A NEW YEAR, A NEW CREATION

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It’s that time of year again; the season of looking back at where we’ve been for the past year. Each of us is filled with our own unique mixture of pride, humility, celebration, mourning, success and failures in varying measures

For some of us, it was a very good year and for others, well… here’s hoping this coming year is an improvement.

Once again we look forward. We make resolutions. We plan to fix things that are broken, change things that no longer serve us,reprioritize, revive and reset our lives. We promise to spend more time on the things that are important and to generally be better people than we were last year.  Some of us will succeed at these resolutions, and the rest of us will hang on as long as we can.

“Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!”                                            2 Corinthians. 5:17

What if this year, instead of resolutions, we step into a revolution? This verse from Corinthians tells us that we can have a New Year’s Revolution every day of every year because God loves us so much that He sent Jesus Christ to be our model for living. Through Jesus we are brought to a new and living
relationship with our Creator. We are in fact “new creations” every moment of our lives. New… Forgiven… Reconciled… We are no longer bound by our fears, or those things that hold us back. When we choose to stand united with Christ, to follow in Discipleship, we are set free to live into the full blessing and potential promised to us in our creation. We are empowered to
“have life and have it abundantly.”

How do we achieve a New Year’s Revolution this year?

What if we turn our focus toward Jesus and lived out his mission to Love the Lord our God with all of our hearts, souls and minds and to Love our neighbors as ourselves? What if we prayerfully come to Him for strength and guidance in those two areas and made them our complete and total priority? What if we didn’t worry about what we weighed, what we earned, how we make a living and what we own but only thought about whether or not we placed God and others ahead of everything else?

My prayer for us all is that we may come this year to know the “old is gone, the new has come.” May we become aware of what it feels like to be filled with the Love and Grace of God so that we become empowered to walk away from our fears and into the promise of God’s New Creation.

Grace and Peace to you in your discipleship walk this year.

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