Happy New Year

‘I’m glad to see the end of 2020 … I do hope 2021 will be better!’ Most people in Britain will be very pleased indeed to see the back of 2020. No-one can remember any year like this past year, with all its various challenges. It is truly unique, for there is not one person in the country who is unaffected by the disruptive, difficult and disturbing troubles of Covid-19. It is often said that ‘truth is stranger than fiction’, and no one would have dared predict, nor any novelist pen all that has come upon us here in the United Kingdom over the past year. It surely is beyond imagination.

The days between Christmas and New Year are often a time of reflection on the past as we all look back and review what has happened over the previous 365 days, led by television, radio and the news media. Every year, pundits and prophets like to predict what they think will happen during the forthcoming year. Accompanying this, many individuals reassess their personal lives and make ‘New Year’s Resolutions’ indicating their intention to make things better next year … but how many of us really learn from our past mistakes? … and how many of us fulfil our good proposals and promises beyond the end of January?

What about you, how are you approaching this New Year?

With a heart filled … with Hope or Helplessness … with Faith or Fear … with Trust or Turmoil?

For Christians, for those who know the Lord Jesus as their Saviour, who have given their lives to Him and know His hand of peace in their lives, there is the tremendous assurance that God is in control:

“… we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love Him, who have been called according to His purpose”

The Sovereign Lord said to His chosen people through Jeremiah, when they were in deep distress for disaster was looming and terrible destruction was getting closer as Jerusalem was under siege:

“Stand at the crossroads and look; ask for the ancient paths, ask where the good way is,

and walk in it, and you will find rest for your souls”

The Lord God is giving us a similar word of instruction today as we move into the New Year. We have a choice: … we can either continue to abandon the Lord, His Word the Bible, and our Biblical heritage as a nation who have been greatly blessed by the Lord in times past, … or we can turn back to Him in repentance and humbly ask for His help in this difficult phase of our individual lives and of the life of our nation. Christians know that as we focus our eyes on Him, He will pour out His blessing and grace on us as we humble ourselves and ask for His help in the midst of the hopeless darkness that this world brings.

“Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the Author and Perfecter of our faith”

As you enter the New Year, will you start with a Promise to do better, to keep your resolutions or will you start with a Prayer, submitting to the Lord and asking for His help?

“Your Kingdom come O Lord, Your will be done, on earth … and in my life”

In his 1939 Christmas broadcast, George Vl quoted from a poem by Minnie Louise Haskins,

And I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year:

“Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown.”

And he replied:

“Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the Hand of God.

That shall be to you better than light and safer than a known way.”

So, I went forth, and finding the Hand of God, trod gladly into the night.

The Sovereign Lord is holding out His hand for you to grasp as you move forward into the New Year.

 

Are you walking into 2021 in lonely isolation or are you joyfully gripping the hand

of our loving God and heavenly Father?

Ron Brickman

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