New.

I’ve got to admit, I’m not New Year’s biggest fan. Because I’m a ‘morning person’ (partly enforced by an early rising one year old) and partly due to ‘festival fatigue’ (just one week after Christmas) I tend to go to bed as normal and let everyone else get on with the firework watching, champagne quaffing and blagging their way through Auld Lang Syne. 

However, I LOVE the first of January. It feels like a reset, a refresh, a blank page, the timer set back to zero or the tumbling of that first Tetris block on an empty screen. I love the feeling of new. 

The Christian life is full of contrasts and paradoxes.  

If you want to be first, you have to go last.

If you want to live, you have to first die.

We are sinners and yet we are saints.

Jesus is fully man and fully God.

And here is another that relates to the new: God is the same yesterday, today and forever... and yet he is always doing something new.

Today, let this knowledge of newness propel you into 2020. May you perceive where God is doing new things in you. Take the time to ask what new things he might be preparing to do through you. But also, be encouraged and inspired about what he might do in those around you. 

I assume that you, like me, have a long list of unanswered prayers. I hope that some of those prayers relate to people you know who don’t know Jesus yet and that you are praying for to become a Christian. I have many of these prayers and longings, prayed hundreds of times over many years and it can be easy to lose hope. 

My encouragement to you today is to trust again and believe again in the God of the new. I am a long suffering football fan of a club that has not won a significant trophy in decades. Yet every year I believe this could be our year. Every January I am challenged to apply the same measure of optimism and yearning to what God might do in the lives of my friends and family who do not know him yet. 

Today may the God who knows his way out of the grave cause you to hope afresh that your prayers may be answered.  May new year provide the moment of reset you need to pray again for those who need him. And may those prayers cause a new boldness to tell your story and invite your friends closer to the God who loves them. 

Because he is always doing something new. 

New.

Like a freshly cut lawn.
The first snowflake to fall. 
Like the popping of Pringles
The first night tingles
Goose pimples, bursting with anticipation 
Waiting just to taste the

New.

We wait.  For the welcome to the stage.
The pen hovers over the page.
Like a tiger caged on the verge of release
Unleashed.  
Brace yourself for impact of the

New.

Because he never ceases
Pushing and pulling, greasing the levers of eternity
To let their be light from murky waters
From barren old couples to sons and daughters
To ring, coat and sandals from feeding swine
From washing up water to the priciest wine

To a global movement from an unlikely rabble
To speaking in tongues from the Tower of Babble. 
Sight from blindness, life from death
A cosmos erupting from you drawing breath

And our hearts ransomed from Golgotha's hill
From an empty inheritance to an infinite will
To all debts cancelled from unpayable price
To resurrection and rebirth from sacrifice

He is the God who makes all things

New.