I’m not sure what it is, maybe the time of year or maybe just the time in our lives, but these last couple months have been a bit of a dry season for a lot of people I’m close to.  A lot of us have been out in the wilderness when it comes to jobs, our prayer life, our worship time, our family time; everything just seems pretty dry.  It’s a time of waiting, a time of internal struggle, and a time of longing.

If you happen to find yourself in a dry season, take heart!  You’re not alone, and we are not alone in history either.  The Bible is filled with stories of men and women who spent considerable time in the desert before God did great things in their lives.  Moses, was in the wilderness tending sheep when God spoke to him through the flaming bush.  He went on to lead the Israelites through the desert for 40 years before they reached God’s promised land.  David spent plenty of time running around in the wilderness from King Saul before he became king.  The New Testament tells us that John the Baptist spent the first part of his life in the wilderness eating locusts and honey before his ministry started.  And after John baptized Jesus and the Holy Spirit came upon Jesus, instead of heading strait to ministry, Jesus spent 40 days in the wilderness.  I could go on and on with examples, but I think you get the picture.

The wilderness ends up being an important thing for those who serve God and his kingdom.  It’s a time when we learn that we can’t just make things happen out of our own strength, a time when we learn to lean heavily on God to sustain us.  Often it’s in the wilderness when we first turn to God’s word, looking for some sort of answer to what we face.  God uses our time in the wilderness to mold our hearts, to be the great Potter, shaping our lives into his design.

If there’s one place right now that I could say I’m in the wilderness, it’s in my devotional time.  I’ve been reading the One Year Bible, and right now we’re in Leviticus.  Anybody who’s ever read Leviticus knows exactly what I’m talking about.  It’s filled with page after page of tedious instructions on how to prepare offerings.  Eat this. Don’t eat that. Wear this. Don’t wear that.  There’s a chapter or so that’s devoted to how to prepare a certain kind of incense.  It’s incredibly easy to get bogged down in Leviticus.

I’ve been here before, so every time I reach Leviticus, I just roll up my sleeves and try to read through as quickly as I can.  This time however, God struck me with something that I had never noticed before.  Even as God deals out these detailed, strict, seemingly legalistic instructions, there is a definite thread of grace throughout the passages, for even as the required sacrifice might be a goat, God says, “If you don’t have a goat, bring two pigeons.  But if you don’t have two pigeons, bring some grain.”  God wasn’t actually hung up on having a goat, he wanted the heart behind it.  Ultimately, the poor person’s grain offering and the rich person’s goat offering counted as the same in God’s eyes.

You can find this theme in Jesus’ life as well in the story of the widow who had only two small coins to give in the offering.  While the religious, pious people were bringing huge, luxurious offerings, Jesus said that this woman’s offering of her last two coins was greater than all the rest.

I believe that the same principle applies to our spiritual dryness.  I don’t think God wants us to feel guilty for not having the same emotional response we may have had in worship last year.  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard people say with a disheartened look on their face, “I just don’t feel anything anymore.”  That’s okay.  God is well aware that we sometimes don’t have the same amount to give that we had before, and what he wants from us is for us to give anyway.  He looks at our hearts with so much love and grace.  And better yet, as believers, he looks at our hearts and sees the sacrifice his Son Jesus made.

So, if you’re in the wilderness, don’t panic.  Press into God and his Word and know that it’s his desire to use this time to shape you into the person he wants you to be.  And even when you don’t feel like you have anything important to give God, give him the what little you do have.  He delights in your sacrifice.

Oh You bring hope to the hopeless
And light to those in the darkness
And death to life
Now I’m alive
Oh You give peace to the restless
And joy to homes that are broken
I see You now
In You I’m found

And You opened the door for me
And You laid down
Your life to set me free
All that I am will serve You Lord
And You opened my eyes to see
All the wonder and awe of Christ in me
Jesus You’re everything I need

Oh You fill those who are empty
And rescue those in the valley
And through it all You calm my soul
Oh You find me in my weakness
And heal the wounds of my heartache
I worship You in spirit and truth

But then, the song made it around to the bridge:

All honour
All glory
All praise to You

Those words kept repeating over and over again, and I wanted to shut it off.  I found myself wrestling with the idea of giving God glory and praise in the midst of tragedy.  It was a huge heart check.  I started asking some questions that are really hard to process.  “Where is God in all of this?”  “Is God really good?”

I ended having a lot of conversations with friends and with my parents about it.  Sometimes when tragedy strikes, it’s difficult to stand up and definitively state, “God is good.”  My heart wanted to say it, but my eyes were so stuck on the hurt and pain of so many thousands of people.  I realized that when I’m confronted by heartache or tragedy, I’m fine with saying, “God help!” but I struggle to say, “God, thank you.”  But that’s exactly what we’re supposed to do.  Here’s what Paul told the church in I Thessalonians chapter 5:

¹⁶ Always be joyful. ¹⁷ Never stop praying. ¹⁸ Be thankful in all circumstances, for this is God’s will for you who belong to Christ Jesus. (NLT)

Thankfulness is rooted in faith.  Expressions of thankfulness to God serve as both an evidence of our faith in him as well a foundation upon which faith is built.  The more we acknowledge God’s provision through thanksgiving, the more our faith in him is renewed and strengthened.  To be thankful through trials is an evidence of unwavering faith in God.

So, how do we get there?  How can you say “thank you” when what we see is calamity and what we feel is heartache?  I think that we have to build our faith upon two scriptural promises about God: first that he is good and second that he is unchanging.  As you start to look at these two things in scripture, you’ll find that they are very often mentioned in the same breath:

Psalm 107:

¹ Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good!
His faithful love endures forever.

James 1:

¹⁷ Whatever is good and perfect comes down to us from God our Father, who created all the lights in the heavens.^[a] He never changes or casts a shifting shadow

The truth is that sin is the greatest tragedy the universe has ever seen.  Where God intended us to live every day wrapped up in his goodness and glory, sin created a wedge that separated us.  But God in his perfect, unshakable goodness has chosen not to leave us separated from him.  The sacrifice of Christ on the cross tore the curtain in the temple that separated us from his presence.   Each day that we live brings us closer and closer to the day that we will be with him again, and what a glorious day that will be!

Rom 8:

¹⁸ Yet what we suffer now is nothing compared to the glory he will reveal to us later. ¹⁹ For all creation is waiting eagerly for that future day when God will reveal who his children really are. ²⁰ Against its will, all creation was subjected to God’s curse. But with eager hope, ²¹ the creation looks forward to the day when it will join God’s children in glorious freedom from death and decay. ²² For we know that all creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. ²³ And we believers also groan, even though we have the Holy Spirit within us as a foretaste of future glory, for we long for our bodies to be released from sin and suffering. We, too, wait with eager hope for the day when God will give us our full rights as his adopted children,^[j] including the new bodies he has promised us. ²⁴ We were given this hope when we were saved. (If we already have something, we don’t need to hope^[k] for it. ²⁵ But if we look forward to something we don’t yet have, we must wait patiently and confidently.)

So, with hope in my heart, I look at the destruction in Haiti and long for the day of Christ’s return.  It is in God’s goodness and steadfastness that I have hope, and because of it I can say, “God, thank you for loving me.  Thank you for never changing.”  From there, love and compassion leads to action.  And that is why we volunteer and give and go and serve, that the people of Haiti might also find hope in the promise that even when everything else around shakes and crumbles, God is good and he never wavers.

“When you find someone you can talk to, that’s special…when you find someone you can play music with, that’s really something.”

That’s how I feel about writing songs with Lindsey Jones.  Every time I’ve ever sat down to write a song with Lindsey, something beautiful comes out of it.  Several of those songs have ended up on both of our records.  Today we got together for the first time in months and wrote a song about God’s love.

I’ve been particularly enamored by the promise that God’s mercies are new every morning.  How amazing is God’s love that it doesn’t get tired like our human love does.  God never wakes up and says, “Man, I just don’t feel it today.”  However, I do.  A lot.

So Lindsey and I wrote this song called “To Know You” that’s basically a prayer to love and trust God better even when we don’t feel his presence.  We count on the promise that he is always with us, and we are thankful that he allows us the room to ask for faith when we don’t have any.

I’ll go ahead and include our rough work tape.  It’s not polished or produced in any way, and I definitely screw up some of the chords, but I want you to hear it.

To Know You – by Lindsey Jones and Wes Pickering
© 2010

Your love, no I don’t always feel it
Burning a hole in my heart
And I know you don’t try to conceal it
But it seems like we’re so far apart

I know it’s not it’s always a feeling
‘Cause feelings they come and they leave

Help me to know you
Help me to love you
Help me to trust you
When you’re there but my eyes just can’t see
Help me to know you
Help me believe through my unbelief

Your mercies are new every morning
Before I even get out of bed
You’ve numbered the days set before me
And you know every hair on my head

What more could I ever ask for
When you’re all I want love to be

I know it’s not it’s always a feeling
‘Cause feelings they come and they leave
What more could I ever ask for
When you’re all I want love to be

This year, my church has encouraged us to take on a Mitzvot for the new year.  Rooted in Jewish traditions, a Mitzvot is a task one voluntarily undertakes in order to experience a spiritual change.   So here is my Mitzvot, my resolutions for the new year, all rolled into one.

• Read the One Year Bible
• Read one book per month
• Listen to 1 sermon podcast per week (in addition to the sermon from my home church)
• Run 3x per week (I’ve found running to be great prayer time)

The only one I’m a little nervous about is the running.  I love to run, but I haven’t been as disciplined as I should be about it.  I’ll keep you updated on how that goes.  Also, I’ll be updating the blog with reflections as I read through the Bible and read at least 12 other books this year too.

Happy New Year!

In the meantime, I recently had the honor of interviewing a fellow songwriter who has influenced my own music more than just about anyone. Sara Groves. She’s was incredibly humble and transparent. Her new record comes out at midnight, and I encourage you to pick it up (it’s amazing). Head over to http://backseatwriter.wordpress.com/2009/11/16/sara-groves-honest-reflections-on-faith-songs-and-fireflies/ to read the interview.

However, there are some days, some moments, when my heart is seized by tremendous doubt.  Faith becomes something that I know in my head but cannot muster to feel in my heart.  It’s a dark and lonely place, and in those moments all my hopes and goals seem infinitely far off, if not altogether unattainable.  If I’m honest with myself, in those moments I’m even afraid to put my faith in God because to have faith means placing oneself in a position of vulnerability.

“What if I put all my trust in God, but he lets me down?”

Sometimes I find myself hesitant to pray for things because I’m afraid to be disappointed by God if my prayer isn’t answered.  I don’t think I could stand being let down by God.

I am deeply comforted by the multitude of stories in the Bible in which our biblical heroes walk through their moments of great unbelief.  Our “giants of the faith” were all 100% human and all of them at one point or another wrestled with fear and doubt.  Everybody from Abraham to David, from Moses to Elijah.  Every single one of Jesus disciples abandoned him at the end of his life.

But here’s the good news.  God assures us- no, he promises us that he will never abandon us.  Jesus promises that he hears and answers our prayers.  Even after the disciples all ran out on Jesus, he returned to them and did not hold their panic against them.

A little bit of faith goes a long way.  Jesus reassured us that the tiniest amount of faith is enough to see miracles.  He didn’t tell the disciples that until they had giant-size faith, they were useless.  Instead, he said that faith the size of a mustard seed can move mountains.

And still there is the problem of doubt and fear.  At a certain point, the rubber meets the road, and even though we read and know all the promises of God in our heads, it’s our hearts that still can’t make the jump.  And that’s where I finally understand what it means to have faith: to risk a broken heart and take God at his word, to be vulnerable.

That’s where my heart is tonight.  I’m choosing to take God at his word, and trust him with my life, knowing that my heart will break if he doesn’t come through.  I’m scraping together every bit of faith I have (which I’m pretty sure isn’t much bigger than a mustard seed) and placing all of it in God’s hands.

Even in typing these words down, my heart is filled again with the peaceful knowledge of God’s presence.  He never leaves me.

http://vimeo.com/5239013

The video pretty much speaks for itself. The “marshmallow test” is one of those classic illustrations of how we deal with temptation, but let me expand on it for just a moment. It seems no matter how old we get, the way we deal with the temptation of sin has little difference from the way 7-year-olds deal with resisting a marshmallow.

We know we’re not supposed to indulge ourselves, and even bigger than that, we know that there’s a reward at the end for doing the right thing. Most of the kids in the video decided from the outset that they were going to wait it out for the second marshmallow, but the more time dragged on, the more the sight and smell of it lured them in. Don’t we do the same exact thing with sin?

“I’m just going to hold it for a while.”

“I’m just going to smell it.”

“I’ll just hold it up to my lips.”

“Let me just nibble off a tiny piece; nobody will notice.”

Before long, our beautiful marshmallow ends up being a half-eaten gooey white blob. We try to kid ourselves into thinking that as long as we only go so far, we’ll still be able to enjoy the reward at the end, but if we take an honest step back, it’s evident that we’ve already messed everything up. Too many times, we then shrug our shoulders and say, “Oh, well. I might as well enjoy the marshmallow that I do have.” But by then, the disappointment of our failure keeps us from enjoying what was supposed to be a delicious treat.

So, now let’s pause everything and look at the promise that God makes us. Paul puts it this way in 2 Corinthians 5:17:

“Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!”

Jesus, through his sacrifice on the cross and his resurrection, hit the reset button on all our sin and shortcoming.  Simply by the petition of God’s grace and the surrender of our lives to him, we can rest assured that when God looks at us, he doesn’t see the sin that has so tarnished our lives, he sees his perfect son who took our place.  We’re no longer bound by the sin that used to hold us back; we’re an altogether new creation.

Why then do we still wrestle with sin?  Why then do we still feel so weighed down by our failures?  Make no mistake, the Bible does indeed make it clear to us that we are to move forward and strive for holiness in our lives.  If you don’t believe me, just read the book of James.  It’s kind of tough to swallow.  So, how do we escape the snares that constantly trip us up?  Let me offer a few suggestions:

Firstly, remember that this world we’re living in is still very much under the curse of sin.  However, in Christ, we are no longer bound by that curse.  We are called to be God’s Kingdom here on this very imperfect planet, and sometimes that seems near impossible.  But don’t lose sight of the fact that there is a day coming when all will be made right.  Christ will indeed return, and what a glorious hope that is.  I suspect that if the kids in the video had only had a count-down clock to look at, they would have fared much better in resisting the marshmallow.  So, don’t look at the temptation before you.  Don’t look at the broken promises this world has to offer.  Set your eyes upon the promise that Christ is coming again.

Secondly, in the mean time, don’t linger around temptation.  We give ourselves way too much credit when we think that we’ll be just fine as long as we only go so far.  Get away from temptation.  Take proactive steps to steer clear of the things and places that bring on the heat.  Be radical about it.

Thirdly, don’t go it alone.  My favorite part of that video is the twin brothers.  They started out by telling each other how good the marshmallow smelled, but later on, they were collectively silent.  Together they didn’t even touch it.  They waved their arms and kicked their legs together.  Accountability goes a long way.  Surround yourself with people who you can be honest with and who will ask you the tough questions.  We’re not called to be Lone Rangers in our battles with sin; so don’t bother trying to do it that way.

Lastly, don’t allow your mistakes to keep you away from God.  This is one of the most insidious lies that we buy into: that our sin is so bad that we can’t turn to God until we clean our act up.  God is the very thing that we NEED.  Run to him like a child to his loving parent.  Don’t hide your shame with fig leaves.  God’s grace covers us right where we fall.

• I want to love like John 13:34-35
• I want my faith to grow bigger than just a mustard seed
• I want to marry a girl who reminds me of Christ
• I want somebody to get saved at my wedding
• I want to pay off my student loans and be debt free
• I want to make a record with a great producer like John Leventhal or Daniel Lanois
• I want to write a song with Sara Groves
• I want to one day have a son to share my old G.I. Joe collection with
• I want to be a great electric guitarist
• I want a car I don’t have to worry about
• I want to be known as a faithful friend
• I want to stay hungry
• I want to hear God say “well done, good and faithful servant”
• I want to stop making my own plans and follow God’s
• I want to stop hesitating when I hear God’s voice
• I want to be generous
• I want to follow Christ and not just admire him
• I want Season 5 of Lost to start up already
• I want to meet Bono and Rush Limbaugh
• I want to live on the 1st floor so that I can get a real piano
• I want to lengthen my attention span
• I want to be able to grow a full beard one day
• I want a kitchen in which to cook for my friends
• I want to tour all six populated continents
• I want to write songs that other people call “my song”

So, now the question is, what do you want?

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