“These
all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off were assured of them, embraced them and
confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth. For those who say
such things declare plainly that they seek a homeland… Therefore, God is not ashamed to be called their God, for He
has prepared for them a city.” Hebrews 11:13,14,16
The pendulum swings inexorably into another year. A page in time’s grand album turns; it is for me a crisp, clean, clear page,
unscratched, a bright hope-filled blessed new beginning. Chuck Missler has helped
me to fathom anew the Christ who lived even in the book of Genesis. “In the beginning
God”…. in the Trinity acted to create the world and all things in it; “Let us make man in our image,” wrote Moses in the beginning
pages of the Torah, under the direction of the Holy Spirit. “The book of
Genesis is more about Jesus than it is about creation”, writes Missler. This
became a theme St. Paul would repeatedly trumpet in his letters. The perspective
one discovers of Jesus Himself being there in the beginning is a needed counterpoint to the modern mindset that would relegate
Christ to a distant past. However, the wise intellect stretches to grasp the
riches laid up hereafter for all those who are joint heirs with Jesus. E. Stanley
Jones reminded his readers that royal blood flows in the veins of those who follow this Christ of the Holy Book. How blessed to begin the New Year bathed in the wealth and security of discipleship as the media portrays
Europe in economic chaos, America mired in hopeless debt and runaway spending, and the Middle East on the brink of nuclear
holocaust. James S. Stewart in a sermon, The
Cross as Power and Wisdom has offered a prescription for the global despair: “Here
is the cross, history’s blackest crime – and history’s brightest hope.
Here is the most atrocious tragedy ever enacted—and it is precisely this which has become the supreme assurance
of the sovereignty of God. They gave Him a cross, and He made it a throne. They slammed every door against Him, and flung Him outside the city gates to die;
and that very act has lifted up the gates of the universe to let the King come in. They
thought they had hunted God to His doom, not knowing that it was God who was tracking them down. He reigns.... ‘We preach Christ crucified, the power
of God’ – the one power big enough to take a grip of the world’s desperate situation, and defy the gates
of hell, and give it a fresh start to humanity. If only the world today would
align itself in His victory...”
“For last year's words belong to last year's language and next year's words await
another voice. T. S. Eliot
“The object of a new year is not that we should
have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul.” G. K. Chesterton
"For I know the plans I have
for you," says the LORD. "They are plans for good and not for disaster, to give you a future and a hope. Jeremiah 29:11
