‘Do not remember the former things, Nor consider the things of old. Behold, I will do a new thing, Now it shall spring forth; Shall you not know it? I will even make a road in the wilderness. And rivers in the desert’. Isaiah 43:18-21
Every birthday and Christmas one of the things at the top of my girls list of presents is a new notebook. Despite the fact that they have a ton of notebooks in their bedrooms there appears to be nothing more satisfying than opening up a new page and starting with a blank sheet of paper on which they love to put all their new ideas, pictures and stories. The first page always has the neatest handwriting, it’s like a fresh start. Many of you probably understand that feeling, we even have phrases like turning over a new leaf, or starting with a blank sheet of paper. We all love the opportunity to start afresh. This is not a bad thing. In fact it is what the Lord actually encourages us to do. In today’s verse we see the Lord calling his people to lift up their eyes and to see into the future and to begin to believe for a new thing that he is going to do among them.
The Lord does not want us to be stuck in the failure, sin or discouragement of the past. That is why he tells us “Do not remember the former things, Nor consider the things of old.” He understands that if we dwell on these we will stay defeated and we will never be able to move forward into the new things that he has for us. When we read Isaiah 43 we learn that it is not that the Lord wants us to ignore the past and act like it never happened. In fact in verses 16-17 he tells Israel to look to the past and remember the great things God did for them at the Red Sea. You see, our view of the past needs to be through the lens of God’s love and faithfulness towards us. The Lord wants us to remember the incredible works He has done for us. He wants us to be mindful of his goodness and recognise his hand of deliverance and provision. However he doesn’t want us to pay attention to our shortcomings and where we mess up because this will hold us back from believing that there is hope for tomorrow.
Biblical hope is not like hope that the world talks about. Worldly hope is based on our ability to perform but biblical hope is a confident expectation of good based not on our efforts but on the faithfulness of the Lord. In these verses Isaiah was prophesying of a time when the Israelites would be released from exile. He was talking to God’s people who were being held in captivity in Babylon. The Lord promises that “I will even make a road in the wilderness.” For God’s people at that time they were separated from their homeland by literally hundreds of miles of desert and yet the Lord was telling them that although all they could see was the impossibility of the situation He would provide a way through. He wanted them to see with eyes of faith into the future that He had prepared for them.
Today we might be struggling to lay hold of promises in our lives because we are overwhelmed by the obstacles that we can see ahead of us. We are forgetting that the Lord has made us “more than conquerors” ( Romans 8:37). The Lord wants us to step back and recognise that He is going before us and making a way. He is working behind the scenes of our lives, He is making plans that we know nothing about. Today our responsibility is to let go of our burdens and to leave our problems in His capable hands.
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Unshakeable Hope Series – Exchange Church Belfast 2021