Read silently to yourself for 5 mins. Try reading the passage a few times.
Isaiah 49:8-15
8 This is what the Lord says: “In the time of my favor I will answer you, and in the day of salvation I will help you;
I will keep you and will make you to be a covenant for the people, to restore the land and to reassign its desolate inheritances, 9 to say to the captives, ‘Come out,’and to those in darkness, ‘Be free!’ “They will feed beside the roads
and find pasture on every barren hill. 10 They will neither hunger nor thirst, nor will the desert heat or the sun beat down on them. He who has compassion on them will guide them and lead them beside springs of water. 11 I will turn all my mountains into roads, and my highways will be raised up. 12 See, they will come from afar some from the north, some from the west, some from the region of Aswan. 13 Shout for joy, you heavens; rejoice, you earth; burst into song, you mountains!
For the Lord comforts his people and will have compassion on his afflicted ones. 14 But Zion said, “The Lord has forsaken me,
the Lord has forgotten me.”15 “Can a mother forget the baby at her breast and have no compassion on the child she has borne?Though she may forget, I will not forget you!
Discuss the following:
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C.S. Lewis writes:
Imagine a man in total darkness. He thinks he is in a cellar or dungeon. Then there comes a sound. He thinks it might be a sound from far off – waves or wind-blown trees or cattle half a mile away. And if so, it proves he’s not in a cellar, but free, in the open air. Or it may be a much smaller sound close at hand – a chuckle of laughter. And if so, there is a friend just behind him in the dark. Either way, a good, good sound. I’m not mad enough to take such an experience as evidence for anything. It is simply the leaping into imaginative activity of an idea which I would always have theoretically admitted – the idea that I or any mortal at any time, may be utterly mistaken as to the situation [we are] really in.
Have you ever attended an appointment or social event that went much much better than you originally thought? What made the moment so good?
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What words/phrases of this passage create meaning to you and why?
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In verse 8, God promises to make a group of individuals a covenant people. What do you think it means be a covenant people?
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What role do the covenant people have? What acts of restoration/redemption are the people of the covenant responsible for? Discuss what you think each act of restoration means.
by: Jinha Kim
"But those who drink the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life." John 4:14
