Not a Consolation

There is a voice, and you have been hearing it for a while now, and it is always kind.

It is the voice that says: you are still so gifted. You have still got so much to give. There is still plenty of time.

Every one of those is a true sentence. Every one of them is said with love, usually by somebody who has stayed close to you when others did not, and usually at a moment when they can see you are low and they want to hand you something.

And every one of them lands like a consolation prize.

You cannot say that out loud, obviously. What are you going to do, correct a person who is being kind to you? So you say thank you and you mean it and something in you goes down another inch, and neither of you understands what just happened.

Let me tell you what just happened, because I think naming it will help.

The word still is doing the damage. Still is a word that gets used about the remainder of a thing. It looks backwards. Still gifted means gifted compared to who you were. Still time means less time than there was. Every one of those kind sentences quietly frames your future as what is left over after the main event, and the main event, in that framing, has already happened and you were in it and it is over.

That is the consolation register, and it is being used about your whole life.

So here is what I want to do with this message. I am not going to encourage you. Encouragement in that register would just be more of the same thing at a higher volume. I want to change the register altogether, and there is a verse that does it.

I am not going to ask you what happened either. Not one detail, not a category. This message needs the voice, not the file.

God does not use the consolation register

Isaiah 43 has God speaking to people who had lost nearly everything, and listen to the register He chooses.

Behold, I will do a new thing; now it shall spring forth; shall ye not know it? I will even make a way in the wilderness, and rivers in the desert.Isaiah 43:19

Read the words He does not use.

He does not say: there is still something for you. He does not say: you have still got much to offer. He does not say: let us make the best of what remains. Not one syllable of that chapter is in the register of a person being handed a smaller thing gently, and the Holy Spirit who moved Isaiah 43 has never once spoken to you in it either.

He says new. He says now. He says behold, which is a word you use to make somebody look up.

And the two verses before it are the part that most readers rush past. God tells them not to remember the former things nor consider the things of old. That is a startling instruction to give people whose entire identity was built on a former thing that God Himself did for them. He is not telling them the past was worthless. He is telling them to stop taking their measurements from it.

Here is what that puts in your hands this morning. You are not living in the leftovers of your own life, and Isaiah 43:19 has God calling it a new thing rather than a remainder, and the Holy Spirit is the one who springs a thing forth in a person who has been quietly measuring everything against a year that is over.

Notice where He puts it, too, because this is the detail that undoes the consolation entirely. A way in the wilderness. Rivers in the desert.

He does not say He will take you back to the garden. He does not restore the old road, He makes one where there was not one. The new thing in Isaiah 43 happens in the wrong place on purpose: in the very terrain that everybody, including the people in it, had written off as the part of the map where nothing happens.

Now let me hold the line honestly, because I will not do to you what the kind voice does.

This is not a promise of scale. It is not a promise of a platform, or a role restored, or that anything returns in the shape it had. If the new thing is small and local and known to about nine people, that is not a lesser version of Isaiah 43:19. A river in a desert is not measured by its width.

And a quiet second half is not a consolation either. What makes something a consolation is not its size. It is being handed to you as compensation. God is not compensating you. You are being given something rather than being made comfortable about a loss, and Isaiah 43:19 says now it shall spring forth, and the Holy Spirit is not in the business of settling anybody down with a smaller version of what they wanted.