The Wilderness Experience

Many believers will boldly talk about their wilderness experience

They wear it like a victor’s cap

They boast about it like it is a must have experience

They insisted it is compulsory for every believer to have one

He has listened to so many sermons

The ones with such tales of woe and sorrow seemed very appealing

One pastor told them of how he was able to cope with the death of three children and his wife

Another told the story of his spiritual attack and how he won the battle against mental illness

People seemed to find those messages very entertaining and people find such stories easy to relate with

Sometimes the stories were delivered in such a passionate way that made people break down in tears

As a man desiring to go into ministry

He needed to have that wilderness experience

So that his experience arsenal will not be void of such an important talking point

But how does one get a wilderness experience?

He thought about it

Suddenly it dawned on him

That all he needed to do was ask God

It seemed God delights in giving his children spiritual experiences more than material prosperity

He went on his knees

He asked God for his own wilderness experience

He cried and cried

He cried day and night

An experience that will shake the church of God

An experience that will make him a testimony in the tabernacle of the righteous

An experience that will swallow up the testimonies of others

He prayed and fasted

One day he fell ill

He prayed about it and forgot about it

He hardly fell ill and whenever he did, he would just say a word of prayer and it would be gone

But not this time!

The sickness persisted

He couldn’t hold down his food

Even if he drank water, he would vomit it

He had to go to the hospital eventually

The doctors carried out comprehensive tests on him

He was diagnosed of high blood pressure, diabetes and tumor

He looked up to the heavens as if to rebuke the diseases

A spirit reminded him of his persistent prayer

“God has answered your prayer, this will be your wilderness experience”

WOW!

He told his wife and children to take him home

He was being taken through the wilderness as requested

When he got home

He refused to pray about the sickness

He continued to thank God for making his life an example of the suffering of Christ

He had read some “Christian” materials

Materials talking about the necessity of Christian suffering

Many of such materials were written by devout Christians

Believers whose life God decided to make “miserable for his glory”

Such worthy vessels are proof of God’s sovereignty over all flesh

God doesn’t have to be good all the time

Didn’t he say in the scripture that he made “evil” for his own delight?

Many of his fellow Christians came to his house

They came to pray with him that the will of God will be done in his life

They talked about Job

They talked about Abraham

They talked about John the Baptist and his experience with Herod

Sometimes the righteous were made to go through certain hurdles

As a form of warning for the sinners and unbelievers

Loot at Jonah!

God deliberately took away the shade he was given

Just to prove a point!

God might use anybody’s life to prove a point

May God deem us worthy for his use

However, He might have decided to use us!

His wife and children suffered greatly

They didn’t bargain for the pain and misery God was putting them through

Many people encouraged the wife to do better than Job’s wife

“See, sister, stand by this man of God

Do not be guilty of fainting in the days of adversity

Hold on!

Everything that has a beginning must have an end

Be strong sister”

His wife tried as much as she could

Until one day she decided she wanted out of the church

How can a good God afflict his own child like this?

How can a good God turn a strong, agile, able bodied prayer warrior to a vegetable?

For his own Glory!

Was there a scarcity of glory in heaven?

That God must glory in putting her family through pain and misery?

Even the devil does not afflict witches and wizards the way her husband had been badly afflicted

He had lost weight to the point where he was all ribs

He had bed sores all over

He had to be carried in and out of the sun everyday

At the age of forty

She was just 37

They had been married for ten years

Their children were still very young

She had to cope with fending for them and him alone

At a point she started praying that her husband would die

His death would mean less pressure on her meager earnings as a front desk officer

It was all too much for her to bear

Just too much

Whenever their church members came to see him

She would deliberately refuse to open the door

Sometimes she would drop hints that they were taking him for treatment somewhere

Just to get the church members off their doorstep

She has had it with them and their wicked “God”

The sickness lingered on for three years

How he managed to keep breathing was such a mystery to her

One day she decided enough was enough

She would pack whatever she had, take her children and leave!

The landlord was on their case for house rent

They were owing for two whole years

If not because the man had “human feelings”

They ought to have been ejected since

One day a friend of hers invited to a church programme

It was for another denomination entirely

The shallow Christians she and her former church folks used to laugh at

Christians who always wanted everything to be rosy

Christians who pray against natural realities and reject life’s curves

How could any sane Christians be saying “I forbid death in my family”

As surely as there are people in the world, death is a must!

It is only a matter of time but everybody will lose somebody to death

How could Christians be so blind to sense?

They would be praying against sickness and disease

Rebuking infirmity and deformity

Unrealistic expectations had watered down their Christian realities

Why would God give humanity the wisdom to set up hospitals if people wouldn’t be sick!

Sickness is a reality of life

Deformity also is a reality of life

Man fell in the garden of Eden and he was cursed with thorns and thistles

That was how deformity came into perfection

But these milk and honey Christians wouldn’t tie the scriptures up properly

They would take a portion they find to be nice and build doctrine on it

Forgetting that the scripture is one complete book and shouldn’t be broken

Her friend insisted the speaker was different

“He doesn’t preach the way you and I do

And he makes a lot of sense

You need to come and hear him preach”

She was idle that morning

She knew she would pick holes in the person’s teaching within minutes

Most of the preachers of such churches were not grounded

They didn’t attend seminaries

They didn’t study philosophy

They would rather be drunk in ignorance than walk in knowledge

All of them are the same thing!

She got to the church

The preacher was the brother in Jeans and T-shirt

He took his sermon from 1 Corinthians 15:45

He practically slaughtered the Old Testament on the cross and resurrected the new testament three days later

She was livid with rage

Her husband was a living proof that the brother had deceived the people

If God doesn’t deal with Christians the way he did with the characters of the old testament in Christendom, then her husband shouldn’t have been sick

Not for a minute

She decided she had to see the brother after the service

Such heresies should be challenged!

Unlike other preachers

The brother didn’t go into an office

He announced that he would attend to people right there in the church after service

And he did

Almost 100 people waited to see him

He sat with each person without a protocol team and listened to them patiently

He prayed with each person

She saw miracles happened right before her very eyes

His attitude and mannerism convicted her

She didn’t know how to feel about him anymore

He might have taught heresy but he was obviously anointed and he had the temperament of Christ, at least as she was observing him

It took two hours for him to reach her

She challenged his message immediately

He mentioned heroes of the faith who God dealt with just the way he did with the biblical characters of the old testament

She mentioned people who God gave cancer, kidney disease, blindness just for his glory

She mentioned people like Jacob who limped, Leah with her set eyes, Mariam who was leprous for a while by the hand of God, King Saul who suffered from depression, Isaac who went blind in his old age and Moses the stutterer – these are instruments in God’s hand and they had health issues!

Apostle Paul and Timothy also had documented afflictions!

He was patient with her

She had her say

Though she had come to respect his patience and character, she didn’t know why she was so angry when she started speaking with him

He looked at her and said “Why are you so angry?”

The question startled her

She was just asking herself the same question in her own mind

She didn’t know what to say

She wanted to speak but her voice gagged as tears poured forth!

Her husband was suffering for the cause of Christ and the brother in Jeans and T-shirt was trying to rubbish her husband’s legacy through his sermon

If she was to believe what the brother in Jeans and T-shirt was saying, it would mean she had suffered for over two years for nothing and her husband was somehow guilty of making himself sick!

God has a hand in it

It was God’s responsibility to heal and to make sick

God is guilty in her book

God has turned her life upside down

And nobody should absolve God and somehow turn the victim into the perpetrator!

The brother in Jeans and T-shirt stood up abruptly!

She was still crying!

He started attending to other people

She wanted to leave but one of the ushers told her to stay because the brother in Jeans and T-shirt would still like to see her

She waited another 45 minutes

The brother in Jeans and T-shirt told her to come with him

She did

He told her to please take him to see her husband

She was eager to do so

He had to see for himself in order to understand that his teachings were not grounded in the word but in wishful thinking!

He had to see!

The brother in Jeans and T-shirt didn’t say a word throughout the journey!

Her children were just returning from school when they got to their house

They parked right behind the school bus dropping them off

The brother in Jeans and T-shirt walked with her and her children into the house

Her husband was lying on a mat right in the sitting room

The brother in Jeans and T-shirt sat down beside her husband and said “Brother, I have a message from you from God! He said he has seen your labour of love and your suffering for the sake of the gospel. He asked me to inform you that it is time for you to be healed and to recover fully so that you can share testimonies of your healing to strengthen the faith of many believers all over the world!

All you have to do is say after me

“Father, In the name of Jesus, by the power of the Holy Spirit, I command my body to respond to the word of God and be healed right away in the name of Jesus…

Her husband refused to say a word

She couldn’t believe it

She: Dear, why aren’t you saying anything?

Husband: I want to die a martyr! I want the crown of life.

She: Jesus!

Brother in Jeans and T-shirt: There is no crown for foolishness sir. The Lord sent me to you with an express instruction and you are disobeying the Instruction right here! You are doing this according to your own will and you will lose your testimony if you die in disobedience

The husband started crying

Husband: Lord, why do you count me unworthy to be a saint! Why should I not carry my cross to the end. Why should I abandon the quest now? This is my wilderness experience. Why Lord?

She started crying too. Suddenly it all made sense! Why he refused any form of treatment while claiming God afflicted him and only God can heal him

She begged him and pleaded that he should not die in disobedience! God can change his mind at any time but if you die in disobedience you will go to hell!

He took his time but eventually agreed to pray for his healing

The brother in Jeans and T-shirt laid hands on him and instead of praying for healing, he rebuked the spirit of affliction, infirmity and religion

Her husband, though frail suddenly became strong!

His bones gained strength from nowhere

He jumped up from the mat and started barking like a dog!

Woah!

The brother in Jeans and T-shirt wasn’t surprised at all

She was stunned!

If ever there was a holy man in the world, that man is her husband!

She had seen people with demonic spirit manifesting before but she never thought in a million years that husband was possessed by a spirit

After a few minutes

Her husband started vomiting a greenish substance

It was over in twenty minutes

Her husband collapsed backwards

The brother in jeans and T-shirt caught him from injuring himself and laid him down

The brother in Jeans and T-shirt then commanded the body to start healing, reversing the damages done by the demonic affliction upon the body

Within an hour the prayer session was over

The brother in Jeans and T-shirt gave her husband Holy Communion

Prayed for the whole family and left!

Her husband became well

He started eating, started walking, started talking properly

Within a week, he had reopened his fashion accessories shop

People didn’t know how it happened

Even she couldn’t say exactly what happened

The transformation was supernatural

As the scripture says “Woman indeed received their dead relatives back alive”

PS: Many of us forget that Christianity is very progressive

We lump up the obsolete with the effective

And yet the word is “be it unto you according to your faith”

What a Christian confess will most likely be his or reality

If God framed the world by the word of his power and we are his express image

We also frame our realities by the words of our mouth