In a culture obsessed with the new, the best new things are old things. God is ever new, and never changing. God embodies the groundedness of what never changes, with the ability to bring ever fresh expressions of His timeless truth and presence.

We don't always like change.

Change can be exciting and scary at the same time.

There's a balance between things in our lives that ground us, and things that need to change. Too much change all at once isn't good. That can cause stress and feel overwhelming. It's good to be grounded in the familiar, even while launching out into the adventure of the unknown.

The most grounded aspect of our lives is the relationships that sustain us over the long haul. The most grounding of those is our relationship with God.

When we try to ground ourselves in less stable things, we find that our lives can feel more uncertain. Success, money, accomplishments, and material possessions may seem to offer stability, but they cannot deliver the kind of consistency in life that stable relationships can. How often people cast aside relationships for these kinds of lessor things, sacrificing friends and family for success in the arena of work or other personal pursuits. The same is true with God.

How often we make our pursuit of God secondary to a lot of other things. And yet, there is no greater ground of stability than our relationship with God. God knows how to ground us in every season of life in unchanging things, while pushing us to grow in the right areas at the right time. That is the purpose of the indwelling Holy Spirit, to give us that internal sense of comfort through the abiding love of Jesus, while also convicting and challenging us to change what needs changing.

God has a purpose and plan for your life.

That purpose is first to grow in relationship with Him. That is and should become ever more the ground of what will never change in our lives. That purpose is second to call us into His holiness, to be and become more like Him. God desires to get to work in our hearts and minds, transforming us into ever better versions of ourselves, which is also the "self" that He created us to be from the beginning. Locked inside each of us is the person we are meant to be, covered over by the layers of programming that have sent us looking for our identity in things other than God. There is a lot God needs to do in order to remove that old programming, in order to get us back to the older programming He created us for originally.

The New Wine of God is the Spirit, and the New Skin is a new nature, which is the original nature we were created to live in. So, let's get back to the center of who we are in relationship with God, so God can get us back to the center of who we were created to be. Amen!!