DEC 19 | The New Thing Already Sprouting | Isaiah 43
The New Thing Already Sprouting
"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 will make a way in the wilderness and streams in the desert."
— Isaiah 43:18-19
You are standing at a threshold.
Maybe you feel it—that strange tension between what is ending and what has not yet begun. The year behind you holds weight. Grief, perhaps. Or exhaustion. Or the quiet accumulation of ordinary days that somehow added up to something you cannot name. You carry it with you into this moment, and part of you wonders if you are supposed to set it down before you can move forward.
God speaks through the prophet Isaiah to a people who knew that feeling intimately. Israel had been carried into exile, displaced from everything familiar—their land, their temple, their sense of who they were. The "former things" Isaiah mentions were not small. They were the exodus itself, the parting of the sea, the pillar of fire that led their ancestors through the wilderness. These were the stories that defined them, the memories they had built their identity upon.
And God says: Forget them.
Let that land for a moment. God is not asking Israel to pretend the past did not happen. He is not suggesting amnesia. He is saying something more radical: Do not let what I have done become a cage that prevents you from seeing what I am doing.
We do this more than we realize. We build shrines to God's past faithfulness and then spend our lives tending them instead of walking forward. We know how God worked before—in that season, through that person, in that way—and we wait for him to repeat himself. We become curators of what was instead of witnesses to what is.
But God is not a God of reruns.
"See," he says. The Hebrew word is hinneh—a word of immediate attention, like someone grabbing your chin and turning your face toward something you have been missing. Look. Right now. Right here.
"I am doing a new thing."
Not "I will do" someday. Not "I might do" if conditions are right. I am doing. Present tense. Already in motion. The verb carries the sense of something actively underway, something that has already begun whether you have noticed it or not.
And then the image: "Now it springs up."
Picture a seed underground. For weeks, nothing visible happens. The soil looks the same. If you did not know better, you might assume the seed had failed, that whatever was planted had rotted in the dark. But beneath the surface, something is stirring. Roots are reaching down. A shoot is pressing up. And then one morning—a green tip breaks through.
That is the verb Isaiah uses. The new thing is sprouting. It is pushing through the soil of your life right now, in this moment, as you read these words. The question God asks is not whether the new thing exists. The question is whether you can perceive it.
"Do you not perceive it?"
There is gentleness here, but also challenge. God is not scolding. He is inviting. He knows how easy it is to miss the green shoot when your eyes are fixed on the dead branches of what used to be. He knows how grief and disappointment and sheer exhaustion can narrow our vision until we can only see what we have lost.
So he asks the question not to shame but to awaken. Can you see it? Will you look?
The new thing God promises is specific: "I will make a way in the wilderness and streams in the desert." Wilderness and desert—the places where paths disappear and water runs out. The places where survival seems impossible and hope feels naive. God does not promise to teleport his people past the hard terrain. He promises to meet them in it. A way where there was no way. Water where there was only dust.
This is the shape of God's new things. They rarely look like escape from difficulty. They look like provision inside it. Not a detour around the wilderness but a path through. Not the absence of desert but streams running where streams have no business running.
You are standing at a threshold—between one year and the next, between who you were and who you are becoming, between the former things and the new thing already sprouting. You do not have to understand what is ahead. You do not have to feel ready. You only have to look.
The God who parted the sea is still at work. But he is not parting the same sea twice. He is doing something you have not seen before, something that will require new trust, new eyes, new willingness to walk into unfamiliar territory.
The light is already breaking. The shoot is already pressing through.
Do you not perceive it?
Today
Find five minutes of quiet before the day ends. Ask God one question: "What new thing are you doing in my life that I have not yet perceived?" Do not rush to answer it yourself. Sit with the question. Let it work on you. Write down whatever surfaces—even if it is only a single word or a half-formed image. Tuck it somewhere you will see it again.
An Invitation to go Deeper….
If today’s message spoke to you, join the FaithLabz 30-Day Prayer Challenge and strengthen your connection with God’s unshakable love. You are never alone—let’s grow together!
