6: The Healing Journey

[00:00] Stephanie: Season two, episode six. We are continuing our series on Lessons in the Wilderness. Lessons from the Wilderness. I like to get that ‘in’ and ‘from’ mixed up, don’t I? It’s an exciting series. Very much enjoying it. And also it’s an exciting day because this is book release week.

Hello, Father.

[00:26] Marcus: Hello, Daughter. It’s Breakthrough! week. Yeah!

[00:30] Stephanie: You have a book releasing.

[00:32] Marcus: It is always so weird to write a book and have it come out six months later. Yeah, that thing. I’m very excited about this because I think that, honestly, this is an attempt to try to put something together that gives people a one stop shop when it comes to an overview of all of it. And so I’m excited. I hope it does well.

[01:02] Stephanie: It is a very excellent book and we’re going to talk more about it at the end of the episode. But for now, I do want to get straight into our topic today, the Wilderness of Mediocrity. We’ve called this The Healing Journey: Lessons from the Wilderness and also the original idea was The Wilderness of Mediocrity so that title inspired this whole series. And it’s looking at the Exodus story as a whole.

[01:29] Marcus: The idea of wilderness and mediocrity comes from my dad, your grandpa. It just grabbed me when I was young and I heard him talking about this idea that people get stuck in a wilderness they’re not supposed to be in. The idea that I can cooperate with God on my journey in a way that I will get where he wants me to be, faster, quicker if I will cooperate. It’s an encouragement to trust and obey God. And so I was really captured with that idea. It brings me to one of my favorite verses.

[02:15] Stephanie: Yes, I was just about to say, from the beginning of the Exodus story, the people of Israel were meant to go to the wilderness, but they were not supposed to stay there. So this leads you to one of your favorite verses. Please read it.

[02:29] Marcus: When you first read it, you go out there. That’s one of your favorite verses? But it’s Deuteronomy, chapter one, verse two. I’ll just read it:

“It is an eleven day journey from Horeb to Kadesh Barnea by way of Mount Seir.” That sounds like a throwaway verse right now. “It is an eleven day journey from Horeb to Kadesh Barnea by way of Mount Seir.” Until you read the next line “In the 40th year…” It, to me, is like one of the most drippingly sarcastic verses in scripture. It’s like, okay, this eleven day trip took them 40 years. What is the story? What is the backstory here? How did an eleven day trip take 40 years?

What we find out is that God fully intended for them to be two years in what I call their boot camp. Two years of the boot camp of the wilderness, and one full year of this. It was three months to get to Mount Sinai, a full year at Mount Sinai, and then onto the promised land. Right? And so only for a year and a half were they to be somewhat stationary and in the wilderness, and then they were to be clearly leaving the wilderness and heading towards the promised land for the rest of it.

So you get at least the anticipation, we’re heading there, we’re heading there, we’re on our way, we’re moving. And instead it just turned into this kind of classic story of disaster because they rebelled against God. They said, “No, not going to do it your way, we’re going to do it our way.” And they ended up spending the rest of their lives in a wilderness of mediocrity because they did not learn to trust him, they did not obey him.

And their time in the wilderness is marked by ongoing rebellion. They just never really got with the program and continued fighting God. And again, they were meant to be in the promised land fighting the enemy, and instead they were in the wilderness fighting God.

[04:32] Stephanie: Oof. Yeah. So let’s start at that end and then walk backwards.

[04:36] Marcus: Okay.

[04:37] Stephanie: So what did the promised land mean to them and what does it mean to us? Those are probably two separate questions.

[04:43] Marcus: Well, when I grew up, and I’m significantly older than you, I know, shocking. So when I grew up, there were a lot of songs that talked about the Jordan River like it was death and crossing the Jordan, getting to the promised land, and so the promised land becomes heaven. There’s a couple things wrong with this. One is, heaven is not actually our destiny, right? It’s our resurrected life that’s our destiny and heaven is sort of this in-between place that we’re at for a while. But then it comes to earth and we live out our eternal destiny here. So our hope is resurrection life.

The other thing that’s wrong with this is the picture here is not, I crossed the Jordan River and I’m finally home. They crossed the Jordan River and there were giants waiting. There were walled cities waiting. There were battles to be fought. My dad pointed out rightly, I think, that the promised land is a wonderful picture of the victorious Christian life, because that’s where we fight these battles, but we’re having victory in those battles.

Now, I will say that a lot of the spirituals that use Jordan and promised land, they weren’t, strictly speaking, as interested in teaching theology as they were in giving escaping slaves hope. The theology here is not that the Jordan River is death and we get to heaven on the other side. The theology is that the Jordan River marks a crossing in the same way that the Red Sea marked a crossing.

So I left this slavery. I left Egypt. I left my time of abuse, I left my time as a victim. And now I’m crossing into another place, which is the wilderness, where I’m now in boot camp. I’m in training. I am learning to live a new identity. I’m learning to live a different kind of life.

And then I’m going to cross again, this time the Jordan, into a different season of life. And this is one where I am fighting battles that are taking ground from the enemy and making a difference for the kingdom.

[06:54] Stephanie: All right, so then let’s go back even to, I guess, the wilderness stage, when they were supposed to be in the wilderness.

[07:04] Marcus: What’s supposed to be happening in the desert is what I call boot camp. Because you think of boot camp as two basic purposes. One is an identity shift, where I go from being a civilian to being military. The other is that I am learning skills, all the skills that I’m going to need for warfare. Well, if you look at this and you go, well, what skills were they learning in the desert? You don’t see them doing a lot of close order drills like learning to stab their enemy with swords and things. I mean, it’s not like they spent half their day shooting arrows in the sky. They weren’t doing military drills.

What they were doing was God was testing them. And he would take them from one situation where they needed to trust him to another situation where they needed to trust him. And then after that was done, he’d give them a break, and there’d be a little oasis, there’d be a little time of rest, and then he’d move them on and then they got to the next thing. It was another chance to test them.

What happened was instead of them passing the test by trusting God and obeying, they turned it into testing God, they were testing his patience, in a sense, “Okay, we’re going to defy you,” and he would save them anyway. And finally, he was like, “I can’t take you into the promised land if you haven’t learned these lessons, because it’ll be a disaster anyway. This isn’t going to work.” What’s supposed to be happening in the wilderness is training.

[08:33] Stephanie: Yeah, well, it’s breaking down the old identity, building up a new identity and training them, “You are used to relating to people as victims, you are used to relating to people as oppressed, and I want you to relate to people now as my people living out of your true self, your victorious self. And I will always be there for you. Trust me.”

[09:00] Marcus: We are now a holy people. We are a chosen people. We are precious. We are God’s treasured possession. And we are victorious. We are heading to a place of victory. And so that identity is very, very different, and God is working very hard to get them to embrace their identity, and then learn the skills of trusting and obeying.

That really is a pretty good summary of the Christian life, because our identity in Christ is the foundation and we mature. Maturity is the ability to live out of that identity even when we’re being tested. Even when life gets hard, we don’t flip back and turn into our victim self.

[09:47] Stephanie: So going back even farther and also the beginning of the story, and then the story as a whole, there’s a model that you have seen emerge when it comes to the healing journey.

[09:58] Marcus: Yes, it starts in Egypt with oppression and abuse and slavery. And there’s groaning. It’s interesting because this word ‘groaning’ is seen throughout the Bible. The Israelites groaned under their oppression. The earth is groaning, waiting for God to be revealed. And the Holy Spirit himself groans. And groaning is the appropriate response to the oppression of a sin soaked evil world.

It’s interesting that God himself enters this picture by, “I’ve seen the groaning.” And in the New Testament, we see the Holy Spirit sharing that groaning. I think that’s part of the idea of weeping with those who weep and mourning with those who mourn. And so the journey begins with the idea that God sees the oppression. He sees what created this victim mindset.

He sees why we are the way that we are, but he loves us too much to leave us that way, so he’s going to take us on a transformational journey that is going to give us a new identity, teach us how to live out of that identity and get into living a victorious Christian life rather than one that is stuck in the wilderness.

[11:13] Stephanie: Yes. So God not only saves his people from sin, but he rescues them from their abuse and then takes them into training so that they can learn how to level up, how to grow, how to mature into their true selves. Our true selves. And how long that period of training goes on is sometimes up to us as we started from the episode.

[11:37] Marcus: Well, and where this transferred over to emotional healing is that you can’t expect somebody who’s in one stage of the journey to act like they’re in another stage of the journey, right? So somebody who’s just fresh out of the abuse and just starting this, you can’t ask them to be out there taking cities for the kingdom.

I think that we make that mistake sometimes in Christianity. A famous person will get saved and we immediately want to trot them out on stage as an example of Christianity and they haven’t gone through any kind of training, they haven’t gone through any kind of transformation other than they now believe. And so I think that we need to be careful sometimes about this and especially careful about how quickly we give people responsibility because a lot of times we ask people actually to lead these battles and lead the charges in the promised land. And they haven’t ever gone through boot camp and they don’t really know what it’s like yet to develop the skills that are needed to live that kind of life in Christ.

So we do need to be careful. This is why the New Testament warns against making people elders too soon and putting them in that position too quickly.

[12:45] Stephanie: Yeah, well, and it’s not just for the protection of the community, but also for the protection of that person that, hey, don’t try to take on a role. God’s not asking you to take on what isn’t appropriate to you right now. And what is that lesson? I think what we see in the wilderness is, like you said, how much time are we spending fighting God? How much time are we spending fighting the enemy? How much time are we spending getting to know God? How much time are we spending wishing that we were our old identity?

[13:19] Marcus: Well, my dad used to say, too, that the first priority of the Christian life is to know God. It’s to know God, to trust his love for us, and to grow in that trust and knowledge of God. He said the second priority, however, is to know your enemy. And he said it would be foolish, no commander would go into battle saying, “I don’t care what the enemy is doing, I know what I’m doing,” because you could be walking into a trap. So that was kind of the priority, and that’s the order we see here, too.

[13:52] Stephanie: Very good. Well, before I bring us over to Breakthrough, any closing thoughts for this episode?

[13:59] Marcus: Well, this story and the whole wilderness wandering event was so profound in trying to help people on their own healing journeys, and helping me understand a little bit better my own journey, that it had a lot of influence into the Breakthrough book idea. Because there were multiple breakthrough things that happened on this journey.

There was the breakthrough that’s evidenced by them finally saying to Moses, “Yeah, go ahead, let’s do this.” There was the breakthrough of seeing God actually defeat the gods of Egypt with these signs and wonders. There was the breakthrough of the Passover. There was the breakthrough at the Red Sea. There was the breakthrough when they got water when they didn’t have any.

I think that this is parallel to our journey, that too many of us think that I’m going to have a single breakthrough moment and everything’s going to be all better. And we don’t see that, no, it’s this long journey, and you may have dozens and dozens of breakthrough moments on this journey, and you’ll get to the next one. They’re all trying to use the video game term ‘level us up’ to a new level of maturity, to a deeper level of trust. What I find is that some of us have mastered trusting God in one part of our lives, but not in another.

And so God is going to push us into those areas where we don’t yet trust him and keep bringing us back there because he wants to grow us to the point where our default response to life is to look to God and see what he’s going to do about this. And not to say, “Why did I ever follow Jesus? This was such a bad idea.” And yet I’ve seen that happen.

I can remember when I was working with youth as a young person. One young lady gave her life to Christ at an altar call, and the week later she was like, “Yeah, I don’t want to do this anymore. It’s like everything in my life has fallen apart since I did that.” And I remember telling her, “Don’t you think that might be a backhanded way of saying, you did the right thing, and the enemy’s not happy about it?” She goes, “I don’t care. I didn’t sign up for this.”

And so I’ve seen people express that ‘I want to go back to Egypt’ mindset. And there’s a lot of times when this creeps up for all of us. I think God is patient and he’s compassionate. He’s going to work with us, but he wants to get us to the point where we are trusting him with more and more areas of our life.

[16:33] Stephanie: All right, well, the series will continue next week, but for now, I want to take a little moment and celebrate the book release of Breakthrough and remind everybody that you are invited to the webinar. It’s March 5, on book release day, and if you come live to the webinar, it’ll be a party. But if you can’t come live, you can still catch the recording, so you can go look for it and register.

But, Father, would you give your crash course? What are people going to get out of this book?

[17:08] Marcus: Yeah, so the book was written with two audiences in mind. The first one was people who work a lot with folks who are struggling with addiction or struggling with some area of bondage they can’t seem to get through. In some ways, this would be almost like my expanded approach to The Bondage Breaker that Neil Anderson wrote, and that is, he wrote this with Freedom in Christ and it often requires spiritual warfare. Here’s spiritual warfare help.

What I’m looking at is, freedom in Christ and the breakthrough that we’re looking for often involve spiritual warfare, but it also has these four other things. And so the idea here is, let’s take that and expand it and build on it and look at the holistic picture of what’s going on in our breakthrough journey. We look at five engines. We look at various strategies and how they tie together and why some people experience breakthrough through spiritual warfare while somebody else experiences it through inner healing, somebody else experiences it because they finally got in shape and lost a bunch of weight. They just feel better about themselves.

And some people experience healing because they’re now in a community where they feel a belonging and they feel attachment, and it’s just changed everything. And it’s trying to look at this idea that there are a lot of elements to go into the healing journey and kind of ties them all together for us.

[18:27] Stephanie: All right, and what’s the second audience?

[18:29] Marcus: The second audience is people who are actually looking for the breakthrough personally. There are practical things in there, like what can I do right now? And what we realized is there’s some things I can do by myself, but there’s some things that take a group. And so it’s kind of trying to separate this out. This is what you can do by yourself. This is what’s going to take some outside help, and let’s be humble enough to go look for and ask for that outside help.

There are other people who are like, “Well, I’ve been looking for outside help for years and I’m desperate. I can’t find it. So is there anything I can do just on my own?” And the answer is yes, there are some things you can do. So we have also this audience. If you’re looking for help personally for a breakthrough in your life, I think you’ll find some suggestions in here that are going to register and click.

[19:12] Stephanie: Beautiful. Thank you.

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