8 Hidden Tests God Uses to Prepare You for Your Calling

• Think of Moses, a prince in Egypt, learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians, mighty in words and deeds. But God could not use the prince of Egypt to deliver Israel. That man was clothed in an identity of power and prestige that was utterly alien to the heart of a shepherd God. So where did God take him? To the backside of the desert.
• For 40 years, the man who was once a somebody became a nobody, tending another man’s sheep in a barren land. What was God doing? He was dismantling the Egyptian in Moses to reveal the deliverer. In the silence of that wilderness, the flaming bush of God’s presence could be seen. In the hustle of the palace, it would have been just another curiosity.
• In the solitude, it became a lifealtering, history-shaping encounter. God had to get him alone to get him clean, to get him quiet enough to listen. This is the first and most profound test, the test of isolation for revelation. He is testing to see what or who your true source is. When the committees aren’t meeting about your life, when the phone isn’t ringing with invitations, when you are no longer introduced with your former accolades.
• Who are you? And more importantly, who’s are you? Will you trust the hand that led you into the loneliness to be enough for you in the loneliness? In this wilderness, he begins to reveal things to you that the noise of your former life would have drowned out. He reveals the depth of your own heart, not to condemn you, but to cleanse you.
• You see pockets of pride you called confidence. You see strands of self-reliance you called capability. You see a hunger for approval, you called ministry. The wilderness has a way of mirroring your soul back to you. And it is a severe mercy. It is here he reveals himself to you in new ways. Not as the God of the harvest festival, but as the god of the daily manner.