by Pastor Douglas Brauner

God Is Doing Something New

You can listen to today’s devotion by clicking on this SoundCloud link.

Many of us are familiar with the lyrics to “Sunrise, Sunset” from Fiddler on the Roof. How true it is that one season follows another, a season that is laden with happiness and tears.

On the cusp of another year we reflect on our sunrises and sunsets, on where we’ve been and where we’re headed.

It’s easy to get hung up on the sunsets, on the past. We wax nostalgic at New Years unless we’re trying to leave behind a pandemic, but even then we might think how “wonderful” the past was. However, the past probably wasn’t as great as we think it was.

The difficulty with sunrises is that we can’t see into the future. We don’t know what the day will bring, and if we did, we’d probably be frightened of what was coming.

Days roll into days, months into months and years into years until we breathe our last.

“Remember not the former things, nor consider the things of old. Behold, I am doing a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.”
Isaiah 43:18-19 English Standard Version

The people of Israel would have a lot to think about when considering their sunsets. They would remember their failures to live up to God’s covenant. As they sat in exile in Babylon, they found it difficult to sing the songs they sang at the temple, a temple that had been obliterated by their enemies. They might feel like giving up, that nothing would change.

What we forget is that God is in the business of doing something new and that something new was giving us Jesus, his own Son. It is Jesus who makes a way for us in the wilderness, who makes us drink from the river that is running in the desert, even the desert of a new year.

Though this year will be laden with happiness and tears, through it all may we find hope that God is doing something new.

Copyright Holy Cross Lutheran Church, Colorado Springs, Colorado