Character is carved our rather than instantly created. God’s deal goes like this” “Reap the fruit of unfailing love, and break up your unplowed ground” (Hosea 10:12). To God, our lives are like fields that need to be worked. Once we have worked one Field of Change, we move on to the next plot, where He bids us to get back to work on other character flaws by tilling weed-infested soil. Sometimes this takes more time than we’d like, but we have to keep driving that tractor back and forth across the fertile earth.
Change will happen, and the Bible gives us insight into how it happens. Think of Joseph in an Egyptian jail. Moses in the desert. David’s fugitive years. Jonah in the whale. Gideon in a cave. Job’s catastrophes,. Elijah’s encounter with the widow. King Nebuchadnezzar’s riches-to-rags-to revelation. The apostle Paul’s’ blinding encounter with God. These stories, and many like them, recount God’s relationship with men, and we need to look at those stories as forerunners of our own personal journeys. As history has shown, God will give a man a desert experience to prepare him for the future.