Led by the Spirit into the Wilderness

How God prepares His servants

Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. (Matthew 4:1)

Before His public ministry began, Jesus was led by the Holy Spirit into the desert. He was not led to a mountain, a synagogue or a council of elders who would prepare Him for what He was about to do. He was led into the desert – to fast, to be tempted and to be alone with His Father.

The Lord Jesus was about to begin the most magnificent ministry the earth has ever seen. He would perfectly reveal the Father, teach truth without error, heal the sick, cast out demons, raise the dead, die on the Cross to bear the penalty of human sin, rise from the grave and establish His Church on the earth – the Church that has spread to nearly every nation since. The next three years were going to change the world forever.

But before that could happen, the Holy Spirit thrust Him into the desert.

These are the ways of God. This is how He prepares His servants for what He will do through them. There is no other way.

God’s Affirmation Came First

Just before this, in Matthew 3, John had baptized Jesus in the Jordan. This is what happened when He came up out of the water:

… behold, the heavens were opened to Him, and He saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and coming to rest on Him; and behold, a voice from heaven said, “This is My beloved Son, with Whom I am well pleased.” (Matthew 3:16-17)

What a moment! The heavens opened, the Holy Spirit descended like a dove, the Father Himself spoke from heaven – the whole triune God present in one deep affirmation. “‘You are My beloved Son; with You I am well pleased’” (Mark 1:11).

If anyone has ever had a mountaintop experience with God, this was it. There is nothing higher than the affirming voice of the Father from heaven over His Son.

And then, almost immediately, the Holy Spirit led Him into the wilderness.

Have you ever known this in your own life? You have just had a beautiful season of victory, perhaps the deepest experience of God’s love and Presence you have ever known, and then suddenly everything collapses. You find yourself in a place of weakness and loneliness – and you wonder, “What just happened? Did God change His mind about me?”

He did not. The Holy Spirit Who descended like a dove on the Lord Jesus is the same Holy Spirit Who led Him into the wilderness. The Father did not stop loving Him for one moment. The affirmation and the desert both come from the same Father. They are both the ways of God.

Jesus Walked This Wilderness First

Jesus did not need the desert experience to become more holy, to correct His doctrine, to deal with hidden sin or to refine immature character. He was already perfectly holy; there was no sin in Him – no selfishness, no error, no flaw in His doctrine, no dross to be brought to the surface and skimmed off. He was the eternal Son of God in the flesh, entirely without blemish.

And yet the Holy Spirit led Him into the wilderness.

Hebrews tells us what was going on:

Although He was a Son, He learned obedience through what He suffered. (Hebrews 5:8)

Jesus had no sin to overcome, but in His humanity, He had to learn dependence on the Father through suffering. He walked the path of weakness in human flesh so He could be our Savior (Hebrews 5:9). And because He has walked the path of weakness Himself, He understands your weaknesses:

For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but One Who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin. (Hebrews 4:15)

If the perfect Son of God needed the wilderness, how much more do you and I? If the Lord Jesus had to be brought into the desert before His ministry could begin, how can we imagine we will build a life and a calling with God without ever passing through the desert ourselves? There is no other way. The path of dependence on God runs through the wilderness.

He Will Not Let You Hide

The desert is dry and dangerous – heat in the day and cold in the night, rocks and thorns, no food or water. But more than any of these, the desert is a place of loneliness. Jesus was led there to be alone.

Jesus needed His friends because He was fully human. We know this because of what happened later in the Garden of Gethsemane. He took Peter, James and John farther into the Garden with Him, asking them to watch with Him, and then was grieved when they fell asleep. He needed their support – the comfort of not being alone in His agony.

But here, at the beginning of His ministry, the Holy Spirit deliberately led Him away from people into the loneliness of the wilderness.

God does certain things in your soul when you are alone that He will not do in the crowd. So He leads you out into lonely places – away from the friends you would normally turn to, the busyness and the distractions you would hide behind – until there is nothing left to do but face Him.

This isolation comes from God’s love. He knows that we will hide if we can. We will keep Him at arm’s length by hiding behind our family, our friends, our work, our routines and even our spiritual activities. And He loves us too much to let that happen. So He brings us, one way or another, into the place where we must look at Him alone.

The Holy Spirit led the Lord Jesus into the wilderness, and the same Holy Spirit will lead you into your wilderness too. Whatever your desert was or is or will be, God wisely places it before you and leads you into it because He has a work to do in you that can be done nowhere else. You do not stumble into it or get abandoned in it.

The Path of Weakness

For 40 days, Jesus fasted in the wilderness. And then, at the end of those days, when He was at His weakest, the devil came to tempt Him.

If you knew a great battle was coming, what would you do? You would prepare, build yourself up, eat and rest and gather strength. The last thing you would do is starve yourself for 40 days right before the fight!

But God did the opposite with His Son. He led Him into the wilderness, had Him fast for 40 days and let the devil come at Him at His moment of greatest physical weakness.

This is because, in the Kingdom of God, the path of strength is the path of weakness and dependence – looking to the Father for what we cannot do ourselves. Our own strength keeps us depending on ourselves. Weakness drives us to depend on Him. The Holy Spirit led the Lord Jesus into a place of extreme physical weakness because that is where the Father, not His own human strength, would be the Source of His victory.

Paul learned this. He had what he calls a “thorn in the flesh,” and three times he asked the Lord to take it away. The Lord answered:

… “My grace is sufficient for you, for My power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me. (2 Corinthians 12:9)

Paul learned to embrace what God was doing through his weakness, testifying, “For when I am weak, then I am strong” (2 Corinthians 12:10). The very weakness Paul wanted removed led him into a deeper experience of the power of Christ.

This is how God prepares us. Instead of strengthening us by making us strong, He makes us weak so that we will trust Him entirely. The desert is the school where this dependence is taught. There is no other school.

His Voice Still Speaks

Before the Holy Spirit led Jesus into the wilderness, the Father had already spoken from heaven: “This is My beloved Son, with Whom I am well pleased” (Matthew 3:17).

The Father did not change His mind between the baptism and the desert. He Who affirmed Jesus at the Jordan River was the same Father Who was with Him through the 40 days of weakness and temptation. However, the wonder was gone, the open heavens were gone, the dove was gone. Jesus could not outwardly see the affirmation of His Father – He had to trust it.

This is true for you in your own desert. God has not stopped saying, “You are My beloved son, My beloved daughter. With you I am well pleased.” He said it when you were full of joy and faith and felt His Presence so strongly you could barely contain it. He says the same thing now, in the dryness and the loneliness and the weakness. It is just that you do not always hear it the way you heard it then.

God gave you experiences of His love and grace before He brought you into the wilderness so that in the desert, in the worst of it, you would know He has not rejected you or gone silent. He brought you here, and He is still saying what He has always said about you.

The Father’s affirmation precedes the wilderness. Hold on to what He said when you could hear Him clearly. He has not changed His mind or abandoned you. He is the One Who led you here into the desert.

The Desert Experience Ends

The 40 days in the desert came to an end for Jesus. The devil left Him, and angels came and ministered to Him. And then Luke records what happened next:

And Jesus returned in the power of the Spirit to Galilee, and a report about Him went out through all the surrounding country. And He taught in their synagogues, being glorified by all. (Luke 4:14-15)

He was led into the wilderness by the Holy Spirit, and He came out in the power of the Holy Spirit. Far from stripping Him of anything, the wilderness released the power that was now ready to flow out into His ministry.

He went to Nazareth, His hometown, and stood up in the synagogue. They handed Him the scroll of Isaiah. He found the place and read:

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me, because He has anointed Me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent Me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” (Luke 4:18-19)

Then He rolled up the scroll, gave it back and sat down. Everyone in the synagogue looked at Him. And He said, “‘Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing’” (Luke 4:21). Jesus’ world-changing ministry had begun!

But Jesus’ ministry was born in the wilderness as much as here in the synagogue, or in the moment of the open heavens and the wonderful affirmation – born in the long 40 days, in the weakness, temptation and loneliness. The ministry of the Lord Jesus – the powerful work that would change the world in the next three years – was birthed in the desert.

And so it is with you.

Our temptation is to believe that our desert experiences are keeping us from the ministry God has for us. But if we look at Jesus’ testing in the wilderness, we see that our testing is preparation for the work God has ahead of us. What He does in you prepares you for what He will do through you. There is no shortcut. The wilderness is the school where He prepares you for the future. If you submit to God while passing through it, you will come out in the power of the Holy Spirit, ready to give to others what you have received from God.

There Will Be More Deserts

Luke ends his account of the temptation with this:

And when the devil had ended every temptation, he departed from Him until an opportune time. (Luke 4:13)

The devil left, but only for a time – the Garden of Gethsemane and the Cross were still ahead.

And so it is for you. This desert will end – they all do – but it will not be your last. You will encounter other deserts in the years to come, for the same reasons and with the same purposes: deeper dependence, deeper trust, a deeper experience of the Father’s Presence. Each time, the path will be the same: He will lead you into the wilderness by His Holy Spirit, He will be with you and, if you surrender to Him, you will come out with greater fullness of His life and purpose than you went in with.

When the next desert comes in your life, remember that God is not being moody or changing His mind about you. The desert you face is the next stage of His preparation of you, the next expansion and deepening of His work in you. You can walk into it knowing that the same Father Who said, “This is My beloved Son,” over the Lord Jesus says it over you. The same Holy Spirit Who led Jesus through His wilderness is leading you. The same end is possible – deeper union with Christ and greater power of the Holy Spirit upon you.

The desert is only part of the story. What comes next is the life of God working through you for the sake of others who are still wandering, still searching, still desperate to know that there is a God Who sees them in their wilderness and is leading them through.

So death is at work in us, but life in you. (2 Corinthians 4:12)

Let’s pray together.

Father, we look at Your Son in the wilderness. Forty days of fasting. Temptation by the enemy. Weakness in His body. Loneliness in His soul. And all of it leading to the moment when He returned in the power of Your Holy Spirit to begin the ministry that would change the world forever.

This is the path You have set for us too. We did not choose it. We would not have chosen it if You had asked us. But You did not ask. In Your love, You lead us into our own deserts, where we are isolated, weak, tempted. You reveal to us what has been inside us all along, and what we have lacked, and how desperately we need You.

Forgive us, Lord, for the times we resist You. For the times we fight to get back to what we had before. For the times we ask You, “Where are You?” when in fact You have taken us into the very place where we will find You more deeply than we ever have before.

We thank You that You do not leave us. We thank You that the same voice Who affirmed us in our seasons of joy is the voice Who affirms us still in the desert. You are with us. You have not changed Your mind. You say over us, “My son, My daughter: with you I am well pleased.” We hear You. We rest in this.

Lord Jesus, You walked this way before us. You were led by the Spirit into the wilderness and came out in the power of the Spirit. By Your Spirit Who lives in us now, lead us to walk the same way. Help us to trust You in our weakness. Help us to face You in our loneliness. Help us to hear You in our quietness. And then, in Your time, bring us out into the future You have prepared for us, anointed by Your Spirit, ready to give to others what You have worked in us.

When the next desert comes, give us grace to walk into it without fear. We know what it is. We know Who leads us into it. We know the end of it. We trust You with the heat. We trust You with the duration. We trust You with the loneliness. We trust You with the weakness. The desert is part of our story, and You are the One writing it.

In the Name of Jesus. Amen.