“And the voice came to him a second time, What God has cleansed and pronounced clean, do not you defile and profane by regarding and calling common and unhallo-wed or unclean.” Acts 10:15 (Amplified)
God may be constant, but His plans for mankind are constantly evolving, although His master plan remains unchanged. This is the reason why the concept of change is often shocking to its human recipients, when entrenched sacred cows are unceremoniously sent to the abattoir and promptly extinguished on the slaughter slab of progress, as new and more interesting ideas take root in readiness for the new move of God. Now, this does not mean that salient principles such as sin suddenly becomes kosher, for God and sin will ever remain mutually exclusive. However, it does mean that we have to reassess those things we have always held as unchangeable. This process known as a paradigm shift imply assessing same things from a different and newer perspective in order to move in step with what God intends to accomplish in our world.
Imagine being told all your life that Gentiles aren’t kosher and can’t ever be, only for God to powerfully disprove those assumptions is a few hours. Well, that was Peter’s lot. This meant that he had to confront his own lifelong prejudice against the Gentiles, the doorway to whose ceremoniously defiled homes his proud Jewish shadow would previously not have darkened. Those things he had held as sacrosanct all his life now had to be trampled underfoot in the light of God’s new revelation. That step would no doubt have been tough for any observant Jew of whom Peter was one. Nevertheless, God was insistent in His demand, having shown the same dream to Peter thrice to impress His point on His reticent servant. He knew what he had to do and like a good disciple that he was he did it unhesitantly. He broke the taboos that had separated Jew from Gentile for previous generations and in so doing launched the church into the next phase of her development and the preaching of the Gospel to the whole world.
Change often becomes necessary because procedural staleness easily sets in to corrupt what has been on the ground for long. Seasons of refreshing or in some cases a drastic revolution become obligatory whenever a process known as routinisation of charisma occurs. For example, it is an open secret that whenever churches have been around for too long, certain procedures and human conventions, which are deemed necessary to stabilise and maintain order, are often introduced, but which in the long term stifles the primacy and move of the Holy Spirit and ultimately leads to the gradual death, irrelevance and ineffectiveness of such denominations. So, what is the solution to this loss of spiritual inertia? These are two fold. We need to either rub the new wine of the Holy Spirit on the old wineskins, where possible, since this is an admittedly onerously difficult task to accomplish or we need to obtain new wineskin with new wine, which is what Jesus recommended. The key is that are you willing to move with the cloud of the Holy Spirit or still insisting on holding to the now moribund ossified views that can only lead to spiritual irrelevance? The seasons of change represent God-given opportunities for us to imbibe His new ideas for our contemporary times. You either get on board or get left behind. Which would you rather have?
Prayer:
Lord, Moses cried out to you that they would rather not move unless your presence went with them. Give us the same desire to seek your presence. Help us see what you see so that we can truly become your hands and feet in our fallen world. Amen.