A New Beginning
New. What a beautiful word. Fresh. Something never discovered before. A beginning.
Is this what you are looking for? To be made new?
Isaiah 43:18-19 (NIV) says: “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?”
The prophet Isaiah wrote the book of Isaiah about 700 years before the coming of Jesus. This passage was written to the Hebrews held in captivity in Babylon, desperate to be set free. They were in physical captivity. They were also in spiritual captivity. Sin—the mistakes and wrongs that are the source of separation between man and God—was reigning over the hearts of man with no one to conquer it. But a way out was coming.
The last part of the passage says: “I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland.”
For a people lost in sin and separated from God, there was no way out on their own. But God made a way by sending His Son, Jesus, as the perfect sacrifice and victorious conqueror of the sin man could not overcome alone. New. He came to make all things new.
Jesus is the way in the wilderness. He is the stream in the wasteland. He is the way when there is no way.
When you feel broken over your sin, trapped in addictions you can’t escape, overwhelmed by temptation, or frustrated by failure, you don’t need to try harder. You need to be made new. You need a way out. You need Him.
Today, you can be made new by Jesus. You don’t have to wait. You don’t have to try to cleanse yourself of your sin. Your transformation can begin today—and it begins with Jesus.
Psalm 55
English Standard Version
Cast Your Burden on the Lord
To the choirmaster: with stringed instruments. A Maskil[a] of David.
55 Give ear to my prayer, O God,
and hide not yourself from my plea for mercy!
2 Attend to me, and answer me;
I am restless in my complaint and I moan,
3 because of the noise of the enemy,
because of the oppression of the wicked.
For they drop trouble upon me,
and in anger they bear a grudge against me.
4 My heart is in anguish within me;
the terrors of death have fallen upon me.
5 Fear and trembling come upon me,
and horror overwhelms me.
6 And I say, “Oh, that I had wings like a dove!
I would fly away and be at rest;
7 yes, I would wander far away;
I would lodge in the wilderness; Selah
8 I would hurry to find a shelter
from the raging wind and tempest.”
9 Destroy, O Lord, divide their tongues;
for I see violence and strife in the city.
10 Day and night they go around it
on its walls,
and iniquity and trouble are within it;
11 ruin is in its midst;
oppression and ...