Today is the first day of January, in the year two thousand and twenty-four. Truly it doesn’t seem possible that the Good Lord would be kind to me and let me live to see a new millennium back in year 2000, let alone allow me to be alive in 2024. Yet God is good and still has a plan for me to accomplish prior to seeing him in Heaven. With each new year comes multiple resolutions that typically fall flat on day two of the new year. A reminder to cancel your gym membership before you stop going. Just trying to save ya some money.
But do we really try to become better at the start of each new year, and why do we try it at the start? Each day is new. Each week is new. Each month… well you get the idea. Does making a resolution at the beginning of the new year make us more likely to acquire the finished goal? Who do we become should we follow through on those resolutions?
I’ve been completing a daily devotional plan called “Prayers for a Fresh Start”. Today’s prayer was for refreshment. A refreshment of my heart thus allowing God to search it and heal it. Every new year is uncertain. Unlike each new day where we will plan it out in detail weeks or months in advance. We ultimately expect each new day to arrive fresh and carpe diem ready. When it doesn’t, we blame God or others for the “bad” day we just experienced. A blue-sky holiday won’t fix it either, yet a year is made up of 365, or 366, individual days.
Psalm 139: 23-24 tells us, “Search me, oh God, and know my heart! Try me and know my thoughts! And see if there be any grievious way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting!” David was asking a genuine question of a Holy God. “You who are Holy, is Omniscient, Omnipresent, and Omnipotent, could you search my human heart? I would really like to change. The me I see in the mirror is nowhere close to what you want to be. It’s full of pride, lust, hatred, disobedience, and so many other sins. Only you are able to clean this heart, clean this mind, and create a new person.” I bet David wasn’t sitting on the cusp of a new year when he penned this song.
Let’s start the new year right. Let’s start the new year asking God to take inventory of our hearts and minds. Let’s agree with God that when he does find something, and trust me his Holy Spirit will, that we let him cleanse us of that sin or heal us of that hurt. I love worship music. Recently a local Christian radio station was playing “Run to the Father” by Matt Maher. The chorus resounds.
“I run to the Father
Fall into grace
I’m done with the hiding
No reason to wait
My heart needs a surgeon
My soul needs a friend
So I’ll run to the Father
Again and again
And again and again”
More like Christ is whom I desire to become no matter what year. Oh,may we choose to run to our Heavenly Father all the more this new year.
Grace and peace, James
*Scripture from ESV translation, Crossway Publishers, 2001
- Prayers for a Fresh Start from YouVersion, the Bible App
- ”Run to the Father” by Matt Maher, Essential Records, 2020
- Photo Courtesy of AdobeStock