A New Focus

[HKHaugan]

Focus on Looking Forward

“This is what the Lord says---He who made a way through the sea, a path through the mighty waters, ‘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 wilderness and streams in the wasteland (Is.43:16, 18-19).’”

Before we continue, one thing needs to be made clear. The above passage presents a primary scriptural attitude. We look to the past for the principles that make us look forward. We don’t look to the past wishing we could go back there. Why?

Because Jesus was looking forward in everything He did.

He was trained in the Scripture that, from its very beginning, got Him to look forward totally open to His Father’s will for Him in every next moment. The Scripture identifies Jesus and His way of being open---faith. He accepted the limitation of a human body in which to live by faith. He had faith in His Father’s Word that every step He took would in some way please and serve His Father. Even though in it, the picture of a lonely death lay before Him (something He learned from the Word). It is what His Father wanted in every next moment that counted. He saw the Cross and knew, by faith in that Word, His destiny was to yield to it. The Father’s will was that He would not only live by faith but die by faith not knowing what the next second would bring but to be faithful to His Father’s Word in it. That’s how we know we are living by faith because His will is revealed after we take every next step in faith. Faith is being right. Faith is acting on what we believe. Faith is acting forward. Faith is righteousness.

Visualize for a moment what the Hebrew people faced as they were moving out of Egypt, out of slavery, out of their collective misery. They left based on the promise of something they had yet to see. They left on the promise their leader, a man of faith in God, would guide them. They left with just what they could carry on their backs toward a land yet unseen. The promise was a land that would be their own. No more slavery, no feeling of worthlessness and no more hopelessness. They had hope. Their destination was a promised land, a promised new experience, a place just for them that God would bring them to. But to get there they would have go through an unknown wilderness across a sea without ships and waves that could destroy them all. While none of them including their leader had no idea of what lay ahead, they trusted a crusty 80 year old dreamer named Moses, with nothing but a staff, to lead them. They were given a promise, trusting that promise and following a person with the promise. It was God, the God of the Promise and God the Deliverer, empowering Moses’s mind, heart and spirit. By faith they lived and moved. Now here’s the bottom line---Faith propelled their hope.

Several things to be seen in this picture, this image and this landscape of promise. First, the person Moses. His name means ‘drawn out.’ He was an abandoned Hebrew child from the tribe of Levi drawn out of the Nile River by Pharaoh's daughter and raised in that household. There are three ‘now’s’ for our consideration.

Now, let’s just look at this beginning from our Jesus-perspective. First, Moses was a Hebrew by blood, a man from God’s chosen people. Second, he was a Levite, the tribe that God would anoint to be temple servants. Third, he was drawn out of the water, an early image that would be a piece of tile in the larger mosaic, showing the importance of Baptism.

Now, just as Abraham was called out from his country, his people and his father’s household, so Moses would lead the Hebrews to leave their country of slavery, their Egyptian captivity and their slave family identity to live in their own land, a spiritual family with a restored personal identity for each of its people.

Now, perhaps we can see the broader spiritual context of how each of us was born in a land, in a family and enslaved to a culture. We’re born into a physical family, in a physical geography with multiple personal identities according to our cultural conditioning. Out of each, God has called us to be new persons in a new family headed to a new land. It is not that what we were physically born into was bad in its structure. Quite the opposite. What we are born into is being redeemed for a new purpose, to fulfill the promise given so long ago to Abraham and Moses. To discover the real problem of our world is spiritual and therefore separated from God by sin. Then, being forgiven through a relationship with Jesus, what we are as persons, families and nations, can be changed from our fallenness and restored to God’s original intention. And that relationship is the key to each person being a personal diplomat for Jesus Christ in the local world of family, community and nation in which they live. The end of this process is a redeemed world and eternal life in the Kingdom of God.

The main thing to understand about this process is its relational basis in the person of Jesus. Thankful for the past we move forward. To underscore this forward looking mode Paul says this in 2Cor.5:17, “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!” Every situation in which we find our selves is new in every next moment. Not only new because we are new but because everything is new in every next moment and we, the disciples of Jesus, are called to be the new response to witness to the possibilities that lie in front of us.

So, every person is a new reality that demands a faithful response because it is faith that allows us to fulfill what the gift of every next moment means and can produce. Faith is the doorway to newness. Faith in Jesus Christ who says He is the door (Jn.10:19). But not only the Door, it’s what awaits when that Door is opened. Jesus goes on to say, “If anyone enters by Me, he will be saved, and will go in and out and find pasture.” We are not only entering, we are entering to be saved. Saved to go in and out again and again. The pasture is a new kind of feeding ground. It is the presence of the Holy Spirit leading us from one moment to the next spiritually and relationally.

Think of discoveries and inventions, research and innovation. They all came because people were created to look forward, to see things as new. It seems man was not only created to look forward but to expect the Kingdom of Heaven to be new in its perfect existence. This is what ministry in the Body of Christ is all about. We are given gifts to help each other not only see the Door but to enter it and experience the new life in the Spirit. The Holy Spirit is the pasture and the leading He gives us is into what the pasture offers while we are on the way. The Door is a relational Door through which we meet one another as images of God and that experience in itself is the beginning of the new life. What those relationships bring us are the opportunities to help one another grow in the Spirit who revitalizes us to be in His pasture of discovery and innovation, of new ministry and new experience. These ministries are the ones that go into all the world.

The question of course is what happens after we open the Door. Once you are in, what happens next? What is the new life all about? That’s for tomorrow.