daily java

Daily Java: 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 43:18-19)

Everybody has a backstory.

Sometimes it is a good one. They came from a good family and had good things happen to them, a happy childhood, they did well in their work, life was good.

Sometimes it is a bad one. Abuse and neglect characterized their past, sadness follows them today.

But whatever the backstory, God has something new for everybody. He says to forget what came in the past because he has something new, something brand new for us.

Our problem is that we dwell on the past too much. We cannot seem to get rid of it and it haunts us.

If our past was successful, we remember that, especially if we are not successful any longer. We remember our past successes and realize that the future holds something different. We may be successful again, it may be that we will be just as successful, but will we match the older success? Will things ever be as good as they were for us?

If our past was bad, and we made mistakes, we remember that. Will we make those mistakes again? We wish we had not made them, and they come back to torment us, especially at night when we are trying to get to sleep.

With churches as a corporate body, it is the same. A church was a huge, successful church back in the 70’s and remembers that. And, of course, they want to be again. Those were the days when people noticed them, asked their advice, the leaders were important people, they had tons of money to spend on stuff, missionaries begged their indulgence, the denomination had them on a special list.

Now they are small. And it may be for no real fault of their own. They may be in a changed demographic now, the neighborhood has shifted from what it was to something almost alien to many in the church. It may be that people have left the town, the dominant industry has changed or shut down. It may just be that the church is stuck in the past and cannot seem to be able to move forward.

Maybe there was open sin in the leadership in the past, or the church made some major financial blunders and people left because of it.

Maybe nothing happened at all and people just kind of drifted away to greener pastures, other churches that looked more exciting.

Maybe the church just died.

There are all kinds of reasons why a church has a bad past. The hardest thing for a church to do is to realize that the past is in the past and the future is in God. Isaiah says that God is doing a new thing. The old thing is gone.

That, of course, is the problem. The church wants to grow, but what they want is the old thing revived and for them to be the way they were 40 or 50 years ago. And it will not ever happen.

That old thing is gone. For the church to grow once again, and for it to be able to accept the leading of God it has to acknowledge that there is a new thing, something new, something completely different.

And we do perceive it. That’s why it gets so much resistance. People can see the new thing and they don’t want it. They want the old. God keeps showing them the new thing and they say no. Then, after a while, God takes away the new thing and leaves them with what they have: death.

I want to be part of the new thing. I want to live and let God live in my church.