We like to hold on to the familiar. Our preference is to be left comfortable in the place where we excel. We do not mind observing change but it is not usually the thing for which we eagerly volunteer. Most of us live with reluctant hearts once we have found something we enjoy, something we understand or something we have mastered. Yet our bibles teach us repeatedly that God is always changing things, working transformation, morphing today into tomorrow. Sometimes this thrills us but many times it can be quite intimidating. Most of us would affirm that we believe God is generous and benevolent and kind and gracious. What we do not like to talk about among ourselves is that He is also the Lord of removal, reduction, rearranging and replacement. God has never promised to leave things as they were. As a matter of fact…He is committed to making all things new.
“Behold, I am doing a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.” – Isaiah 43:19
When Christians find themselves in the refiner’s crucibile – that place of heated flame – it is essential that we remember quickly whose hand controls the height of the fire. The sovereign God of Heaven who proved His lavish love for us at Calvary is not willing to merely justify us. He has promised to sanctify us and also to glorify us. The path for each follower of Jesus leads to only one eventual aim: to remove Adam’s likeness from us and replace it with the nature of Jesus Christ. What God begins in a moment of salvation He perfects during a lifetime of transformation. He has looked at each of us and declared, “Behold, I am doing a new thing…do you not perceive it? I will make a way.”
Your life has a limited capacity. Because God is determined to bless you with His very best, He must regularly remove the lesser things. Our dilemma is that we cannot conceive of that thing He has removed as being “lesser”. We define its value by our own desire for it and when God applies subtraction to the equation of our lives, we sense utter loss because we cannot conceive that He will soon apply multiplication to our lives and bring more blessing in the place of our current loss. Friends, we simply cannot keep receiving and keeping – we do not have capacity for that. We are designed to live like a river – something is always moving in while something is always moving out. You never step into the same exact river twice. Most everything in your life today was never intended to be there until the day of your departure. Nothing is permanent down here and we are all living life at a departure gate, awaiting our flight home. The new things God is doing in your life have been planned for you since before there ever was a you. He knows the end from the beginning and the logical sense of these new things which He is working belong with Him. We do not understand and, hallelujah, we are not supposed to. Life is not a riddle to be solved as if its origin and outcome were tethered to earth. Life is God’s gracious opportunity to be introduced to Him, to learn and love Him, to tell others what you have tasted of Him and then to ultimately be ushered into His presence forever. No redeemed person in Heaven misses earth and none believe that living below with Christ and for Christ was a mistake, a bum deal. This life is never to have the sense of the same-old-thing. This is a constantly new thing and He has been generous to tell us the end of the story: Healing, joy, peace, victory, light, love, worship, ecstasy, relief from all woe, conquest of sin, removal of every foe, Paradise and everlasting oneness with the glorious King of the Universe. This is our destiny. If we are ever to reach it we must recognize that it regularly entails God doing a new thing – to you, in you, around you but mostly…for you. This is our destiny from Him.
Trust Him completely today. He is working out something new for you.