A New Start

It’s the time of year for new beginnings. The calendar on the wall is showing January and the diary is pristine and new. It’s time to start afresh, put the old year away and turn with expectation to the new year ahead. There’s something special about getting a new start. I remember very well as a child when I was issued with a new exercise notebook, it’s pages spotless white. It inspired me to a new hope; hope that this book would have less mistakes, blotches, smudges, crossings-out and red pen marks. A hope that in this next season I would do so much better than in the last. If I remember rightly the ‘newness’ didn’t last very long, and the new book quickly resembled the old one with all the reminders of my academic shortcomings.

The truth is that everyone’s life is a bit like my school exercise book. The past season has been marred by our human shortcomings. Some of us may be trying to give ourselves a fresh start, turning over a new leaf and hoping that the next year will prove more presentable. We may be thinking that making a lot of New Year’s Resolutions will help, although past years should have taught us that they almost always prove to be rather ineffective and are mostly short-lived.

But, for those of us who love Jesus, there is a different opportunity for a new start, and it doesn’t just happen at the turn of the year, or only when you get a new exercise book. Jesus offers us something amazing, but first we need to face our past, with all its blots and mistakes, with clarity and honesty. Then, by coming to Him and ‘reasoning’ with Him, it’s clear from the words of Isaiah that He’ll give us that much needed new beginning.

So, what does it mean to reason with Him? It means seeing our lives from His perspective and owning our failing. It means knowing His heart for us and allowing His mercy and the saving work of Calvary to be applied into our lives. He alone can take away the sins of the world, and therefore He can take away our sins from each one of us. In this way our shortcomings, our sins, our mistakes and our rebellion, which have loomed large, and as obvious as if they were blotches and errors marked in bright red on our life-page, can by Jesus be made ‘white as snow’. A new clean page can be ours today and every day. Alleluia.

Prayer: Lord Jesus, thank You that, in You, I don’t need to live my life with the weight and defilement of my past sin marring my present and my future. Thank You for Your grace and mercy to a sinner like me. Today I want to come to You and ‘reason’ with You, so I can appropriate all that Your pure righteousness has won for me. Amen.