See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? Isaiah 43:19
Consecrate yourselves, for tomorrow the Lord will do amazing things among you! Joshua 3:5.
Not long ago, my son and I were watching an episode of one of our "it's a guy thing" shows on TV, "Mythbusters." The myth being tested was whether or not you could stop a car moving at full-speed by suddenly shifting the transmission into reverse. Now, I've never tried to do this (and not sure why anybody would want to), but I do know what happened when I tried to put the car into a gear it wasn't ready to go into! I don't think anyone ever forgets the sound of those grinding gears! Needless to say, the myth was "busted" (proved wrong), as they never were able to get a car, regardless of the type of transmission, to shit into and unwanted gear and force a stop.
The flip-side of this reminds me of a biblical truth that permeates all of Scripture: you can't move forward if you're stuck in reverse. Reverse, for the sake of our discussion, is what we'll affectionately call "the past" and Forward we'll carefully call "the future." The simple fact is that the greatest obstacle to us embracing the future is our tendency to cling to the past.
All through God's Bible, we see God doing one amazing thing after another. Yet, at the same time, we never see Him do something the same way twice. How often we long for the "good ol' days" when it seems everything was better - and probably some of those things were. I have seen people spend incredible amounts of time and money in an effort to recreate those days. They are so reluctant to shift out of the past...to shift out of Reverse.
Problem is, until we are willing to shift out of Reverse, we can never go Forward - we just can't go both directions at the same time - it must be one way or the other. Now, this doesn't mean to forget the past...that would be foolish. But we must realize that the purpose of the past is to provide a solid foundation of learning, and thus, actually prepare us for the future. We would be lost without our past, and we should never throw it away. But correctly understood, it will always propel us into the future.
God has an abundance of amazing, new things prepared for us, ahead of us, but we'll only enjoy them as we move Forward. Because God's purposes are unshakeable, we can gratefully let go of the past, confidently embrace the future and thoughfully accept His new ways to accomplish those purposes. While we will always appreciate how God brought us this far, we must also realize that the things that brought us here won't be what takes us Forward, for He is constantly preparing to do a "new thing."
So what must we do? "Consecrate [our]selves." This means to learn all we can from the past, but prepare ourselves for tomorrow by setting our focus wholly on the Lord's purposes and ways. It won't always be easy, but it will always be good with the Lord as our Helper. So let's make sure we're in Forward, give it some "gas," and securly move with Him!
