The idea behind this verse is that we are people being shaped. The illustration goes back to the wilderness journeys when Israel was first called the people of God. And they were on a journey, a pilgrimage, leading to the promised land, and on that journey the purpose was that they would be shaped. They would be built up in dependency upon God with the provision of the manna and the water. There would be difficult lessons to learn. There would be rebellions among them which would be judged by God. But God would be preparing and shaping a people along the journey. Very few entered into the promised land, but they were a people under God's training. They were just nomads; now they are the people of God, in his care and under his direction, and his shaping influence. We are a people under training, being fashioned, shaped, all the time. We are supposed to be better than we were last year as individuals and as a local church. We are supposed to have learned lessons and remembered them, repented of certain sins and left them behind, certain virtues becoming apparent, things being realised by us, attitudes being changed, self-control being deepened. You should be able to look back and say, ‘Ten years ago I did not have the self-control which God has enabled me to exercise and given to me, and I must hold onto that for all I'm worth and pray often. It’s not a matter of pride; it’s matter of valuing and treasuring God’s work in us.
There are those who use a rather disparaging term and call this ‘replacement theology.’ Those who believe that the church has replaced Israel of old are guilty of replacing Israel of old with the church. Well, it isn’t really that, because it is what God has always said. It has always been the case that he has given special blessings to the Jews in the Old Testament and complained to them that they were not worthy of them, that only a remnant, a minority among them, were ever worthy of those choice expressions. Right from the very beginning in the book of Genesis and the great promises to Abraham made clear that when Christ came all the nations of the world who would be included. As the great commentator Matthew Henry puts it, the Jewish flag, the flag of the Jewish church, would be run down and the flag, the standard of the Jewish-Gentile church of Jesus Christ would be run up.