God Wants To Do A New Thing In Your Life

Wayne Searls

Isaiah 43:18,19

TEXT: Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past. 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.

PROPOSITION: To motivate the hearer to seek a new vision and a new in-terest in the things of God.

INTRODUCTION: Isaiah’s writings to the children of Israel came at a bleak period of their history. They are in captivity, they have lost everything they thought they would keep forever, and they were home sick for the land and the blessing God had promised them.

The 1st step to embracing the new thing what God wants to do in your life is to
I. CHANGE YOUR FOCUS -- QUIT LOOKING BEHIND START LOOKING HEAD v.18
Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past.

A Healing Journey

Written by Angie Cote

Secret -concealed from general knowledge or view, hidden. (Webster’s Dictionary)

There are different kinds of secrets. Some are things hidden from our understanding, sometimes called the mysteries of life: how they built the pyramids, miracles, unexplained events. There are military secrets – confidential military matters, the CIA and spies. There are the secrets that are methods or formulas based on successes: if you send in your hundred dollars, you can receive a secret blend of tea/cream/pills guaranteed to make your cellulite disappear. Don’t we wish. There are the secrets where others share confidences with you.

Then you have the secrets that are of the personal nature – things that we have done ourselves, or had done to us, or been involved in that we don’t want anybody to know about. Usually it is something that is not socially or morally acceptable.

Do you want to get well?

Sharon Jaynes

Today’s Truth
“Do you want to get well? Get up! Pick up your mat and walk” (John 5:6,8, NIV).

Friend to Friend
Do you want to get well?  That seems like a strange question, doesn’t it.  But sometimes we can get so used to being soul sick, we don’t even realize that we are not truly well. Sometimes the chains we wear shackled to our hearts become so comfortable, we get used to the pain and forget what it is like to be well. Perhaps some of us have never known. But the big question is – do you want to get well? Do you want to be free? Of course I do, I hear you say.  

But do you really?  

There was a certain man that Jesus encountered who faced the same crossroads in his life. In Jerusalem, men and women with various infirmities congregated at the Sheep Gate Pool. Surrounding the pool were five porticoes or shelters, where sick people clustered, waiting for the “moving of the waters.”  They believed an angel of the Lord came down from heaven at certain seasons and stirred the pool.  When the people saw the waters ripple, they all made a mad dash to jump in. They believed that the first one to make it to the pool would be healed.