Spiritual Maturity and the Wilderness Seasons of Your Faith

From the sermon preached on June 7, 2026

Spiritual maturity rarely looks like what we expect. In John 6, Jesus deliberately engineers a moment of deficit for his disciples, not to abandon them, but to form them into people whose hearts instinctively reach for his presence rather than for human solutions. Trusting Jesus, Pastor John Starke argued, is what Jesus is always working to produce in us, and he uses wilderness seasons to get us there.

The sermon opens not with John 6 but with the book of Exodus, and for good reason. When God led the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt, he did not take them on the shortest route to the promised land. He led them the long way: through the desert, through hunger and thirst, through the slow erosion of any confidence in their own resources. The Old Testament is direct about why. God took them the longer way to test them. Not a pass-fail test, but the kind of pressure you put gold through (exposure that reveals what is actually there).

What the wilderness exposed was uncomfortable: it is easier to take a person out of slavery than it is to take the slavery out of the person. The Israelites needed to be formed. They needed to learn that the Lord was both their tester and their provider, that his presence was the defining variable in every circumstance they would face. The wilderness seasons with God were not a punishment. They were the curriculum.

This is the frame Pastor John Starke brought to John chapter 6. Jesus feeds over five thousand people with five barley loaves and two fish (one of his most famous signs). But the miracle is set deliberately at Passover, which sends the imagination back to the Exodus story. Jesus is not just feeding people. He is doing what the Lord did in the wilderness: providing miraculously, yes, but also testing the hearts of his followers to show them what they most need to see about themselves.

Ask yourself: in moments of deficit, where does your heart instinctively go? That is the question Jesus was asking Philip. Take one step toward that honest self-examination today (sit quietly for five minutes and notice what you reach for first when things feel out of your control).

The second movement in the passage is what Pastor John Starke called a reveal of identity. Jesus turns to Philip, a disciple who knows the local area well, and asks where they can buy bread to feed the crowd. The text is explicit: Jesus asked this to test him, because he already knew what he was going to do. Philip does the accounting. Two hundred denarii (roughly several months of wages) would not be enough to give everyone even a small amount. Andrew finds a boy with five loaves and two fish, then adds the obvious: but what is that for so many people?

The commentator Pastor John Starke cited put it plainly: Philip gets an F, Andrew gets a C. For both of them, the size of the human problem weighed heavier in their imagination than the presence of Jesus. This is the failure that testing faith is designed to surface. It is not cruelty. It is diagnosis. Jesus had already performed three signs in front of these disciples: water turned to wine at Cana, healing of an official's dying son, restoration of a man paralyzed for thirty-eight years. Each time, Jesus brought abundance out of deficit. Each time, the disciples were meant to see: this is who Jesus is. His presence changes the equation.

The deeper point of this reveal is Christological. In Numbers 11, Moses cried out anxiously to the Lord: "Where am I to get meat for all this people?" Jesus asks the same question of Philip (not anxiously, but knowingly). Moses pointed to the Lord as the faithful provider. Jesus is pointing to himself. He is not simply another Moses. He is the one Moses was praying to in the wilderness. The Lord who tested and provided in the Exodus story is now standing in front of his disciples, testing and providing still.

Testing faith, understood this way, is an act of pastoral love. Jesus wants his character and power to inform your imagination more than your circumstances do. One honest practice: the next time you face a moment of genuine deficit, pause before problem-solving and ask, "What does the presence of Jesus mean for this?"

The third and most challenging movement in the passage is what Pastor John Starke called a removal of presence. After the miracle, the crowd makes a move that seems, on the surface, entirely reasonable. They declare Jesus the long-awaited prophet and attempt to seize him by force to make him king. Jesus withdraws.

Why does Jesus reject the crown? Pastor John Starke pointed to the parallels with Jesus's own temptation in the wilderness (Satan's offer of bread, spectacle, and authority over the nations). Each temptation was a shortcut to glory that bypassed the cross. Jesus knew that true exaltation comes only through humiliation first. The cross before the crown. Suffering before success. And if Jesus walked that path, his followers are called to walk it too. "If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me," Jesus said in Matthew 16. The crowd wanted his power without his path.

This is where the sermon turned deeply pastoral. Pastor John Starke drew on the sixteenth-century mystic St. John of the Cross and his concept of the "dark night of the soul." He described the early seasons of spiritual life as a mother nursing an infant: the faith (the felt sense of God's presence, the emotional satisfaction of worship) is warm, immediate, and real. Every word of Scripture seems to burn. These early consolations are genuine gifts. But a mother's goal was never to keep the child an infant. At some point she sets the child down (not because she loves him less, but because she is loving him forward toward a more mature form of nourishment).

Spiritual maturity, in this vision, looks like a weaned child resting in its mother's lap (calm, not panicking, trusting that food is coming even without the urgent feeling of hunger being instantly met). Psalm 131 gives the image: "Surely I have calmed and quieted my soul like a weaned child with its mother; like a weaned child is my soul within me." Spiritual maturity does not mean the end of need. It means a deeper confidence in the one who meets it. Jesus withdraws his felt presence not as punishment, but as the beginning of a more adult relationship. The season of dryness is not the end of the story. It is the middle of the formation; he is not falling apart even when everything around you feels like it is.

One honest practice for this season: read Psalm 131 slowly, once in the morning. Let its three verses be a reminder that waiting on the Lord is not spiritual failure (it is the mark of a soul that is growing).

John 6:1-15 is the hinge on which this entire theological argument turns. Jesus's feeding of the five thousand is the fourth sign in the Gospel of John, and like every sign, it points beyond itself. It points to the one who provided manna in the wilderness (forming his people through deficit while remaining faithful to supply what they truly need). It points to a Jesus who is not simply a new teacher or a better Moses, but the Lord himself (standing among his people, knowing what he will do before they can even ask).

New York has a way of forcing the question that Jesus asked Philip: where are you going to get what you need? Whether you are carrying that question through the Upper East Side or East Harlem, across Morningside Heights or Washington Heights, the weight of deficit, pressure, and the slow erosion of easy answers is a genuinely shared experience across this city. Apostles Church Uptown gathers on Sunday mornings at Regis High School on the Upper East Side, and its community groups meet across Manhattan, from Hamilton Heights to the Upper West Side, for exactly this reason: to be formed, together, into people whose hearts instinctively reach for the presence of Jesus rather than for whatever the city is selling. If you are in a wilderness season and you have been wondering whether faith still holds, this community is a place where that question is taken seriously.

Jesus is a tester and a provider. He will not lead you around the wilderness; he will lead you through it. But he does not lead you through it to crush you. He leads you through it because the weaned child, resting calmly in his mother's arms, has something the panicking infant does not: trust that is no longer dependent on the immediate sensation of being fed.

For weekly sermons, teaching, and resources to help you keep going through difficult seasons, the full sermon library is available: find it here.

If you are new to Apostles Church Uptown or exploring faith for the first time, come and see what this community is about: plan your visit.