Scripture’s Answer to Our Waywardness and Wandering

Delight and Devotion to the Father

Waywardness and wandering. Since the day Adam wandered from God’s word and will and way in the garden of Eden, eating from the forbidden tree, we have been a race prone to wander. Wandering reflects waywardness; it is a manifestation of our human condition in Adam. As such, it is another way of describing our sinful tendencies. We wander instead of worshiping because we are wayward. We leave the God we claim to love and instead cleave to the sin we claim to hate. Even as the godly offspring of the woman, we are not immune from this waywardness:

Prone to wander, Lord I feel it,
prone to leave the God I love.¹

Scripture’s answer to our waywardness and wandering is not, in the first place, to work our way out of it. It does involve work. It involves watchfulness and wariness (1 Cor. 16:13; 1 Pet. 5:8); it involves sobriety and sanctification (1 Thess. 4:3; Heb. 12:14; 1 Pet. 4:7); it involves working out one’s salvation with fear and trembling (Phil. 2:12–13). But that work first begins with returning to the one who worked it out for us—Jesus Christ, the righteous pilgrim and faithful worshiper. Hebrews 4:15 tells us, “For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin.” Jesus sympathizes with our weaknesses because he has been tempted (tested) as we are in every respect. As one born of a woman, born under the law and placed in a life context of suffering, Jesus’s commitment and obedience to his Father is tested just as ours is. His spirituality is put under scrutiny. The wilderness temptations provide a focused, intensified example. As with Israel before him, Jesus is taken into the wilderness to see what is in his heart, to see if he loves God with heart and soul and mind and strength (Matt. 4:1; cf. Deut. 8:2). Adam failed in this respect; so too did Israel, so too did David and Solomon, and so too did every king after them. Each of them a “son of God” in his own way—Adam as the primal son (Luke 3:38), Israel as the national son (Ex. 4:22–23), David and Solomon as royal sons (Ps. 2:7; 2 Sam. 7:14); each of them placed under God’s law and tested to see what was in his heart; and each of them revealed as wayward and wandering. But not so with Jesus, the final Son of God. Faced by the same ancient serpent, the devil himself, Jesus stands resolute in his devotion to God and in his obedience to God’s word and will and way. He refuses to bow to the devil’s temptations; instead, he feeds on the word of God to sustain his life (Deut. 8:3); he trusts God’s presence to protect his life (Ps. 91:11–13); and he worships God only (Deut. 6:13), so that he may take the long road to suffering at the cross and then receive the kingdoms of the world. His heart attitude is one of delight and devotion to his Father and his word and will and way. As the writer of Hebrews states,

Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing

Jonathan Gibson

Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing offers a 31-day liturgical guide rooted in the Psalms, providing content, structure, and rhythms that center hearts on praising and honoring our God.

When Christ came into the world, he said,

“Sacrifices and offerings you have not desired,
but a body have you prepared for me;
in burnt offerings and sin offerings
you have taken no pleasure.
Then I said, ‘Behold, I have come to do your will,
O God,
as it is written of me in the scroll of the book.’ ” (Heb. 10:5–7; cf. Ps. 40:7–8)

Among the godly offspring of the woman, there is finally a worshiper who is not wayward and therefore does not wander.

As he sings the Psalms, Jesus prays in his heart,

Search me, O God, and know my heart!
Try me and know my thoughts!
And see if there be any grievous way in me,
and lead me in the way everlasting! (Ps. 139:23–24)

And his Father replies, “I have searched him and known his heart; I have tried him and known his thoughts—there is no grievous way in him; he has walked in the way everlasting. Behold, this is my beloved Son in whom is all my delight” (cf. Matt. 3:17; 17:5). Personally, perfectly, and perpetually (throughout the whole of his life), Jesus does what Adam and Israel and David and Solomon were supposed to do under the law but never did. He keeps God’s law entirely and exactly, offering up the whole of his earthly life as an act of pure worship to his Father. Jesus achieves what the “sons of God” before him failed to achieve, and because of that, we who are now united to him by faith may enjoy a perfect, righteous standing before God the Father. The worship we now render is acceptable to a holy God because it is offered in and through the perfect worshiper, Jesus himself.

Practically, this involved Jesus being tested in his own discipline to read and meditate on Scripture and persevere in prayer. Amid the busyness of daily life, with its distractions and pressures, as well as its exigencies, Jesus had to set aside time to meditate on Scripture and pray to his Father (Mark 1:35; cf. Isa. 50:4). In more intense moments of testing, Jesus had to actively strive to meditate on God’s word and trust what it said: During his temptations in the wilderness, he was tempted to wander from God’s word in the middle of spiritual warfare with the devil—yet he remained resolute in his devotion to Scripture (Matt. 4:1–11). In the garden of Gethsemane, he felt the weakness of the flesh in the middle of great spiritual turmoil as he wrestled with having to fulfill his Father’s will—yet he remained faithful in prayer (Matt. 26:40–42). Throughout his life, Jesus showed himself to be a disciplined student of Scripture and a committed pray-er of prayers. But it did not come automatically; it took desire and effort and striving on his part. In the humdrum of daily life and the intensity of spiritual warfare, Jesus learned through discipline what it took to maintain a close walk with God. In this respect, he was tested just as we are—yet without sin. And that makes for good news, because we have a high priest in heaven who can sympathize with us in our weaknesses, even with respect to our personal walk with God. More than that, he is waiting to provide mercy and grace to help us in our time of need as we walk that walk (Heb. 4:16).

But what of our ongoing waywardness and wandering? Scripture reveals that the problem of wayward and wandering saints continues in the New Testament: After spending over three years with him on a nearly daily basis, Peter denies Jesus three times, claiming that he does not even know him (Matt. 26:69–75). Peter later has a wobble over how a person is justified before God, needing to be corrected by Paul (Gal. 2:11–14). Thomas doubts whether Jesus is alive (John 20:24–29), while Mark behaves in such a way that makes him appear, at least to Paul, as if he is no longer useful in Christian ministry (Acts 15:36–39). These failures, faults, and moments of faithlessness are common to all Christians. Indeed, Paul reminds us that the Spirit and the flesh war within us: “For the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh, for these are opposed to each other, to keep you from doing the things you want to do” (Gal. 5:17). And often, as Paul confesses elsewhere, the flesh gets the better of us:

For I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. . . . For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh. For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing. (Rom. 7:15, 18–19)

The worship we now render is acceptable to a holy God because it is offered in and through the perfect worshiper, Jesus himself.

This internal struggle, alongside the lure of the world and the enticements of the devil, presupposes the problem of waywardness and wandering, providing the context for the warning passages of the New Testament. Jesus warns us to “watch and pray” so that we do not fall into temptation, because the spirit may be willing, but the flesh is weak (Matt. 26:40–43). Paul encourages us to “keep alert” to the end with all perseverance (Eph. 6:18), to “set [our] minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth” (Col. 3:2), not to sleep but to “keep awake and be sober” (1 Thess. 5:6), and to “look carefully” how we walk (Eph. 5:15). The writer to the Hebrews warns us of the deceitfulness of sin and the danger of not persevering to the end (Heb. 3:13); instead, he encourages us to persevere, so that, having done the will of God, we may receive what God has promised (Heb. 10:36). This is where our responsibility comes in, where our work begins. Instead of being wayward and wandering, we are to be wary and watchful (1 Cor. 16:13; 1 Pet. 5:8); we are to struggle against the world, the flesh, and the devil (Eph. 6:10–12), and we are to pursue “holiness without which no one will see the Lord” (Heb. 12:14). In short, united to Jesus by faith, we are to strive for a closer walk with God, to “work out [our] own salvation with fear and trembling” (Phil. 2:12). Every Christian committed to this prays with William Cowper:

O for a closer walk with God,
a calm and heav’nly frame,
a light to shine upon the road
that leads me to the Lamb!²

Every Christian experiences that time in his life when his “walk with the Lord” becomes stale and dry, when he feels himself wandering from God due to the waywardness of his heart. Whether due to a lack of discipline or direction, at some point we feel our hearts grow cold in prayer and our desire to read God’s word begins to wane. William Cowper captures the experience well in the second stanza of the hymn just quoted:

Where is the blessedness I knew
when first I sought the Lord?
Where is the soul refreshing view
of Jesus and His Word?³

When we experience this, it is easy to become discouraged, especially if we do not know where to look for help. But help is at hand. Help is available from our Savior in heaven, who walked the path before us, demonstrating himself to be the perfect, devoted worshiper; he was devoted to God in daily worship through Scripture reading and prayer. Help is also available from saints on earth, who have walked the spiritual pilgrimage before us and have left us aids for our own spiritual journey, not least in their liturgies and prayers. Using the best of these elements from the Christian heritage of personal and corporate worship, we may render to God daily worship in spirit and truth through faith in his Son, Jesus Christ. So as we open Scripture each day, seeking that closer walk with God, we sing (and pray) with Robert Robinson:

Come, thou Fount of every blessing;
tune my heart to sing thy grace;
streams of mercy, never ceasing,
call for songs of loudest praise.⁴

Notes:

Robert Robinson, “Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing” (1758), https://hymnary.org/.
William Cowper, “Walking with God” (1772), https://hymnary.org/.
Cowper, “Walking with God.”
Robinson, “Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing.”

This article is adapted from Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing: A Liturgy for Daily Worship with the Psalms by Jonathan Gibson.

Jonathan Gibson (PhD, University of Cambridge) is Minister of Tenth Presbyterian Church, Philadelphia, and President's Professor of Biblical and Systematic Theology Studies at Westminster Theological Seminary. He is a coeditor of and contributor to From Heaven He Came and Sought Her and author of Be Thou My Vision: A Liturgy for Daily Worship. Jonny and his wife, Jackie, have four children.

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