“I Can Do a New Thing in You”

New Year’s Devotional Thought 

By Sylvan A. Lashley

University of the Southern Caribbean

Isaiah 43:19 - “Behold, I will do a new thing…I will even make a way in the wilderness, and rivers in the desert” 

The marketplace is empty, no more traffic in the streets; all the builders’ tools are silent, no more time to harvest wheat”. Sometimes, everything stops, as we await the grand entry of a supreme moment, a new thing or person.  This morning, I challenge you to move from the marketplace of the ordinary, to the mall place of the extraordinary, a veritable work of transformation.  The African-American heritage hymnal puts Isaiah 43:19 to song: “I can do a new thing in you, whatever you ask for, whatever you pray for, nothing shall be denied”.

Sometimes, we are in the empty marketplace of failed opportunity, disconsolate neglect or the flow of low-ebb tides.  If in 2015, those things occurred, Isaiah challenges us to “remember yet not the former things, neither consider the things of old” (vs. 18), because a new day is coming, and a new day has dawned, and the future tense promise of what will happen, must already be considered to have happened, because it is God speaking. It’s sealed and delivered, and His promises are sure.  When God spoke of the future, it is merely the manner in which the Old Testament prophets reported.  Feeble, human thought could not express fully how God could have already accomplished a task that had not yet taken place, and resorted to a human future tense.  What God will do, He has already done. 

Therefore, in 2016, God has already done a new thing in our lives, and He bids us forget the former things because where there was wilderness, there shall be an oasis. It is up to us to grasp hold by faith of what has been promised and take opportunity by the forelocks for it is signed, sealed and delivered, and waiting. It is with these words, then, that we can turn our eyes northward, with resolute abandon and an air of certitude.  God Bless!  Just as I sign this missive, so then has God signed, sealed and delivered. We have nothing to fear for 2016.  Just claim our victories daily and serve the Lord with gladness and fullness of heart.

Sylvan A. Lashley

The University of the Southern Caribbean

“It’s a New Year and a New Thing”