Highlight: Remaining teachable in the wilderness

“The deepest lessons and the most significant lessons you don’t learn in prosperity, you only learn them in difficulty and in the wilderness.”

Steve Farrar shares wisdom and encouragement for remaining teachable in the midst of uncertainty.

Sometimes we are plucked out of our comfortable lives and placed into a season of wilderness. Steve reminds us that valuable lessons can be learned during this time.

“There are times I have found that when God quite literally will put us into a corner, He’ll paint us into a corner, and the reason that He does that is He wants to teach us lessons that you don’t learn when life is going along well.”

“There are times God takes us back to school because He’s got something He wants to do in our lives, specifically. It’s usually taught through suffering; through the wilderness, through a tight spot.”

We are not beyond his reach when walking through the wilderness. God is ruler over the seasons of blessings as well as the seasons of adversity.

“Consider what God has done: Who can straighten what he has made crooked?
When times are good, be happy; but when times are bad, consider this: God has made the one as well as the other.
Therefore, no one can discover anything about their future.” Ecclesiastes 7:13-14,

God is working in us to bring us closer to Him and to bring about about His glory.

“Everything in my life; the good, the bad, the hard, the disappointment, the victories, the grief, the thrills of answered prayer; all of those things ordained by God and it’s all designed to take me from spiritual death to spiritual birth.”

He may be calling you to higher heights and deeper depths.

“Once I’m born again now He wants me to grow; He uses wilderness to take us from immaturity to maturity and His eye is on all of it.”

Ecclesiastes 3 reveals there is a time and season for every purpose under heaven; this includes the days in the wilderness.

“The seasons in the wilderness they have a beginning, they have a middle and they have an end. We are not always in the wilderness, but there are lessons to be learned.”

When we find ourselves in the wilderness, we are encouraged to identify the lessons God is trying to teach us. Steve offers advice on how to pray,

“When I’m in the wilderness my prayer is, ‘Lord, Don’t let me miss these lessons. What are you trying to say? Give me a teachable spirit. I don’t want to go to summer school in this class, I want to pass this before it’s time. So Lord, make it real clear, give me a teachable heart because you’re doing this for my good.”


Steve Farrar is the founder and chairman of Men’s Leadership Ministries and author of over fifteen books, including the bestselling book , and  .

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