Preparation, the work of Barren Lands

And he will go on before the Lord, in the spirit of Elijah, to turn the hearts of the fathers to their children and the disobedient to the attitude of the righteous; to make ready a people prepared for the Lord. Luke 1:17

The Wilderness was all too familiar a place for the Israelites, wasn't it? We read how they cried out to the Lord and He heard their cry for salvation from slavery. And no sooner had he delivered them that they cried to return. Forty years of this clinging to and groaning at the Lord led Israel to one pivotal moment... possessing the promise land. Oh, but those were not wasted years.
Deut 8 says this, "You shall remember all the way which the LORD you God has led you in the wilderness these forty years, that HE might humble you, testing you to know what was in your heart, whether you would keep His commandments or not. He humbled you and let you be hungry, and fed you with manna which you did not know, nor did your fathers know, that He might make you understand that man does not live by bread alone, but by everything that proceeds out of the mouth of the LORD. Thus you are to know in your heart that the LORD your God was disciplining you just as a man disciplines his son.
That word discipline makes me shrink back right away, until I see that the Lord doesn't discipline as just any man, but as a father in love with His child. Every time He mentions our discipline it's to be done with love. The word is sophron, it literally means to "save the mind, to train up". So, why the wilderness? Besides being the landscape for most of the Bible lands, apparently it's His choice tool for training us up!
The wilderness is where God sent John the Baptist to declare the coming of Jesus. All the prophets and the Law prophesied until John, and there he stands in the wilderness shouting repentance. Could it be that the message is still the same today? The wilderness stood to represent desolate, deserted, lonely, uninhabited places in scripture, but I know those places still exist today in our own lives. Hard times, dark places.
What would the Lord have us to know out of the dry weary lands? First of all, to our astonishment, it's not always about correction. Dark and desolate places sometimes are the ramification of our own sin, and so then repentance is the point of the wilderness. But sometimes it's something altogether different. Picture how our Heavenly Father led His son into the wilderness. Just after Jesus had been baptized by John He was led into the wilderness to be tested by the devil. After He had fasted forty days and nights, He became hungry. Every time the enemy tempted Christ he returned to him with the Word of God. Jesus drew his strength on the Word of God alone. I don't think wilderness times are always a result of the enemies attacks, remember that the Spirit led Christ there. But one thing is for sure, our Father used the same way to teach the Israelites as He did his own son, and so I think we can be sure He's still teaching us the same way today.
In the wilderness of tough times we too are HUMBLED, HUNGERED AND FED. It's His way. He causes us to hunger for something not of this world so that we might know that man doesn't live on bread alone, but on every word that proceeds from the mouth of the Lord. Our lives, our ministries, our heritage depends on our remembrance of this. In Deut 8, just before the Lord reminds his children of how he led them in the wilderness for 40 years, he tells them to "BE CAREFUL to do all I command to you, that you may live and multiply, and go in and posses the land and which the Lord swore to give to your forefathers."