Sheryl Brady - Wilderness Moments

On your way down to your seat, you might encounter someone telling you about wilderness moments. Yes, they are real, and we all experience them. In our text, we see Jesus, and in the third chapter, he is standing at the back of a crowd, watching the premier preacher of his generation, whose name was John the Baptist. John and Jesus were actually cousins, and Elizabeth was John’s mother. She had been carrying him in her womb for approximately six months, and she had just begun to feel him move inside of her. Every mother expecting a child knows that by the time you hit six months, you should have already felt something happening inside. One day, a knock at her door would change everything. You never know how just one day and one knock at your door can change your life forever. Mary had come to Elizabeth’s house to tell her that she was carrying not just a baby—which would have been exciting by itself—but that she was carrying the Messiah. When Elizabeth heard the news, the Bible tells us that John began to leap inside of her womb. I know she was probably a little disoriented because, number one, her child was carrying the Messiah, and number two, her baby had just begun to move. Most people will tell you that the reason John leaped at Mary’s salutation was that somehow, in his spirit, he knew he had met someone he was ordained to meet. He knew, somehow, when he heard about the Messiah, something in him said his purpose had come alive. The relationship they had was purpose-driven. I want to say to someone this morning: don’t ever underestimate the moment when you meet someone that causes something inside of you to leap. Do you know what I’m talking about? When you meet someone and say, «God, I don’t understand this, and I don’t know what will come of it, but I know that there’s some kind of connection that’s deeper than what the eyes can see.» John was inside his mother’s womb, jumping up and down, saying, «Mom, that’s the guy! He’s the one! I am his forerunner; he is the reason I am coming into the earth.» So whatever you do, don’t underestimate when you find yourself connected and something is leaping inside of you, because that might just be the absolute purpose for which you were born. You may not know how it will work out, how you will connect, or what you will do together, but you do know that this is no ordinary relationship. Look at someone and tell them there’s something different about this. Look at someone else and say, «Look for the leap.» In other words, stop pursuing relationships where there is nothing leaping inside of you; you will get tired, exhausted, and end up spending your purpose in a place where you have no business investing it all because you rushed without waiting for the leap. So touch someone again and tell them, «Wait for the leap.» We did not have the privilege of watching every step along the journey that these two took. We don’t know every detail, but we do know that when they came together, they would change the world forever. There are some connections in life that, when you hook up with them, everything changes. John was the man whose appearance marked the end of the old dispensation and the emergence of the new. He held the Old Testament in one hand and the New Testament in the other. John was a very strange and peculiar kind of God. He was a unique preacher with one message that he preached everywhere he went, and if people grew tired of hearing it, he didn’t care; he was on assignment. He completely defied the religious community of his day. In other words, John was the preacher who danced to the beat of a different drum. He chose to eat wild locusts and honey, wore camel’s hair, and instead of taking his ministry into the limelight, he took it into the wilderness. He refused all titles, perks of ministry, cliques, clubs, and culture. He said, «Okay, this is your culture, but this is not my culture. I am here to obey God.» He completely refused to be a priest like his father and chose simply to be called a voice crying in the wilderness. If a title ever fit anyone, that title really fit John, because he would cry until Israel left the city and came into the wilderness to hear him.