The New Year: Bring On the New and the Renewed
“Man’s life [cannot] be sustained without renewal from God. As it is necessary to repair the body by the frequent meal, so we must repair the soul by feeding upon the Book of God, or by listening to the preached Word….” – Charles H. Spurgeon
Read 2 Corinthians 5:17
The New Year: Bring On the New and the Renewed
Each new year in one sense is nothing more than the turn of a calendar. But there’s also the sense that the arrival of a new year offers either an opportunity to build upon the good things of the year past, or a chance to make much-needed changes – to experience a fresh start. Maybe even a “do-over.”
Just as nature is always changing cycles, moving from growth to dormancy and back to growth, our lives undergo continual change, whether we like it or not. Some things are out of our control, but not all. We must be sensitive to when God wants us to make some changes – and not to resist when He decides to be the One doing the changing.
Several decades ago, I came across a verse that has made an incredible difference in my life, 2 Corinthians 5:17. It declares, “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!” Before you read on, ponder those words for a few moments. What do they mean? Specifically, what do they mean for you?
Until I discovered this promise, started meditating on it, and finally, trusted it to be true, I’d been stumbling and bumbling in my Christian life. I was living according to the spiritual equivalent of the motivational mantra, “If it’s to be, it’s up to me.” I was trying my hardest to live the life I thought God expected of me – but failing miserably.
Anger, anxiety, selfishness, a quick temper, an unrestrained tongue. These were among the “symptoms” of my inability to succeed in the so-called “Christian life.” I could have agreed with the apostle Paul’s admission in Romans 7:15, “I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.”
Have you ever felt that way? I fervently prayed, asking God to help me to do better. But it seemed He either wasn’t listening or didn’t care, because I continued doing and saying the same dumb things – while not doing and saying what I knew I should.
“Maybe I’m not even a true believer?” I wondered. Have you ever asked yourself that? Sometimes that’s good to make an honest spiritual self-appraisal. But in my case, it wasn’t a matter of whether I was saved or not. The issue was not understanding God’s promises or how to put them into action by faith.
You see, God’s all about making things new. It started with the Creation, speaking into being an entire universe out of nothing, and He’s been at it ever since. We could cite dozens of passages from the Bible, but here’s a representative sampling:
Speaking to the people of Israel, the Lord said, “I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh” (Ezekiel 36:26). He wasn’t going to fix their hard hearts; He was giving them new ones.
But that assurance wasn’t just for the Israelites. King David, who had hit more than his share of bumps in the road along his own spiritual journey, wrote, “He put a new song in my mouth, a hymn of praise to our God…” (Psalm 40:3). Then in one of his psalms of fervent repentance, the king pleaded, “Create in me a pure heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me…. Restore to me the joy of Your salvation and grant me a willing spirit to sustain me” (Psalm 51:10)
Jesus asserted that His desire was not to give His followers some help or even to improve them, but to make them new: “No one sews a patch of unshrunk cloth on an old garment. If he does, the new piece will pull away from the old, making the tear worse. And no one pours new wine into old wineskins. If he does, the wine will burst the skins…. No, he pours new wine into new wineskins” (Mark 2:22).
The apostle Paul, who had undergone a dramatic transformation upon encountering Jesus on the road to Damascus, declared, “We were therefore buried with Him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life…. In the same way, count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus” (Romans 6:4,11).
In Romans 12:2, Paul gives this exhortation: “Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” Then he states in Colossians 3:9-10, “…you have taken off your old self with its practices and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge in the image of its Creator.”
What I learned years ago is that God isn’t asking us to embark on a self-improvement program. He doesn’t want to make us better – He wants to make us new. And to be renewed. The question then becomes, ‘Am I willing to let Him do that?’
Perhaps you’re already in the midst of God’s making new/renewing process. But if not, if you’ve been struggling in vain to become someone you can’t in your own strength, there’s no better time to get started than the new year!