Expect Great Things
Toby – Faithfulness in the Past
- New Year’s brings new seasons and times of transition and change. These new seasons should always start with remembering God’s faithfulness from the past. In the midst of God doing a new thing for Israel, He instructed them to gather memorial stones to His faithfulness and what he had done during their journey to the promised land.
- What are the testimonies of God’s faithfulness in your life?
- How are your favorite ways to stay focused on God’s past faithfulness and not miss out on what He is doing in the present?
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Josiah – Faithfulness in the Future
- For me to see the goodness of God, I must start expecting to see God’s goodness. The world has conditioned us to expect the worst and miss God’s best. Begin by expecting God to do good things today because God has been good in the past. How do defy the world’s predisposition to expecting the worst and live a life expecting (and receiving) God’s goodness, God’s very best?
- If we expect a good God to do good things in our life, it may not change the events of our life, but it will change what we notice about those events. And when we expect God to do good things, then we don’t miss the good that is happening even in the middle of the storm. How would that change the way you live, the way you respond to others, the way you react?
- When you are expecting something good, often the best thing you can do is get around other people who are expecting something good! What do you need to change to spend more time with people looking for and expecting God’s goodness?
- Expecting God’s goodness is contagious! How can I bring that level of influence into my relationships, work, or everyday encounters?
Joshua 4:4-7 NIV So Joshua called together the twelve men he had appointed from the Israelites, one from each tribe,
and said to them, “Go over before the ark of the Lord your God into the middle of the Jordan. Each of you is to take up a
stone on his shoulder, according to the number of the tribes of the Israelites, to serve as a sign among you. In the future,
when your children ask you, ‘What do these stones mean?’ tell them that the flow of the Jordan was cut off before the
ark of the covenant of the Lord. When it crossed the Jordan, the waters of the Jordan were cut off. These stones are to be
a memorial to the people of Israel forever.”
Proverbs 23:7 TPT For as a man thinks within himself, so is he.
Jeremiah 17:7-8 NLT But blessed are those who trust in the Lord and have made the Lord their hope and confidence.
They are like trees planted along a riverbank, with roots that reach deep into the water. Such trees are not bothered by
the heat or worried by long months of drought. Their leaves stay green, and they never stop producing fruit.