Jesus, The Oasis in the Desert

[HKHaugan]

Mark 1:2 It is written in Isaiah the prophet:
“I will send my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way”—“a voice of one calling in the desert, ‘Prepare the way for the Lord, make straight paths for him.’”

Preparation is the issue here. How do we prepare for the ‘new?’ What is ‘the desert?’ What is the message? Who is the messenger? What needs straightening?

First, Jesus identified John the baptizer as the ‘new’ Elijah, Mt.17:9-13, Mk.9:9-13, Lk.1:17. He is the messenger. If you want to read about Elijah, check 1Kings 17 on to 2Kings 2. This section has lot of keys to preparation.

Second, Jesus is the message. “After me will come one more powerful than I, the thongs of whose sandals I am not worthy to stoop down and untie. I baptize you with water, but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.”

Third, the desert is the secular world where the mind, heart and spirit are separated from God. It is any image of God caught in the waterless dry basin of self-centeredness and aloneness where you feel the bottom line is confusion, fear, insecurity and frustration. This desert is filled with the wild animals of fear, conformity, compromise and all the spirits of evil that vie to keep any image of God separated from God and feeling constantly anxious.

Fourth, an idol, a stronghold, any attitude we use to face to the world without God is what blocks the ‘new’ from happening. If we are locked in to achieving success in a material sense and reach that goal, what have we gained? This is the old way, the ‘old.’ This is like trying to pour new wine into old wineskins. Old wineskins are the attitudes we carry in us that are constructed by us outside of God’s Word to handle our life in this world. They are attitudinal and self-constructed without benefit of God’s Word. Actually, they close the door to God’s wisdom, which is an ongoing wisdom that the Spirit of wisdom brings. These are what need straightening, spiritual distractions that throw us off course.

We can only experience the ‘new’ when we are open to the Spirit of God to take away the blocks to letting Him show us the that every next moment is not so much a moment as it is an event, a continuing event, a timeless event. If you love someone it’s not a measurable clockable thing. It is an event that goes on. If you have faith there is no way to calculate it, weigh it or contain it. It is an ongoing experience. It is a gift from God, a piece of His grace. The same with hope, it is a gift. If you have hope it is always looking ahead to what is going to happen.

This is the nature of the relationship we have with God in Jesus. He is an ongoing, continuing, flowing movement wherein we are carried along in a series of events motivated by the Spirit of God. Being in a relationship with Jesus is not a plateau we reach, a mountaintop we ascend, an emotional pinnacle upon which we stand and think ‘ I made it.’ Rather it takes us from a sedentary, self-focused, self-defined search for peace and security into an eternal growth event. Paul makes this very clear when he says, “For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ: for it is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth; to the Jew first, and also to the Greek. For therein is the righteousness of God revealed from faith to faith: as it is written, “The just shall live by faith” (Romans 1:16-17 KJV).”

The operative phrase here is ‘from faith to faith.’ Faith doesn’t stand still. We don’t just say, ‘Now I believe, I can sit back and relax.’ We accept faith like it is a river inviting us to swim in it. God’s will is the river and we are constantly moving in it. As we move in the river we find it is a moving relational experience with Jesus carrying us along. We swim without fatigue. There are rapids, shallow sandbars, calm pools, boulders and falls but each is part of the new challenges we face and faith handles each with growing certainty that what we have is evidence of the unseen. Something different happens in this river. We can’t drown, be overcome nor can fear defeat us.

So, to see faith in action it takes viewing every choice and every decision as a faith event. When we cover each choice and decision with faith in Jesus, the Holy Spirit directs us. Seeing Scripture as the bedrock for the Spirit to guide us at those faith events is to be choosing an eternal context, to be preparing for an eternal context and to be living in an eternal context. Scripture is our ‘from faith to faith’ text.

As we move the more God smiles on us. As we grow the more He enjoys us. But even more there are a whole host of others doing the same thing and each is being filled with power and love and we are a family of brothers and sisters holding hands in the deepest pools, encouraging one another as we face the boulders and falls that can never harm us, finding strength upon strength and confidence upon confidence as we flow from one faith event to another, from faith to faith.