Thankful Even for the Detours of Life

Archaeologists Discover Moses Fitbit Map

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Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ!

It’s not good for a pastor to talk about himself too much in a sermon. The sermon can easily degenerate into a grade school-like essay: “What I Did During My Summer Vacation” or given the holiday we are observing this evening: “What I Am Thankful For.” Or it can turn into a Joel Osteen pep talk on how to have your best life now if you just follow my example. But today, I’m going to make an exception and tell you a little about myself. I pray that by doing so, it will help you view your own life’s detours from a Scriptural perspective.

A few years ago, I would not have expected to be standing here today, a full-time pastor of a new tri-parish. I was in my ninth year as pastor of a congregation that had been steadily growing in faith, wisdom, membership, and ministry; and I was looking for many good things to come in the years ahead. But as Thomas á Kempis is credited with writing in “The Imitation of Christ: “Man proposes but God disposes.” Or as Solomon writes in the book of Proverbs: “The heart of man plans his way, but the Lord establishes his steps” (16:9). 

Life’s journey is not one straight, smooth road, but full of potholes and detours. And God can use all of it to shape us and make us into the people He wants us to be, to use us in the ways that He best knows as He gets us to our ultimate destination—our heavenly Promised Land. So, on life’s journey, I found myself in the middle of a detour I could not get off myself.

How did I get there? In one word—sin. Without going into a lot of details—pride and an error in judgment created mistrust. Satan fanned the spark of mistrust into a flame of unnecessary conflict through rumor, failure to put the best construction on the situation, and unwillingness of others to repent and/or forgive. So, I resigned my call to try to avoid a greater split to the congregation.        

I don’t tell you this to hold myself up as a role model. Like you I am a poor miserable sinner who only stands here by God’s grace. And I don’t tell you this to try to gain favor with God, although I must admit that the false promise ran repeatedly in my sinful mind that if I just did the right things, that if I just prayed hard enough, then He might call me back to full-time ministry.         

Neither do I tell you this as a sort of purging or catharsis. I’ve confessed my guilt before God and man, and I know that I stand before the Lord, pure and blameless, forgiven and absolved solely for the sake of Jesus Christ, His perfect life, atoning death and resurrection. Nor do I blame others. I accept full responsibility for the consequences of my actions. I’ve done so privately and publicly. Mea culpa. Mea maxima culpa. My fault. My own grievous fault.

And I do not tell you this to gain sympathy. Though my life has been very different than I would have expected, I’ve had a very good life. I’ve learned what is most important to me—the Lord, my wife, Aimee, my family, friends, and ministry—in that order. My greatest fear in all that happened was that my children would become bitter with the church and fall away from the faith. But if anything, these events have brought my family closer together and to the Lord.

I’ve come to better understand and appreciate the Lord’s provision of daily bread. I enjoyed my work at Wal-Mart. I made a lot of friends there, sharpened my leadership skills, and had a greater opportunity to share the Gospel on a one-on-one basis than I’ve ever had as a parish pastor. The overnight schedule gave me the opportunity to preach and teach on a regular basis while I waited for a call. It also enabled me to be able to accept the call to Trosky, where the saints of St. John’s have provided a place of healing, showing unconditional love to me and my family, demonstrating a Christ-like spirit of cooperation with one another, a heart for outreach to the community, and an unshakable trust in the Lord Jesus to provide what is needed for His Church now and in the future.  

As the Lord has humbled me on this detour, I have learned to trust in Him rather than my own skills, abilities, and determination. I have learned more patience, waiting for God’s timing and God’s plan to unfold. Good ministry is seldom done in a hurry. And I’ve been reminded that there isn’t a thing that you do or say that can’t be misunderstood, so one must try to communicate as clearly as possible and put the best construction on others’ words and actions.

No, I don’t share this other than with the hope that it might somehow help you to better understand your own detours in life in relation to our text for today, Deuteronomy 8:2-3:  

And you shall remember the whole way that the Lord your God has led you these forty years in the wilderness, that He might humble you, testing you to know what was in your heart, whether you would keep His commandments or not. And He humbled you and let you hunger and fed you with manna, which you did not know, nor did your fathers know, that He might make you know that man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.

Forty years in the wilderness. Talk about a long detour! And living in tents to boot! I enjoy camping out. The peaceful solitude, the sounds and smells of the great outdoors are invigorating. But forty years? I don’t know about you, but I like a hot shower occasionally. And it wasn’t like the Israelites were in some lush national forest. They were in the wilderness, a desolate region with no native food or water supplies. And despite their wilderness setting they didn’t even have the luxury of “getting away from it all.” Imagine, taking the entire populations of South Dakota, North Dakota, and Wyoming and placing them in a portable tent city that slowly moved about the Badlands of South Dakota. This is the kind of detour on which God led the people of Israel for forty years!

If you look at a map, you’ll see just how strange it is that it would take this long to get from Egypt to the Promised Land. Cairo is less than 300 miles away from Jerusalem as the crow flies. It certainly didn’t have to be this way. The Lord is quite capable of doing things differently. After all, this is the same all-powerful God who parted the Red Sea rather than say, “Why don’t you spend a few days going around?” But He picked the long road—a forty-year detour. Why? He tells us through His servant Moses: “that He might humble you, testing you to know what was in your heart, whether you would keep His commandments or not.”

When they ran out of water and food in the wilderness, the people of Israel were quick to panic and fret that they were going to die of thirst and starvation. In other words, they were quick to doubt the Lord’s mercy. In fact, they were quick to accuse Moses and God of leading them into the wilderness to die! 

That sort of distrust can swing more than one way. So, the Lord warned that once they reached the Promised Land and had all its abundance, they’d be likely to forget that it was all a gift from Him. They’d be tempted to take it for granted, or think that they had earned it themselves. So, in preparation for the Promised Land, the Lord humbled them. He put them in a situation where they would say, “We cannot survive out here on our own. We need the Lord to keep us alive.” 

There was more to it, too. It was a matter of discipline. Moses declares, “Know then in your heart that, as a man disciplines his son, the Lord your God disciplines you.” Some of the discipline in the wilderness was punishment. There’s no hiding the fact that they were in the wilderness because when they came out of Egypt, they refused enter the Promised Land for fear of the Canaanites. Because they doubted God, the Lord declared that none of the Israelites would enter the Promised Land until that generation died off. That was the reason for the forty-year detour—a year for each of the forty days they had spied out the land and then failed to claim the Lord’s promise.

But not all of it was punishment. Discipline also means training. And once again, the Lord was training His people to trust in Him. As He provided food and deliverance from danger in the wilderness, so He would give them victory over the inhabitants of the Promised Land. The Lord was training them to know that they were to live “by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.”

One more thing about that forty-year detour: it had a starting point. The Israelites weren’t always in the wilderness. They’d spent over 400 years in Egypt, the last portion as slaves. They would have died there as slaves, too. But the Lord rescued them from that slavery—rescued them wondrously, miraculously, and dramatically. No, the wilderness might not be the greatest place to be, but it was a far better situation than the slavery and death they’d known up until then.

That’s especially true since it wasn’t their destination. The detour in the desert was just the time between the slavery and the Promised Land. Throughout those years, the Lord would humble them, test them, and discipline them. He would also provide for them, protect them, and when the time was right, give them the Promised Land full of every good thing. But more than that, He would give them a Savior, one of their own, who would deliver them to eternal life.

It’s no coincidence that many centuries later Jesus went into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. As Israel was baptized through the Red Sea into the wilderness for forty years, so Jesus was baptized and went straight to His temptation for forty days. He did perfectly what the people of Israel failed to do. Where the people sinned against God again and again, Jesus remained perfectly sinless and obedient. Where they needed to be humbled, He was perfectly humble. Where Israel panicked because there was momentarily no food, Jesus fasted and trusted. In fact, when the devil tempted Jesus to turn stones into bread, Jesus quoted this Old Testament lesson: “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God” (Matthew 4:4). 

Always humble, Jesus met every test and remained the disciplined Son. Why did He do so? Jesus wasn’t just re-enacting wilderness life to see what it must have been like for His ancestors. He did this to redeem them—and to redeem you, too. He lived that perfect life to credit you with His perfect obedience. Then He went to the cross; and on the cross, His Father punished Him with the judgment for the sin of the world—that you might have eternal life. 

All of this frames your life on earth; and it frames your Thanksgiving Day. I pray that it is a day of family and friends, of food and fun. But even if your life has taken an unexpected detour, remember, there is a reason for this: you’re not in the Promised Land yet! You’re still in the land of fiery serpents and scorpions—of thirst and hunger, arthritis and cancer, bad decisions and troubled relationships. That’s what the wilderness is like, and the troubles you face will be used by the devil to leave you thankless and doubting God. 

But you have so much to be thankful for. There’s the obvious stuff for thanksgiving—the first article things like body and soul, food and drink, house and home, family and possessions. Second and third article gifts like faith and forgiveness, salvation and eternal life. Those are blessings we think of most often; but there’s more to be thankful for. The Lord also gives you those other strange gifts that He gave Israel in the wilderness: namely, the humbling, the testing, and the discipline. Be thankful for the detours. 

Life in this wilderness is a rocky road. You will hurt. You will lack. You will sin. You will stumble and fall. And you’ll wonder why the Lord chooses to do things this way. The best answer we can give from Scripture is that you’re His children. The setbacks and troubles you face are consequences of being a sinner in a sinful world. But their effects on you are not random slaps of a heartless cosmos. The Lord has made you His children—you are heirs of His kingdom. 

As you make your way through this wilderness, remember the wilderness is already a step up. Once you were enslaved in sin, dead and headed for hell. But the Lord brought you out of your “Egypt” through the Red Sea of Holy Baptism. For those apart from Christ, this world is the beginning of hell. You’ve been rescued, redeemed by the blood of Christ. The Promised Land of heaven is yours, where you have the certain hope of eternal life free from all sin and struggle, where God will wipe away every tear from your eyes.

A blessed Thanksgiving to you all; and rejoice, my friends—even in your weaknesses and detours. The Lord is treating you as His beloved children, because you are His beloved children. He gives you all that you need for this body and life. He gives you all that you need for this body and soul for eternal life—the Word that comes from His mouth and the Bread that comes from heaven—His very body and blood. In these means of grace, you have forgiveness, life, and salvation. Indeed, you are forgiven for all of your sins.

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture quotations are from the Holy Bible, English Standard Version, copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.