When God speaks to comfort his people, he reminds them of who he is, what he has done, and what he is doing. In other words, he directs their focus back to the big picture of himself to rescue them from the distractions of the immediate that lure people into a rut. Those distractions might be adversity, or they might be prosperity. In both cases we of mortal flesh tend to have our gaze pried away from the One who is our highest good and deepest satisfaction. We find it too easy to get settled in a rut of fleeting comfort or ill-perceived security.
God is constantly at work weaving together all aspects of time, space, circumstance, and human choice to draw people to himself. Through the prophet Isaiah, Jehovah, the Holy One of Israel, said, “I work, and who can turn it back?” (Isaiah 43:13).
When his Son, the God-man, walked the earth, there were those who pushed against his good and mighty deeds because what he did and how he did it did not fit their parameters. To them Jesus responded, “My Father is always at his work to this very day, and I too am working” (John 5:17 NIV).
Is it possible that we could be distracted from what God is doing by being too preoccupied with what we are doing and precisely how we are doing it? Here is my resolve: whatever God is manifestly doing, I want to be all in. In this resolve we follow Jesus,
“Truly, truly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of his own accord,
but only what he sees the Father doing. For whatever the Father does,
that the Son does likewise. For the Father loves the Son and shows him all
that he himself is doing. And greater works than these will he show him,
so that you may marvel.
John 5:19–20
Sunday’s worship was just a glimpse of what God is up to! He is at work in people’s lives, and he is working through his people. Sunday was a delightfully uncommon time, but God loves doing the uncommon so that you may marvel. What God does through a people submitted to him arrests the attention of the unbelieving, and he is glorified.
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.
The wild beasts will honor me, the jackals and the ostriches,
for I give water in the wilderness, rivers in the desert, to give drink to my chosen people,
the people whom I formed for myself that they might declare my praise.
Isaiah 43:19–21
It is my prayer that we will have a united desire and resolve to be all in with what God is doing, “so that as grace extends to more and more people, it may increase thanksgiving to the glory of God” (2 Corinthians 4:15).
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