Looking at what we can become in the New Year

Last time we took a stroll through the Old Testament and found that God has been active all through history, not just once a year at Christmas.

We saw Him taking the pulse beat of entire peoples. We saw Him doing the same with individuals, intimately, one at a time.

We saw Him dealing with the actions of the past for both nations and individuals.

We saw Him affect their present in dramatic ways.

We saw Him deal with their futures through the words of His prophets.

We saw Him read their hearts, their minds, their psyches.

Most dramatic of all, as in the case of

Gideon, we found that He is more than willing to see us as we can become, not necessarily as we are.

That ability to see us as we can become is our bottom line at this time of year. For us, the New Year is a time of looking at where we were over the course of the fading old year, so we can figure out ways to do better during the next. For many, this results in a larger or smaller list of resolutions designed to fix what we see as the problems. That is all well and good.

But are our own insights the best guide to the reformation we think we need? This writer would submit that we need not only our own insights, but those of God as well.

Remember, when God’s angel found Gideon hiding in the well, it greeted him by saying he was a, “… mighty man of God.” As his relationship with God took on depth and meaning Gideon became just that!

However, that sure knowledge of us that God has goes much deeper than our own here and now. Psalm 139 lays it all out. “I thank you, High God – you’re breathtaking! Body and soul, I am marvelously made! I worship in adoration – what a creation! You know me inside and out, you know every bone in my body; You know exactly how I was made, bit by bit, how I was sculpted from nothing into something. Like an open book, you watched me grow from conception to birth; all the stages of my life were spread out before you, the days of my life all prepared before I’d even lived one day.” (Psalms 139:14-16, The Message)

In other words, God not only knows who we are, intimately, but He also has known that from before we were ever born.

Weave those threads! God knows us, more intimately than we can imagine. How He used the prophets over and over again in the Old Testament to warn people that their actions have consequences tells us He wants what is best for us most of all.

Combine these ideas with what Christ did and taught us in the New Testament. Put it all together and see what you get. Here is a hint. The thief on the cross who called Christ, Lord, was told he would join Christ in Paradise. We can see that God is willing to give each of us a start-over, not a do-over, but a start-over, no matter what we have done, even with death looming over us.

God is in to beginnings, start-overs, at New Year’s or any other time. I don’t know about anyone else, but I am glad He is. I have needed a start-over more than once. How about you?