Some time ago, I began blogging on our Sunday sermons to help myself review; today, I’m continuing that by covering our Oct. 25 sermon, on Deuteronomy 8:1-7, by Pastor Peter Chung. You can stream the recording of this service here.

As usual, I won’t summarize the sermon, as you can live stream it, but will focus on what I take away from it. Our text was Deuteronomy 8:1-8.

Before I do that, though, I want to relate something a visiting pastor preached on a couple years ago which really stuck with me: Church isn’t primarily about us, but is primarily about God and his glory. Sometimes, we get pretty caught up with thinking we need to learn something new every sermon (but that can be dangerous, because after we’ve been in church for a while/studied the Bible carefully, if we find ourselves suddenly hearing something totally new, it may very well be new because it’s unbiblical) or hear God speaking to us very personally through each sermon. But this isn’t always the case. Yes, God’s Word is living and active, and it ought to work in us – but the most important aspect is God’s glory. So sometimes, perhaps our take-away may need to be seeing God’s glory more clearly and worshipping him.

Anyway, that’s a bit of a digression, but my statement about my “focus on what I will take away from it,” reminded me of that. Sometimes, I can make even church be too self-centered, whereas it’s God who deserves all the worship.

In any case, to this particular sermon: God led the Israelites into the wilderness on purpose, deliberately, to worship and serve God. This plan was designed by God, and declared by him in advance. No matter the details of our current wilderness, God in his sovereignty and goodness has purposed it. We also went through a couple specific aspects of why God planned it – for testing and for training. Then we wrapped up with application – that the wilderness is not and never will be our home; Christ is going to return to take us home, and he’s familiar with the wilderness, and understands our difficulty.

Those first and last points – that the wilderness is God’s plan, yet it is not our home – were my main take-aways. In particular, I need to see my current, every day frustrations – with difficulties at work, problems with the kids and parenting, the many demands on my time and the feelings of disappointing people that come from competing priorities – all of this is the wilderness God has me in, and it’s coming from his loving and gracious hand. I need to rely on him, trust in him, and look ahead to my real home. And when I do that, the wilderness becomes joyful.