Everyone.Everywhere.Praying Everyday.

God spoke these words to a people who had every reason to believe their best days were behind them. Israel was facing exile, about to lose everything, and God reached back to the greatest moment in their history, the exodus, the night he split the sea and walked them out of Egypt. Then he said something almost shocking. He told them to stop looking back, even at that, because he was about to do something new. The God of Isaiah delights to make a way where there is no way, and to bring rivers to places that have only ever known sand. This is good news for anyone who feels they have travelled too far down the wrong road. John Newton spent his early years in the slave trade, a man so hardened that other sailors were shocked by his coarseness, until a violent storm at sea in 1748 drove him to cry out to a God he had spent years mocking. That cry was the beginning of a new thing. The man who once captained slave ships became a pastor, wrote "Amazing Grace," and lived to see the trade he had profited from begin to fall. No one is too far gone for the God who makes rivers in the desert. Wherever you have been, however many years you feel you have wasted, the gospel says your past does not get the final word. The new thing is already springing up. The question Isaiah leaves with you is whether you will perceive it.