Looking Forward to a New Year
One of the great teachers in my life often said, “We are not guaranteed the day nor the hour.” Many folks look at a new year as some sort of promise, but there is no promise of a new year—there is no promise of tomorrow! Every moment, every day, week, month, and year, is in fact a Gift!
How often do we take our time for granted? We make plans, have expectations, speak of the future as if it must come to pass, when in fact everything can change in the blink of an eye! No, I’m not trying to dim your hopes for the coming year. My intention is to show the importance of our continued closeness to God!
There is an old quote by the Scottish poet Robert Burns, “The best laid plans of mice and men gang aft agley, and leave us naught but tears and pain from promised joy.”
Allow me to give you an example of how everything can change our expected plans. Eight years ago I was coming home from work, my expectations for the rest of the day were my wife getting home, a good evening with my wife and dogs, a good meal and some rest.
My mother-in-law had been visiting friends in Texas, and my wife would pick her up from the airport Saturday afternoon. Just normal things with little or no thought, just foolish expectations. As I arrived home that day the phone was ringing when I walked in the house.
As I answered, our world was thrown into chaos. It was a doctor from a hospital in Texas asking for permission to treat my mother-in-law for a heart attack she had a short time earlier. My wife got an opportunity to speak with her mom later that night, but the next morning her mother arrested again and passed.
Thirty days later I was walking out of the house on my way to work when the phone rang and my mother had passed from a blood clot in her lung—she had been packing for a cruise with a friend.
So you see everything can change in the blink of an eye. We are not promised the next hour or even the next minute. God alone makes His plans for the future happen.
Isaiah 46:9-11 helps to explain this. 9 Remember the former things, those of long ago; I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is none like me.
10 I make known the end from the beginning, from ancient times, what is still to come. I say, ‘My purpose will stand, and I will do all that I please.’
11 From the east I summon a bird of prey; from a far-off land, a man to fulfill my purpose. What I have said, that I will bring about; what I have planned, that I will do.
God’s plans are God’s plans, and that is that! There is no assurance behind anything we might plan! Yet we continue to make plans. We can have assurance that God has a plan for us and our future.
The Scripture clearly teaches this in Jeremiah 29:11 11 “For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.”
What we must do is be prepared always to serve God and walk in the path which pleases Him!
The Scripture says in Ephesians 2:10 For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.
God had a plan for our lives before we were even born. Jeremiah 1:5 “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart; I appointed you as a prophet to the nations.”
Philippians 1:6 “being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.”
It is clear that God has made the plan for our lives and not us. If we insist on doing things our way, we have then become an Idol unto ourselves.
So I ask you, dear brothers and sisters. After reading this, what are your plans for the new year?
Kenneth Kellar
A Man Called by God to Teach and Disciple