7 Browley Street, Moss Vale NSW 10am Sunday Worship Service
Are you sick of making New Year resolutions that don’t last? We all long for a whole fresh start – walking away from the mess we’ve made of our relationships, our failed attempts at reforming bad habits, wrong decisions that have led to disastrous consequences in our professional lives, etc. The older we get the less confidence we have in the real value of New Year resolutions.
One of the important Jewish festivals talked about in the Old Testament is the New Year Festival, or Rosh Hashanah. It lasts for two days and provides an opportunity for Jews to ask questions about their actions throughout the year, questions like: • What’s the most meaningful thing in my life? • Who in my life means the most to me, and how often do I let them know this? • What are the most significant things I’ve achieved in the past year? • What do I hope to achieve next year and in my life generally? Sadly, the OT is an honest account of centuries of history during which this hasn’t really worked – any more than our New Year resolutions ‘work’. But, the good news is that in the middle of this history God gives them a promise. Through one of his prophets he says this: “I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you will be clean; I will cleanse you from all your impurities and from all your idols. 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. And I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws.” (Ezekiel 36:25-27). Ezekiel follows this up in the next chapter with his vision of the ‘valley of dry bones’ where new life is breathed into a vast number of strewn-out skeletons lying across the valley floor.
At Christmas, we celebrated the beginning of the final fulfilment of that promise – the birth of the Saviour! This, together with his life, death and resurrection, fill out the picture of what God has done and is doing to keep his amazing promise. C.S. Lewis, in ‘Mere Christianity’, put it like this: “For mere improvement is not redemption, though redemption always improves people even here and now and will, in the end, improve them to a degree we cannot yet imagine. God became man to turn creatures into sons: not simply to produce better men of the old kind but to produce a new kind of man.” And the Apostle Paul put it like this: “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!” (2 Corinthians 5:17).
Have you thought of taking hold of this promise for yourself by answering two of the Jewish questions above, “What’s the most meaningful thing in my life? and “Who in my life means the most to me, and how often do I let them know this?”, with just one word: ‘Jesus’? You can find out more about what this means in practice by going to Church!
Bruce Christian