I have just returned from four days in the Rocky Mountain wilderness with fifty other men. The men were living in tents during cold and rainy conditions. Yet it was a powerful time for men to encounter the deepest wounds of their heart in a setting that mirrored the wilderness of our heart.
God has always used the wilderness to develop men. Abram became Abraham in the wilderness of Canaan. Moses was driven out of civilized Egypt and became Moses the liberator while being a shepherd in Midian. David, the son-in-law of King Saul, ran for his life into the wilderness. Elijah and Elisha were developed into prophets as men of the wilderness. Tradition tells us that John the Baptist left home at fourteen and lived the remainder of his life in the wilderness. Before launching his public ministry, Jesus was confronted with Satan in the wilderness.
A Dangerous Place
The wilderness is a dangerous place. In the Rockies, the weather can change dramatically and quickly. There are predatory animals that roam the wilderness. If you’re unprepared, food can be hard to come by in the wilderness. The wilderness is not unlike our hearts and our need for God.
We call our retreat into the wilds of Colorado, “Wilderness Encounter” because we are escaping the civilized, mechanized, predictable world of our modern existence in order to find our primitive natural selves. We are leaving behind the formulas of modernity to discover the ancient truths of our heart.
In our twenty-first century world we don’t talk about the heart. The deep workings of the heart are never covered on a job interview, a resume, or a 360 performance review. But God cares more about the heart than anything else. It is in the deep things of the heart that we find out who we really are and who we are becoming.
Like the wilderness, to dig into the heart of a man is dangerous stuff. When we delve into our heart, we find much we don’t like. Respect motivates men and when we study the motivations of our male heart, we find much we don’t respect. It’s agonizing to see how broken we truly have become.
Authenticity
But it’s when we face our shame, failure, and brokenness that we unearth the authentic self. It’s in the vulnerability of being with other men and sharing our pain that we encounter the wilderness of the false self.
But, the wilderness of our soul can become the launching pad for the fruitfulness of the new man. It’s in identifying our false self that we begin the journey to the true self. We can’t forgive ourselves if we don’t know what we need forgiveness from.
This past weekend it was an honor to sit by the fire, share, laugh, and cry with men who were genuinely desirous of being wholehearted and free. The rain and cold was an apt picture of the uncomfortable lives many of us have been living. And on the final day, the sun broke out, the temperature warmed up. A prophetic picture of the new man, the authentic way of God in our true selves.
Pastor Steve
