A New Thing


Isaiah 43:19 : “Behold, I will do a new thing; now it shall spring forth; shall ye not know it? I will even make a way in the wilderness, and rivers in the desert.”


Do not miss the word behold … it is an instruction before it is anything else. Stop. Look. Pay attention to what is happening, because it will not look like what happened before and you might miss it.
The new thing does not arrive in familiar packaging.
The people God was speaking to were fixated on the former things … the Exodus, the Red Sea, the miracles they had heard about and rehearsed. God honors that memory … but then says: stop looking backward. Something new is starting and you’ll miss it if you’re still staring behind you.
The way in the wilderness is new. The rivers in the desert are not where rivers have run before. The provision comes from an unexpected direction, through an unexpected means, at an unexpected time. And the danger is that familiarity with how God used to move blinds us to how He is moving now.
Is God doing something new in your life that you are missing because it does not look like what He did before?
Behold. He is making a way. Look for the river in the desert … it may already be flowing.

The Table in the Wilderness


Psalm 78:19 : “Yea, they spake against God; they said, Can God furnish a table in the wilderness?”

It was a question born of desperation but shaped by doubt. The people were hungry … genuinely, physically hungry … and the question they asked was not really about food. It was about the limits of God. Can He? Here? In this?
The wilderness had become their frame of reference, and they were trying to fit God inside it.
We do this too. We look at our circumstances …the barrenness of them, the impossibility of them, the specific kind of empty that our particular wilderness produces … and we begin to wonder whether God’s provision is actually available in this terrain. He seemed to work back there, in that season, in that version of our lives. But here?
Can He furnish a table in this wilderness?
The answer, across the whole of scripture, is consistent and almost exasperated in its consistency: yes. He can. Manna from heaven. Water from rock. Five loaves feeding thousands. He is not limited by the location of the need.
Your wilderness is not too barren for His provision. The table can be set anywhere He chooses to set it.
He has set it in harder places than yours.

The God Who Does Not Sleep


Psalm 121:3-4 : “He will not suffer thy foot to be moved: he that keepeth thee will not slumber. Behold, he that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep.”

There is a specific comfort in this verse for the person who wakes at 3am with a mind full of everything they cannot control. The darkness of the early morning hours has a particular weight ..problems feel larger, fears feel closer, the silence makes every anxious thought louder.


But you are not alone in those hours.
The God who keeps you does not sleep. He is not unavailable between midnight and morning. He is not resting between your crises. He does not hand the night shift to a lesser power while He recharges.
He watches. Continuously. Without fatigue. Without distraction. Without ever once closing His eyes to the life He is keeping.
Your foot will not slip ….not because the terrain is always safe but because the One guiding your steps never loses concentration. He sees the stone before your foot finds it. He steadies what would otherwise fall.
The next time the night feels overwhelming, remember: the One who keeps you is already awake, already watching, already working in the darkness you cannot see through.
You can close your eyes. He never does.

Come as You Are


Isaiah 1:18 : “Come now, and let us reason together, saith the LORD: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow.”

God does not say get clean, then come. He says come ….and then describes what happens to the scarlet when it arrives in His presence.
The invitation precedes the transformation. You do not clean yourself up to qualify for the conversation. You bring the scarlet … the full weight of it, the exact shade of it, the specific history of it … and God reasons with you about what to do with it.


Scarlet was the color that did not come out. In the ancient world it was a permanent dye …. the kind that set into the fabric and stayed. The kind no amount of washing removed. And God takes that specific metaphor and says: that is what I work with. That is the raw material of My grace.


White as snow. Not pink with effort. Not cream with time. White … as if the scarlet had never been there.
This is not cheap grace that ignores the weight of sin. It is extravagant grace that absorbs it entirely. The reasoning God invites is not a defense of your record. It is a surrender of it.
Come as you are. Leave as something entirely new.

The Good Work He Started


Philippians 1:6 : “Being confident of this very thing, that he which hath begun a good work in you will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ.”

He started it. That is the anchor of the promise. Not you …not your discipline, not your consistency, not your spiritual track record. He began the work. And what God begins, God completes.


The confidence Paul describes is not confidence in the Philippians’ ability to maintain their growth. It is confidence in the character of the One doing the growing. A God who starts things and leaves them unfinished is not the God of scripture. He is a finisher … of faith, of creation, of the work He initiates in human hearts.


This matters enormously when you look at yourself and see how far you still have to go. When the gap between who you are and who you feel called to be seems impossibly wide. When you have failed the same test for the hundredth time and wonder if transformation is actually available to you.
You did not begin this work. You cannot be responsible for finishing it. Your job is cooperation …showing up, surrendering, remaining in the process. His job is completion.


He has not abandoned the project. You are still in the hands of the One who started what He always intended to finish.
Trust the Craftsman.

Love That Will Not Let Go


Romans 8:38-39 : “For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God.”


Paul builds the list carefully … as if anticipating every argument your fear might raise. Death? No. Life? No. Angels, powers, things happening right now, things coming in the future? No, no, no, and no. Height …the highest you could climb … and depth … the lowest you could fall?
Still no.
Nothing in the created order can sever what God has joined. The love of God in Christ is not a conditional arrangement that requires your consistent performance to remain in effect. It is not a contract that expires when you fail. It is not a feeling that fluctuates with your spiritual temperature.
It is a bond that the entire universe cannot break.
This matters most not when life is good but when the evidence seems to argue against it. When you feel abandoned, distant, unworthy, forgotten. When the circumstances of your life look nothing like the life of someone who is loved by God.
Paul wrote this from prison. He was persuaded anyway.
You are not separated from that love. Not by what you have done, not by what has been done to you, not by what is coming that you cannot yet see.
Nothing. Not one thing.

The Sower and the Soil


Mark 4:20 : “And these are they which are sown on good ground; such as hear the word, and receive it, and bring forth fruit, some thirtyfold, some sixty, and some an hundred.”


Three kinds of soil fail. The path, where the word is taken before it can root. The rocky ground, where enthusiasm blooms fast and dies faster. The thorny ground, where the word is real but the cares of the world and the deceitfulness of riches choke it slowly until it produces nothing.


And then there is good ground. Which hears. Receives. And bears fruit … not uniformly, not competitively, but genuinely. Thirty, sixty, a hundred .. all of it fruit, all of it acceptable, all of it the result of the same seed landing in soil that was prepared to receive it.
The parable is not primarily about the sower or the seed. The seed is the same in every scenario. The sower sows it the same way. The variable ….the only variable …. is the condition of the soil.
And soil can be tended.
Hearts do not have to remain rocky or thorny. The hard path can be broken up. The stones can be removed. The thorns can be pulled. It is slow work, often painful work …but it is the work that determines what kind of harvest your life will produce.
What does your soil look like today?

The Armor and the Battle


Ephesians 6:12 :”For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world.”


Your real enemy is not your difficult coworker. Not your estranged family member. Not the person who wronged you, the institution that failed you, or the circumstance that derailed your plans. These may be instruments of conflict ….but they are not the source of it.


Paul pulls back the curtain on a battle happening at a level the natural eye cannot see. And understanding the level of the battle determines how you fight it.


When we mistake the instrument for the enemy, we direct our warfare at people … through bitterness, retaliation, manipulation, or withdrawal. None of these weapons work because none of them address the actual conflict. You cannot win a spiritual war with emotional ammunition.


The armor Paul describes in the surrounding verses is entirely defensive and offensive in spiritual terms ..truth, righteousness, peace, faith, salvation, the Word of God, prayer. Not strategy sessions. Not political maneuvering. Not social leverage.


The most powerful thing you can do in a season of conflict is get on your knees. Not because it is passive … but because it is fighting at the right level.
Know your enemy. Fight accordingly.

He Restores


Psalm 23:3 :”He restoreth my soul.”


Not he improves my soul. Not he polishes my soul. He restores it …which implies the soul had been in a state of disrepair. Worn down. Depleted. Wandered from where it belonged.
Restoration is a different work than construction. It assumes something was once whole and has since been broken. It means God is not building you from scratch … He is bringing you back to what you were always meant to be.

There is a particular tenderness in this promise for those who feel they have strayed too far, lived too long outside the pasture, accumulated too much damage to be worth restoring. Restorers work with the original design in mind. They do not discard what is broken …they study it, treat it carefully, coax it back toward wholeness.


The Good Shepherd does not look at your depleted, wandered soul and start over with something new. He restores this one …the actual one, the one with the history and the scars and the long road back.


He leads you in paths of righteousness after He restores you. The restoration comes first.
You do not have to be fully healed to be led. Let Him restore you on the road.

Salt and Light


Matthew 5:13-14 : “Ye are the salt of the earth… Ye are the light of the world.”


Jesus does not say become salt and light. He says you are. Present tense. Declarative. Not an aspiration …. an identity.


Salt in the ancient world was not primarily a flavoring agent. It was a preservative. It kept things from rotting. It pushed back decay. When Jesus calls His followers salt, He is describing a people whose very presence changes the environment around them … not through conquest but through character, not through volume but through nature.


Light works the same way. It does not argue with darkness. It does not negotiate with it or compete against it. It simply is ….and the darkness recedes. A city on a hill does not try to be seen. Its position makes concealment impossible.


The calling here is not to be louder. It is to be truer. To be so genuinely and consistently yourself …the self God made and redeemed … that your presence has an effect you may not even be fully aware of.


You are preserving something in your workplace, your family, your neighborhood simply by being there and being faithful.
Do not lose your saltiness. Do not hide under a bowl.
The world needs what you already are.