(This has been stewing in my head since the Beginning of July and you’ll have to forgive me that it’s taken me so long to put it into words, but it seems I’m still not done learning all the aspects of this.)
Recently in a conversation with a good friend, I recounted an item I wrote regarding finding God in my 30’s. Or really “Where is God now?” All the wondering and time passed words fell out of my mouth that adjoined it all together. I wrote a few weeks ago “He Waits for Me,” and in that same episode I had another revelation linked to it. At that moment in worship I asked God for a new understanding. That I didn’t want the old devices of doing things. New wine skins. New anointing. Whatever it was He was trying to get my attention with now. I knew that I was in a untouched area of my life and I wanted to hear what He had for me now and not a review of the past. God has certainly been answering that heartfelt prayer in the last weeks. Something opened in my heart that had been closed, because suddenly I was more aware of God and hearing Him more readily.
Coming to Christ in my early teens, moving into college age, and my 20’s everything was brand-new. Those passages on God doing something new brought excitement, because I saw the futility of the old ways. However, I had not participated in the older movements due to not being of the faith yet. I was an outsider looking in. Yet here in my 30’s, for the first time in my life I tried to manufacture what God did in my earlier years.
I tried futilely to recreate how God manifested Himself before. The problem? Well, God had new things that weren’t inside the ramifications of how He spoke to me before. My perception of the world has matured. Faith has deepened. God can speak to me in being a wife and mother that I would have not understood before. The way I went about spending time with God has morphed.
Yes, Abba blessed those old ways and habits to know Him….but NOW He has something more.
Where is the God of my 30’s?…I got stuck looking for God in a particular way (of my younger youth) and thus got stuck recreating an event. When I think I’m not being religious, it’s the very thing I’m acting out. I crave a system. I gravitate to something known. Wanting repetition that gives the desired effect of comfort. Thus limiting how God can speak to me in a more deeper intimate way.
Yes, even a 35 year old cosmo woman can find she’s become old-hat when God is ready to show her more in this walk that ever changes. I don’t want to rely on the old wine skins of my younger years…they cannot contain the new wine God wants to pour out now. Heck, I don’t want the old wine skin of last year or last week. Every day is new and afresh and eager with the expectation He will just blow my mind again with something more.
Neither is new wine put in old wineskins; for if it is, the skins burst and are [a]torn in pieces, and the wine is spilled and the skins are ruined. But new wine is put into fresh wineskins, and so both are preserved.
(Matthew 9:17, AMP)
tessagroves 