This morning we return to our series on Exodus where we discover how God created His first community of faith and freedom as they journeyed to the Promised Land. Today we discover that God can lead you to freedom, but only you can choose to stop being a slave.

Prayer - O God in the midst of so much confusion and chaos, we give thanks for Your sacred Presence which comes along with us in the wilderness of life. You never settle for the life we have settled for, but You continue to provide for us day by day so that we may learn to journey each new day with You and You alone until we finally know that You are everything that we need. Give us this day our daily bread. In the Name of Jesus, Amen.

While I was in graduate school at Abilene, my friend Mike Williams and I went camping one weekend at some desert oasis in West Texas. I don’t even remember the place. Probably some name with a hill or water in it. West Texans tend to give names to places that are a bit optimistic – hopeful I guess. All the churches in Abilene were named after hills – which was quite ironic since the whole town was flat. We went camping somewhere oxymoronic like Sweetwater, Big Spring, or Lake Brownwood. We were so proud of ourselves. Two graduate students being real men for a couple of days. We went to the grocery store and bought all that we would need to be real men – weenies, marshmallows, firewood, chips and salsa. We drove forever to our campsite in the middle of nowhere, and we were starving. We set up the tent, unpacked the food, and readied ourselves for a great feast. We placed the weenies on the grill, looked in our bags to get the matches . . . and . . . no matches. There were no stores for miles. All our hopes for a great feast of grilled weenies, and for being real men in the wilderness – they all dissipated in the face of a fireless pit.

In the fifteenth chapter of Exodus, we are told that three days after the miraculous Red Sea crossing the Hebrews traveled twenty-five miles south to a place called Marah, where the water was bitter. We are told, “The people complained against Moses, saying, ‘What shall we drink?’” That is fascinating isn’t it? Three days after witnessing one of the greatest miracles in history, and soon as their canteens get dry, nobody says, “I can’t wait to see what God does now.” Instead, they begin to complain. Remember too that they had been following God’s Presence in the cloud. Now God has led them to water that they can’t drink. God can be such a tease sometimes.

When the Hebrews left Egypt, all they had was just a vague dream of a better life. They knew little who God was, or who they were. So as soon as the road through the desert became hard, they immediately began to feel like nothing more than desperate runaway slaves, heading south into the desert, twenty-five miles away from the Promised Land. All they knew was that they were ill-equipped, out of resources, and terrified that they would die of thirst. Now the dreams they had when they left Egypt seemed foolish.

In the face of anxiety and challenges in the present, the miracles of yesterday are hard to remember. But it is our memory of God’s faithfulness in the past that helps us to believe that He will be faithful in the future.

What about the things you were hoping for? Perhaps you had dreams for your job, or your children, or your future. Maybe you saw your life as being devoted to something significant. You started out on a journey to realize those hopes with just a few resources like love, commitment, education or resolve. But very soon on the hard road your resources ran dry, and you wondered what happened to your hopes, and if God had abandoned you on the way to them.

How will we survive the long walk ahead in the desert? We must have faith in the faithfulness of God whose grace is always found on the hard roads.

God miraculously turned the bitter water into clean, drinkable water. After being delivered, the people moved on. Six weeks later they journeyed further into the wilderness and this time they ran out of food. And again the people complained to Moses and Aaron, talking about how wonderful it was in Egypt “when we sat by the fleshpots and had our fill of bread. But you have brought us into this wilderness to kill us with hunger.” (Exodus 16:3). Really? Moses and Aaron have just led these people to freedom, and now all the people can do is accuse them of a sinister motive.

It is nice to know that sometimes never change. Whenever the people find the journey difficult they blame their leaders. That is because they still can’t see that it is God, and not their leaders, that have called them on this journey. But He has not called them to arrive at a certain place. If that was true, they could have taken a shorter route through the desert. The reason God had called them into the wilderness is to be changed. Every journey through the wilderness comes at some cost, and the greatest cost is the old comfortable life that we knew before the journey began.

Let me say that another way. I believe that the life of faith is harder than the life of self-dependence. Relying on ourselves comes natural to us; faith doesn’t. If your goal is to get to a certain place in the quickest way possible, then self-dependence will get you there a lot faster than faith in most cases. Your life may even be easier than those people who are attempting to learn to live by faith rather than will. Think about it: It was much easier to be living the good life as an Egyptian than it was to be out there wandering in the desert with no food or water. Only with a God who says, “Trust Me.”

So why walk this road of faith if it is a much more difficult road? The blessing of the hard road is that at the end of the road we will be different people. We will be people who have found our life’s work and calling, to worship God and enjoy Him forever. And the only way you can find this God and come to trust Him is on the hard road. I believe that is what Jesus meant when He told His disciples, “Whoever desires to be My disciple must take up His cross daily and follow Me.” When we journey the hard way, when we follow Jesus down the way of suffering and death, we discover that salvation is found not in returning to where life was easy but to walking forward to see the faithfulness of God along the way.

When the Lord heard the laments of His people, He said, “I am going to rain bread from heaven for you and each day the people will go out and gather enough bread for that day.” (Exodus 16:4). So the rest of the journey every morning, except the Sabbath, the people went out to collect manna, the bread from heaven. This manna was interesting. It was a fine, flaky substance, we are told in verse 14, as fine as the frost on the ground. For forty years it became the daily staple of the Hebrew diet. I am not sure what God would do today since we have the Atkins Diet, the South Beach Diet, and the Oprah Boot Camp diet. I guess we would just eat quail. But this manna came every morning, and everyone was responsible for collecting their own manna. Every day … except Saturday … more white stuff. Manna collection, manna cooking. 1000 Ways You Can Prepare Manna! How long before the complaints started coming? And there were so many particular rules surrounding manna. You couldn't’t hoard it because it wouldn't’t last. If you took too little, more would be available to you. If you took too much, the amount you took would decrease. Either way, you only took or received what you and your family needed. It wasn't’t a lot. It was just enough to keep you going on the journey.

Manna is a wonderful symbol of how God cares for us along the way. We may all travel together on this journey, but everyone has to gather his or her own spiritual nourishment. And you have to get it daily. That is why prayer and the reading of Scripture are important. No one ever stores up all they need to know about God. No one ever gets fat on manna. We have been fat long enough. Now it is time to be free, free to accept greater purposes of life than ease.

The best reason for seeing manna as the symbol for the faithfulness of God comes from its name. A literal translation of manna is “What is it?” Every morning moms would gather “what is it” on the table, and the kids would ask, “What is it?” The answer was always, “Yes.” Their daily nourishment was not found in something that was certain and satisfying. It was found in something mysterious, something that was just enough. “What is it, God, that You are doing?” “What is it that You are calling me to that is so different than what I left behind?” Nothing is more nourishing to your faith than asking that question, and that question is only one that you encounter on the hard road. It is the daily question of someone who has chosen to walk in the wilderness with God.

Some will say, “We saved our whole life for retirement. But now that we can finally enjoy it, one of us has become sick. All our money and health are gone. What is it God that You are doing with us today?” Others thought that they would finally be happy when they found the perfect job. Now that they are in it, they hate it, and it’s too late to start over. “What is it God that You are telling me?” For months now we have fought a war against terrorism, and we would hope we would feel more secure. Yet, many of us feel only more afraid. Two years ago we had imagined many great dreams for His church, but this past year we suffered the loss of some critical families due to job transitions and moves. And we ask, “God, what is it that You want Your church to be?”

We are tempted in those moments to look back to Egypt where at least life was certain and had a certain ease. The wilderness is difficult because it is there that we learn how to no longer be slaves. What is it that God is doing? Let God worry with that. Today it is enough to bring that question to worship, and to give thanks that while we may not know who we are becoming, we are grateful that God has not abandoned us to the slavery of what we once were.

The good news is that God did not abandon His people to their complaints. God did not answer His doubtful people in wrath but gave them a gentle lesson about His compassionate nature. God is faithful, even when we are not. He gave them water. He gave them manna. He gave them quail. He gave them protection from Amalek. He gave, and gave, and gave. God always is doing more for us than we realize, and He always comes to us in Jesus Christ to deal with us gently in our weaknesses.

The Psalmist says it this way, “The Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. He does not deal with us according to our sins, nor repay us according to our iniquities. For as the heavens are high above the earth, so great is His steadfast love toward those who fear Him; as far as the east is from the west, so far He removes our transgressions from us.” (Psalms 103:8-14)

It is a hard road to walk. But the great compassion of God can only be learned in the wilderness where you are aware of just how much you really do need Him. It is often in the dry and barren places of life that God shows up to remind us again of just how much He loves us.

The Christian songwriter and artist Michael Card puts it this way in his song, “The Wilderness.”

In the wilderness we wander
In the wilderness we weep
The wasteland of our wanting
When the darkness seems so deep
We search for the beginning, for an exodus to hold
We find that those who follow Him must often walk alone.

In the wilderness
In the wilderness
He calls His sons and daughters
To the wilderness
And He gives grace sufficient to survive any test
And that’s the painful purpose of the wilderness.Have you been feeling teased by the promises of God only to find out that they appear to be empty? Are you wandering why God has brought you into a dry and barren place? Look up. There is manna falling from heaven. He says, “I am the living bread that comes down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever.” (John 6:51)


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