“He will make her wilderness like Eden” (Isaiah 51:3)  

I imagine a howling wilderness, a desert stretching for miles in every direction. The sand is strewn with thousands of bleached skeletons, the remains of wretched men who died in the baren waste, without hope. What an appalling sight! A cheerless graveyard for a forsaken race! But look! A Savior comes forth. He transforms the wilderness into a Garden and raises the dead to life, a mighty army! “Thus says the Lord God to these bones: "Surely I will cause breath to enter into you, and you shall live … and breath came into them, and they lived, and stood upon their feet, an exceedingly great army” (Ezekiel 37:5-10). 

 Christ has enlisted you in His army. You were once dead in sin, wandering aimlessly in a wilderness of your own making, but He’s given you His Life (Romans 6:4). You’ve become a “partaker of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust” (2 Peter 1:4), so “put on the New Man who is renewed in knowledge according to the image of Him who created him” (Colossians 3:10). “Walk worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing Him, being fruitful in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God; strengthened with all might, according to His glorious power, for all patience and longsuffering with joy” (Colossians 1:10-11). If you let Him, God will “make you complete in every good work to do His will, working in you what is well pleasing in His sight” (Hebrews 13:21). 

 Is your life a Garden of the Lord? It can be, if you yield to Him unconditionally. “The Lord will guide you continually, And satisfy your soul in drought, And strengthen your bones; You shall be like a watered garden, And like a spring of water, whose waters do not fail” (Isaiah 58:11).