Not Everything is Net New
Matthew 1:20-21
I have gone through so long asking for a new word, a new vision for my family, a new hope, a new this a new that. Sometimes God wants to give you something that has already been. What I mean is God wants to renew things. not everything is net new In business, a common idea to have is to talk about only the "net new" things. Things that have not been recurring problems, or recurring themes, or things that people have not brought up over and over again. The idea is to sift out the older items from all the total items (gross) and provide just the pristine new items (net). This concept is dangerous in business because it often leads to short-term organizational memory. This is evident when teams repeat the same mistakes and never grow closer as a team or learn from past problems with their work.
In Christianity this can also be bad. As I have shown from personal example, one outcome is expecting God to always provide a new word when sometimes he wants to renew the word he gave you previously. Another outcome, as was the case with Joseph, God confirmed a word HE decided. Did you know that God loves you so much that He lets you choose sometimes which path you will go?
After reading this verse today, God showed me that Joseph may have been wrestling with the idea of divorcing Mary quietly, as one other verse puts it, but one other option was to keep their wedding plans intact. I can only imagine the immense pressure that Joseph felt; socio-political, family, religious, all the pressures of a young Jewish man in that time period. All of them telling him to divorce her because she was "tainted goods." The law of Moses would have even allowed him to do that by those circumstances. He would have thought she was lying. However, then, he was going through everything in his mind and was about to go ahead and divorce her when an Angel appeared.
As we read, the Angel tells him that the thoughts he considered, thoughts of grace, of mercy, thoughts of steadfast love in the face of adversity were not only good, but they were God's plans for the two of them and for humanity. Just some wednesday thoughts for you.
But after he had considered this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, “Joseph son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife, because what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins.”I was using this verse for my verse of the day on twitter (click link on the right to subscribe -------> ), when God dropped a little more into my spirit about than I thought. Did you know that God sometimes uses the ideas and creativity we already have to carry out his will? No really! I have gone on so long in my life asking God to speak to me without fully realizing that he has been speaking to me. He has chosen to use the circumstances of life to show me how to live for him...
I have gone through so long asking for a new word, a new vision for my family, a new hope, a new this a new that. Sometimes God wants to give you something that has already been. What I mean is God wants to renew things. not everything is net new In business, a common idea to have is to talk about only the "net new" things. Things that have not been recurring problems, or recurring themes, or things that people have not brought up over and over again. The idea is to sift out the older items from all the total items (gross) and provide just the pristine new items (net). This concept is dangerous in business because it often leads to short-term organizational memory. This is evident when teams repeat the same mistakes and never grow closer as a team or learn from past problems with their work.
In Christianity this can also be bad. As I have shown from personal example, one outcome is expecting God to always provide a new word when sometimes he wants to renew the word he gave you previously. Another outcome, as was the case with Joseph, God confirmed a word HE decided. Did you know that God loves you so much that He lets you choose sometimes which path you will go?
After reading this verse today, God showed me that Joseph may have been wrestling with the idea of divorcing Mary quietly, as one other verse puts it, but one other option was to keep their wedding plans intact. I can only imagine the immense pressure that Joseph felt; socio-political, family, religious, all the pressures of a young Jewish man in that time period. All of them telling him to divorce her because she was "tainted goods." The law of Moses would have even allowed him to do that by those circumstances. He would have thought she was lying. However, then, he was going through everything in his mind and was about to go ahead and divorce her when an Angel appeared.
As we read, the Angel tells him that the thoughts he considered, thoughts of grace, of mercy, thoughts of steadfast love in the face of adversity were not only good, but they were God's plans for the two of them and for humanity. Just some wednesday thoughts for you.
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