Embrace Change

So who likes change? If your answer is “yes”, I would say “I don’t believe you”. With the earthquakes in Christchurch I have realised how much we are creatures of routine and habit and we like living in our comfort zone. Change is stressful. Indeed the very definition of stress is the physiological reaction to mobilise our bodies to cope with change. Change produces grief over the loss of what was. Change taps into nostalgia which is defined as pain over a sense of a lost wonderful past. So change is not something we naturally embrace. However I want to suggest that God wants us to embrace change.

Let me give you just one reason why we should embrace change.

In Daniel 2:20-22 Daniel prays the following prayer:

  “Praise be to the name of God for ever and ever;
   wisdom and power are his.
²¹ He changes times and seasons;
   he deposes kings and raises up others.
He gives wisdom to the wise
   and knowledge to the discerning.
²² He reveals deep and hidden things;
   he knows what lies in darkness,
   and light dwells with him.

The key is vs 21: God changes times and seasons.

That is the reason we need to embrace change – because God changes times and seasons. We may have a way of ministry that connects with what God is doing and with culture but God will change the times and seasons and unless we embrace change we will find ourselves perfectly attuned to a reality that no longer exists!

There is a saying along the lines that "if we keep on doing what we have always done we will keep on getting what we have always got." Actually that is not true. Reality is actually worse than that. Because God changes times and seasons, if you keep on doing what you have always done you will get increasingly irrelevant and increasingly ineffective!

The context of this prayer shows how radical this change can be. Daniel is about to interpret a dream that Nebuchadnezzar the king of Babylon had. He dreamed of a giant statue with a head of gold, chest of silver, waist of bronze, and legs of iron. These represented four successive world empires. Daniel was saying to the king that his empire was glorious but one day God would change the times and seasons and his empire would pass and the world would completely reconfigure around another empire. In fact Daniel saw that the world would completely reconfigure four times around four different empires; Babylon, Persia, Greece and Rome. Each one with a different geographical centre, different capital, different culture, and different language.

How do we live in light of a God who changes times and season like this? Back to Daniel 2:

He gives wisdom to the wise
   and knowledge to the discerning.

God will enable people to discern the changing times and give wisdom which in the Bible means knowing what to do, in this case, what to do to embrace the new changed reality.

Daniel says, “He reveals deep and hidden things; he knows what lies in darkness, and light dwells with him.” God can equip us to live in a world of changing times and seasons.

If God changes the times and seasons, then is everything up for grabs, is nothing stable and certain? There is a lovely verse in Isaiah 33:6

He will be the sure foundation for your times,
a rich store of salvation and wisdom and knowledge;
the fear of the LORD is the key to this treasure.

God is the sure foundation in the midst of the changing times. What is unchanging is the character and purposes of God. However we are called to live at the intersection point of the unchanging God and the changing times and seasons. Again wisdom and discernment are the answer.

Isaiah mentions another issue: one thing that never changes is that God is a rich store of salvation. Other translations say, in him is abundance of salvation. Jesus also said the harvest is here. I want to suggest that this actually becomes a litmus test of whether we are positioned well at this intersection point. See us older Christians will be happy to live on the nostalgia of the move of God that swept us in the kingdom and then just seek deeper teaching. We won’t notice that people are not getting saved. If we have got this intersection right, one of the signs will be people getting saved. At the intersection point of the unchanging God and the changing times and season, there is a well of salvation!

The final line is profound and a key: the fear of the LORD is the key to this treasure. Other translations say the fear of the Lord is the treasure! The treasure is not the memory of the form in which we encountered God – it is the actual encounter with God. Embracing change is ultimately not about being relevant or being successful –it is about reverence for God and desiring to be found in alignment with what God is doing. When we treasure that above all, we will embrace change to reposition to live at the intersection point again of the unchanging God and God’s present time and season.

I said i belive God calls us to "embrace change". Embrace is a pretty intense word! Imagine if it did that preacher's trick and said "turn to the person next to you and ...EMBRACE!" That could get ugly!

Have a look at a couple of refernces to "embracing" in Scripture:

Genesis 33:4
But Esau ran to meet Jacob and embraced him; he threw his arms around his neck and kissed him. And they wept.

Genesis 48:10
So Joseph brought his sons close to [his father], and his father kissed them and embraced them.

To embrace is to run towards, arms thrown wide open, to grab hold of and to kiss and hold tightly. Imagine that kind of attitude towards change.

God’s word to us is: embrace change!