The Wilderness Way: Finding God in the Dark Night of the Soul
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If you're like me, you left a religion or a belief system because you discovered how wrong it was. And if you're like me, you probably went through or going through a period where you feel lost, where you're not sure what to believe, where you don't know if any of it's true. If you're like me, and I know that a lot of you are, and that's probably why you're watching or listening to this to begin with, I want you to know that that time period, that dark night of the soul that you're going through or went through is a very good thing from a biblical perspective. And that's what I'm going to talk about today. Let's start right off with our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ because he went through this too. Mark's gospel tells us something really amazing about what happened to Jesus as soon as he was baptized.
In Mark 1:12 and13 it says, "Immediately the spirit drove him out into the wilderness. He was there in the wilderness 40 days tempted by Satan. He was with the wild animals and the angels were serving him. Now, the first thing I want to point out about this passage is that word drove. The spirit didn't gently suggest that maybe it would be a good idea for Jesus to take a spiritual retreat. It didn't offer it as an option for people who are seeking spiritual growth, deeper growth. The Greek word used here means to cast out, to expel with force.
It's the same word that's used when Jesus casts out demons. Think about that. The spirit cast Jesus into the wilderness. It drove him there. And think about the timing of that, too. Jesus had just been baptized, right? He had experienced the most profound spiritual confirmation imaginable.
The heavens opened up in front of him and John the Baptist and everyone who happened to be there. The spirit descended like a dove. God's voice bmed from the heavens. You are my beloved son in whom I am well pleased. Talk about your spiritual high. a moment of absolute complete divine affirmation.
But right after that, immediately it says, not after a season of ministry, not after, you know, building on this mountaintop experience or anything, immediately the spirit drives Jesus out into the wilderness into emptiness. 40 days of hunger, temptation, wild beasts. It's not like Jesus had a handgun, you know. It's not like he had a really easy way to defend himself. You know, the Bible doesn't say, "Did he have a sword?" It was common for people to carry that in the wilderness to defend themselves. We don't know.
What we know is that was not an easy time. Imagine you walking into the forest for 40 days and just figuring out how to survive. That's what Jesus had to do. From the heights of heaven opening up before him into the depths of this desert desolation.
That pattern was necessary for Jesus. Otherwise, the spirit wouldn't have driven him out into it. And it's necessary for us. Why do we think that if Jesus had to go through that that if the spirit moved him to do that that it's not going to move us to do the same thing? Are we better than Jesus? Obviously not. Why do we think that once we find God, once we have that moment of clarity, the conversion, spiritual awakening, that our path forward is just going to be smooth and certain, easy sailing, you know, like lemonade on a Sunday morning.
That's not the Christian life. I read the Gospels. What does Jesus say? Pick up your cross and carry it and follow him.
And it's very interesting to me that the wilderness comes after the baptism. The darkness follows the light. It's not a deviation from God's plan. That's the spirit. It drives us to do that, which means that there's a very beneficial purpose for it. And this is not an isolated incident. This didn't just happen to Jesus.
This is woven throughout the entire Bible. Here's another one. After the Israelites were miraculously delivered from Egypt, they saw the plagues, the parting of the Red Sea, the pillar of cloud and fire, God leads them into the wilderness for 40 years. Now, it wasn't supposed to be that long. It was their own fault that it was that long, but they needed it. And the Bible talks about why. In Exodus chapter 13, we're told that God deliberately took the Israelites the long way instead of the direct way.
It says, "When Pharaoh had let the people go, God didn't lead them by the way of the land of the Philistines, although that was near. For God said, lest perhaps the people change their minds when they see war, and they returned to Egypt." But God led the people around by the way of the wilderness by the Red Sea. God chose that wilderness route instead of the direct route. That meandering, the hunger, the uncertainty they faced. All that was intentional. It wasn't accidental.
And why? Well, the Bible tells us why in Deuteronomy 8 2 and three. It explains, "You shall remember all the way which Yahweh your God has led you these 40 years in the wilderness, that he might humble you to test you to know what was in your heart, whether you would keep his commandments or not." He humbled you, allowed you to be hungry, and fed you with mana, which you didn't know. Neither did your fathers know that he might teach you that man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by every word that proceeds out of Yahweh's mouth. And isn't it interesting that Jesus quotes that man must not live on bread alone to the devil when he's tempted while on that 40day wilderness sabbatical.
The wilderness revealed what they were really depending on. When we've got these familiar structures, visible securities, Egypt, right, the empire of the world at the time, when all that gets stripped away, what's left for the Israelites? What's left for us? Would they trust God himself? Or did they only trust these systems, these routines, the predictable provisions? That's the purpose of the wilderness. It's not punishment.
It's purification. It's the stripping away of these false securities. They're not real. What we really depend on is God. That relationship with him. That's what gives us life and breath in all things. Not these systems, these structures that we've lived by and lived through for so long.
Consider Job. Job was described as blameless and upright, one who feared God and turned away from evil. Evil. He had it all. He was wealthy. He had a big family. He had his health.
He had a clear understanding, he thought, of how righteousness was supposed to work. and he lived by it. And because of that, he was called blameless and upright. He believed, and it's taught, do good, receive blessing. Follow the rules, and you'll prosper.
And then it all fell apart. In a single day, he loses all of his children, his wealth, his health, even his wife tells him to curse God and die because it gets so bad. and his so-called friends, they insist that there must be a proper theological explanation to what's happening to him. You must have sinned. Confess it, get your doctrine right, and God's going to restore you. But Job's suffering didn't have anything to do with fixing his doctrine. He lived correctly.
The Bible calls him blameless and upright. Clearly, God calls him that. God's own words is that he's blameless and upright. It wasn't about him not living correctly or having proper doctrine. It was about moving him out of that secondhand religion into firthand encounter.
At the end of the book of Job, after God appears to him in the whirlwind, what does Job say in chapter 42:5? He says, "I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you." So Job went from just hearing about God, which did lead to him living a good life, to actually seeing God. He goes from correct belief to direct experience. The wilderness made that possible. Had those things not happened to Job. Had he not suffered all those things, he would have lived his entire life just knowing about God and not being in actual direct connected relationship to God.
And that would not have been good, which is why he had to go through it. Jesus himself, a perfect sinless man, had to go through it. Why do you think you're not going to go through it? Even the Apostle Paul with his impeccable religious credentials, he was circumcised the eighth day of the stock of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews concerning the law of Pharisee. He came to look at all of that as just a loss refu. In Philippians 3:7 and 8, he wrote, "However, I consider those things that were gained to me as a loss for Christ. Yes, most certainly.
And I count all things to be a loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I suffered the loss of all things, and count them as nothing but refu that I may gain Christ. Paul had the doctrine. He knew the rules. He followed them zealously. And he calls it all refues. Literally, that word means dung. compared to knowing Christ, not knowing about him, knowing him.
And didn't didn't Jesus say that you had to know God and the one whom he sent forth, Jesus Christ. You have to know them. It's not just head knowledge. It's experiential.
In the 16th century, and this is the point, right? A Spanish monk named John of the Cross, he gave language to everything I've been describing. He called it the dark night of the soul. John described the phase in spiritual development that many believers experience. I went through it, too. It's a time when all of the consolations of faith disappear. That sense of God's presence that you once felt, it's gone.
The joy you had when you would worship, it's not there. The clarity you had about your beliefs. You knew everything you needed to know. You thought that evaporates. Prayer begins to feel like you're talking to the void, like there's nothing there. Scripture just feels like old words written by some random person on a page. You start to wonder if you ever really knew God at all.
Or maybe does he even exist? or if it's all just emotional manipulation and wishful magical thinking as the atheists claim. This is terrifying for people if you're coming out of a rule-based religious system like I did because in that religion and I use religion as a pjorative here not spirituality but religion like an institutional construct of belief when you're in that you measure your spirituality by external metrics. Are you going to church enough? Do you believe the right things? Is your doctrine sound? Are you following the rules?
As long as the checklist is complete, you believe you're in good standing. And that brings you emotional comfort and well-being. But what happens when you can't feel God anymore? When the doctrines you memorized feel hollow or you come to realize that they were wrong and everything you thought you knew. All the rules, all the asurances, the consistency of the future, all that comfort is gone because you realize it's a lie or at least you just don't feel it anymore. That checklist says you're doing everything right, but inside you're empty, dark, lost. Here's what John of the Cross understood.
That darkness is not abandonment. It's advancement. God takes away. He withdraws all those emotional rewards, those consolations, that sense of his presence for a very specific purpose to move you from spiritual infancy to maturity. You've been baptized. You're leading a good life. You're blameless and upright.
But that wilderness beckons. It beckoned to Jesus. It beckoned to Job. It beckoned to Paul. It beckoned to the Israelites. And it beckons to us.
And it makes logical sense why. When you first find God, you need all that emotional stuff. You need the good feelings, the warm fuzzies, the signs, the tangible sense that you're on the right path. It's training wheels on a bicycle is what it is. It's important that it's not a bad thing. But there comes a point when God sees your advancement, your maturity, and that's why you left the controlling religion you were in before, if you ever were. That's why you abandoned all those things.
You were maturing and realizing that all of that was wrong. And then God tells you, "All right, now you're ready for more. You're ready to love me, not because of how I make you feel, but because of who I am. You're ready to trust me, not because you can see the entire path to eternity, but because you know my character, and that's enough. So God takes off the training wheels of your spiritual bicycle. At first, just like a kid riding a bike without training wheels for the first time, it feels like falling. And sometimes you do literally fall.
It feels like failure because sometimes you do fail. But it's actually graduation. The dark knight purifies you and it purifies your motives. It reveals what or who you've really been depending on all this time. Is it God himself or was it the emotional and intellectual security that came with trusting in a religious system? It made you feel good. It made you feel secure.
You believed you had the entire path all the way into eternity, heaven, paradise, whatever your particular religion taught. You understood all the prophecies. You knew what was going to happen. It gave you a sense of security. Not because you actually trusted God, but because you thought you knew everything that was going to happen. It strips away all of those false foundations when you have to go through that dark night. And when you come out on the other side, you realize you're standing on the true solid rock.
Now listen to what the prophet Hosea heard from God in Hosea 2:14-15. Therefore, behold, I will allure her and bring her into the wilderness and speak tenderly to her. I will give her vineyards from there in the valley of Acor for a door of hope. and she will respond there as in the days of her youth and as in the day when she came up out of the land of Egypt.
God allures her into the wilderness. The wilderness isn't the end. It's just the doorway. The valley of Achor, which literally means valley of trouble, that became the door of hope. The place of stripping away becomes the place where you're actually restored. But you have to go through it. You have to open that door.
You have to walk through it. There's no shortcut around the wilderness. Jesus couldn't have made the choice to not spend 40 days in there. The spirit drove him into the wilderness.
This happened to me, too. It may have happened to you. I spent the first 40 years of my life in the cult of Jehovah's Witnesses. I had certainty. I had answers to every doctrinal question. I believed. I knew exactly what God expected, what the Bible taught, what all the prophecies meant, what you had to believe and to do to be acceptable.
I knew it all. There was a lot of comfort in that. Even when the system was controlling and harmful and all the interpretations self- serving, it was comforting. And after I left at age 40, I realized just how comforting that was when I had to walk through the wilderness. Everything I built my life on before, all the beliefs, all the relationships, that sense of identity, it collapsed. And that just flooded me with questions. Was I wrong to leave?
Were they actually right? What if there isn't a god? What if I just traded one delusion for another? I floundered. I even explored atheism for a while. Maybe it was all just human invention and I had been wrong about everything. That didn't last very long though.
But then I studied Eastern religions. I studied Buddhism. I studied Dowoism. I thought, well, maybe the truth was somewhere else entirely. And there was a lot of wisdom in those writings for sure, but it just it didn't feel like home. And so I abandoned that too. And I turned to agnosticism.
Well, maybe we just don't know. Maybe we can't know. I started to practice mindfulness meditation, a secular practice. It wasn't a religious practice. Just uh emptying out the mind and coming into presence and not letting all my thoughts control and panic me all the time. And that really worked. It began to quiet the anxious voice that had lived inside my head for so long and insisted that I needed to have it all figured out right now.
No, right now is all you need to know right now. So, what's happening right now? Are you healthy? Are you whole? Are you at peace? Is there any threat? If the answer to all those questions is no, well then why why do you have anxiety in this moment right now?
That was very helpful and beneficial to me. My anxiety level today is a 1% of was it what it was when I was in the religion of Jehovah Witnesses because I actually understand that I'm standing on the rock. I don't have to see the whole path forward because I trust the one who guides my steps. And that made all the difference.
Slowly, gradually, as I walked through that wilderness of wandering, something shifted. I stopped trying to figure out what the right system was, and I started paying attention to my experience with God. I stopped asking myself, what am I supposed to believe? What's right? What's true? And I started asking myself instead, who is God really beneath all this human construct? Well, that brings us to the Bible.
The Bible, which I once read as a rule book, as my doctrinal encyclopedia, I began to see it completely different. I read it for the first time all the way through with no indoctrination and with all this experience of walking through the wilderness. And I realized that it's not so much God's dictation to humanity. It's more of humanity's love song towards God. Oh, absolutely. We learn all kinds of important things about the divine, especially in Jesus in the Gospels. But it also shows the longings, the misunderstandings, the cultural baggage and genuine breakthroughs of a people that are reaching for something that they could barely comprehend.
Jesus h Jesus emerged from the pages of the gospels no longer as a theological construct that I was supposed to believe in correctly and absolutely but as the clearest picture of God's character. He wasn't a rulegiver. He wasn't a judge waiting to condemn me. He ate with sinners. He touched the untouchable. He forgave extravagantly.
And he said that the entire law could be summed up in loving God and loving your neighbor as yourself, which means you have to love yourself too. That's when I started to identify as a Christian mystic. And all that means is someone who prioritizes their direct relationship with the divine over doctrinal correctness, who seeks to experience God rather than just believe in God or know things about God. that dark night, those seven years, and I find the fact that it took me seven years uh very very symbolic and meaningful. That dark night, those years of floundering and doubt and uncertainty, that was the best thing that could have ever happened to my faith because it forced me to let go of all those false securities, my secondhand religion that I had inherited from my parents, all that comfort of being right. When I look back on it now and I realize, yeah, it felt good, but I was in a much more precarious situation because anytime anything would threaten what I believed, and this happens sometimes, and Jehovah's Witnesses are famous for their door knocking thing.
And I used to do that all the time. And I remember once once I knocked on a door and the guy who came to the door, he was actually he had a masters of divinity. He he bragged about it, which in my mind, you know, this that wasn't appropriate, but he picked apart everything I was saying. The man knew the Bible like the back of his hand. And when I left, initially, I felt panic because I had no way to refute what this guy was saying. But then of course the indoctrination kicked in and I just you know wrote him off as being uh lost and even Jesus knew how to I mean even Satan quoted scripture to Jesus when he was in the wilderness and so on. But that panic that fear what if I'm wrong that comes from having the false security of religious institution.
When you're directly connected to God, when you have a relationship with God, when you really know him, then you know, if you're wrong about this or that, okay, I it's not a big deal. It doesn't really matter. Like, oh, well, that's a little piece of clarity. How nice. It doesn't scare you because you everything you believe, your whole life is built on trust and love and a relationship. Just like, you know, I'm married to Beth. Love my wife.
She's a wonderful person. If I mess up, if I say something wrong, if I'm in a bad mood or something like that happens and she calls me out on it, I'm not afraid she's going to leave. I just apologize. I'm like, "Oh, I'm sorry. I didn't, you know, I was tired or I shouldn't have said that or whatever." This happens all the time. I am a man.
You know, you women listening, you know how we can be sometimes. I have a true relationship with Beth, though, so I never worry about me making a mistake ending that relationship. And she feels the same way about me. Like, nobody's perfect. We we mess up. So, when you make a mistake in your belief system, when you think something that's incorrect or you realize that a path that you're on isn't right or needs to be adjusted, you don't panic. When you have a relationship with God, he's not abandoning you.
That's actually impossible. Which is another thing you come to realize when you know God. God is with you. Whether you like it or not, he's there. Your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit. Whether you want it or not, he's there. Now, you can ignore it.
You can turn away from it. You can choose not to look at it. But you don't have the choice of being completely uh uh devoid of God's presence. You can make the choice, let me rephrase that. You can make the choice of completely removing the spirit from your life. And Jesus talked about that when he said that uh you can sin against the Holy Spirit and it not be forgiven in this age or the age to come. So you can make the choice to completely disconnect yourself from it.
But God isn't making that choice. God isn't pulling away from you. You are pulling away from him. And that's the point.
I learned what it really meant to call God aba after walking through the wilderness. Not a distant theological concept, but a father in an intimate relationship. He is my abba. He is my dad. He is the one that I look to. That's the word that Jesus used in the garden of Gethsemane when he was facing his own dark night. He said, "Aba, Father, all things are possible to you.
Please remove this cup from me. However, not what I desire, but what you desire." Even Jesus in his greatest moment of anguish, he didn't have certainty about the path. Think about that. Jesus asked God to change his path. He asked for it to be different, but he had a relationship with his aba, with God. He had trust.
He knew that whatever God wanted him to do, he would do it and that would be the right thing. It was enough to trust in God. Now, if you're listening or watching this and you're in your own wilderness right now, if you left a high control religion, a cult, or you've deconstructed the faith you grew up with, if you feel lost and uncertain, and you wonder if you've made an awful mistake by taking that step, there's something you need to hear. You are exactly where you need to be. God put you in that wilderness. You're there on purpose. It's your next step.
You're graduating from that control system that made you feel warm and fuzzy and emotionally secure but was not where you needed to be in the end. That confusion, it's not a detour. Your doubt, that's not failure. That feeling that you don't have it all figured out anymore and it makes you panic, that's not a sign that you've gone astray. It's a sign that you're being led to a much deeper truth that you don't need to know what tomorrow will bring. And didn't Jesus say that each day will have enough of its own evil. Don't fear tomorrow.
Don't ask, "What am I to eat? What am I to drink? What am I to put on?" God knows you need these things. Seek first the kingdom and his righteousness, and you will have all those other things. Each day has enough of its own evil.
Jesus said in Luke 17 20 and 21, "The kingdom of God doesn't come with observation. Neither will they say, "Look here or look there." For behold, the kingdom of God is within you. Not in some external religious structure, not in getting your doctrines just perfect or lined up right. Not in following the right rules or believing all the right things. The kingdom of God is within you in direct lived experiential relationship with God, with the divine. Paul said in 1 Corinthians 13:12, "For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face.
Now I know in part, but then I will know fully, even as I was also fully known." Our understanding now is meant to be partial, unclear. Anyone who claims to have it all figured out, they don't understand the nature of the journey. Just read the Bible and see all the wilderness accounts. We see dimly. We know in part that's okay. And that's just the human condition.
When we're in relationship with the infinite, we are not infinite. There's many things we will never understand. In fact, Paul goes even further in 1 Corinthians 8:2. But if anyone thinks that he knows anything, he doesn't yet know as he ought to know. Think about that. The person who thinks they have it all figured out, all doctrinally correct, who's confident that they have all the right interpretations, and judges others for not seeing it their way, that person does not understand the nature of knowing God. Paul says, "So, if you think you know, you don't know as you ought to know."
Because knowing God isn't about intellectual mastery. It's relationship. It's humility. It's love. Any relationship you have is like that. The longer you know someone, the deeper you come to know them, the more you learn about them, you're never going to know everything about any individual you have any kind of relationship with at all. What makes you think that God and his infinite capacity is ever going to be fully comprehendable to our human mind?
But you know what does comprehend God? Our heart, our love, our trust. We can know those things fully, but all the particulars, the sub that makes the mind feel good. Nah, we there's no way. God is infinite. We can't comprehend that. Which is why Proverbs 3:5 and 6 tells us, "Trust in Yahweh with all your heart and don't lean on your own understanding.
In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make your path straight." We can't lean on our own understanding of God because we can't fully understand God. So stop trying to figure it all out intellectually. The not knowing, the trust in the dark night, the acknowledgment of God in the absence of certainty. That's what faith is. That's the path we take. He illuminates our next step, not the entire road to eternity.
And that's enough. If you really trust God, that's all you need. What's my next step for today? That's all you need to know. because you trust that wherever that step goes and the next one and the next one and the next one is leading you down the right and righteous path that he's meant for you. Isaiah 55:8-9 tells us and I've quoted this a lot. For my thoughts are not your thoughts and your ways are not my ways, says Yahweh.
For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts. God operates beyond our comprehension. And that means that the whole project of trying to get doctrine exactly right, figure God out completely, it's inherently limited. You can't know that the vastness of God's presence is always going to exceed any intellectual, theological, doctrinal system you create.
So what do you do in this wilderness? How do you navigate this dark night? That's a good and important question. And it starts by stopping stopping trying to navigate by what you can see and learn to walk by trust and faith in God. You stop trying to have all the answers and you're willing to just sit with the big questions. You stop measuring how spiritual you are by external checklists of what you're doing and you pay attention to what's happening inside. How are you growing in compassion, in patience, in love, in mercy and not in sacrifice?
As Jesus quoted from Hosia, the ways you're learning to rest rather than learning to strive. Now, of course, naturally, when you do that and you grow in compassion and love and mercy and all those good things, action will follow. But the action comes from what's inside first. The love precedes the action. You don't take the action to build the love. You learn to love which then naturally results in action. That's why James 1 2-4 says, "Count it all joy, my brothers, when you fall into various temptations, knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance.
Let endurance have its perfect work that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing." All these difficulties, these trials, this wilderness season that you went through or are going through, it's producing something very good in you. It's producing maturity. It's producing completeness. That testing is not meant to break you. It's meant to refine you. You're never going to go through anything you can't handle.
And it's going to surprise you how strong God knows you to be sometimes as you're going through that stuff. But you will come out the other side. and it will be for your good. Which is why James says to count it all joy. Paul learned this too in 2 Corinthians 12:9 and 10. He writes about his thorn in the flesh. And this is something he begged God multiple times to remove, but God said no.
To be precise, he said, "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness." That place where you don't have it all together, where you realize you can't fix it yourself, where there are no answers to the questions that you're asking, that's where divine power shows up. It's not in your strength, but it's in your weakness. It's not in your certainty, it's in your surrender.
The beautiful thing about the biblical narrative is that God consistently meets people not in their certainty but in their confusion. He meets us where we are and he gives us what we need. That next step. When Moses encountered the burning bush in Exodus 3, he asked the most fundamental question. Who are you? What is your name? And it's funny to me how God answers that question in verse 14.
He says, "I am who I am." He doesn't say Yahweh. He doesn't say Yovah. He doesn't say Jehovah. He doesn't say any of those names. He says, "I am who I am." That's essentially a non-answer.
It's an invitation to relationship rather than a de a neat neatly filed away definition. Right? God refuses in this moment to be reduced to a word or a concept that Moses can fully understand and master. Instead, he offers his presence. He tells Moses, "I will be with you." His answer to the question is, "I am who I am." In other words, well, you're going to find out.
Experience me and you will see who I am and that's enough. When Jacob wrestled with God all night in Genesis chapter 32, Jacob didn't get clarity from that. He got wounded. He got hurt. He walked away limping. But he also walked away blessed because he saw God face to face. That encounter wasn't comfortable and it wasn't neat.
It was fierce and costly, but it was real. And that made all the difference in Jacob's life. And it'll make all the difference in yours, too. You will have real fierce encounters with the divine and it will wake you up to what it really means to know God. And that will change your life forever. Just like it did with Jacob, just like it did with Paul, just like it did with James, just like it did with the Israelites and with Jesus Christ himself.
This is the truth that Christian mystics have always understood. There's a medieval text called the cloud of unknowing. The writer was anonymous. They claim to be a 14th century English monk. And they describe these two clouds. The one above us is the cloud of unknowing. All the things we just can't comprehend about God, they're beyond us.
And below us is a cloud of forgetting. All of our attachments, our concepts, and even our good theological ideas, they're all down there. Now, the author of this cloud of knowing, he says that God can't be reached through our intelligence, through our reasoning on things. You can think about God, but you can't think your way to God. Instead, God is reached through love, a naked intent of the will, a reaching out and longing that doesn't depend on our understanding. Love is not produced by the mind. The mind is a tool that has a specific use case.
Access to God is not one of its abilities. Trying to use the mind to reach God is kind of like trying to drive a toaster to the grocery store. It's a ludicrous endeavor, but that's not what it's made for. It's meant to make toast, not to be drivable. Trying to use the mind to reach God is very similar to that because the mind is a tool. Intelligence is a good thing. Reasoning is a good thing.
It's not bad. It's great for planning when you do your taxes, stuff like that, if you're planning a road trip. But it doesn't bring you to God because that's not what it's for. The proverbial heart is what brings you to God. Love, that naked intent of the will to the desire to know him. That's what gets you there. The text of that old writing, it literally instructs readers to take all your thoughts, even your holy thoughts about God, and to just shove them down into that cloud of forgetting and then reach up through the cloud of unknowing with what it describes as a sharp dart of longing love.
This is what the wilderness teaches you. This is what that dark knight of the soul will purify in you. That need to understand, to control, to have God figured out. All of that's going to get stripped away. And rightly so. It needs to go away. That's the old you.
That's the milk. That's spiritual immaturity. What remains when all that is melted away is love, trust, relationship, the things that give you real access to the divine, not the mind. It's not going to get you there.
Even Jesus himself, and this is so poignant, when he was hanging on the cross in his darkest moment, what did he cry out in Matthew 27:46? My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Even Jesus Christ experienced the feeling of divine absence in his darkest moment. He knew what it was to cry out in apparent silence. God does not respond to him in that moment. God speaks up for him multiple times in the gospels. But not then, not in his darkest moment.
Don't you think that that was recorded to teach us something? That if the son of God went through that feeling of darkness and abandonment, but then was resurrected three days and inherited everything that he was promised by God. Well, surely we shouldn't be surprised when we go through that, too. It shouldn't be disheartening eternally. It shouldn't drive us completely away from our belief and our love for God. We should see it as what it is. It's the path through the wilderness that we have to go through because it brings us to the next level that we will never get to from the mind.
But notice, even in that awful, awful moment of feeling forsaken, Jesus was still crying out to my God. The relationship held even when the feeling of God's presence did not. Throughout all the gospels, Jesus repeatedly confronts the rule keepers, the rule makers, the ones who thought they had it all doctrinally correct, followed every religious rule and regulation, measured everyone by external standards of righteousness that most of which they invented themselves. and he consistently chose relationship over those rules. In Matthew 9:13, he's criticized for eating with tax collectors and sinners. And what does Jesus say? He quotes Hosea 66.
But you go and learn what this means. I desire mercy and not sacrifice. For I came to call not the righteous, but sinners to repentance. mercy, relationship, meeting people where they are. Not demanding they get it right right out of the gate, but extending connection, compassion, and love in the mess of humanity. The religious leaders, they had all the scriptures memorized. They wore little boxes on their head, right?
They knew the doctrines. They knew the rules. They followed them meticulously. And yet Jesus called them whitewash tombs. They were beautiful on the outside, but they were dead inside. They had knowledge, but they didn't have love. And what is knowledge without love?
They had correctness, but they didn't have compassion. And correctness without compassion leads to abuse. They had doctrine, but they didn't have relationship. And so, their doctrine resulted in conformity and control rather than love, belief, and compassion.
In John 14:23, Jesus promises, "If a man loves me, he will keep my word. My father will love him and we will come to him and make our home with him." Notice the order of those things. You love first and obedience flows from that. Like I said, love produces action. Action doesn't produce love. We don't need to get the rules right and then God loves you.
But you're loved. And then from that love, relationship grows. That's the freedom that the wilderness brings. You stop performing for approval. You stop trying to earn your standing through the right beliefs, right behavior, checking all the boxes. You realize that you're already loved. You're already connected.
You're already home because God is home in you. That's what Jesus said. that God would make his home in you. You just didn't know it because the religious system had convinced you that you needed their mediation, their approval, and their certification in order to be right with God. And that's just nonsense. That's why I say I'm a Christian mystic. You don't need those things.
There's nothing wrong with going to church. It can be very beneficial having other believers around you. It's beautiful to see that camaraderie, that love, that uh group praise. It's powerful. Jesus said, "Where two or three of you are gathered in my name, there I am with you." But it's not necessary, and they're certainly not your mediator. You don't need their approval, and you don't need their certification.
Like Paul wrote in Philippians 3:7 and 8, all those credentials, all that doctrinal correctness, it's refugees. It's garbage. What matters is knowing Christ. Not knowing about him, knowing him, experiencing God through Christ. That's what it is. So, if you're in the wilderness today, let me let me speak some hope to you. That disorientation that you're feeling, I I know it well.
That's the old false foundations. They're crumbling so that the real can be built. That certainty that you used to have that's gone now, it was never really yours. It was the system's way of controlling you by making you think you had certainty. That confusion and doubt, they're not signs of failure. They're signs of you finally being honest with yourself. You're learning to walk by faith, not by sight.
You're learning that God is bigger than your doctrines, wilder than your theology. That was a big one for me. vastly more loving than the religious system ever taught you. Because most religious systems don't teach that God is purely love, even though 1 John 4:8 says he is. They teach that God is largely denunciatory, that he's out to get you if you don't live right. And that gives them control. But you are learning now that the divine doesn't require you to have it all figured out, to follow all these man-made rules.
It just requires you to show up honestly as you are right now. That valley of acorn, the valley of trouble, that becomes a door of hope. The wilderness isn't the end of the journey. It's the passage between your inherited secondhand religion, the pass me down, and your firsthand encounter with the divine. It's where the training wheels come off and you finally learn to ride for real. Because you learn just how strong you are and that you don't need those training wheels to hold you in balance. You can balance yourself.
Why? Because you have a real relationship with God. You trust him completely. The next footfall, the next step, that's all you need. And one day you're going to look back on that admittedly terrible season and you're going to realize that's when everything changed. That's when you stopped trying to be acceptable and started learning to receive God's love that was waiting for you all the time. That's when I stopped performing and I started just being.
That's when the God I thought I knew revealed himself as infinitely more beautiful, more merciful, more present than I ever imagined. Looking back on it now, I look back at the Jehovah I used to worship. And I've said before, it's fine if that's the name you use for God. It doesn't bother me at all. I prefer Aba because I don't call my father James. I call him dad because I have a close personal intimate relationship with him and it would be weird for me to call him that. So I don't call him uh Jehovah or Yahweh or Yhovah when I'm communicating with him.
I call him Aba like Jesus did in the garden. But looking back I realize God was always there for me even when I was in the cult of Jehovah's Witnesses because I truly 100% believed. I had a lot of things wrong because of what I was taught by them. I 100% believed in God. I saw his behavior in my life. I saw his hand. I saw answer to prayer.
I saw all these things. It was greatly hindered because of my intellectual acceptance of the religion of Jehovah's Witnesses. But it was still there because I did truly believe. I inherited that from my father in a good way. And my father taught me that God was compassion, love, kindness, merciful. And he was those things to other people, which was odd to me uh when I left the religion. But then I looked back and I saw ah my dad had a very abusive father growing up.
And so he equated the abuse of the religion of Jehovah's Witnesses as love that he had learned. But he also was an avid student of the Bible. So he knew that God was truly love, compassion, mercy, all those things. He just never outgrew the rule system unfortunately as wonderful of a human being as he was. But I look back on God on Jehovah when the seven years when I didn't know what to call him. And yet he was there carrying me just like the footprints in the sand poem talks about. You know, I was mad because I thought he had abandoned me.
But what I didn't realize when was that looking back at that single set of footprints in the sand, he didn't abandon me. He picked me up and carried me through the wilderness. And for that, I will forever be eternally grateful. The wilderness is hard. The dark night, it's disorienting, but it leads you home. Home to your true self. Home to the divine that dwells within you.
Home to the relationship that you were created for. As John of the Cross wrote, "In the dark night of the soul, bright flows the river of God." That darkness isn't empty. It's full of divine presence, working in ways you can't see yet. It's leading you to places there's no other path to get to. The promised land is across the wilderness, but you have got to be willing to walk through the wilderness, however long it takes to reach the promised land. That was true of the Israelites.
Even though they made it a lot longer than it had to be, they still would have had to walk through the wilderness. They would have had to do that regardless. So do you. So did I. So did Jesus. So take heart. Keep walking.
Trust the process. You're not lost. You're being found. Let this be our prayer.
Aba Father, we come to you not with certainty, but with trust. We don't have it all figured out. And we're learning that's okay. We're learning that you don't require us to have perfect theology or flawless understanding. You only ask that we show up honestly, that we reach for you even in the darkness, that we trust your character even when we can't see the path. For those of us in the wilderness right now, those who feel lost, confused, uncertain, give us the courage to keep walking. Help us see this not as abandonment but as invitation.
Not as failure but as refinement. You're stripping away the false securities, the secondhand inherited religion, the need to be right so that we can discover what's real, our relationship with you. Teach us to hold our doctrines lightly and our love fiercely. Teach us to value mercy over correctness, compassion over doctrine, presence over performance. Help us remember that Jesus ate with sinners, touched the untouchable, and reserved his harshest words for those who believe they had it all figured out. We release our need to understand everything. We release our need to be right.
We release our need for others approval and we rest instead in this truth that we are loved, that we are known, that we are yours. Not because we earned it or figured it out, but because that's who you are. That's who you've always been, and we can finally see it. Thank you for the wilderness. Thank you for that dark night of the soul. Thank you for loving us enough to lead us through the stripping away so that we can discover the solid rock beneath. May we emerge from this season not with more answers, but with deeper roots, not with greater certainty, but with greater love.
We trust you, Aba, even in the darkness, especially in the darkness. In Jesus' name, amen. I wanted to take a moment to tell you about my book, The Broken Mirror: Rediscovering Our True Nature in Christ. Readers call it a fantastic book where you will feel yourself discovering your identity in Christ. One reviewer praised it as five-star material for the spiritual mystic or group Bible study. It's time to escape legalism and shame. Discover you're already God's beloved child with divine nature flowing through you with what reviewers describe as excellent writing style and elegant pros like a campfire discussion with a knowledgeable and gifted recon tour.
Journey from Genesis to Revelation uncovering your true identity. This book shows how to access God's peace, wisdom, and strength from within. Your struggles become opportunities for divine light to shine through. Available in hard coverver, paperback, Kindle, and audiobook. The link to the book is in the video description. May God bless your journey along his path for you. [Music]
