December 31 – “Irresistible Future”

OK.  I know 2020 has been “one of those years” like few others in recent memory (I can only think of one that came close, and that was Hurricane Ike/Recession year – 2008).  Absolutely crazy things have happened.  Covid, of course.  Quarantines.  Masks.  Shutdowns.  Three hurricanes.  A contentious presidential election.  Church online.  Church outside under the building.  It has definitely been one for the books. 

 

In the midst of all this craziness, have you been looking for a way to contemplate the New Year?  Sometimes it helps to get some help there.  How about from a guy who died way back in 1917?  Check out these words from Oswald Chambers in My Utmost for His Highest.  They are certainly appropriate for “ponder-ation.”

 

Security from Yesterday.  ‘God requires that which is past.’  At the end of the year we turn with eagerness to all that God has for the future, and yet anxiety is apt to arise from remembering the yesterdays.  Our present enjoyment of God’s grace is apt to be checked by the memory of yesterday’s sins and blunders.  But God is the God of our yesterdays, and He allows the memory of them in order to turn the past into a ministry of spiritual culture for the future.  God reminds us of the past lest we get into a shallow security in the present.

 

Security for tomorrow.  ‘For the Lord will go before you.’  This is a gracious revelation, that God will garrison where we have failed to.  He will watch lest things trip us up again into like failure, as they assuredly would do if He were not our reward.  God’s hand reaches back to the past and makes a clearing house for conscience.

 

Security for today.  ‘For you shall not go out with haste.’  As we go forth into the coming year, let it not be in the haste of impetuous thoughtlessness, but with the patient power of knowing that the God of Israel will go before us.  Our yesterdays present irreparable things to us; it is true that we have lost opportunities which will never return, but God can transform this destructive anxiety into a constructive thoughtfulness for the future.  Let the past sleep, but let it sleep on the bosom of Christ.

 

Leave the Irreparable Past in His hands, and step out into the Irresistible Future with Him.

Isaiah 52:12 says, “The God of Israel will be your reward.”

 

Father, thank you for the past you have walked with us through.  Thank you for the promise that always lurks in our future.  And please walk with us in our “meanwhiles” of the present.  Amen.