The God Who Renews

One of the main ways God has wired me to experience Him is to connect with Him in nature. I have always been drawn to the woods because the silence and the simple, elegant beauty raise my affections heavenward. I feel God in the majesty of the oceans and the mountains. I sense God in the stillness of the lake or the pond. When David wrote in Psalm 19:1 that “the heavens declare the glory of God, and the expanse proclaims the work of his hands,” I like to think that maybe he was recalling nights spent under a clear Judean sky tending his sheep. If so, I get where David was coming from. 

The world around us cries out with evidence of the hand of a Creator. And so much of this evidence comes in the form of renewal.

Renewal surrounds us in nature. It is in every fragile green bud sprouting from gray, leafless branches. It is in the emerging, delicate petals of bulbs that have long laid dormant in drab soil. The natural world around us reminds us that the same God who created all things has the ability and the desire to see this spirit of renewal come alive in every aspect of our existence. 

There are many lenses through which we can view the Bible’s story, and one of the most uplifting is the concept of renewal. Throughout the biblical narrative, we see that renewal is not just a theme, but a deeply ingrained aspect of who God is and what it means for us to be in relationship with Him. 

In Lamentations 3:22-23, God promises that His tender care for us, born out of His undying love, is renewed with every morning’s sunrise. 

Through the prophet Isaiah, God promised that after the hardships His people had experienced, He would ultimately be there on the other side to give them a renewed strength to face the future, a strength like the soaring eagle (Isaiah 40:31).

Of course, we know that part of what it means to come to saving faith in Christ is a transformational renewal from death to life: “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has passed away, and see, the new has come” (2 Corinthians 5:17). Paul speaks about this renewal elsewhere in his epistles, specifically in Colossians 3, where he calls us to live godly lives since we “are being renewed in knowledge according to the image of you Creator.” 

And when Jesus finally returns to call His people to Himself, we will not gather with Him on earth as we know it or in Heaven as we currently understand it, but in a new physical reality that He will introduce. In this place, which John calls the “new heaven and [the] new earth,” God will undo the effects of sin, renewing the purity and perfection that originally existed when God and humans dwelt together in Eden: “He will wipe away every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; grief, crying, and pain will be no more, because the previous things have passed away” (revelation 21:4). God makes all things new. He makes and is making people new. He makes and is making creation new. He makes and is making the future new. 

This truth is a bottomless well of hope for the Believer. Why? We can be assured that the Renewer is at work in the world and in our lives. 

The existence of a good, sovereign, all-powerful God at work to bring about renewal gives us hope that the troubled marriage can find its footing once again. It gives us comfort that the wayward child may someday return. It provides a balm for the grieving that there will be a cessation of heartache and tears one day. It says that the rut you are in won’t last forever. That God is the Great Renewer is a truth that drives away worry, sadness, and complacency. 

What the flowers in the spring say to us is that no matter how long the winter feels, it has never lasted longer than its appointed days. And it never will. 

This article originally appeared in the Good For You Newsletter, Vol: 16.

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Andy BlanksComment