Sing a New Song: Embracing God’s New Work in 2026 - Sermon 4th January 2026

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Okay, the Bible reading today, there's two of them. The first one comes from

Isaiah 43, verses 14 to 19.

Isaiah 43:14–19

This is what the Lord says, Your Redeemer, the Holy One of Israel.

For your sake I will send to Babylon, and bring down as fugitives all the Babylonians,

in the ships in which they took pride.

I am the Lord, your Holy One, Israel's Creator, your King.

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 the 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.

And the second reading is from Philippians 3, 7-16.

But whatever were gains to me, I now consider loss for the sake of Christ.

What is more, I consider everything a loss because of the surpassing worth of

knowing Christ Jesus, my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things.

I consider them garbage.

That I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my

own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ,

the righteousness that comes from God on the basis of faith.

I want to know Christ, yes, to know the power of his resurrection and participation

in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so somehow attaining

the resurrection from the dead.

Not that I have already obtained all this or have already arrived at my goal,

but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me.

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 towards what is ahead.

I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.

All of us, then, who are mature should take such a view of things.

And if on some point you think differently, that too God will make clear to you.

Only let us live up to what we have already attained.

The sun rose this morning at roughly the same time that it rose last Sunday.

I'm sure that the bills that you had due in December are still due.

I'm sure the messages that you haven't replied to are still unreplied to.

The relationships that were strained before midnight on the 31st,

there's a good chance they still remain strained today. Yet, something has changed.

And I don't just mean that all of a sudden it feels awkward if your Christmas

decorations are still up.

It's 2026, a new year, a new thing.

And I wonder today, what is it that you are going to do with this new thing?

I wonder what we as a church community are going to do with this new thing.

As I opened our service this morning, I read from the Psalms,

a line, a statement, a command, a phrase that appears regularly throughout the

Psalms, five or six times. It appears also in Isaiah.

It appears at different points in the Old Testament, this line where God commands

his people to sing to the Lord a new song, sing to the Lord a new song.

God is not afraid of the new. In fact, we often find in Scripture,

we often find, I think, in life, that it is God who is the one who is nudging us toward the new.

And I wonder if, as we enter into 2026, whether,

as you sit there this morning, you might be able to consider your life,

and you might be able to consider what it might mean for you to sing to the Lord a new song.

While the Psalms, where it says it in the Psalms, discusses that idea within

the very literal music type of singing and song,

I'd like for us to consider today the principle underneath that,

both the literal but the abstract concept.

Principle, to see God's heart underneath that command.

So, straight up from the beginning, let's be clear, this morning is not a sermon about our music.

It's not a sermon about our music team or our song choices. They're not the

conversations that I or Peter or anyone wants to be having after the service.

No, this morning's a little deeper than that. It's about asking ourselves the

question, what might possibly be the new thing that God is calling us toward,

this year? Let me pray again.

Lord, we bring our whole selves to this morning. We've brought our offerings.

We've brought ourselves in music. But we want to say to you,

God, today we bring our bodies and our whole selves as individuals and as a community.

And we ask this morning that you would again nudge us, first in our imagination

and then into our actions, into a new thing.

Help us, Lord, to follow you, to not step without you.

God, I pray that you would give us open hearts today to hear what you might be moving us toward.

In Jesus' name, amen.

So God commands a new song, but it's important, I think, to understand when

we read those words that there is no suggestion, there's no suggestion from

God that the singing of old songs is all of a sudden forbidden.

It's not some terrible sin to sing a song that has already been written,

to do a thing that's already been done.

That's not the idea, the intention, the heart of the command.

And it's not a case of saying that old equals bad and new equals good.

Rather, I think any command or suggestion or refrain that nudges us,

moves us towards something new, I think that in some ways it shows how much

God knows what we're like.

I think God knows that often doing the same old comes very naturally to us.

We don't often find it difficult to hum and sing the stuff that we already know.

I'm not sure what the number is, but there is an age where all the new music

sounds wrong and all of your favorite songs, that's where music peaked.

But in the same way, we don't find it difficult to repeat the same habits.

We don't find it difficult to keep the same patterns, the same routines that

we already know continuing.

All of us know how challenging it is to learn and to apply a new habit into

our lives. The old habits, they stick, they're ingrained into our brains, into our lives.

So when we're nudged towards a new thing, it's God sometimes saying,

I already know you like the old thing.

But what about a new thing? And a new thing, just like a new song,

is by its very nature not yet known to us.

And like learning a new song, a new thing often costs us emotional and mental

energy to just even open ourselves up to it.

I often talk to youth and parents about the idea, oh, my child,

or I'm interested in coming to youth group on Friday, but just I'm not sure.

They're not sure. There's a feeling of the unknown, the anxious.

And I say the same thing every time, that by far the hardest youth night ever.

For a young person to ever come to, is the first one. The first one.

And I say to them that it doesn't change when you become an adult.

Being invited to or having to go to something that is new, not yet experienced,

unknown, is often a challenging, difficult thing that some of us will do everything

we can to resist such an awful thing.

But it's often the first one that's the hard one.

When Psalm 98 opens with the line, sing to the Lord a new song,

it's nudging us into the uncomfortable.

It's nudging these people musically, in this instance, into something uncomfortable.

Sing to the Lord a new song, but it immediately tells us why,

if we're going to do this, why we should do this.

It says, sing to the Lord a new song, for God has done marvelous things.

And so the commanded, the suggested, the new song that we ought to sing is not

based on feelings of boredom or a desire for novelty.

It's not even based on a desire to keep things modern and fresh.

No, it's based on the idea that our God has done marvelous things. Thanks.

Growing up, I had an auntie who I visited every month. These days,

unfortunately, less often.

But something about going to my auntie's place, it was like every second or

third time that I would walk in the door, the furniture in her home had been

completely rearranged.

Rooms had been swapped.

Things were just not as they were last time. She would do this all the time.

And while it was essentially the same things in the same place,

it always felt like walking in to a new home.

And she would say, well, I'm not going on a holiday anytime soon,

so this is my holiday. Change is, they say, as good as a holiday sometimes.

But this isn't what God is nudging us to do. He's not just nudging us to just

rearrange the furniture so that everything can feel fresh.

You know he's saying really something new something not yet known,

it's also not encouraging us as we think about our lives and possibly doing new things,

it's not encouraging us to find new ways to burn ourselves out it's not encouraging

us to find new ways to feel bad about ourselves new ways to feel like we aren't doing enough.

No, singing a new song was simply a fresh response, a fresh act of worship,

a fresh response of bringing our whole selves,

in light of, in face of, in response to a God who has always been.

In Romans chapter 12, the Apostle Paul gives an interesting perspective on this, I think.

Romans 12 · chapter mention

He says at the beginning of that chapter, Therefore I urge you,

brothers and sisters, in view of God's mercy, to offer your bodies as a living

sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God. This is your true and proper worship.

Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.

We see a pattern emerging here. The pattern is God's divine action,

in this case, his mercy, in other places, his marvellous deeds,

God's divine movement, action, and expression of his character,

is then encouraged to us in response to that, to respond in worship shaped by newness.

And here in Romans 12, worship is not as it is in the psalm, singing of a song.

It is bringing to God our whole life, our whole bodies, our whole being.

And God says that within that process, we ought to be also shaped by the renewing of our mind.

We ought to be constantly refreshing the way that we think about what we're doing.

It's a present continuous command. It is not something that you do once.

It's an ING word. That is, it's something that we are commanded to do now and

always, in every moment, renewing.

In another place, the Apostle Paul in Philippians chapter 3,

Philippians 3 · chapter mention

as we heard read for us today, Paul writes about his own personal approach to being open to newness.

He says there, forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies

ahead I press on toward the goal,

Paul's personal philosophy of being open to newness is shaped by this idea of,

forgetting what is behind.

I'm sure many of us would like to forget some of the things that are in our lives behind.

What's Paul really saying here? Because what we do know, and even if you have

your Bible open, you look at the bit of that chapter beforehand,

Paul was not someone who pretended like his past didn't happen.

In that chapter and other places in the New Testament, the Apostle Paul,

he does not hold back about giving his biography in great detail.

He's not shy about listing his credentials.

He's also not shy about listing his sufferings and the things that he's done.

And he's also not shy about listing his failures, his lowest lows,

and the story of his conversion.

So when he says that in some senses, his personal philosophy involves some sort

of forgetting of what is behind, well, he's clearly not saying that he's erased

from his mind completely his history.

But what he had done, I think, and what he was saying, and perhaps what he might

be encouraging us this morning to consider,

is that in the part of his mind that determined his identity,

and in the parts of his mind that determined his decision-making process about

what would come next for him, in those parts of his mind,

he refused to let the knowledge of his own history, he refused to let the knowledge

that he had of his previous experiences,

be the things that would limit what was coming next.

And many of us, many of us, if not all of us, struggle to forget in the way

that Paul tells us to forget.

Instead, many of us are very skilled at riding the rollercoaster of performance

and the rollercoaster of experience, where even if we know better,

there's still a part of us that considers our evaluation of our own inner goodness

and our own evaluation of our life satisfaction,

to be based on things that have happened in our life in the past,

whether long ago or in recent history.

And for some of us, this is something that feels high and good.

And for some of us, it's the other way.

For some of us, we struggle with being stuck in regret, being stuck in disappointment.

Perhaps for some of us, as we consider and remember our 2025.

Maybe we feel like our last year was filled with failures and it was filled with disappointments.

And what we do when we feel like that, when we reflect like that,

we do what we're all good at doing, we're all really good at it,

is what we do is we drag all of the mess from our past.

We drag it with us, those regrets, those disappointments, those hurts, those traumas.

What we do is we drag it into the new season of life that we go into.

And we do this because somewhere along the way, we became convinced that all

of those regrets and those disappointments, all of those failures,

all those things that went wrong or we did wrong,

what they are, they give us accurate data to help us to predict what's going to happen next.

And we get stuck. And when we get stuck, the idea of singing a new song,

doing a new thing, being open to a new possibility,

is really challenging, if not impossible, because,

the song that's stuck in our head is one that constantly reminds us of the bad

things that have happened, the bad things that we've done.

It constantly reminds us of how everybody else is succeeding and we are the failure.

Others of us aren't necessarily stuck in regret or disappointment,

but maybe we're actually stuck in the positive. Maybe for us,

what we're stuck in is either nostalgia or pride.

So we can often come to believe in our lives and come to the conclusion,

well, all of my good days behind me.

And there were some good days, but they're behind me.

So because of that, we can fall into the trap of thinking, well,

I've already made it in life. I already know everything. I already got it covered.

I already, I'm done. My feet are up.

Look at me go. I've succeeded. I've made it. I've graduated. I am done.

Or we can think because there are such a high quantity of good days behind us,

we believe that there then can't possibly be something ahead of us,

that is worth our attention and our effort.

And so whether for you it's more disappointment and regret, or it's nostalgia

or pride, or maybe for you it's fear, maybe for you it's just plain old fatigue,

all of these things can make us unavailable,

it can make us resistant, it can make us closed off to what God might be placing

before us now, in the present continuous.

It closes our eyes, perhaps, to the thing that God wants us to see.

All of these things, all of this stuff, keeps us looking backwards when God

is inviting us forward into the new.

In Isaiah 43, I have a passage from this morning, God speaks to a people in

that context who have every reason in the world to be trapped in their past.

They are in exile. They've lost their land. They've lost their homes,

their temple, their political identity.

Everything they thought they knew about life and everything they thought they

knew about God, everything they thought they knew about what it means to be

in God's plan had been totally shaken up and turned upside down.

And into that situation, God says something that I think is actually a little bit remarkable.

He says to these people in that context, do not remember the former things or

consider the things of old.

I am about to do a new thing. Now it springs forth. Do you not perceive it?

God says, do not remember the former things or consider the things of old.

I am about to do a new thing. Now it springs forth do you not perceive it again,

we're being encouraged in some form in some way to not remember to forget.

And again, this is the structure, I think, of what God is saying.

He commands these people, hey, stop dwelling in the past so much.

But he commands them to do this, not in a way that's just grounded in positive

thinking or the power of a fresh start.

But again, it is based upon his own divine action. God is doing a new thing.

It's him. And because of that, therefore, the people can release their grip,

on some of that old stuff that they need to release their grip on.

And then he asks a question. A question arrives into this that I think would be interesting for us.

It perhaps might be interesting for you this morning to sit with and to consider.

God asks them not whether, do you think you can handle this?

He doesn't ask them, are you up for a change?

He doesn't ask them if they have the willpower to sustain their New Year's resolution.

No, He simply asks them, do you not perceive it?

He says, a new thing has happened, a new thing is happening,

but can you perceive it? Can you understand it?

And so perhaps the question for the new year is definitely not whether God is

faithful or whether God is good or whether God has moved.

That question has been settled. God is faithful. And actually,

God is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow.

And he absolutely did a new thing when he sent his son Jesus.

But he also promises us a future day when he will do another new thing,

a future day when sin and pain and death will be finally gone for good,

the day when he makes all things new.

And he says to us again, do you not perceive it? Do you understand?

In the second last chapter of our Bibles in Revelation 21, John shares the vision

of what that future day will look like.

It says there in Revelation 21, Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth,

for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea.

I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God,

prepared as a bride, beautifully dressed for her husband.

And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, Look, God's dwelling place

is now among the people, and he will dwell with them.

They will be his people and god himself will be with them and be their god he

will wipe every tear from their eyes,

there will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain for the old order

of things has passed away,

verse 5 of revelation 21 it says he who was seated on the throne said i am making everything new.

Our God is the God who makes everything new.

That part is settled. That part is certain.

That is rock solid foundation upon which we can respond to.

A question amongst this is whether we will be attentive enough and brave enough,

in our lives, in our unique circumstances,

to respond to him with our new expressions of faith and obedience and worship,

that reflect the season that we find ourselves stepping into.

Think for a moment with me now the difference between these two scenarios,

and they're very different.

The first scenario is a child on Christmas morning, the moment their eyes open.

The other is an adult, perhaps for you tomorrow, fingers crossed for you it's

in eight days, maybe even 15 days would be good.

The other is an adult on the morning that they have to return to work after a break.

So you've got a child on Christmas morning, the moment their open eyes,

the other an adult the morning they have to return to work.

Both of them are facing something in some sense new the child doesn't know exactly

what wrapped packages are going to be under the tree the adult doesn't know exactly what,

challenges and frustrations and things the new work year will bring but in that

moment one of them expects goodness and the other maybe perhaps depending on,

your work might expect burden.

But in that moment Neither of them are experiencing yet the new thing, yet,

that expectation, that attitude of something new is coming and how will I face

it, those emotions that are evoked,

completely shape their attitude and their enthusiasm.

A new thing is happening. There's a new year before us.

And I don't know what it might be in your life. I don't know what new calling,

new relationship, new chapter.

I don't know. But if we respond to who God always has been, and we do so with

just eyes open, ready to perceive where he might be leading us, not naive,

as though nothing difficult will happen,

Not in denial about very real struggles that may lie ahead,

but trusting, oriented toward the possibility that maybe a new thing before

us could be a gift rather than a threat.

And so for you, singing a new song may mean being open to a step of obedience

that you've been delaying, something that maybe God's been nudging you toward,

but you've been putting off, you've been resisting.

Maybe it might mean letting go of an identity or a past action, a failure.

It might be just letting God's mercy finally be the thing that determines how

you feel and think about yourself.

And it may mean allowing God to lead you into something genuinely unfamiliar.

And to repeat, this isn't a case of old equals bad, so new equals good,

so any new thing must be good.

That's not the command, that's not the encouragement. But there is an encouragement

to be ready to perceive it, to see it.

And so for those who come into this new year carrying failures or regrets,

I think perhaps this morning what you can hear is that your worst year does

not define you, and it doesn't have to define what you do next.

Perhaps for you, simply the new thing is entering into this new year ready to

finally receive his fresh mercies.

But perhaps to those amongst us this morning who come into this new year,

maybe just a little bit comfortable, who have settled into patterns that work

well enough and see no particular reason to change anything,

all I am encouraging us to do is to consider the possibility that God might

be calling you to something unfamiliar.

I'm not telling you to just go and do something because it's unfamiliar.

I'm just saying, hey, let's not be the type of people that automatically put

a line through a possibility just because it's new.

Often the best new songs of our lives are waiting for us on the other side of

a step that we've been reluctant to take.

And so it's 2026. It's a new year. There are new things ahead.

But our God is the same. and we can continue to trust him,

sometimes trusting him means stepping into the new so hear these words again

this morning sing to the lord a new song for he has done marvelous things,

and i want you to hear this morning that he's not finished yet let's pray again,

lord we thank you that you are unchanging we thank you that we can trust you

always that you are our rock that never our moves.

Lord, we thank you also that you're living and active, that your spirit moves, that,

you want us to renew our minds, to see new things, and help us,

Lord, this morning in our individual ways, but also us as a community to be

a church that is open to where you might lead us.

We pray this in your precious Son, Jesus' name. Amen.