Sunday, May 31, 2026 | Into the Wilderness, Week 1

Where Are We Headed This Week?

Nobody plans the wilderness. You don’t pencil it into the calendar. It shows up — the job ends, the diagnosis comes, the marriage goes quiet, the faith you’ve leaned on for years suddenly feels like it’s holding nothing. The ground you were standing on isn’t there anymore. And the first thing you assume is that you did something wrong, or that God walked off, or both.

This week starts a new series, and it starts by saying something that’s hard to believe when you’re in it: the wilderness is not a mistake. In the Bible it’s never wasted ground. Israel got formed there. The prophets heard God there. And before Jesus did a single miracle, the Spirit led him straight into the desert. Led him. On purpose.

That’s where we’re headed this week. Four texts, one point: God sometimes takes us where we’d never choose to go, not because he’s done with us, but because he loves us too much to leave us the way we are.

A Deeper Look

Here’s what most of us actually believe, underneath the church answers: a good life is a stable one. Steady job, steady health, steady relationships, steady faith. And when the stability holds, we feel close to God. When it cracks, we assume he’s far. We’ve quietly made our circumstances the thermometer for whether God is near.

The texts this week pull that thermometer out and break it. Moses tells Israel God led them into the wilderness for forty years to humble them and test them and find out what was really in their hearts. The psalm warns them not to harden up the way the older generation did when things got dry. Hebrews says the discipline that feels like God’s absence is actually proof you’re his kid. And then Jesus — full of the Spirit, fresh off hearing the Father call him “beloved” — gets walked into the desert by that same Spirit and goes hungry for forty days.

Notice the pattern. The wilderness doesn’t mean God left. In every one of these stories he’s the one doing the leading. The point of the desert isn’t to punish you for failing. It’s to show you what you’ve been trusting instead of him, and to teach you that you’re still his even when everything familiar is gone. Stability never made you beloved. You already were.

Biblical Texts This Week

• Sunday: Deuteronomy 8:2–5, Psalm 95:7–11, Hebrews 12:7–11, Matthew 4:1–11 — Led Into the Wilderness
• Monday: Deuteronomy 8:2–5 — God led Israel into the desert to show them what was in their hearts
• Tuesday: Psalm 95:7–11 — don’t harden your heart when the road gets dry
• Wednesday: Hebrews 12:7–11 — the discipline that feels like absence is proof you belong
• Thursday: Matthew 4:1–11 — the Spirit led Jesus into the wilderness, and he held onto who he was
• Friday: The thread named

Weekly Practices

1. Name your wilderness out loud this week — to God, and to one person you trust. Not “everything’s fine.” The actual thing: the worry, the loss, the dry stretch you keep changing the subject away from. You can’t be led somewhere you won’t admit you are.
2. Each morning, before you reach for your phone or your to-do list, say one sentence: I’m yours even here. Then go look at your day and notice where you’re reaching for stability — control, busyness, your own competence — to feel okay. Just notice it. That’s the work this week.