"All of my life, in every season, You are still God. I have a reason to sing; I have a reason to worship. I Will bring praise."
Each of us has been through the highs and lows of life. We experience the mountaintop with God, we feel his blessings and Spirit flowing through our lives and then we go through periods of time where it feels like God is ignoring us or has forgotten us: the desert experience.
How easy is it to worship and praise God on the mountaintop? How many of us remember to committing our spirits to praising and worshiping when we arrive in the desert?
One of my favorite Biblical accounts of God's power is the wandering story of Elijah. In 1 Kings 17-19, God leads Elijah on a wandering journey, both a physical and faith journey.
God speaks through Elijah, whom the Bible calls a man "just like us," and says that will not be rain for three years. Imagine receiving such a powerful word of God that you can tangibly see coming to fruition right in front of you! I can only imagine the mountaintop experience that Elijah was having as God led him into a ravine to be served by ravens who brought him meat and bread morning and night.
But then, everything changed. The ravens stopped coming and the brook of water that he'd been drinking from dried up! I imagine there was some confusion on Elijah's part as he wondered what God was doing, why He had led him into the wilderness just to have the food and water stop coming.
The the wandering begins. God leads him to the house of a widow and her son who have no food and who about to die. Elijah blesses their food and the three live that way for a while, with their food being supplied by God's providence. But then the boy gets sick and dies and the woman turns on Elijah! Elijah cries out to God and heals the boy, but it is once again a confusing situation, a far cry from the mountaintop experience.
From there, God leads Elijah to another mountaintop experience: the conflict with the prophets of Baal, where Elijah calls down the fire of God to prove God's might and power. An amazing experience, where God's spirit again flows directly through Elijah in an obvious and tangible way! But Elijah is immediately led back into the desert, where he is downtrodden. He thinks he is the last servant of God in the land.God has to remind him that He has bigger plans than what Elijah can see.
All that to say this: we will go from highs to lows, from seeing God move powerfully in our lives to not seeing God's action in our lives at all. But we still must praise God.
We must set our hearts and minds to say "In every season, He is still God, so I will praise Him." Even in the desert, we must still praise God.
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