Transition! - Cultural Shift (Daily Devotional)

Greetings, thank you for joining us today for our daily devotional. This is the last day of 2025, December 31st and we're getting ready to step into a brand-new year. It's highly likely you're planning to spend this evening in a place of worship or seeking God as you transition into a brand-new year. This week, we've been focusing on that theme – transition, looking at various transitions that you and I would have to go through in life at various stages and various points in life. Today, I want to talk about cultural shifts and this can happen to us in so many different circumstances. Sometimes we may experience a culture shift or a cultural change, sometimes because we relocate geographically, go from living in one city or one country to another, there's a dramatic change in the environment and the culture in which you have to operate. Sometimes it could be as simple as a change in your work environment and you're going from one work environment that you've been used to into a totally different work environment, there's a change in the culture of the work environment and they could be changes in the neighborhoods where you're living, so many cultural shifts that we may have to make. In the Bible, for instance when God's people were taken away captive into Babylon, they underwent a huge cultural shift to the point where one of the psalms, Psalm chapter 137 actually is a psalm of lament where the people were sitting in Babylon and they wrote these words, ‘by the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept when we remembered Zion. We hung our harps upon the willows in the midst of it.’ In other words, they just stopped singing and they said, "How could we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?" So, they're in a place where the cultural shift, the change of what has happened has so affected them, they've stopped their singing, they've stopped their worship so to speak and they're just lamenting that ‘oh we wish we were back in Zion.’ But to such a people, the prophet Jeremiah says in Jeremiah chapter 29, verses 4 to 7, he says, ‘the word of the Lord comes to you. And he says, in this land that you are, build houses, plant your vineyards, you have your families, you grow your increase and seek the peace of the city where I've caused you to be captive, pray for it.’ In other words, God is saying, don't sit there and lament. He's saying thrive where you are, pray to the Lord for the new environment that you're in and you continue to thrive. And so, God is inviting them to change their perspective of the environment in which they are and that is something to ponder about. Transitions happen to all of us and sometimes transitions bring about a cultural change and the things to keep in mind is seek to thrive even in that new environment, pray to the Lord for that environment, seek the blessing of God upon this new environment where you are, seek to thrive in it because God is there with you in the midst of it all. So, remember, when there's a culture shift, God is there, thrive, pray to the Lord for your new environment. Let's pray, Father, we ask that you'll help us welcome transitions as you cause us to move from glory to glory and help us to have your perspective of changes that come upon our lives and give us the grace to thrive in the midst of these changes, to seek your blessing even in the midst of these changes, we thank you in Jesus’ name, Amen.

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