Daily Lesson for May 22, 2017

Today's Daily Lesson comes from Romans chapter 8 verses 2 and 3:

2Remember the long way that the Lord your God has led you these forty years in the wilderness, in order to humble you, testing you to know what was in your heart, whether or not you would keep his commandments. 3He humbled you by letting you hunger, then by feeding you with manna, with which neither you nor your ancestors were acquainted, in order to make you understand that one does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.

One of my favorite songs is Andrea Crouch's, "Through It All" the lines of which say:

Through it all,
Through it all,
I learned to trust in Jesus,
I learned to trust in God.
I learned to depend upon His word.

We only learn to trust and depend on God in times when we can no longer depend upon ourselves. It's when we are tested that we grow in faith and learn resilience. This is why James the brother of Jesus said,"Consider it nothing but joy when you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces endurance," (James 1:3).

The Israelites wandered in the wilderness 40 years. They turned a week-long trip into a life-long journey. Why? Because God had to teach them. God had to form them. They had to learn to trust God. That's what the desert is all about. That's what the long way teaches us. We wouldn't learn it any other way.

In fact, we couldn't learn it any other way.