Hello everyone!
We’re about to embark upon a whole new season of mission in Melbourne’s north, on several levels. It will be exciting and challenging at the same time. Exciting because God is doing a new thing and He has been preparing our churches for this new thing through the refining and testing season of the COVID-19 pandemic. Challenging because, in the light of what we have learned, some changes will be made to our approach to mission and ministry. The changes won’t be wholesale, but gradual as we keep and include the learning we have acquired these last eight months or so … and we have learned quite a lot.
God is doing a new thing …
Isaiah 43:18-19 “Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past. 19 See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland.”
Our churches are approaching a “restart season” (in a sense) as COVID-19 Restrictions ease more and more. Our approach to restarting will require wisdom, discernment and patient sensitivity or we will miss crucial opportunities, and possibly even compound the hiatus caused by the pandemic. There is no quick fix in getting everything back to normal especially since Christmas is fast approaching as well, followed by January, which tends to be a bit of a down time from the usual ministry pace.
God is doing a new thing. Many of you have heard that Isaiah 43 scripture before, perhaps many times, and have even used it as a promise of God to look forward to a new season. And, in a sense, it is kind of like that – but it’s not a promise of God as such. It was a prophetic encouragement to Israel to look to the new future God was preparing for them. It has been a prophetic encouragement to the people of God at various times – kairos times, God’s appointed, anointed times, to encourage God’s people to look forward and not backward ... no dwelling on the past.
When God finishes doing something, when it is completed … He does a new thing …
When God speaks this word to Israel through the prophet Isaiah it was near the end of a very long season in which Israel had struggled to be a nation among other nations. She’d struggled to take her place as the people of God in the overall scheme of God’s great purposes in the world. They had struggled to be led by YHWH, they wanted to be like other nations with a visible king of their own and so on. They’d struggled to discover who they were meant to be and to come into all that God had planned for them. Israel was frustrated and disappointed with the way things had worked out, that the potential of the nation had not been achieved and there was, amongst the people, this general sense of disappointment and unfulfillment - there had to be something more, but they couldn’t lay hold of it. They didn’t know how. They were stuck and felt as though they had missed something significant in God and that this was how it was now, and would never change …
But God in His great love for them, in His great mercy and grace … He looks upon Israel’s disappointment and hurt, their sense of loss at the way things worked out, the loss of destiny … He sees their sense of resignation hurt about it all, that this is what it has all come to in the end … shattered dreams … this is the way it is now and there is nothing they can do about it … and they’re just lumping it, so to speak … they couldn’t dream anymore, couldn’t dare to dream …
And so, moved with deep compassion YHWH says to them, “Oh no, no, my children forget all that, forget the former things, don’t dwell on these painful memories, don’t consume your emotional energy on all that, and beat up on yourselves with what was, or what wasn’t! I’m doing a new thing, and you won’t have to lump anything – and I want you to see this new thing. Do you not see what I am doing … right now?”
A new era had dawned with this prophetic word, and God wanted Israel to see it. He was speaking it into existence with that prophecy. He instructs Israel to turn her back on the past with its disappointments and pain, and not to “live” there anymore, not to remember the past as a pattern for her current life. The emphasis in these passage is on "a way in the wilderness" and "rivers in a wasteland" – wilderness and wasteland had become the reality for Israel in the sixth century B.C. in more ways than one. But God was changing that … proactively so … doing a whole new unprecedented thing. Grace is always unprecedented in a sense …
This word is so applicable to us today as we emerge from the wilderness of COVID-19. Let us focus our minds on the new thing God is doing – and not look back. He is doing a wonderful, amazing new thing. Can you see it?
You are wonderfully loved.
Ps Milton