This comes with our very best wishes for a Happy New Year, and our prayers that all of us will have a heightened awareness of the love of God and of His presence with us in 2022. May we recognise, each day, His kindness and care for us, His hand in our lives working for our good, and His power working in us, to transform us to be more and more like Jesus, as we ‘behold’ Him.
‘Now the Lord is Spirit and where the Spirit of the Lord is there is freedom. And we, who with unveiled faces all reflect the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into His likeness with ever increasing glory, which comes from the Lord.’ 2 Corinthians 3:18.
We might be feeling some trepidation as we start another, humanly speaking, very uncertain year but I believe there is a key for us here in the verse quoted above. ‘Where the Spirit of the Lord is there is freedom’.
We need freedom from fear in financially uncertain times; freedom from fear in yet more days of pandemic; freedom from fear that our resources won’t be enough for the many sorts of challenges which lie ahead. This freedom will only be ours as we find ourselves soaked in, infilled with, and surrounded by His Spirit. And, if this year has taught us anything, it is that the Spirit of God loves a grateful heart, and all of heaven comes as we love and worship Jesus.
So, as the New Year begins, let us (in the words of the chorus that we used to sing based on Joel 3:10.) ‘Give thanks with a grateful heart. {Not a grouchy one}. Give thanks to the Holy One. Give thanks for He has given Jesus Christ His Son. And now “let the weak say I am strong”, let the poor say “I am rich”, because of what the Lord has done for us. Give Thanks.’
Let us go into 2022, with full and thankful hearts that, because of Jesus, we are the richest people on the earth. Our inheritance in Him is immense. He is with us!! He is for us.!! ‘If God is for us who can be against us? He who did not spare His own Son, but gave Him up for us all – how will He not also, along with Him, graciously (freely NASB) give us all things?’ Romans 8:28-32.
Let us go into 2022 thanking Him for these truths, and thereby release our faith and confidence that we will have the riches of His presence through any new crisis, financial, health, personal or relational.
Let us go into 2022 knowing that ‘in Him’ this is going to be a ‘good year’.
