“I Don’t Like What God Is Teaching Me.”

Let’s just be honest with each other for a minute.

There are seasons in the life of faith when you know, somewhere deep in your chest, that God is doing something in you. And it is not comfortable. It is not what you prayed for. It is not the breakthrough you posted about or the testimony you imagined giving. It is slower, stranger, and harder than any of that. It feels like subtraction. Like loss. Like being led somewhere you never asked to go.

If you are in that place right now, or if you have ever been there, this is for you.

Because Scripture has a name for that place. It has always had a name for it. And when you find it on the map of God’s dealings with His people, you discover something that changes everything: you are not off course. You are not forgotten. You are not being punished. You are in the desert. And the desert, in the hands of God, is the most intentional place on earth.

“Therefore I am now going to allure her; I will lead her into the wilderness and speak tenderly to her.” — Hosea 2:14 (NIV)

The desert is not an accident

We read about the wilderness in Scripture the way we watch storm footage on the news, as something that happens to other people, far away, in another era. But the desert is one of the most consistent and deliberate themes in the entire biblical narrative. It is not incidental scenery. It is a theological address. And God keeps sending His people there because He keeps needing to do the same thing in each of us: strip away every substitute for Himself until we finally discover that what we were hungry for all along was never anything else but Him. Look at the pattern. It is everywhere.

Moses: forty years, one burning bush

Moses was a man with a future, educated in the greatest empire on earth, positioned for power, burning with a sense of calling about his people’s suffering. And then he acted on that calling in the wrong way, in the wrong time, in the wrong strength. And God sent him to the backside of the desert for forty years. Not forty days. Forty years. A generation. Long enough for Moses to conclude that the calling was dead.

That is the part we rush past. Forty years of silence. Forty years of shepherding someone else’s flocks in a land with no monuments and no audience. Forty years of watching the sun rise over sand and stone and wondering if God had forgotten the promise.

He had not forgotten. He was forming. The man who would stand before Pharaoh could not be the man who killed the Egyptian in a flash of self-will. The man who would carry God’s presence into the wilderness had to first learn who he was in the wilderness without it. The desert was not Moses’ punishment. It was his preparation. And it produced in him the thing that Exodus 3 simply calls this: Moses was tending the flock. He had become a shepherd. He had become a man at rest with obscurity, at peace with smallness — and in that posture, God showed up in fire and said: now. Now I can work with you.

Israel: forty years, one lesson

A journey that should have taken eleven days took forty years. And God, speaking to them later through Moses, told them exactly why: “He humbled you, causing you to hunger and then feeding you with manna, which neither you nor your ancestors had known, to teach you that man does not live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of God” (Deuteronomy 8:3).

Read that slowly. God deliberately caused them to hunger. Not because He was cruel. Not because He was withholding. But because hunger was the only classroom where they could learn the most important lesson in the universe: that bread was never the point. That the land flowing with milk and honey was never the point. That the destination was never the point. That He was the point. That being with Him, sustained by His word, covered by His cloud, fed by His hand, that was the life they were made for.

But Israel kept trying to go back. They wanted Egypt’s food more than God’s presence. They wanted the certainties of slavery over the uncertainties of following a cloud. And so the desert grew longer, because the lesson was not yet learned. How many of us are in a desert that is longer than it needed to be because we keep looking over our shoulder at Egypt?

“The desert reveals what the city conceals; what your heart is actually running toward when everything else is taken away.”

David: years in the cave, a king in formation

David had been anointed king. Samuel had spoken over him, the Spirit had come upon him, the people had sung his praises. And then Saul tried to kill him. And David ran, into the wilderness, into the caves, into the margins of the kingdom he had been promised. He lived as a fugitive. He lost his wife, his city, his safety, his credibility. He wrote songs in the dark.

Those songs. Read the Psalms written from the wilderness (Psalm 63, Psalm 57, Psalm 142) and you hear a man being refined in real time. You hear the distance between what God promised and what David’s life looked like, and you hear David making a choice, over and over, to chase God rather than the promise. “You, God, are my God, earnestly I seek you; I thirst for you, my whole being longs for you, in a dry and parched land where there is no water” (Psalm 63:1).

He wrote that from an actual desert. A literal dry and parched land. And what he discovered there, what the cave and the wilderness produced in him, was a desire for God Himself that was entirely untethered from the throne. David stopped needing to be king in order to need God. He found that God alone was enough. And it was that David — not the gifted one, not the anointed one, not the celebrated one, but the broken, desert-forged one, whom God called a man after His own heart.

Jesus: forty days, the full weight of it

This one stops us in our tracks, because Jesus had no sin to be refined out of. He had nothing to learn about His identity. He had no Egypt to leave behind. And yet immediately after His baptism, immediately after the Father’s voice thundered ‘This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased’… the Spirit drove Him into the wilderness. Not nudged. Drove.

And in the wilderness, the enemy came to Him with bread. With power. With a shortcut to the kingdom that avoided the cross. And Jesus met every temptation with the same weapon: the word of God. “Man shall not live by bread alone.” “Do not put the Lord your God to the test.” “Worship the Lord your God and serve Him only.”

The desert, even for the sinless Son of God, was where the terms of the mission were settled. It was where Jesus, fully human, chose the Father over bread, over spectacle, over kingdom by any other means. He came out of the desert knowing, in every fiber of His humanity, what He had chosen and what it would cost. He came out ready.

If Jesus needed the desert to settle what He was living for, what makes us think we can skip it?

Moses: forty years. Israel: forty years. Elijah: forty days in flight. Jesus: forty days in combat. The number is not coincidental — it echoes across Scripture as the duration of God’s most serious work in a human soul. It is long enough to forget your own agenda. Long enough to get hungry for the right things. Long enough to learn that He is enough.

What the desert is really teaching

Here is the thing about desert seasons that nobody puts on their testimony card: they do not feel like formation while you are in them. They feel like failure. They feel like silence. They feel like God has moved on and left you in a chapter that has no resolution, no timeline, and no visible purpose.

But look at what every desert in Scripture produces. Moses comes out knowing God face to face. Israel comes out knowing that they cannot survive a single day without God’s provision. David comes out with a heart that wants God more than it wants the kingdom. Jesus comes out full of the Holy Spirit and ready to change the world.

The desert does not produce bitterness in the people who let it do its work. It produces intimacy. It produces a stripping away of every false hunger, the hunger for approval, for certainty, for control, for comfort, until the only appetite left is the one we were made with. The hunger for God Himself. Not His gifts. Not His blessings. Not even His purposes. Him.

This is what Hosea 2:14 means when God says He will “allure” Israel into the wilderness and “speak tenderly to her.” The wilderness is not rejection. It is a romance. It is God drawing His beloved away from the noise and the crowd and the competition of other loves, into a place where it is just the two of them, and He can finally say what He has always wanted to say and we can finally hear it.

One thing: the heart’s only real desire

David asked for one thing in Psalm 27:4. Just one. “One thing I ask from the Lord, this only do I seek: that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to gaze on the beauty of the Lord and to seek Him in His temple.” The man who had been given a kingdom reduced his request to this: just let me be near You. Just let me see Your face.

He got there through the desert. Not despite it.

That is the invitation underneath every hard season you have ever walked through. Underneath the silence and the confusion and the grief and the “I don’t like what God is teaching me,” there is a question being asked by God. And the question is always the same: Is it Me you want, or is it what I can give you? The desert is where we finally answer it honestly.

Because in the desert, there is nothing else to reach for. There is no crowd to perform for, no success to point to, no comfort to run to. There is only the raw, exposed, aching truth of your own heart and the God who has been waiting, patiently and tenderly, for you to stop filling the ache with everything else so He can finally fill it with Himself.

You were not made for the bread alone. You were not made for the land of milk and honey alone. You were not made for the throne or the ministry or the breakthrough. You were made for the One who gives all of those things — and the desert has always been where His people finally, finally believe it.

“The desert does not take something from you. It returns you to yourself and to the God who has been the deepest want of your heart all along.”

For the one in the desert right now

If you are in a season that feels like loss, like silence, like being led somewhere you never chose, let this be your word today:

You are in good company. The best company, actually. You are standing in the same desert where Moses met God at the burning bush. Where Israel learned that His word was bread enough. Where David wrote the songs that have sustained the faith of millions. Where Jesus settled, once and for all, what He was living for.

The desert has not disqualified you. It is qualifying you. And the God who led you in is the God who will lead you out — and when you emerge, you will carry something you could never have found any other way: the unshakeable knowledge that He is enough. Not His plan for you. Not His gifts to you. Not even His calling on you. Him. Just Him. Only Him.

And you will discover, as every desert pilgrim before you has discovered, that He was always what you were looking for. Every restless search, every reaching for the wrong thing, every hunger that no earthly food could satisfy — it was always pointing here. To this. To Him.

I don’t like what God is teaching me either, some days. The lesson is hard and the classroom is bare and the timeline is unclear. But I am learning, slowly, stubbornly, gratefully, that the point was never the lesson. The point was always the Teacher. And there is no better place to know Him than here, in the quiet, in the sparse and holy ground of the place where everything else has fallen away and only He remains.

He is worth it. He has always been worth it. The desert will prove it.