Way Of The Desert

Product Description

In the Bible the desert is a place of punishment & discipline but also of blessing & loves reawakening. Both Jesus & the people of Israel before him spent time in the desert learning what it meant to be chosen & loved & holy. Yet while the people of the Exodus frequently got it wrong providing some cautionary tales for us to learn from Jesus himself constantly got it right offering a perfect model for us to follow. In The Way of the Desert Andrew Watson takes us on a Lenten journey from Ash Wednesday to Easter Day from the parting of the Red Sea to Israels entry into the promised l&. Combining these Old Testament scriptures with insight from the Gospels he reveals the continuing relevance of the exodus story to all who would seek to follow Christ. The author writes: It became the must-have accessory among Christian young people in the 1990s: a rubber wristband cryptically inscribed with the letters WWJD. A hundred years earlier Charles Sheldon American pastor & Christian Socialist had written a book entitled What Would Jesus Do? & the initials on the wristbands picked up just the same question. Whatever situations we face in life
- whatever decisions we are called upon to make
- the issue of WWJD is vital for the Christian disciple. Jesus call after all is to follow me". As a church leader at the time when WWJD wristbands were selling by the truckload I was therefore positive about this simple summons to Christian thinking & discipleship. My only reservation was that WWJD seemed to beg a prior question & one on which our young people appeared increasingly hazy namely " What Did Jesus Do?" Short of marketing my own range of WDJD wristbands there were limited means to get my message across though I mentioned it in the odd sermon at the time. But the danger of asking speculative questions about Jesus without rooting them clearly in the Jesus of the Gospels is a real one. How easy to construct a Jesus of my own making a pocket Jesus (or idol to use the Bibles own term) who conveniently seems to share my views on politics religion money & relationships without making me feel uncomfortable or challenged at all! As we approach Lent the question " What did Jesus do?" yields some interesting answers for the 40 days of Lent reflect the period that Jesus spent in the wilderness following his baptism & before the start of his public ministry. Its a period briefly mentioned by the Gospel writer Mark (1:12
- 13) & described in greater detail by fellow evangelists Matthew (4:1
- 11) & Luke (4:1
- 13). So what did Jesus do in what we could call the first Lent?"