manna

Being in the desert is hard. Just ask the Israelites. They were there, in the wilderness, for 40 years (bear with me).

I often think about the Israelites and how similar I am to them. God delivers me from a place of hardship, and after a little more testing, I would rather go back to the first evil than face the current difficulty. Is this making any sense? Have you experienced anything similar?

Anyways, I was thinking about this same idea today and about how easy it is to worship God because of what I think he does or how I think he acts instead of worshipping him for who He IS. If I worship God only based on what he does or does not do, when a loved one dies from cancer, God cannot be who he says he is. When a friend hurts me and wrecks the friendship, God cannot be who he says he is. When a husband is unfaithful and tears apart the family, God cannot be who he says he is. When you have to spend forty years in the wilderness living on manna, God cannot be who he says he is.

And yet, God claims to be faithful, loving, patience, peaceful, gracious, gentle, merciful and unchanging. In fact, the very roots of our faith go back to and rest on the qualities that God says he has. Where does our worship go wrong?

Our worship goes wrong when we forget that God is who he says he is. Period. End of story. God IS faithful. God IS good. And although our world is terribly messed up and sinful, and although things like death and destruction take place, those things do not occur because God willed them to. Those things occur because sin exists.

So, praise God for all that he does, yes, but more than praising him for external actions, praise God for all that he IS- his heart! What he IS is unchanging, no matter our viewpoints. How we view what he DOES changes. I mean, look at the Israelites. One day, they are praising God for deliverance out of Egypt, and the next, they want to go back into the very place they came from.

Back to the blog title. Elisabeth Elliot says the following in her book, Passion and Purity: "Was it necessary for God to test the fiber of His children for forty years in the wilderness? Wouldn't forty days have been enough? The process must go on...and on...and on...Through affairs of the heart God uncovers our true intentions: 'whether or no it was in your heart to keep his commandments. He humbled you and made you hungry; then he fed you on manna...' But it was not manna the people wanted. It was leeks and onions and garlic. It was meat and bread, wine and oil- ordinary food...[The natural is not] the only thing God has in mind for us. We are not meant to live merely by what is natural. We need to learn to live by the supernatural. Ordinary fare will not fill the emptiness in our hearts. Bread will not suffice. We need extraordinary fare. We need manna. How else will we learn to eat it, if we are never hungry? How educate our tastes for heavenly things if we are surfeited with earthly?"

Friends, if you are in the desert and are feeling abandoned by God because of circumstances and contexts, cling to who God says he is. And don't be afraid to be hungry and thirsty; God provides manna when we are in the desert to see if we are truly hungry for what is supernatural. Come hungry. Come thirsty, "For he satisfies the longing soul, and the hungry soul he fills with good things (Psalm 107:9)."

We need manna, not bread.