January 1, 2018

“A Word for the New Year”

“Behold, I will do a new thing.  Now it shall spring forth;

Shall you not know it?  I will make a road in the wilderness

And rivers in the desert…

 To give drink to my people, my chosen.

This people I have formed for myself

They shall declare my praise!”     (Isaiah 43:19, 21)

A new thing…

It shall spring forth.

Shall you not know it?

God says, “I will make a road in the wilderness [a place without roads].”

“And rivers in the desert [in a dry and forsaken place].”

This Year of our Lord, Two Thousand and Eighteen, A.D., can be approached with faith, expectation and joy or with trepidation, anxiety and fear.  The perspective we bring as we approach the unknown future can help us or hinder us in the journey before us.  If the Lord Jesus Christ gives us a Word as the New Year begins, shall we not hear it?

The word which I have written above, the Lord gave to me this morning as I awoke to begin the new day.  So this is the word which I have been given to set my perspective for this New Year.  What word has your God given you?

How many of us need a new thing?   I know I do.  I need to be shaken from my complacency of expecting nothing save what has gone before.  I need to know that when I encounter a wilderness, a jungle before me, that the Lord envisions for that place a road through it to the other side!  I need to know that the dry and forsaken place where I find myself living now is a place where the Lord Jesus promises to help me find the rivers of life!  So with this new perspective for this New Year, let us begin:

Mostly in the past year I have been really down about our President.  I have found him not representing me, my family and most persons I care about.  He chooses to call himself a Christian, but does not exhibit any of the fruits of Jesus Christ.  He expresses no kindness to the poor.  He does not welcome strangers.  He does not show hospitality to those unlike himself.  He does not care for the little children, for the poor, for the sick or the dying.  He does not welcome refugees.  And so I find it hard to rejoice in him.

But the Lord Jesus tells me to pray for him, that he might become a better President.  Jesus has even encouraged me to pray that he might become a better person, a more whole human being.  It is hard, the scripture tells us for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.  But what is impossible for men is possible for God.  So I pray for his soul.  I pray that he may come to know the Lord Jesus Christ and be saved.

I also pray for Kim Jong-un, the dictator who rules over North Korea.  To secure his place of power he has murdered members of his own family.  God knows he needs to know the love of Christ.  North Korea was one of the great mission fields in the history of the Presbyterian Church.  At one time there were more Presbyterian Christians in North Korea than in South Korea.  What happened?  Following the Korean War, many North Korean Christians fled to South Korea.  But some remained.  For the sake of those still remaining in that dark, dark place, let us pray for the church of Jesus Christ in North Korea.  Let us join in prayer that they and their brothers and sisters in South Korea will be spared a Nuclear War.  Ask the Japanese, there are no winners in a nuclear war.  Historians say when America dropped the two atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it shortened the war in the Pacific by at least one year and possibly saved a million soldiers’ lives.  But at what cost?  Kim Jong-un, to save himself is prepared to destroy his country and millions of human beings.  Whether Donald Trump is prepared to destroy these millions of human souls is unknown.  God, I pray, let this never comes to pass.  And so we pray today for two men who have the power to forever change our world.  God help them both to turn to the way of Jesus Christ, to our Jesus, who comes neither to kill nor to destroy.  May our God help us all!

Tonight, let us pray for the refugees.  Where are the refugees tonight?  We know about the refugees who have come to Europe, seeking a place with no Syrian war.  We know why they are displaced, or at least we think we do.  And the USA and Canada have millions of “illegal refugees” from Mexico and countries in Central and South America.  A few, as President Trump says are “criminals.”  Are all these millions criminals?  Suppose we weed out the “criminals,” but allow the others to find a path to citizenship in a legal way.  Is that not the way of Christ’s compassion?   And then there are the Muslim refugees from Indonesia fleeing to Bangladesh.  There are at least a half a million of these who have suffered ethnic cleansing by the Buddhists.  Can we also pray for these?  Would Christ not wish us to have compassion on these refugees, too?

We in the United States should not claim to be a “Christian nation” unless we do the deeds of Christ!  If we do not love our brothers and sisters whom we have seen, how can we say we love God whom we have not seen?  Jesus says very clearly, “By their fruits you will know my disciples!”  We can say, as many do, “the world is a lot more complicated place than when Jesus was alive, therefore, it is harder for us to do what Jesus did!”  The world is a complicated place.  But to show the love of Christ to our neighbor is no more complicated than it was 2000 years ago.  It is a difficult thing for any of us to do, but not so difficult if our hearts are filled with the love of our God in Jesus Christ our Lord.

If we are not willing to do the deeds of Jesus Christ in this world, then we have no right to claim the name of Jesus Christ as our own!  If is as simple as that.  We show our faith by our works, by our deeds of love and of mercy!  When Jesus tells us to lay up treasure in heaven, what is he speaking about?  The only enduring quality that carries from this life into the next is how we treat our fellow human beings, whether we have loved them and cared for them or not!  What else that we do endures across the grave?  “As ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me!” Jesus says.

God remembers all and cares for everyone!  Do we?  May we all find Christ’s blessings in this New Year!

Bill Wilson, servant of God by God’s grace and mercies, through Jesus Christ our Lord and our Redeemer, to whom be all praise, glory, honor and blessing, both now and forevermore.  “Amen and Amen!”

Let all of God’s people say, “Amen!”

“Amen!”  We praise you, Lord Jesus Christ!”