A New Year’s Reflection

New Year’s is an opportunity for renewal. It is a time when even the calendar reminds us that God is making all things new; that the old passes away and the new is brought forth.  It is a time of renewal.  If we think about it and act upon it, New Year’s Eve & New Year’s Day can be like our contemporary Rosh Hashana. (Leviticus 23.23-25; Numbers 29.1-6)

But renewal is rooted in faith, not in resolutions. Resolutions are made for New Year’s and forgotten on an average of thirteen days later, according to the surveys. Faith is the result of a response to Christ.  I know I cannot make myself new or make you new.  But Christ will make a new me and a new you, as we remind ourselves of who he is, what he has done, and what he has promised.   (2 Corinthians 5.17; Revelation 21.5)

A New Year’s Prayer

Here is a New Year’s prayer from Jim Eliot I don’t think I could ever express any better:

I pray that the Lord might crown this year with His goodness and in the coming one give you a hallowed dare-devil spirit in lifting the biting sword of Truth, consuming you with a passion that is called by the cultured citizen of Christendom ‘fanaticism’, but known to God as that saintly madness that led His Son through bloody sweat and hot tears to agony on a rude Cross – and Glory!