on Spotify as I was writing this article:
“And while staying with them he ordered them not to depart from Jerusalem, but to wait for the promise of the Father…”
I heard a John Piper sermon quite a few years ago (or maybe it was an article I read) where he talked about wanting the gospel to go down so deep into his heart that his impulses were gospel. It wasn’t those exact words but that is what I took from them. Ever since that moment I’ve been reading the Scriptures (and really my own heart) in a different way.
It’s been said that integrity is what you do when nobody is looking. I think you could say something similar about impulses. Those moments when I’m least on guard expose what is really going on in my heart. The unfiltered words which come to my mind are what is really there. And I want those to be sanctified. Again, I want Christ to so change my heart that my first impulse is to be like Jesus. I want to be like John Newton. It was said of Newton that he loved people at first sight. That was his impulse.
What I often do when I read through Acts is look for impulses. I want to know what it was that naturally sprang out of these Spirit-filled followers of Jesus. Here in Acts 1, before Pentecost, Jesus calls on his followers to wait in Jerusalem for the promise of the Father. What will be their first impulses to being told to wait? What will they gravitate towards in those moments that they are waiting for this promise of the Father?
First, they gathered. A first instinct of believers is to want to be around other believers. They didn’t think about going their own separate ways and live their own individual lives. Their waiting meant gathering with like-minded followers of Jesus…and to do so in the very room where Jesus had promised the Spirit.
Secondly, they were united in prayer. Pray is the natural impulse of a child of God. Though we might go through seasons of distress and difficult in this area, communing with the Father is our new normal.
Thirdly, they applied the Scriptures. Peter stood up and exposited the Scriptures (there is likely a bit of an impulse in this as well—where leaders, lead). I am amazed at the way Peter applied Psalm 69 and Psalm 109. Christ became the prototypical righteous sufferer and Judas became the prototypical persecutor of God’s people. So they applied the Scriptures through a Christ-centered lens and acting accordingly.
There are two points I am making here. One is to look at the inclination of the early disciples when they are told to wait. Are my impulses similar? When I’m told by the Lord to “wait” is my first response to gather, pray, and apply the Scriptures? Or do I have different impulses?
The second point that I’m making is that when the Lord places us in a season of waiting that doesn’t mean it is a season of passivity. Waiting on the Lord means doubling down on gathering with believers, prayer, and obeying the Scriptures. Being told by the Lord to “wait” doesn’t mean to be frozen. It means to faithfully dig in to the things that you do know. Be obedient in the disciplines and diligently dig into the Scriptures and apply them. That’s what you do while you wait.
Yep. I don’t listen to anonymous criticism. It’s not because I don’t welcome critique, it’s just that I have no way to filter through what is being said.
You know how you know that you are doing the right thing? If things line up and it seems as if God is providing for you in this season. This was my philosophy and part of how I tried to discern God’s will early on in my walk with Christ. If things came easy and smooth then I figured that was the path of God’s blessing. When I ran into closed doors and difficulty then I figured it was God sovereignly hedging up my way. 
