Hello Friends and Family of RRUMC, I hope you had a joyous Christmas!
As we transition from the festive season to the New Year, let's reflect on our journey and look forward to new beginnings.
Perhaps your thoughts have already turned to January and those daunting New Year’s resolutions. I often find them challenging to maintain throughout the year. They become the very things that I want to do to create the “New Me” in the new year. Why do I fail is the question?
Why is it that I cannot maintain them and, in many years, even get them off the ground?
As I sit and write this on my computer in my office on December 4, I am still laser-focused on the Advent season and our services on Christmas Eve. This article, however, is sending me forward into the future knowing that it will come out the day after Christmas. I feel the Lord is putting the challenging New Year’s resolutions of January right at my feet right now. I have been praying about this. I have been asking the Lord, “Why do I fail when it comes to a new me in a new year, year after year?” Well, are you ready? God told me. God sent me to Isaiah 43:18-19 which says, “Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past. See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?”
That’s it! Each year, I’ve tried to reinvent myself with the turn of the calendar, but I’ve realized that true transformation comes from letting God lead the way. It is no wonder that I failed. I profess and preach a deep faith in God, my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit, and yet there I go, year after year, trying to create the new me completely removed from the One who created me in the first place.
God said in the text from Isaiah, “I am doing a new thing.” It is God that is in control of the new thing, if I will just let Him be. Let’s embrace this divine guidance as our New Year’s resolution for 2025. I want to be made new in the year to come. I want to be more loving, more forgiving, a better dad, husband, and pastor. None of those things can become a reality if I am the only one trying to do a new thing to make them a reality. O Lord my God, do a new thing in me. Remind me daily that all that work starts with you but then gets lived out in me. Remind me to give myself over to the new thing that you have planned for me and not the one that I thought I wanted or needed. These things I ask through Jesus Christ. Amen.
I pray that God is about to do a new thing in you in 2025. I pray that, with each passing day, what John the Baptist said in the Gospel of John 3:30, “He must become greater; I must become less,” becomes the very way that God is about to do a new thing in you and in me.
Pray as if everything depends on God and work as if everything depends on you. I feel that, with that approach in the new year, we all will be made new. Wishing you a blessed Christmas season and a transformative New Year.
Peace and Blessings,
Rev. Dan