22 minute read

Dryness in Our Christian Life

By Lance Lambert

Introduction: Honest Self-Assessment

Now, I want you to be very, very honest. It's not always easy to be honest, and it's certainly more difficult to be honest with those that we know. In other words, when we are in the company of people who tend to know us a little more, it is sometimes harder to be honest.

How many of you feel like dead dry sticks? Would you put your hand up? Dead dry sticks—please be honest. Now put your hand down. Are there any here who feel like living trees full of sap?

Well, what happened to those of you who didn't put your hands up? Do you just feel ordinary? I am very sorry to say that there is no such thing as being ordinary in the Christian life. Now, what I am going to speak about this morning is dead dry sticks, because this is precisely what the Lord uses.

Now, it is a paradox. I asked the other question deliberately, because there is in another part of the Word talk about being like a tree planted by the waters, which bringeth forth its fruit in its season. And there is a great deal of talk about that. It speaks, for instance, of Joseph being a fruitful bough that went over the wall. But there is a paradox, as always, in Christian experience and spiritual experience, and there is this other side.

The Rod in Moses' Hand: Exodus 4

I want you to turn to Exodus 4. Now, normally the rod that was in Moses' hand is taken—quite rightly and correctly—as a type of the name of Jesus. But I want you this morning to see it as a picture of yourself and myself. Because in a very real sense, we have been named with the name of the Lord. That is exactly what it means. We have been incorporated in Christ; we have been, if you like, placed within the hand of God. Our life is hid with Christ in God.

The first thing I want you to note is Exodus 4:2–4:

Then, if you will, just look at verse 17:

The Nature of the Dead Dry Stick

Now, the first thing I want to say about this dead dry stick is that it is a stick which has lived its life and is finished. It is dead. It is a dead dry stick. This was not some living bough of a tree or branch of a bush which Moses was waving around. This was something which was dead.

And you know, one of the hardest things for us Christians to really go through with is the discipline of the Lord to bring us to the place where we are dead dry sticks. We do not like it. Forty years in the desert—the Lord dealt with Moses to get him to the place where he was just like this rod, a dead dry stick.

Now, there is not a single believer who takes joyfully to that discipline, those long drawn-out years of just being on the shelf, seemingly going through a kind of humdrum routine. But you know, time is the essential element in bringing us to death.

Oh, the Lord—the time element is absolutely essential. He will put us into jobs; He will put us up against people; He will make us share homes with people. He will do all kinds of things, and sometimes He will take a decade or two in our lives to bring us to this. And all the time we are trying to escape. Oh, we do try to escape from it. If there is one thing we would like to get out of, it is being a dead dry stick. To be a tree planted by the waters—that is something wonderful. To bring forth fruit in its season—that is marvellous. But that is one side of things. To be a dead dry stick, that is not anything we like.

It is the time element. David had exactly the same experience. When the Lord was going to bring David to the throne, He allowed him to have those twenty years or so, hounded in the wilderness from pillar to pillar, till all thought of the throne died within him. And even when he could have taken it by force—when Saul once or twice came into his hands and he could have taken the throne—he would not do it. The same with Moses. When the Lord finally appears to Moses after this long discipline, Moses has altogether forgotten about serving the Lord in this way, and he said, "I think You had better send someone else. I tend to stammer, Lord." And this is all the more remarkable, because this was the Moses who was the spokesman for the Hebrew people.

The Believer as a Sign

Divine Significance in Ordinary Lives

You and I are for signs. Now, perhaps I am pressing it too far, but that little rod was a sign. It was a picture. It was something through which God did sign after sign—He worked miracle after miracle after miracle. In itself, the stick was a sign, as you can see by the very fact that the Lord said to Moses, "Throw it down," and it became a serpent. "Pick it up by the tail," He said. And when Moses finally did so, it was a rod again in his hand.

Now, dear child of God, that is what you and I are. We are signs. In other words, let us put it this way: your life and my life is filled with spiritual significance. That is why the Lord is taking such a long time over us. He is not going to take any shortcuts. He is not going to do anything cheaply, shoddily, or superficially. He is out to fill our lives with divine significance for all eternity.

Now, there will be a day when people will marvel at Christ in you. They will not marvel at you, but they will marvel at Christ in you—the perfection of Christ in you, the moral beauty of Christ in you, the glory of Christ shining through you. And it has all been worked out down here. The capacity for glory has been worked out here in humdrum circumstances. Therefore, the more time the Lord takes with you, the deeper He goes, the more painful sometimes the experience—the greater the significance.

The Providence of God in All Circumstances

Nothing happens to the Christian by coincidence—nothing. You remember the story of Ruth? She "happed upon the field of Boaz," as the scripture reads. We know it was not any mere coincidence. It was the Spirit of God leading her, so that without her knowing it, she was touching her kinsman-redeemer and did not even know it. So it is in our lives. Every illness—and my dear friends, we can trust the Lord for healing, but remember that whatever comes to us, there is divine significance in it, whether it is to immediately heal us or whether it is to leave us. There is divine significance.

Our circumstances are not coincidental. Everything works together for good to those who love God and are called according to His purpose. So your job, your home, your circumstances, the situation in which you are bound—it is not a coincidence. Even where it has come about through mistake, the Lord is still behind it, as He was with Bathsheba, who was David's greatest and most terrible mistake, but who became the mother of both Nathan and Solomon—both of them in the Messianic line.

The Serpent Within: Dealing with the Self-Life

The Revelation of Self

When you have finally recognised that you are a dead dry stick—and it may take at least forty years, as it did with Moses—when you have finally got to that place, do you know what the Lord says to you about your life? He says, "Throw it down. Throw it down."

And waveringly you have got to the place, in a sense, where you feel you are of no use. You had such big ideas of yourself once. You were going to serve the Lord. You were always going to stand up and spout little words that everyone was going to say, "Oh, how marvellous." You were always going to give hymns, always leading in prayer. You were going to be at the forefront of the battle. You were going, probably, to go out as a great apostle in the finish. Tremendous ideas you had about yourself—absolutely to dust up the whole of Europe and half the rest of the world as well.

Tremendous ideas we often have of ourselves at the beginning. And they are not wrong; they are because we have a sense of purpose. It is not just ambition—it is a sense of purpose. We have a sense that we are in something tremendous, full of divine potentiality, and we are caught up in it. But there comes a time, when the Lord has disciplined us and the time element has played its part, when we feel quite worthless, dead and dry.

Faith as the Means of Mortification

Then the Lord says, "Take it up by the tail." Now, I do not know if there are amongst us any snake charmers or snake handlers, but I think all of you know—even those of you who greatly dislike snakes—that you never pick up a snake by the tail. You pick it up by its neck, just behind its head, never by the tail. Why? If you pick up a snake by its tail, it turns right round and strikes you.

Now, Moses had been forty years in the desert. He knew very well what this poisonous viper was. When the Lord said to him, "Pick it up by the tail," the Lord knew just what He was doing. It required faith. Moses had easily thrown it on the ground. Now the Lord said, "Pick it up by the tail." Moses fled from before it. And the Lord said, "Come back, Moses. Pick it up by the tail." Any man who has been forty years in the desert knows all about these poisonous types of snake. It was a tremendous thing to take it up by the tail.

This is what God does for us. When we realise we are a dead dry stick, we can start to become quite comfortable and complacent about it. "Well, I am nothing. I leave it to the youngsters who are still green. I am nothing. The Lord has dealt with me. I have not got any big ideas." The serpent is still there—all unaware. It is only when you throw it on the ground and really let go of it in any way that suddenly you see the serpent there, all out for itself. Once it was out for glory; now it is out for rest.

Authority Through Weakness: Exodus 14

Do you know that God's idea in getting you to be just a dead dry stick in His hand is that He might exercise His authority? He does not want to exercise His authority apart from you. He wants to exercise His authority in and through you. What a silly little thing this dead dry stick was—yet every single thing that happened in the wilderness was connected with the dead dry stick. Everything the Lord did was somehow or other connected with this little stick.

The Danger of Spiritual Elation

Here is another lesson for us all. Few of us are prepared to really exercise the authority which is in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, because we are waiting to feel something. God says, "You are altogether looking in the wrong quarter. I want you to be a dead dry stick—dead and dry. And then when you are like that, that is when My authority can be exercised. You are safe. You are absolutely safe."

It is when you are full of feelings that the enemy can push you and you overreach yourself. And if you look back in your experience, you will find that every time you have overreached yourself and got into trouble, it has been at a time of great spiritual blessing—not great spiritual pressure, but great spiritual blessing. Again and again, when we look back, we find the safe times have been the times of spiritual pressure. The unsafe periods have been the times of blessing. Because the enemy comes as it was floating in alongside the blessing—as he did in the great Welsh revival, and destroyed it—he just comes in alongside it.

Authority is connected with being like a dead dry stick. We are safe when we are in that position. Oh, what the Lord has to do to get us there. And you see, the whole point is that when the Lord has got us forty years in the backside of the desert and we are absolutely dead dry sticks, we do not feel like exercising authority. First the Lord has to get us to the place where we are dead and dry, and then He has got to get us to exercise faith—so that every time that dead dry stick was used to bring the Lord in an authoritative way, it was faith that was behind it. The just shall live by faith.

Perseverance in Intercession: Exodus 17

The Necessity of Perseverance

Here you have perseverance. Now again, of course, it is authority—but in this connection we have perseverance. Because before, Moses simply lifted up the rod and immediately the waters parted; they went over as on dry ground. But this time he went up and he had to keep his hand up the whole day, from sunrise to sunset. And in the end, Aaron and Hur had to come either side of him, and he sat on a stone with his arms propped up. And the battle went for the Lord's people.

Dead dry sticks! As those children of Israel went out to meet the armed might of Amalek, you could have said, "Dead dry sticks"—a great many of them erstwhile slaves, nothing at all, not trained in any military way. They were dead dry sticks. That was the secret. While the dead dry stick in the hand of Moses was lifted up to God, the battle went for the Lord.

Now, perseverance is an all-essential thing in the battle, and there are very few Christians who can persevere. We all like to see the Red Sea divided instantaneously. We like to see the ground open up and swallow up the rebels in an instant. We like things settled instantaneously. But when we lift up the rod and nothing happens instantaneously, we grow a little weary. That is why we must be dead dry sticks. Because if there is any life about us at all, we cannot wait.

Life from the Rock: Numbers 20

Isn't it interesting that evidently this old dead dry stick was always in the presence of the Lord? Whenever Moses uses it, he always takes it from before the presence of the Lord. This old dead dry stick, laid up before the Lord. It is better to be a dead dry stick laid up before the Lord than a flourishing plant somewhere else.

Death in Us, Life in Others

Now here you will see it is all to do with water out of a rock. Many of us are so anxious to have our thirst quenched, so anxious to be filled. I think sometimes we can get into a trap that the enemy very cleverly lays for us—so that without our understanding it, self-centredness has become the principle of our service.

This is water for others as well as myself. There is such a fine, but such a real difference between wanting my need met that I might meet others, and wanting my need met. I am perfectly sure that the reason the Lord has to hold back with many of us in quickly meeting our needs is because there is the selfish principle in it.

And that is really the difference between spiritual childhood, infancy, adolescence, and spiritual maturity. When for the first time we start to say, "What is He getting out of my life? What is He getting out of my circumstances? What are others getting out of it?"—rather than, "I am getting nothing out of it."

There is that which scattereth, and yet increaseth. There is that which withholdeth more than is meet, and it tendeth to poverty. So the more you hold on to your dear self, the more poverty-stricken you will become. And the more you scatter what you have of the Lord and share it, the more it will increase. You shall receive what you have given, pressed down, shaken together, and running over. What a measure.

Resurrection Life: Numbers 17

We will end with one other little point, in Numbers 17:2. I shall have to leave you to read this chapter about Aaron's rod that budded. Now, someone says, "Ah, now then—the preacher is wrong. You see, here is the story of a rod that had got life in it." Quite right. But I want to point out to you that it was a dead dry stick all the way until a crisis came. And the crisis was over who is the servant of the Lord. When the great crisis came, then the Lord made the dead dry stick blossom.

In fact, it was quite extraordinary. It went through all the seasons in one night. Spring, summer and autumn, all in one night, the whole lot. It budded, it blossomed, it leafed, and it fruited. And when they went into the house of the Lord, there were the sticks laid up before the Lord—but Aaron's rod had budded. And do you know what the Lord said about it? He said, "Put it in the Ark of the Covenant, along with the tables of stone which are called in scripture 'the testimony.' Put it in with the testimony—forever." The old dead dry stick in the Ark of the Covenant.

Now, what does that speak to us about? It speaks to us about resurrection. That is all. Why worry about being a dead dry stick? You have got resurrection there. You have got resurrection. When God wants to bring the resurrection out powerfully, He can do it in an instant. Rather be a dead dry stick like that than to have put in some potted azalea which wilted overnight.

It is a dead dry stick, laid up before the Lord—dead and dry. But suddenly there is divine life in it. Resurrection. Oh, what God can do! You see, God has got all these resources absolutely at His fingertips. All He requires is a dead dry stick, and faith—absolute faith. And do not hit back, do not fight. Never fight. That is why you must be a dead dry stick. When others say, "Hmm, who does he think he is? Who does she think she is?"—do not get upset. Be a dead dry stick laid up in the house of the Lord. That is all.

Always add that on. Do not just say, "I am dead and dry." Say, "I am a dead dry stick, by the grace of God, laid up in the house of the Lord." And it is by the grace of God. And when the Lord wants to—if there is a challenge to what He has done—He can call resources into play which can forever settle the issue. So do not fear.

Closing Prayer

And now, dear Lord, Thou knowest all about us—every one of us. Thou knowest our hearts, Lord, before Thee. O Lord, how we pray that we might be those that Thou canst use. Now, Lord, Thou knowest all the dangers of this being disciplined in the desert. Thou knowest the dangers, Lord, of just becoming dead and dry, even though it is under Thy hand—the dangers of unbelief, of complacency, of laxity.

O Father, we pray together that we might be a people who, though dead and dry in themselves, are full of faith, looking away from ourselves and unto Thee, Lord, so that we might know what it is to exercise the authority which is ours, to persevere, Lord, and to stand with Thee in all the victory that is Thine; to know life out of the rock for others as well as ourselves, and to know that resurrection life of Thine whenever we need it.

And we ask it all in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

About Lance Lambert

Lance Lambert was one of the most distinguished Bible scholars and speakers in Israel in our day. He had an itinerant teaching ministry worldwide.

Born in 1931, Lance grew up in Richmond, Surrey and came to know the Lord at twelve years of age. In the early 1950's Lance served in the Royal Air Force in Egypt and later fellowshipped with the assembly at Halford House Christian Fellowship in Richmond, England.

Later in life, Lance discovered his Jewish ancestry—his father and many members of his family had died in the Holocaust. This discovery led him to become an Israeli citizen in 1980, and he made his home next to the Old City of Jerusalem.

Lance became noted for his eschatological views, which placed him in the tradition of Watchman Nee and T. Austin-Sparks. From his base in Israel, he produced a widely appreciated quarterly audio recording called the Middle East Update, which gave his unique perspective on current events in the Middle East in the light of God's Word. He wrote numerous books and was the presenter of the video production, Jerusalem, the Covenant City.