Living Our Consecrated Deserts (part four): Stepping Up to Tell the Truth

Thank you for joining me today in the desert. Take time to read our scripture focus, Acts 8:26-35.

“Then Philip ran up to the chariot and heard the man reading Isaiah the prophet. ‘Do you understand what you are reading?’ Philip asked. ‘How can I,’ he said, ‘unless someone explains it to me?’ So he invited Philip to come up and sit with him.” (Acts 8:30-31).

There is risk in all writing endeavors.

Misunderstanding.

Not all readers will fully engage with the text as the author intends. It happens. I think, perhaps, it has happened with my thoughts on desert dwelling. I make no apologies for my thoughts, but I want to clarify something before beginning today.

When Adam and Eve walked those final steps of Eden’s embrace to enter into a land void of perfection, they began a desert journey that continues to this day through the likes of you and me. It’s not a popular topic. We rather prefer words of Promise. Indeed, we should, for we are a people of Promise, intended for abundant living. But there is a danger in thinking that all of life, even as Christians, will live as lush and green and ripe.

It doesn’t. Life is filled with hard. God stands with us through these times. He brings his lush and green into the matter for our filling and our refreshment, but for as long as our flesh remains, we continue in a wanton state. We are a people in need of perfection, and more often than not, God uses the desert as his classroom toward that end.

This is the truth that I know. I have lived it. And while I have witnessed many cherished mountaintop moments with God, he never allows me to make them my permanent. Instead, he asks me to carry these moments back down into the valley of my daily. Back into the world that desperately needs to know that this desert is not our home. It is our temporary, and what awaits us beyond the dirt and dust far exceeds our current reality. We have an eternal portion now, but the fullness of that portion is yet to be.

Regardless if you are a Philip or an Ethiopian or a wanderer without knowledge, every last one of us are desert dwellers. We can spin the Israelites’ Promised Land as a truth that breathes with a final and absolute abundance. We can, but it wouldn’t be the truth. They wandered for forty years because of their sin and disobedience, but almost as soon as they set up shop in Promise, they set up their idols and self-reliance alongside. The desert followed them into Canaan, and lest we think that their future was scripted with a permanent lush and green and ripe, let us remember the words of the prophets.

Let us remember the four hundred years of silence that existed between the Old and New Testaments. Let us not forget the consecrated famine that God sent into his children’s souls because they refused the voice of God. That is a desert my friends. And even after Truth presented himself in the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, there are still those…

who refuse to listen.
who listen but don’t understand.
who listen and understand but still find the resurrected life a difficult cloaking.

That is how I define desert living. Plain and simple. So what is one to do with the desert? What are we to do with such truth?

We find our consecration within, even as two men did so long ago on a desert’s pilgrimage outside of Jerusalem.

The Ethiopian didn’t understand what he was reading. He was on the right track. He had the scriptures in part—the Old Testament part. He sought the truth, and it was his earnest seeking that led him to come to Jerusalem via a desert road. Listen to words of the prophet Isaiah that accompanied this seeker’s steps.

“‘He was led like a sheep to the slaughter, and as a lamb before the shearer is silent, so he did not open his mouth. In his humiliation he was deprived of justice. Who can speak of his descendants? For his life was taken from the earth.'” (Acts 8:32-33; Isaiah 53:7-8).

Philip understood the meaning behind the prophet’s words. When asked, he came alongside this seeker and put voice to one Truth that would bring clarity to this eunuch’s question:

“‘Tell me, please, who is the prophet talking about, himself or someone else?’” (Acts 8:34-35).

(Who is this lamb that died a death of humiliation and injustice? Who is this one who was taken from this earth without an offspring to his name? Is it Isaiah or is it someone else?)

And beginning with that very passage of Scripture, Philip told the eunuch the good news.

News of Jesus Christ. News of his new identity because of Jesus Christ.

I wonder about Philip’s words. I wonder if he encouraged this eunuch to read a few verses further into Isaiah’s prophetic renderings—words that breathed a new identity for this one who was so rarely embraced.

“Let no foreigner who has bound himself to the LORD say, ‘The LORD will surely exclude me from his people.’ And let not any eunuch complain, ‘I am only a dry tree.’ For this is what the LORD says: ‘To the eunuchs who keep my Sabbaths, who choose what pleases me and hold fast to my covenant—to them I will give within my temple and its walls a memorial and a name better than sons and daughters; I will give them an everlasting name that will not be cut off.’” (Isaiah 56:3-5).

Can you even begin to imagine the pulse of that moment—the grace that fell upon the seeking heart and opened up the truth of his identity in Jesus Christ? I can, and it nearly sends me to my sandals and to the nearest desert road.

Hear me, if you will, for this is the beating in my heart today.

There is Godly consecration within our deserts.

No matter how we get there, we are ordained to be there and to walk our steps with holy purpose and divine intention. We are meant to come alongside our brothers and our sisters and our strangers and to be the voice that penetrates the enemy’s dark deception with the light and truth of Jesus Christ.

We can refuse our voice in the desert but in doing so we silence God’s consecrated purpose for our lives. We can muddle through the heat, licking our wounds and our wants as we go, or we can extend our focus to include the wounds and wants of others.

Either way, we walk it. And I, for one, am tired of walking it as meaningless.

We are given this one life—these few years as earthly, yet eternal pilgrims in search of a better country. As Christians, we walk them in faith and in the sure hope of things not yet seen. Indeed, things felt. Things cherished. Things believed and things tasted. But the perspective that we need about these “things” must root in the reality that what is seen is temporary. And what is temporary rarely yields a lasting lush and green and ripe.

That which is eternal?

Well, it is everything edenic and worthy of our devoted and abiding affection. Therefore, I fix my eyes unto the hills…to my home beyond this desert, and I run these heated sands because I know that at the end of this road is a memorial inscripted with my everlasting name. It stands in God’s garden as a defining witness to the consecrated pilgrimage I now embrace. And so I pray…

Get me there, Lord. Bring me to an everlasting place of peace within your lush and your green. I do not hurry, Father, because I know that there is meaning in my now. You have given me a journey to walk that includes the lives of others who need to hear the good news of their perfected end. You are that End, Lord, even as you are our Beginning. Punctuate my now with the consecrated purpose of your will for my life. Amen.

Copyright © July 2008 – Elaine Olsen. All rights reserved.

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A further pause…

*I love the Ethiopian’s question. It is one I’ve often asked in the desert. What is it about this question that resonates with desert language?

“‘Tell me, please, who is the prophet talking about, himself or someone else?’”

*Describe a time when someone stepped up into your chariot to bring you God’s truth.

*When have you been called toward a similar stepping?

*Why is it sometimes so hard to “reason” the truth in the desert?