“Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past. See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive
it? I am making a way in the desert and
streams in the wasteland.” --Isaiah
43:19
It is easy for people to get stuck in the past. One of the problems the Israelites had was
that they did not know how to grieve well. They kept looking back to a golden age when
they came out of Egypt and entered the Promised Land. And when things began to break down in Israel
and in Judah, they kept looking back instead of dealing with God in the
present. Rather than lamenting their
losses, they just wished things were different.
When any church or any believer refuses to do the biblical work of
grieving a significant loss or change, then the ghosts of the past roam
everywhere.
No one can effectively move on into
the future unless they confront the stark reality that things have changed and can
never be the same again.
They can, in fact, be even better,
but that will not happen apart from doing the hard work of identifying our
denial of the way things presently are, dealing with our anger, stopping the
bargaining with God, defeating the depression, and coming out the other end
accepting the new reality. The
Israelites were in exile. It was not
their new normal. It was their present
station of history. God was ready to
take them back to Jerusalem, but they were stuck in depression. Jerusalem would never be the same city again,
and they had to resolve to accept it.
But acceptance is not cheap; it takes a difficult journey to get to that
point.
The healthy way to view the past is
to see ancient miracles like the exodus be re-enacted in fresh ways for the
present.
When churches and Christians no longer experience God in
creative, new, and fresh ways in the present, they are limited by their
memories of what God once did back there in the past. If we keep talking about the same things in
the same ways, telling the same stories, we portray a God to others who is not
present to us in the here and now. It is
time we talk about the God we know today.
If we only live off past experiences with God, we will be unable to
connect with God today. We need to tell
present-tense stories of God. When God
is sealed in the past he becomes just an interesting person to be theologically
studied and learned about, like any character from history. But today God is alive! Now, in the present, God wants to do a new
thing!
God is most definitely changeless is
his character and attributes. But that
does not mean God is not into change and doing new things. In fact, God’s work is to effect
transformation in the lives of people who need redemption and new life.
What kind of picture about God are we
painting for people?
That God is
boring, lifeless, careless, or uninteresting?
The proof that something is alive is that it grows, develops, changes,
and matures. The new plants in our
gardens and fields are undergoing astonishing growth and development. What they are like now is quite different
than what they will look like in August and even different than October.
To simply state the matter: new, different, creative, exciting things
need to happen in the church today in the present. As long as those things do not happen in the
church, people will believe that God is dead or just does not care, that is, if
he exists at all. Because God is alive
and works in the present, Christ’s church is to be alive with spiritual
momentum, biblical drive, and Christian proactive love.
If we are continually underwhelmed by
church, we will not be overwhelmed by God.
When we look at Jesus, we get a picture of God. We see a Savior who walks on water, raises
the dead, and amazes the crowds.
Christ’s unpredictability led many to have a new and more accurate
picture of God. Jesus came to reveal who
God is, to give us a good picture of him (John 14:8-14).
Through his life on earth, Jesus
revealed to us a God who is compelling, powerful, relevant, passionate,
unpredictable, exciting, personal and present to his people right now this very
day by means of the Holy Spirit. The
church everywhere has been given the assignment to reveal God to the
world. So, whenever the church seems
boring, irrelevant, powerless, lifeless, and stuck in the past, people conclude
that God is all those things. When the
church becomes like a stagnant pond it portrays the wrong image of God to the
world. What the world needs, and we
believers must have, are churches that allow the awesome God who is gracious
and powerful to stand out and be present to us all.
To be present to God is to be alive
to the possibilities that God’s Spirit wants to effect in the present.
May it be
so, to the glory of Jesus our present and eternal King.
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