Back to the Future

One of the dangers of the days we are living in as Christians is this sense that we need to "go back" to something in order to make things better than they are today. I cannot think of a single biblical example of a time when God wanted His people to go back to stay in a place where they had already been. They were told to remember His works and to walk in His ways, but never did God intend for them to go back to where He brought them from, settle there, and do what they did before.

It was always only the people themselves who wanted things to be the way they used to be... to go back to Egypt... to rebuild the old temple... to relive the glory days... to do things the way they used to be done... to experience God the way they used to experience Him... like entering Narnia through the wardrobe every single time. Eventually, God moves on.

To paraphrase what Mark Rutland once wrote: just because the old train tracks don't get used anymore doesn't mean that there are no more trains. There are just new tracks.

God is not waiting for us in the past; He is drawing us into the future. Some of us keep singing the same old songs and preaching the same old sermons and hoping to get the same old results that we used to get, but we've forgotten to invite the God who was and IS and SHALL BE into our ways of doing things.

It isn't God who wants us to go back to the old-time way; it's the people who can't seem to envision a glorious future that doesn't look like the glory of the past.

We need a fresh vision of Jesus that doesn't look like He used to look... That's why the disciples in Luke 24 didn't recognize Jesus when He was standing right in front of them. They couldn't imagine a Jesus who didn't look like He used to look.

We keep trying to heat up leftovers when God wants to serve us a fresh meal! If we aren't careful, we will take a memorial that helps us remember the past and turn it into a monument where we go to worship the past. What's worse is that we then become skeptical of anything that doesn't look like our monument because we don't think God is in it...

May God help us, myself included, to get past our desire to do things the old way, just bigger and better, and instead catch a fresh vision of what God is doing today and tomorrow.

That's all I've got for now.