Wisdom in the Desert – 40 Days in the Wilds of Faith
Wisdom in the Desert: 40 Days in the Wilds of Faith A Lenten Journey towards Easter
This Lenten season, the saints of St Pauls Christchurch are walking together in the desert.
We are using a resource from Lectio 365 called Wisdom in the Desert: 40 Days in the Wilds of Faith with the Desert Fathers and Mothers. We’ve been invited into a deliberate journey, a journey that is slower, quieter, more searching. And perhaps that is precisely what Lent is meant to be.
The desert is often not a comfortable landscape. It’s a place that’s stripped back to the bare essentials (even less). There is little shade, little noise, and little excess. We usually consider the desert as barren, empty, a place that offers very little, if anything at all. Yet in Scripture, the desert is often the very place where God does his deepest work. It was in the wilderness that Israel learned dependence. It was in the wilderness that Jesus fasted, prayed, and was tested before beginning his public ministry.
The desert can be a place of remarkable spiritual formation and grace.
The early Christian men and women known as the Desert Fathers and Mothers withdrew into the deserts of Egypt and Syria in the third and fourth centuries. At first glance, these people seem distant from our modern and sophisticated world. Yet their context was not unlike ours. They lived after a time of intense persecution, and then in an era when Christianity was becoming increasingly aligned with political power. The Church was gaining status and security but was risking the loss of simplicity and spiritual depth.
These believers were hungry for holiness. Troubled by compromise and noise, they sought silence and solitude. They didn’t flee the world because they despised it; they stepped away because they longed for undivided hearts, hearts shaped more fully into the likeness of Christ. In the wilderness, they faced their fears, temptations, restless thoughts, and hidden motives. They embraced self-denial, prayer, and stillness in order to pursue a deeper relationship with God.
Their model, of course, was Jesus himself.
For most of us, the “wilds of faith” do not look like sandy wastelands. Instead, they look like crowded calendars, relentless news cycles, constant notifications, and the quiet anxieties we carry within.
Into our “wilds of faith” God’s invitation remains the same: draw near to me; return to me.
Here at St Pauls we’ve responded by embracing a rhythm of drawing near to God through daily prayer (using the Lectio 365 app), reflection and conversation in our Life Groups, a midweek on-line devotion, and gathering around the Word each Sunday. We’re being reminded that spiritual growth doesn’t happen accidentally. It requires intention and it requires space.
The desert can reveal what’s in our hearts. When distractions fall away, we notice how restless we are. When we attempt silence, we discover how noisy our inner world can be. When we try to pray, we encounter both our hunger for God and our resistance to him.
Yet this uncovering is not meant to discourage us. It’s meant to open us more fully to grace.
Lent reminds us that we are dust and that we are deeply loved. The wilderness strips away illusions of self-sufficiency and teaches dependence. It exposes the lesser things we use to look after and feed ourselves – achievement, distraction, control – and then gently, persistently, Christ offers himself as the true bread.
As Easter approaches, the journey intensifies. The cross stands on the horizon. Jesus’ forty days in the wilderness were not the end of the story. He emerged proclaiming good news. Beyond Good Friday lies the dawn of resurrection. The desert is not permanent; it prepares us for life.
Some of you may feel as if you’ve been in a desert longer than forty days. Grief, illness, uncertainty, or personal struggle can make the landscape feel barren and unyielding. The wisdom of the desert saints reminds us that God is not absent in such places. Often, he is most deeply at work there. The invitation is for us to lean into him.
A simple teaching of the Desert Fathers and Mothers was this: remain where you are with God. Don’t flee too quickly from discomfort. Stay. Pray. Let God meet you in the very place you would rather escape.
We’re discovering that when we linger in Scripture, when we allow silence to stretch us, when we resist the urge to fill every moment with noise, the desert is not empty after all. It is inhabited by the living God.
The journey through the wilderness might be demanding. But it is also holy ground.
Gracious Lord,
In these remaining weeks of Lent, draw us more deeply into the heart of your Son.
Meet us in the barren and untamed places of our faith,
and make them holy ground by your presence.
When Easter dawns, raise us with renewed hope –
our hearts unburdened,
our vision clearer,
our lives awakened anew
by the power of the risen Christ.
Amen.
Pastor Mark Whitfield
St Pauls Otautahi Christchurch
March 2026
