Where is the Spirit leading me?

Is it just me, or do you find yourself asking this question all the time? Maybe you wonder what you're going to do with your life or even what tomorrow will look like. With faith and just life in general, there comes a sense of mystery concerning specifics. God gives us what we need but not everything we want. Perhaps you have a general direction or destination you feel called to, like a career path or even a person you want to marry, but you don't know how to get there. Faith and hope in Christ are firmly rooted but not exactly all-informative or even easy. In other words, God doesn't promise an immediate answer to every single question you have, but instead He gives His followers an opportunity to practice faith and patience in waiting. Can I get a resounding "Amen" for that? I suck at patience.

If our faith is in a God who was, is, and is to come, then our faith must be constantly fueled by what He did on the cross, what He is presently doing now in and through our lives, and His promised return to bring down Heaven for those who claim Jesus as Savior. The in-between's of life with God are up to God, which begs the questions, where am I now and where is He taking me?

The past month or so, I've gotten a little distracted from the Spirit's guidance and direction in my life. This season and semester of school has been rather hard for me, as I keep getting caught in the enemy's schemes to steal my joy and throw me off my walk with God. I get distracted because I'm tempted to think that the Spirit wouldn't lead me into a difficult place. I only think it could lead me out, so I've been praying harder and harder for help getting out of this place I'm in, as if God doesn't want me here or didn't put me here for a reason. I've asked myself so many times what I'm doing wrong that got me here. I've had this idea that God isn't with me in my suffering like it's some sort of punishment for a sin or set of sins I've committed. Some part of me wants to believe that God is removed from my suffering, that He's not present with me during it, but the great deceiver charms me into these wrongful thoughts. Here's the bottom line of this post: God, in all His grace, allows you to suffer so that you can become like Jesus in His death AND in His resurrection. God is with you in the hard place because He has a plan. God can lead you into hard times just as much as He can bring you out of it. Spiritual formation is always His goal.

1 Peter 5:10 states, "And the God of all grace, who called you to his eternal glory in Christ, after you have suffered a little while, will himself restore you and make you strong, firm and steadfast." There's always promise of eventual restoration, but never a cake walk. I was recently moved while reading Matthew 4, in which Jesus gets tempted by the devil in the wilderness without eating for 40 days and 40 nights. That's no Canes, no Taco Bell, and no Chick-Fi-La for a long time. In Matthew 4:1, the story says that Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness, which caught me off guard. The Spirit led Him to His suffering? Why would it do that?

It's no coincidence that this story follows immediately after Jesus is baptized by John the Baptist, during which God speaks from Heaven that Jesus is His dearly beloved Son with whom He is well pleased. All is going well for Jesus, He's done everything right, and He's officially been declared the Son of God as the Spirit of God descends upon Him like a dove, a symbol of peace and purity. So why is the very next event recorded in Matthew a story of His suffering in the wilderness? This sequence of suffering right after spiritual rebirth and adoption into God's family cannot be a coincidence. I mean, put yourself in Jesus' shoes. Wouldn't you have questioned God? Wouldn't you have wondered why the Spirit led you there? Wouldn't you have wanted to know what's next? Perhaps it's God's children who suffer the most, when everything is going right, and it might be the Holy Spirit that guides them to it.

God loves us so much that He isn't going to let us stay the same or allow us to sink into a dangerous comfort zone. God knows that the comfort zone of faith can be a period of a coma rather than rest. He is always challenging and taking us deeper and deeper into relationship with Him. What does Jesus quote when He is being tempted by the devil? He quotes Scripture, the Word of God, leaning into His relationship with the Father to fight off the enemy's lies to destroy His faith. God wants His people to learn and lean fully on Him. In the character of a loving father, God trains us in righteousness so that we can fully surrender ourselves to Him and be equipped to carry out His mission. As soon as the temptation was over, Scripture says that angels came and comforted Him. There's an end to our suffering and our questioning, but it takes faith and patience to get there. The next story following right after Jesus' temptation is the beginning of His extensive travel and teaching as part of His ministry. Again, this cannot be a coincidence. The unity of birth, formation, and mission is key for every Christ follower to understand. We cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven without being spiritually reborn, and we cannot carry out the mission or spread the Gospel without the Spirit's work in and through us. It's all connected - a trinity conducted by the Trinity.

So now we have a clearer picture of where God is taking us. He's taking us through good and bad times, from mountain tops to dark valleys, so that we can learn to depend solely on Him. He's making us into His children who can bring His Kingdom to the ends of the earth. Praise Him for that. Again, we may not have specifics in life, and that's okay. We simply know we are being led by a Spirit that may lead us into difficult seasons but not in an effort to destroy us like the devil, but in an effort to make us new and make us stronger. This hope amidst suffering, nevertheless, is not an easy thing to do. Suffering can be discouraging, trust me, I get it, but we do not suffer without a promise of Heaven. God's making us into warriors. Let's not pray for God to take us out of a place or time He has in for a reason, but let's take up our cross and follow Him wherever He leads us. Become like Jesus in His suffering and resume the mission He started.

If you leave believing in one thing, let it be this: God sees forty days ahead, and He definitely saw three days ahead of the darkest moment in history. When we struggle to see the future, God knows our future and He's working for our good. Yes, Christ suffered a cruel death, but God knew that He would walk out of that grave three days later, and God is trying to raise us from our graves and comfort zones. We suffer because of the consequence of sin, but we live because of the grace of God. His grace is always sovereign amidst our suffering, and believing that takes practice and patience, so that will be my prayer for you and for me. Depend on God like a child depending on his father, because you are His child.