Jenny Mossman Testimony based on Isaiah 43 18-19b

Printer-friendly version

(also recorded under "Sermon Podcasts" on this website -- see New Years Day 2012)

I learnt a new phrase in October last year. The phrase ‘On Note.’ The reason I learnt it was because it now describes me. For those who haven’t heard that before ‘On Note’ is the term used for the first part of the training to become a Local Preacher. So, here I am… and I’ve only done unit 1. So what I’m going to do is give you a bit of my story.

I wonder how God speaks to us? I wonder how he speaks to you? Maybe it’s one particular way or maybe in different ways. For me, it’s in different ways, but at one particular point in my life God spoke to me very clearly through these verses, Isaiah 43:18-19b.

It was November or December 2007. The New Year was looming on the horizon and there was a sense of ‘out with the old and in with the new’. During this time, one of my daily my Bible readings was Isaiah 43. As I read, part of it struck me. That part was the words ‘behold I am doing a new thing’. Now I didn’t just read it one day and have a major, earth shattering revelation – No, not that that isn’t possible… It’s just I can be a bit slow. I didn’t come across those words just once, or even twice, it seemed that they come up in everything I read, they would keep popping into my thoughts, in fact they just seemed to be everywhere.

So the verse, it starts out ‘behold I am doing a new thing’. These words, seemed so insistent, weaving their way through my daily life that one day I did finally think, ‘Hmm, I wonder if God is going to do a new thing?’ The verse continues ‘do you not perceive it?’ So yes, I eventually perceived it and kind of acknowledged it. Almost immediately the wheels were set in motion and God moved me out of the situation I was in.

That year I had been questioning whether I was in the right church and so I had been praying about it and I asked God to be very clear about the answer. I just wanted to do His will and so during the year I had said, ‘Lord, if this is where you want me to be, I’m happy to stay here’ and then I added ‘as long as Kirsty’s happy.’ (Kirsty’s my daughter!) The verse stayed with me through to the end of the year and in late December, Kirsty and I were doing our Bible time together. As we were discussing, talking and praying she said to me ’Mum I want to go to church but not that one’. And so I prayed again and yes we did leave that church at the end of December 2007. It’s not an easy thing to do – leave your church, and there were doubts as to whether I’d got it right. Having said that I had prayed and I did some research on other local churches.

On the first Sunday of 2008, Kirsty and I found ourselves sitting in an All Age Service, in a different church with the minister introducing a memory verse for the congregation, a verse which started, ‘Forget the former things’… and continued… ’do not dwell on the past’… ‘behold I am doing a new thing’. As I say, I can be a bit slow, but I really felt that we were at the right place at least for that time.

The next few months were a bit strange. God had not only taken me out of a place, but He had taken me out of my ministry too. I really felt that rather than jumping in and volunteering to do lots of things in the new church, I just had to wait and see what God wanted me to do. I had been involved in a variety of different things at the previous church, a bit of youth work, some children’s talks, All Age Services and I helped to lead a ladies Bible study. So, when that all stopped I felt at a bit of a loose end. I did try out one or two new things, but it was in a building called the Chill Factore and shall we just say that I’ve decided that snowboarding isn’t for me.

During this time another part of the scripture was coming to light –‘forget the former things’. By making me wait, the memories of some of the things I had previously done at church began to ebb away and looking back now I realise that God was preparing me for what he was about to do next. And so began the second major new thing He had planned for me…

There’s a Jewish saying which goes something like this – ‘How do you make God laugh?’ Answer ‘You tell Him your plans’.

Well, I had plans. As a stay at home mum I was thinking ahead to the time when Kirsty would eventually leave home to go to university. I felt I needed to prepare myself for that time so that I wouldn’t suffer from what I’d heard people call ‘the empty nest syndrome’. So my plans were, to wait until Kirsty left home in 2014, do some training in something then maybe get a job. Meanwhile, I would take my time looking into what I could do. Just to recap, this was for things that I could do … In 2014.

Now this is just a thread of a much bigger story. We had started going to the new church in January 2008 and to cut a very long story short, I’ll just say that by May 2008 I found myself applying to Cliff College to do a diploma in Children’s Evangelism and Nurture. Yes, I appeared to be starting the first part of my plans… six years too early! But these were God’s plans, not mine. I applied on-line and less than an hour after pressing ‘send’ I was accepted, subject to references.

Several things happened between then and the time I was due to start in September 2008. Perhaps the most significant was that my husband Graham was out of work. He worked freelance and one contract had just finished, but there was no new work on the horizon. The thing was we were paying for the Cliff course ourselves. I offered not to go to Cliff – not as heroic as it sounds, nor as heroic as I would like it to be… You see, although God had been telling me that He was going to do a new thing, I was having second thoughts about the whole idea. Mainly because on Jenny’s timeline it wasn’t meant to happen just yet, it was all a bit too quick. But Graham said I had to go, this was my thing, it was important that I did it and that we’d work it out.

The diploma was a two-year, distance learning course which included 5 residential weeks at Cliff College – one per term. It was a hard, hard slog. I was going back to studying and essay writing after nearly 20 years and even though I had done a degree, it just seemed really difficult. Yes, I was working at home for most of the time, and yes, I didn’t have to juggle my study around a job, but I was trying to keep family life going and even though Graham did get more work, which was great, the job was in London which meant he was working away from home – which meant added difficulties.

Then, just as I thought I was beginning to cope, in April 2009 Graham and I found ourselves rushing Kirsty to hospital, for what appeared to be appendicitis. Her appendix was removed, but the pain still continued and so started 9 months of hospital stays and illness for Kirsty. Once the abdominal pain was sorted, she got severe migraines and labyrinthitis – which included even more hospital stays. No sooner had this cleared then she had a chest infection which developed into pleurisy and left her with a very painful condition called costocondritis.

This was one of the lowest times for me. We often talk about the Father heart, but what about the mother’s heart? What a mother goes through when her child is unhappy or ill can’t be described. It’s an incredible desperation, a desperation to want to swap places just to make the pain go away. In amongst this anguish, Graham was working away, my parents live in Yorkshire, Graham’s live in Scotland and to my distress no one close by offered to help. I felt totally alone and desperate. On top of all this I had essays due.

Whenever Kirsty was in hospital I would stay with her the whole time and do my work by her bedside. But that was difficult and then there were the times when she was just crying out in pain. In those moments I’d ask God again, ‘am I doing the right thing? did I hear you right? I’m happy to give up if I’ve got it wrong’. I’d love to say that His voice broke through and I heard him say ‘Yes, you got it right. Well done thou good and faithful servant,’ but He didn’t.

Having said that, in His amazing love and grace, He affirmed me in the most incredible ways. First of all, all my essays were in on time, I never needed to ask for an extension and secondly, it seemed that the more I struggled with the things going on around me, amazingly, the better my essay marks were.

Again, cutting a very long story short Kirsty seemed to make a full recovery and one day I realised that she seemed to be well and healthy for the first time in months. That was in January 2010 and in June 2010 I graduated with a diploma in Children’s Evangelism and Nurture and I even got the course prize for top student.

A few days later on July the 5^th I was interviewed for a post as children’s worker here at KMC. An hour and a half later, I was offered the post. And the rest is history.

I’ve told you this because I can trace this whole new era of my life back to November/December 2007 when God Impressed upon me those words from Isaiah 43, ‘Behold I am doing a new thing’.

I realised that God likes to do new things. The Bible tells us of a ‘new heaven and a new earth’, ‘new shoots’, ‘new songs’, ‘a new creation’, ‘new wine’, ‘new growth’, ‘new covenant’, ‘new heart’, ‘new spirit’. We heard earlier that His love is ‘new every morning’ and in Revelation we read ‘I am making all things new’. And so it goes on! But if we look back to the verses in Isaiah 43, God doing something new is conditional, it depends on us forgetting the former things and not dwelling on the past.

In context these words were written for Israel who was in exile in Babylon and God was about to bring them home – to do His New Thing. I can’t really say that I was in exile when all this began, but what I can say was that I was in several comfort zones. Things were bumbling along and as far as my ministry was concerned I did a variety of things, I seemed to know what I was doing. It was great. All the things that I was doing were good things. But God took me out of that place. I wonder why?

I once heard someone say that ‘the good can be the enemy of the best’. In other words we can settle for less than what God wants for us, because what we are doing is seen as good. It’s a bit like settling for a turkey sandwich made with leftover turkey, rather than accepting an offer to go for a Christmas dinner. We can settle for yesterday’s blessings, or even last week’s or last year’s, instead of accepting the new blessings God has for us. In other words these are comfort zones which could have taken years to establish, but can be danger zones that stop us moving forward.

As I said before, when I got to the second church, I sat and did nothing, just so that I could hear what God wanted me to do. I waited for 10 months, I sat and listened and got nothing, and that for a person who likes to get up and go and do stuff was very, very difficult. But I believe that in that time God was helping me to forget the former things and stop thinking about the past, the things I used to do, the comfort zones. What I didn’t realise then was God was working in me at a deeper level. He encouraged me to stop looking back and to change my focus. And as we all know, if you keep looking back you can’t see where you’re going.

Are there any other reasons why God wants to move us on and do a new thing? I thought of another three.

1. Because He Loves us.

We know He loves the world (John 3:16), yes he cares about the nations - Isaiah 43 is telling us that God was about to free His people, but He also cares about us all individually. In John 10 we read that He knows every one of us and He calls us each by name. He wants us to have life and not just any old life, but life in all its fullness. He wants us to fulfil our God given potential.

Yes we could go on and sit in our comfort zones but God wants more than that for us. God says that He has started something good in us and He promised to bring it to completion. As Max Lucado says, ‘‘God loves you just the way you are, but He refuses to leave you that way. He wants you to be just like Jesus’. We just need to trust that He loves us and go with Him!

2. For His Glory

I don’t want my Testimony to be just about me, but about how God worked in my life, about His mercy and His grace. I have to give it all to Him. There is no way I could have done this by myself and if He hadn’t been so insistent about doing a new thing, and affirming and re affirming, I would have given up. It just would have been too hard.

We have an enemy who is opposed to the will of God and we are warned in scripture that there will be battles. I certainly had them. Financial battles - Right from the start Graham could have said, ‘no we can’t afford it’. There were health battles, which seemed never-ending, we even had a couple of minor car accidents (neither one my fault!) and so the list goes on.

Perhaps the two most precious words in the Bible are ‘But God…’ and that is what I say here. There were battles, but God says ‘I am making a way in the desert and streams in the wasteland’. And that is exactly what happened. The way seemed impossible but God made a way.

As I was writing this, God reminded me of something else. In Romans 8 He says that we are more than conquerors and so, even before the battle has started, we are the victors, we have the victory through Jesus. I give Him the glory.

3. It’s all to establish His Kingdom.

God’s Kingdom is the same Kingdom that Jesus laid the foundations for 2000 years ago. Which means that those who love Him, are to continue as His Kingdom builders. I recently saw the title of a book which read, ‘You are God’s plan A’, and then in brackets it said ‘and there’s no plan B’.

We may not feel that we are up to the job, but I believe God sees us differently, He tells us that with Him nothing is impossible. Through the new things that we allow God to do with us, and in us, and through us, we not only experience our own growth but He uses us for the growth of His Kingdom.

In the time I have been at KMC, I have spoken about Jesus to two schools, several head teachers, this congregation, parents and children at outreach events and several hundred guides, brownies and rainbows. Maybe there’s more, I don’t really want to think about it because it’s quite scary. And now I can’t believe that I am actually training to be a Local Preacher, except that God keeps saying, ‘behold I am doing a new thing’.

I don’t know what’s happening in your life at the moment. Maybe you have been taken out of a comfort zone and are feeling anxious with doubts and fears. Maybe God’s asking you to let go of the past, maybe that’s a ministry or maybe a grudge, maybe there’s a need to forgive so that we can move on. Or perhaps you are in a battle, one that seems to be never ending with no way out.

Well maybe at this time, God is saying;

Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past.

See, I am doing a new thing!

Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?

I am making a way in the desert and streams in the wasteland.