Changeless
Published in the Omaha World Herald’s “From the Pulpit”
September 29, 2024
Reverend Eric L. Jay
“Changeless”
Change is an unavoidable and constant reality. Change can be scary. Change can be helpful or hurtful. Change can be reinvigorating, or it can be exhausting. Change can be a lot of things to us, but the one thing change will never be is consistent. Change won’t change.
I think what makes the seasons of change in our life so difficult and scary is the unknown. We know things will change, but we don’t know how or when or why or what new realities change will bring. Unless you are deeply rooted, the winds of change will leave you bruised and battered and threaten to blow away all your joy and happiness. Having deep roots is important, but even the deepest roots will be uprooted in the winds of change unless they are found to be buried in the right soil. If the ground in which you plant your roots shifts with the wind or is unstable, then so are you, and then you’re no less subject to the unpredictable winds of change than a fallen leaf.
How we endure through change and how we endure through each season of life has a significant influence on where we find ourselves in the future. The soil in which we plant our roots and how deep our roots go will determine whether we thrive or survive in the season we are in.
The only consistency that exists in this life or the next, the only solid ground that exists in which we can confidently plant our roots deeply, is the Word of God. Living this life rooted in the Word of God, reading and meditating and living in His Word, is the only hope we have of enduring the seasons of change in life and the only way that we can bear good fruit and thrive even in the driest of summers and the coldest of winters.
Everyone and everything in this life will change many times. God, however, says in Malachi 3:6, “For I the Lord do not change; therefore you, O children of Jacob, are not consumed.” And Hebrews 13:8 says that “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever.”
No matter the season or the changes we go through, by God’s grace through faith in our risen Savior, Jesus Christ, our salvation is secure, and we remain the children of God. Stay rooted in His love and His Word, my friends, for as Psalm 1 says, “Blessed is the man who…delights in the word of the Lord. He is like a tree planted by streams of water that yields fruit in its season and its leaf does not wither. In all that he does, he prospers” (Psalm 1:1-3).