“See, I am doing a new thing. Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the desert and streams in the wasteland.” Isaiah 43:19 NIV
We live in a world which shouts more and more for freedom but believes more and more in fate. We say, “This is just the way I am. I can’t help it. So you have to give me the “freedom” to do what I can’t help but do.” That’s not freedom—that’s bondage. We have begun to think like pagans. To think that this world with its endless, pointless cycles, and its relentless fate is all there is, is to think like a pagan.
We look at our broken marriages, our wayward children, our work that is so often pointless and unsatisfying, and it’s easy to feel that whatever our dreams might have been, whatever our hopes might have been, we’re locked in permanently to our present lives. There’s no hope, there’s nowhere to go. So what do we do? We grab as much as we can along the way. The saddest bumper sticker I’ve ever seen is the one that said, “He who dies with the most toys wins.” No. No. He who dies only having acquired toys loses.
The Israelites, captive in Babylon, thought that their life as a people was over. In all the history of national exile no captive nation had ever gone home again. But God, speaking prophetically through Isaiah, said that he could do a new thing. He, the Creator, is not subject to fate, like the gods, the forces of this world, are. And that is precisely what he did: he brought a whole new world empire, the Persian, onto the scene, and the Persian emperor, Cyrus, whom Isaiah had named in advance, said that any captive people could go home. A new thing!
God can do a new thing in your life. Don’t tell him what it will be. But spend time with him and let him tell you what he wants to do. Don’t tell him your plans, but let him tell you his plans which, I guarantee you, will be better than yours. You are not locked in, he can set you free, just as he did for the Israelites. Believe him for a new thing in your life.
Called To Be Transformed 