Listen to the talk here – recorded 19th January (NB moderate audio quality), or read below:

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New Beginnings

‘New Year, new you!’ We’re really familiar with this now. And it’s everywhere at the moment.

It is true that the beginning of a new year offers us a new start. We can finally turn the page on last year, including any of its failures, embarrassments and disappointments. ‘This year is going to be different’, we tell ourselves. 

We feel hopeful for our newly adopted exercise regimes, diets, healthy eating plans, or January fasts, plus any newly discovered productivity hacks etc. So many things right now are being recommended, promoted or sold on the promise of becoming a ‘new you’. Although I think people are getting wise to these advertising strategies, we’re all yearning for a bit of self-improvement and who doesn’t want to become their ‘best self’?

A new Version of ourselves

Then there are new beginnings that require a whole new version of us. Or that a new part of ourselves emerges, or an existing part gets dialled up. New jobs will require new skills, as do new contexts – we will all at times need new ways of understanding, and new ways to communicate with people. Not to mention learning new technologies and new ways of operating – it’s something I had to do when I changed my career a few years ago.

These life-moments which produce a new version of us might include, moving house, moving to a new city, getting engaged, getting married, or having children. Those of you who are parents will probably remember how you felt when you first held your son or daughter, and in what ways being a mother or father has changed you. Similarly how marrying someone and setting up home starts to require new things of you – which can be exciting and challenging all at the same time. No matter your relationship status – single, married, divorced or widowed there are always new callings and new phases of life we have to embrace – all of which present some kind of new beginning. Asking that we become a new version of ourselves in some way. 

For all of us, living through a pandemic has changed us. As has our journey together as a church community over the last few years. As well as completing a season of life, saying farewell to friends, facing illness, caring for loved ones – these are all experiences that require us to become a new or different version of ourselves. Usually for the better, but sometimes it can feel for worse – at least for a while.

But these experiences don’t fundamentally change who we are – we might learn new habits, or ways of doing things; we may grow or expand around our circumstances but our essential personhood remains unchanged. We are still ‘us’. With our various quirks and foibles. And unfortunately our sinful natures. We’re shaped by a whole range of factors which affect the way we respond to things, our thought patterns and the conclusions we draw about ourselves and others, as we navigate life. And we get comfortable. That’s our identity – ‘it’s just who I am’, we tell ourselves. And that can be depressing. Especially when we strive to change ourselves and it doesn’t pay off. What we need is more than just a new version of ourselves – we need a new identity.

A new identity brings resistance

As we heard last week, the Exodus saw the Israelites leave Egypt where they had been enslaved for generations. They witnessed an increasingly severe set of plagues as God turned the screws on Pharaoh to let his people go. When they left Egypt they fled across the parted waters of the Red Sea, and then moved through the desert from camp to camp as they followed a pillar of cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night, for 40 years. Apparently this journey would only take 11 days if they’d walked in a straight line. But this journey was about more than covering distance, they needed to become a new people with a new identity. And they just couldn’t seem to let go of their old identity as slaves in Egypt. So much so, that when the Promised Land was so close they could touch it (literally they’d brought back samples of the produce) they couldn’t enter into it. 

When the twelve spies had gone into the land to suss it out. Ten of them spread a bad report. The people grumbled, freaked out and then even started to organise! They were not going to the Promised Land. In Numbers 14v2 they said: “If only we had died in Egypt! Or in this wilderness! Why is the Lord bringing us to this land only to let us fall by the sword!” They thought it was better to go back to Egypt, v4: “And they said to each other, “We should choose a leader and go back to Egypt”.

As they stood on the cusp of a new beginning, most were too intimidated by what stood before them and believed the negative reports of ten of the spies, spread amongst them. They looked with fear, rather than faith – at the land before them – the land that God was promising them.

A new identity produces new ways of seeing

But two of the spies saw with eyes of faith – Caleb and Joshua. Though they saw the same things there; they had an entirely different interpretation of what they saw. They urged the Israelites to have faith – they were so close! Later in Numbers 14 they said: “The land we passed through and explored is exceedingly good. If the Lord is pleased with us, he will lead us into that land, a land flowing with milk and honey, and will give it to us. Only do not rebel against the Lord. And do not be afraid of the people of the land, because we will devour them. Their protection is gone, but the Lord is with us. Do not be afraid of them.”

But it was to no avail. They refused to listen. God was exasperated at the contempt they showed for him. This was more important than his own glory. And I just want to underline the meaning of contempt because its something that God takes seriously (and so should we): the feeling that a person or a thing is worthless or beneath consideration – disregard and disobedience. These are rooted in contempt. 

God had forgiven them but there still had to be consequences. This is another example of where God has boundaries. He is a Person. “No one who has treated me with contempt will ever see [the Promised Land].” The eldest generation that left Egypt would die in the wilderness and only their children would see it. He then told them that they would spend 40 years in the wilderness, one year for every day that the spies were in the land. 

And then God said – and I think this is really critical: “But because my servant Caleb has a different spirit and follows me wholeheartedly, I will bring him into the land he went to, and his descendants will inherit it.” Numbers 14:24 NIV And then again: ““Not one of you will enter the land I swore with uplifted hand to make your home, except Caleb son of Jephunneh and Joshua son of Nun.” Numbers 14:30 NIV

The ten spies died by plague and when the Israelites tried to enter the promised land in their own strength the Amalekites and Canaanites who lived in the hill country beat them back. They didn’t succeed. And so they wandered for 40 years, that whole first generation dying in the wilderness except for Caleb and Joshua.

A different spirit means a brand new identity 

Joshua and Caleb had a different spirit and wholehearted followed the Lord. They had shed their pasts and their old identities, they were no longer slaves. They had a brand new identity.

Identity was always a struggle for ancient Israel. And it can be a struggle for us to. One of the fathers of ancient Israel was Jacob. And Jacob was a man struggling for identity. As a young man he impersonated his older brother Esau, stealing his identity – this was the original identity theft; in order to obtain his elder brother’s birthright. Then a whole set of trials and circumstances humbled him – until he could articulate his core complaint to God – the heart of the issue. It led him to a confrontation with God – wrestling him (or an angel or Jesus?) in frustration and desperation. His deepest desire/complaint was that wanted God to bless him: “I will not let go until you bless me!” Then Jacob was renamed Israel – and it’s from him whom the people of Israel took their name. 

So here they were, standing on the cusp of this realised blessing, the Promised Land. But there were still fundamental issues of identity holding many back from entering into the very blessing their forefather Jacob wrestled with God for all those years before. And I think it can be the same for us. 

My own wrestle has been with being creative. And allowing myself to embrace who God has made me to be. It wasn’t particularly validated in my family despite there being plenty of creative and its been an existential journey to step into it. I had to embrace a new identity to be who God created me to be.

The ‘new beginning’ of our promised land demands more of us, it demands not just a new version of us but that we have a new identity. And even that we are renamed. Our identity is under constant threat, and it can cost us like it did the Israelites who rebelled, so wedded were they to their old, wrong identities as slaves from Egypt.

Foreshadowing things to come

The different spirit found in Caleb and Joshua, foreshadows what the prophet Ezekiel would say many years later: “I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws. Then you will live in the land I gave your ancestors; you will be my people, and I will be your God.” Ezekiel 36:26-29 NIV 

In turn this foreshadowed the outpouring of the Holy Spirit in Acts, as foretold by the prophet Joel: “And afterward, I will pour out my Spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your old men will dream dreams, your young men will see visions. Even on my servants, both men and women, I will pour out my Spirit in those days. I will show wonders in the heavens and on the earth, blood and fire and billows of smoke. The sun will be turned to darkness and the moon to blood before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord. And everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved; for on Mount Zion and in Jerusalem there will be deliverance, as the Lord has said, even among the survivors whom the Lord calls.” Joel 2:28-32 NIV

What does it mean for us?

For us this means becoming as a child of God. And having our identity in Christ.

There can be many things that cause us to question our identity – rejection, struggle, our personal deserts, suffering, unemployment, heartbreak… Experiences and circumstances can force us to question ourselves – including upheavals, loss, relational issues, change – anything that destabilises us. But God’s unchanging invitation to us is to place our identity in Christ. And he will unsettle those things which we begin to form our identity around – be it a job, a person, a church, our hobbies and interests even which define us. Any answer we might provide to the question ‘Who am I?

The incredible thing about placing our identity in Christ – is that this identity supersedes every other identity we could possibly have. Be it gender, sexuality, relationship status, work, our national identity, racial identity, cultural identity, educational, denominational… who you know. It’s the most freeing thing ever to take on this brand new identity. Identities become labels, they can be reductive, they can be excuses we make: ‘that’s not me’, they can be limitations, they can be exclusionary… I’m a mum now I can’t let loose on the dance floor for fear of my ‘mum dancing’. I’m single and don’t have children – I can’t contribute to the kids ministry. I’m old, that counts me out of contributing, I’m young – what do I possibly have to say?? There is one identity that matters and that is our identity in Christ and it supersedes all others and sets the precedent; once and for all answering the question – Who am I? 

‘The Work under the work’

It’s something that Tim Keller mentions. He talks about: “the work under the work”. That in all our striving and attempts to change and improve ourselves, achieve and drive ourselves forward – become our ‘best selves’ we are trying to answer the question, Who Am I. But placing our identity in Christ takes care of our fundamental identity so that we don’t have to strive to define ourselves. 

In his letter to the Galatians, Paul explain this: “So in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith, for all of you who were baptised into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise.” Galatians 3:26-29 NIV

New beginnings invite us into a new identity. And the ultimate new beginning is our new identity in Christ. In so many ways that is our Promised Land.

And so rather than going back to what we knew, we move forwards, into the new things God is doing. In many ways we’re still travelling, but it’s alway from glory to glory. And so we press on because God has a higher calling for us beyond our ‘new year, new you’ goals and beyond becoming our ‘best self’. We are to become children of God through faith with a new identity in Christ. 

Isaiah 43:19 sums this up, calling back to Joshua, Caleb and the wilderness years of Israel. Our new identity is forward facing and our old identity is firmly behind us. So many times we’re told not to look back – to forget what’s behind us: “This is what the Lord says— he who made a way through the sea, a path through the mighty waters, who drew out the chariots and horses, the army and reinforcements together, and they lay there, never to rise again, extinguished, snuffed out like a wick: “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 wilderness and streams in the wasteland.” Isaiah 43:16-19 NIV

And so we press on. In more words of Paul’s from his letter to the Philippians: “Brothers and sisters, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.” Philippians 3:14 NIV 

And that’s a new year goal worth having.

The singer Bob Dylan is getting a lot of airtime at the moment because of the new biopic featuring Timothée Chalamet. He wrote an amazing set of gospel songs as well as his other music, and I want to play one of them to you. The version we’ll hear is sung by the Chicago Mass Choir but do listen to the original one sung by Bob Dylan too. Listen below.

© Alexandra Noel – All Rights Reserved – January 2025