Formative Seasons in the Wilderness

Pain and sadness can create attitudes in us that, interestingly, on the one hand destroy and incapacitate us, but on the other hand can also prepare us to see the positive aspects of life, to see spiritual things, to avoid getting caught up in the vanity and superficiality of youth and childhood, and to focus our attention on eternal things.

That is what Scripture says: God often uses suffering, brokenness, and pain to prepare us to think more realistically about the positive things in life.

We can quickly think, for example, of how God used Peter’s moral and spiritual failure when he denied Jesus to make him a deeper, more powerful man, who could then become the great apostle who wrote the two beautiful Epistles of the apostle Peter and could become one of the foundations, one of the pillars, of the Church.

If Peter had continued with his impetuous, proud, and somewhat superficial temperament, he probably would not have amounted to much in the spiritual world. But through that trial, the Lord Jesus Christ prepared him to be a deeper man, with a better understanding of himself and his own limitations.

The apostle Paul also struggled with the thorn that tormented him, but the Lord told him: Paul, do not ask Me to take that thorn away from you, because I am using it to perfect you. My power is made perfect in weakness, so learn to live with it and entrust yourself to My grace.

Again and again we see that great people of God, such as Moses, spent a long time in the wilderness. Moses, for example, was broken and alone, thinking about spiritual things there in the wilderness while he tended the goats and sheep. There he was prepared spiritually to become the great deliverer of the Jewish people. And we could spend a long time here looking at how periods of sadness and pain can often be formative times. If we view them in light of God’s great purpose for us—including the great tragedies and losses we have experienced in the past—if we see that they can serve something positive, they end up becoming allies in our lives. The Word says that all things work together for good for those who love God, including life’s sufferings and difficulties. It all depends on the lens through which we see them.

So, through his pain, Jabez develops a substantial personality, a heart that prepares him to attract God’s favor. And that is where I want to pause in this segment: the importance of not allowing life’s circumstances to turn our heart into one that is bitter, resentful, wounded toward God, excessively sensitive to rejection by others, or at times manipulative and ambitious. For our heart, our attitude, our character, can either attract or drive away God’s blessing.

There is a verse in Second Chronicles, chapter 16, verse 9, that many of us know. It says: “For the eyes of the Lord behold the whole earth, to show His power on behalf of those whose hearts are perfect toward Him.”

In other words, when a man’s heart, like Jabez’s, is tender and receptive to spiritual things, submissive to God, preferring God’s honor to any other kind of honor, and loving God above all things—when a man’s heart honors God—God is eager to favor and bless him. What is more, it says that God’s eyes are continually searching the whole earth to find people with whom He is pleased, so that the Lord may bless them, prosper them, use them, defend them, and shield them from all evil.

Clearly, Jabez’s heart was that kind of heart. And we must do everything we can to guard our hearts and continually submit them to God so that He may work on them, because there are often impurities, flaws, and imperfections in us that harm us. We must always ask God to keep shaping, working on, and perfecting our hearts.

The psalmist says: “Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my thoughts; and see if there is any way of wickedness in me, and lead me in the everlasting way,” because our heart is the foundation of our life.

And we must ask the Lord to examine our personality continually, and, if He finds anything in us that does not please Him—that way of wickedness to which the psalmist alludes—to change it, to put us through a process of treatment so that our personality may be reconfigured according to God’s preference, favor, and approval.

Because the quality of our heart—today we would say our personality, our psyche, the way it is configured—is what will determine whether God will bless us or not, or whether we will have within us the qualities needed, at a given moment, to cry out to God in the right way, or the desires needed within us for God then to bless us.

All this is to say that, paradoxically, that sorrowful upbringing in Jabez’s childhood prepares him so that, at a critical moment, when God’s eyes are, as it were, watching over him, Jabez conceives a longing for something different. He is tired, he has had enough of his situation, he detests the sad life he is living, and he dares to envision something different: this wonderful prayer recorded in verse 10, which we will then be able to examine in detail and see how it also contains a series of very great spiritual values and a way for us to pray and address God.

I hope this will be a blessing in your life, because I myself am blessed by discovering these things and sharing them with you. May the Lord bless you, and until our next segment.