I Say Again, Friends, Praise Be to God for This Joyful Time

I keep hearing folks declare how “over this virus” they are.

“I can’t wait to get back to normal!” they say. “This mess needs to end soon!”

As God knows well, I shudder at such sentiments.

It’s painful, and frightening, to consider what the Lord has moved me to type in my next paragraph. I say that because the shudderworthy sentiments I mention are not just common among far flung celebrities and other public figures with whom I have no particular emotional connection. I also see them pop up — sometimes by the dozens each hour — on the social media musings of friends and family I love dearly. Alas, here I go…

Friends (and family), I urge you to proceed with great caution when you find yourself longing for a return to “normalcy.” That is an exceedingly dangerous place to be while God is in the midst the New Thing he is doing.

Instead, I pray repentance will become the new, normal way for each of us.

Psalms 7 offers but one (of many!) Biblical warnings worth our strong attention this days:

“If a person does not repent, God will sharpen his sword; he will bend and string his bow. He will prepare his deadly weapons and shoot his flaming arrows.” — Psalm 7: 12 (NLT)

I pray none of us alive will be God’s target with those arrows.

That warning is not new in 2020, of course. But I’ve come to understand these times as God’s highlighter. He is calling us to back to those words (and all the others like them throughout scripture) like never before.

Let us heed this blessed call, dear friends. Let us NOT yearn for a return to “life as usual,” but let us all come to hate the world God is now calling us to abandon joyfully. Let us hate, not long for, our sin — our pettiness, our gossip, our gluttony, our wastefulness, our laziness, our selfishness, our self righteousness, and, well, all of the devil’s tools that are so often at work in us.

Let us repent, dear friends! And rejoice in what God promises after our repentance.

“For I am about to do something new. See, I have already begun! Do you not see it? I will make a pathway through the wilderness. I will create rivers in the dry wasteland.” — Isaiah 43: 19 (NLT)

I first shared a variation on this message a few days ago after the Lord put Psalm 2 before me. A few friends responded privately, saying they just didn’t quite understand what I was getting at.

I concede. The Lord’s warning for our time can be confusing. Especially if we are inclined to think that we were doing “just fine” before all this “mess” came about.

But that fact is this, friends: outside of The Lord, none of us have ever been “fine.”

And, today, God is now calling our strong attention to that fact — in a way none of us has ever seen before.

That’s what this mess is all about.

And, Praise be to Him, our path out of the mess is simple, actually: repentance.

Yes, repentance is our road to economic recovery, dear friends. It’s our pathway to full healing, as a nation, as a world, and as God’s blessed children destined for His Heavenly Kingdom.

Our Lord — not our politicians, our pastors, our business leaders, our media, or even our most persuasive friends — is our ONLY trustworthy guide in this time .

So, let us trust in Him! Let us repent, dear friends! Each of us, one and all! Let’s Love Our Lord! Let’s Worship Him. And Let’s CELEBRATE these EXCITING TIMES!