Adapted from Formed to Lead by Jason Jensen. ©2025 Jason Jensen. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press. www.ivpress.com.  

At thirteen years old I had built my teen identity around athletic performance. My confidence was rooted in athletic success and the recognition that came with it. Then I experienced debilitating knee injuries lasting nearly three years and requiring multiple rounds of surgery. My confidence was shaken. I was heartbroken and, though I did not understand it at the time, I experienced a crisis of identity and vocation. In the depth of my depression, I did not know what to do or who to be. My world became a wilderness.

How often do we look for God in our dreams of success, vindication, or dominance? Do we look for him in power and control? In security or comfort? In confidence and answers? In policies and positions? Leaders are especially drawn to look in these directions. We like moving forward, looking for redemption and progress. And yet…perhaps God is more likely to reveal himself in the wilderness of our experience than the promised land of our wishes. Perhaps we will find him more in questions than answers, more in challenge than comfort, more in longing than victory, more in arduous travel than in arrival at our destination. The truth is, God meets us more in our humility and weakness than in our pride and strength.

Paradoxically, formation is abundant and rich in the wilderness but often dry and scarce in the oasis. But in order to receive the formation God offers us in the wilderness, we need to first believe he will arrive there, and then learn to pay attention in specific ways.

Wilderness in Scripture

Luke 3 begins with the word of God arriving to John the Baptist in the wilderness. We know from Luke 1 that John was a special, remarkable child with a miraculous birth story. And from Luke 1:80 we know he lived in the wilderness for the first thirty years of his life. In Luke 3:2 we find that the word of the Lord came to him in a particular year. It seems that John had to wait for all of those thirty years before the word came and his preaching began. John’s waiting reflects the extended longing of the people of Israel after the final prophet of the Old Testament, Malachi. Four hundred years later, the word comes again to a prophet, and the crowd vibrates with expectancy.

The God of the Bible has a habit of showing up in the wilderness. Of course, he begins by walking with the man and woman in a garden, in the cool of the early evening under the trees. And occasionally he shows up in a city or a temple. But ever since men and women were banished from Eden, the Lord has visited his people in the wilderness.

Abraham entertains the threefold visitor in Genesis 18 while he sojourns in a tent along the road in a place called Mamre. “The God who sees” reassures Hagar in Genesis 21 as she shelters from the sun in the desert. Jacob wrestles with the angel of the Lord in Genesis 32 in a place where his only pillow is a rock. Moses meets the Lord, but not in the palace of Pharaoh where he grew up. After forty years of shepherding in the barren land of Midian, Moses turns aside to look, and the Lord appears in a burning desert bush in Exodus 3. The exodus story forms a strong metanarrative for the people of God, who are delivered from slavery by God’s mighty hand and then sojourn in the wilderness for forty years, awaiting the fulfillment of his promise of “a land flowing with milk and honey.”

Both Old and New Testaments reflect on that wilderness journey as an ongoing metaphor for the sojourning people of God, liberated but also awaiting full deliverance. We came from a garden, and we are destined for the new Jerusalem, but in the meantime we walk with God in the desert as the liminal space between the home we have left and the one God is preparing for us.

Most notably, God’s true revelation in history happens in the context of a wilderness that is political, social, and also natural. God anoints Jesus the Messiah out in the country, at the Jordan River, amid social, political, and religious controversy. In Luke’s narrative, the wilderness is almost a character. John, the miracle baby with dramatic destiny, grows up in the wilderness and receives the word of the Lord there. Multitudes come out to be baptized by him in the Jordan, as if they are crossing along with Joshua from the exile of wilderness into the Promised Land. The heavens are torn open as Isaiah 64 anticipates, and the Spirit descends on Jesus at his baptism. The Messiah is thus revealed not in Jerusalem but at the Jordan, in the wilderness. After Jesus’ baptism the Spirit drives him again out to the desert to be tested as the people of God are tested between Egypt and Canaan.

The wilderness in Scripture is the place of testing, the place of longing and waiting, the place of suffering and survival. It is a place of isolation, a “lonely place,” as Luke calls it later (5:16). The wilderness is the setting for the journey, but it is not the destination. Often it is a “trackless waste” (Psalm 107:40; Job 12:24) where we can find no path of direction or escape. We need divine help in order to be sustained in the wilderness and to be led out of it.

Yet the God of the Bible consistently reveals himself in the wilderness.