So you know for a young man the key question is not well where's a good looking girl? Listen, there's heaps of them around. The big question you can answer is what kind of man will I be? Will I be the kind of man that a good girl, a Christian, a believer would really want to follow or will I be some unreliable person? I need to work on myself. If you work on yourself you'll be surprised how quickly God will bring someone into your life. Okay, in Deuteronomy 8, Verses 2 and 3, it says Moses is reminding them; he's saying remember the way the Lord your God led you all the way through the wilderness and allowed you, he humbled you, he allowed you to suffer hunger and go through all kinds of different things and as a consequence of that the purpose of that was that He might know you. See, read it there - I'll read it. So He humbled you and allowed you to hunger, and fed you with manna which you didn't know nor fathers know, that He might make you to know man shall not live by bread alone; but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of the Lord.
So God led them. Now you understand the heart of God. God has got a people that have been in bondage. That's the picture of us when we're unsaved before we come to Christ. Then God has got promises, promises about marriage, about family, about finances, about a future, about a destiny, but how does God get them from one to the other? He takes them through a period or an experience called a wilderness experience. So it was God's idea that the wilderness would last them about 10 days. They made it last 40 years. How did they make it last 40 years? Well they just refused to face what they needed to face and grow and change. God was trying to get rid of the victim mentality, this poor me, I can't do anything and someone come through for me, and to raise up a generation who had faith and courage, who would go and make things happen. So He allowed them to go through some experiences which were painful - so they went out in the desert, after a little while there was no water. Then the water they did find was a bit bitter, so what did they do? They had an opportunity to grow.
Did they grow? No, they didn't, they blew it, just complained. Then He took them another place, they got no food. What did they do; did they have an opportunity there to grow? Yes, they did. Did they grow? No, they didn't, they just complained and this went on so long in the end they demonstrated they were unable to enter into all that God had for them. Now begin to think of that in your personal life, of God having many things He wants you to have and to enter an experience, but He's allowing you to walk through a few experiences to help you come to grips with your inner world and change. If you continue to resist changing and doubt that God is good and God can bring you through and what God says, what happens is you delay your life actually ever progressing and accomplishing all God wants. That's why many Christians after years have accomplished little or nothing. They're still in the same place they were years ago.
As a church it's the same. Corporately God wants us to move through difficulties, pressures, stresses, at times opposition, in order that we grow as a corporate body because He has many things in this city, our nation and beyond. So whatever level we look at it God still always does not change how He operates; He allows us to go through some difficulties in order that faith might grow, believing God. In the midst of it what happens is, it says He humbled them that He might know what was in them. Now does that mean God doesn't know what's in you? Not at all. He knows exactly what's in you. If you've got a deep-seated fear He knows it's in there. If you've got a deep-seated grief or bitterness or you're twisted up inside God knows it's there. The problem is you don't. We just blunder through life causing problems all around us, blindly unaware of what's going and just praising God. Isn't that right? You've seen heaps of people like that see?