(Isaiah 43:16-21; 2 Corinthians 5:16-21)
It’s a proverb among pastors that the Seven Last Words of the Church are “We’ve never done it that way before.” The corollary is: the only truly universal creed of the church is “This is the way we’ve always done it.” A similar idea was expressed more sardonically by Montana pastor Chuck Westermann, writing under the pseudonym Karl Beck: “At your average church, it’s easier to introduce a fourth person into the Trinity than to introduce a new carpet pattern into the nave.” These are the sort of jokes pastors tell each other.
Obviously, this isn’t equally true of every church—but believe it or not, to some degree, it’s true of every church. I learned that in Bellingham. The church where I interned was only seven years old when we started attending; we were 25 and 23 at the time, and we weren’t the youngest couple there. You’d assume from those facts that it was flexible and open to change, but it was actually quite the opposite. When the founding pastor started experimenting with some different ways of doing things, “the way we’ve always done it” fought back with a vengeance, never mind that “always” covered less than a decade. One group of people, including some of the leaders, drew up sides; nobody else was choosing sides, but as far as they were concerned, anyone who disagreed with them was against them. Not long after we left there, the pastor chose to jump ship; in his hurry to jump before he was pushed, he and his wife didn’t look before they leaped. Five years later, that church was dead; five years after that, so was he.
Every church has this attitude to one degree or another, because this mindset comes from running the church according to the principles and practices of this world—and every church does that in its day-to-day operations. We’re human beings and the church is a human organization; it’s inevitable. We see ourselves doing the work of the church, we see our work producing or failing to produce the growth of the church, and so we understand the church as the product of our work, and thus as something that belongs to us. The people who don’t support the way things are done, leave; the ones who stay are the ones who do. When you find something you like, something you’re comfortable with, of course you want to keep it going, and not let it end.
The more we think this way, the more we believe (whatever we might say) that we’re the ones who build the church, and we have the right to decide how we build it and what we want to build it into. The more we think this way, the more wedded we become to the way we’ve been doing things, both because that way is familiar and comfortable to us, and because it’s proven. We can put our faith in it and feel confident that we’ll get results that we like. What we end up with is a church that may talk about God, but that has no real place for him in its decision-making or its day-to-day life, and no sense that it actually needs him for anything.
What about living by faith in God? Well, we pay lip service to the idea. We’re all for it, until it gets to the point of actually living by faith. Suggest anything that drastic, and we start talking about this person we knew who refused any medical treatment because they were sure that if they had enough faith, God would heal their cancer. Around here, folks will bring up the Glory Barn. Clearly, since these people claimed to be living by faith in God and they were wrong, the whole idea is ridiculous, right? Well, maybe not. Actually, what examples like that show us is the importance of living by faith in Godrather than in our ability to make God do what we want. It’s an easy mistake to make, because we tend to associate faith with results—we have faith that God will do something, and our faith is validated or not by whether or not God does it. To have faith in God whether he does what we want or not—to be able to say with Job, “Though he slay me, yet will I praise him”—that’s a much harder thing.
To do that, each of us has to set aside the natural idea that the church is here for me, to meet my needs and give me what I want and be what I want it to be. Yes, the church is here for you and for me and for each of us, but not for any of us in particular; it’s here for each of us the same way it’s here for everybody else, including a whole lot of people who aren’t here yet. It isn’t aboutany of us, it doesn’t belong to any of us, and it doesn’t exist to serve our purposes; it belongs to God alone, it’s about him alone, and it exists for his purposes alone. That includes providing for us and taking care of us—but on his terms, not ours. Even there, it’s not about what we think we need or deserve, but about what God knows we need and is going to give us.
Now, nothing I’ve said to this point is unique to the church; Israel was a lot worse. That’s what Isaiah is dealing with here. Earlier in chapter 43, God calls his people to bear witness to all the ways in which he has blessed them—and in so doing, perhaps to see his blessings for themselves for the first time, and actually begin to understand themselves as the people of God. They haven’t forgotten that God did all these things, but they have no sense that what he did in the past means anything to them; they don’t see it as connected to their lives. No doubt they believe God had delivered their ancestors from Egypt; what they don’t believe is that that has anything to do with their lives and circumstances. They believe God had saved, but not that he will save—and that makes all the difference. It’s not that hard to believe that God has done miracles in the past—but that he’s still in the miracle business now? That’s another matter.
We’ve seen in this series so far that the work of the people of God is the work of revival, and that the work of revival is the work of the world made new, because that’s what God is on about; and we’ve seen that we’re completely dependent on him to make this happen, because it isn’t something we can do by our own effort and our own methods. The problem is, it’s easier to put our faith and trust in things we can see than in God whom we cannot see; it’s easier to put our trust in methods and programs and strategies, and it lets us take credit for the work, and claim ownership. As a consequence, we’re constantly being tempted into idolatry, and God’s work has to begin with the reconversion of his people to faith in him.
That’s what we see in Isaiah 43. In verses 16-17, the prophet gives Israel a vivid reminder that the Lord is the one who led the Egyptian army out to their destruction in the sea so that his people could escape; we don’t see this in the NIV, but these verses are mostly in present tense. This isn’t just something God did in the past, it’s something he’s still doing. Then in verses 18-19, the Lord says, “But never mind how I did it. Don’t get hung up on the way I’ve done things before. I’m doing a new thing. I’m still your deliverer, but I don’t need to do anything the same way twice.” God isn’t bound by the way he’s done things before, or the way we’ve done them before; when he moves in power in his people, for his people, through his people, he does a new thing in a new way, so that we can’t fool ourselves into thinking it’s our work—and so that we see that this isn’t just stuff that happens in the Bible.
Too many of us have this nice little box labeled “God” full of all sorts of things God did a while ago, and it really doesn’t have a lot to do with how we live our daily lives. We pray, though maybe not that much, and we read our Bibles, at least a little, but when it comes to the issues we face and the choices we have to make, a lot of us are functional atheists—we do things just like the world does. Not only do we not ask God to guide us, a lot of the time, we don’t even take him into account—we base our decisions solely on “practical” considerations, things we can see and touch and quantify. And that’s not how God wants us to live. He wants us to remember, in everything we do, that we are children of the Lord of the Universe, that he loves us, and that he’s working for our good—including in ways we can’t predict, or see coming. He wants us to walk by faith, not by sight. He wants us to hear him saying, “See, I’m doing a new thing—it’s springing up right before your eyes. Don’t you see it? I’m making a way in the desert, and streams in the wasteland. Can’t you see? Look. Open your eyes. See.”