Written by Dawn Rutan
I’ve been inspired and challenged lately by reading Lloyd John Ogilvie’s book Autobiography of God, which studies the parables Jesus told as a reflection of who God is. One chapter is on the parables of the “new patch and new wine” in Luke 5:33-39. In these parables, Jesus is not very subtle in pointing out that the Pharisees were so absorbed in what God had done in the past that they missed what He was doing in the present through Jesus. Although we tend to judge the Pharisees for missing the Savior, we can be guilty of the same thing today. Ogilvie writes:
There are Christians who can recount with elaborate detail how they first discovered God’s grace in some experience of need or challenge. Often the treasured memory becomes more important than God Himself. His question is, ‘What have you allowed Me to give you and do for you lately?’ …Many of us have built a whole theology on our personal experiences of God. Soon our experiences build us. They become limitations to further development and expansion of our understanding. We become rigid and immobilized. We insist God must always do what He’s done and be for us what He’s been.
Holding on to past experiences may result from complacency, a satisfaction that what’s gone before is sufficient. It can also become a comfortable place that’s free from risk. If God has free reign in our lives, there’s no telling what He may do in us and through us. Ogilvie says:
The false security of the familiar constantly must be replaced by trusting God with the complexities and uncertainties staring me in the face today… The Lordship of Jesus Christ cannot be poured into the old skin of our settled personality structure, presuppositions about life, prejudices about people, plans for the future, and predetermined ideas of what He will do or how we will respond.
That’s a challenge when we’re not certain where our path will lead. It seems easier to rely on what we’ve experienced of God in the past than to trust Him to do whatever He wants in the present. Not that the past is bad. Throughout the Old Testament the Israelites were reminded to consider how God had been faithful in the past in order to trust Him in the future. But we can’t let those experiences define how God will always work. God is not limited by history or tradition, or by human understanding and expectations. God is “able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think” (Ephesians 3:20), so why would we want to limit Him to what He’s already done before? But fear of the unknown is a powerful demotivator.
Thinking through this for myself, I see various areas where I’ve tried to limit God by my own limitations in knowledge, experience, personality and wounds. Ed Tandy McGlasson writes in The Father You’ve Always Wanted, “One of the devil’s main goals is to convince you to name yourself by your brokenness. He wants your future horizons to be completely limited by lies… But God loves to change broken stories and make the impossible possible!” Sometimes God is just waiting for us to say “Your will be done.”
As we were reminded in Sunday’s sermon on Proverbs 3:5-8, our role is to be faithful to God in our everyday life, and trust Him to reveal each step of the path as we come to it. That doesn’t sound too spectacular until we acknowledge and accept the fact that God may do something new and unexpected.
Ogilvie comes to a conclusion that is worth considering:
I have learned a great deal through study of Scripture and years of fellowship with the Lord. But I suspect that my most exciting years are ahead. How about you? If so, I want to surrender any false pride or dependence on the past and make a fresh beginning. My past experience of God can never substitute for the experience of God today. ‘Lord, here is a fresh wineskin; fill me. Here is my naked need; clothe me with Your character.’ Now I can’t wait for what the Lord will do!
“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 43:19
-Photo by Dawn Rutan from parking lot of Dulin’s Grove Church 1/30/15.