“Walk in newness of life.” Romans 6:4 NKJV
“The choices and decisions you make today shape your future; make them carefully and prayerfully!”
My thoughts today are about “real change.”
The Apostle Paul told the Christians in Rome that their faith in Christ provides the power to “walk in newness of life.” Romans 6:4. A New Year has always seemed to me a brief but welcome interlude, an opportunity in the change of calendar between what has been and what can be.
In my spiritual journey, the beginning of a year has often been pivotal. I was just ten years old; it was 1952. In a New Year’s Revival in my father’s church, Mrs. Rice, a Sunday School teacher, asked to pray with me. In the first days of 1952, I committed my young life to Jesus and found the “newness of life” the Bible promises.
Years later as an adult and pastor in San Jose, California, and in the first minutes of January 1975, an elderly church member, Mrs. Eaton, was going home from the New Year’s Eve service when she asked her husband to turn around and return to the church. God had given her a message for me.
Everyone but the janitor and I were already gone as she walked down the center aisle of that semi-darkened church, straight toward me. She told me how God had spoken to her, took my hands in hers, looked deep into my eyes and said, “Pastor Allen, God asked me to tell you, ‘He loves you, and He is not finished with you.’” Everything changed inside my heart. Little did she know what I had told no one: I had decided that would be my last day as a minister. With the New Year, I would seek a career in business.
That would have been the worst mistake of my life, and would have forever changed the direction and destiny of my life, ministry, and family. Received in the earliest minutes of a New Year, God’s personal word to me of His care and my calling continues to shape my life still today. Again, I found a fresh measure of that “newness of life.”
In the spring of that same year, the invitation to pastor Trinity Church here in San Antonio was extended to me, where I have continued to serve joyfully. God’s faithfulness in those first moments of a new year protected me from an error of judgment that would have changed everything about the years since. Remember that the choices and decisions you make today shape your future; make them carefully and prayerfully. It’s important to be in the right place, at the right time, doing the right thing.
The world anticipates this New Year in hope of things being better, their lives being different than they were. The problem is that things once done cannot that easily be undone. The past can be a terrible prison where things hold you that you alone cannot alter, but God can! See Philippians 3:13-14 NLT. A change of calendar changes little except cosmetics.
Real transformation is not cosmetic, it requires a change of course and your choosing Godly character. You won’t have a new year without a new you. At these earliest beginning moments of 2011 is a great time to lay old things aside and begin anew – experience a fresh start and real change. What do you need to change for you to be new again?
The church and every Christ-follower can celebrate the New Year, grateful to God that He has taken away the old mistakes and sins of your past, and given forgiveness and a fresh start in Christ. “If anyone is in Christ Jesus, he is a new creation; the old has gone; the new has come!” 2 Corinthians 5:17 NIV. You can embrace God’s promise and power for “newness of life” any time you are ready and willing!
Here’s good advice for your transition into the New Year, “Lay aside every encumbrance and the sin which so easily entangles us, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the Author and Perfector of faith . .” Hebrews 12:11-2 NAS. I bid farewell to the year just past, grateful for God’s faithfulness and provision; I embrace this new year anticipating God’s providence and and wondrous possibilities.
My prayer for you today is: release anything that hurts and hinders your progress.