Happy New Year or "Same Old Same Old"

 THE FIRST DAY OF THIS NEW YEAR

Happy New Year!  This is the first of 365 days we have in this year to enjoy life and do good.  Will we allow today to be one more day of the “same old same old” or will today be a day we choose to enjoy the love of God and live in response to that love?

You have now become a new person and are always learning more about Christ. You are being made more like Christ. He is the One Who made you.  

Colossians 3:10

We can enter into this new year with joy and hope because it is God who says that when we invite Him into our lives, we become new.  The old goes and the new comes.  God does it.  Prior to God living in us we were dead people walking around not knowing how to do life.  When God makes us alive, He not only shows us how to live but gives us the desire and the power to do things His way. 

So that’s what brings the question, will we continue in our own thinking and planning – “same old same old” or will we actually allow God to make changes in us by making us more and more like Jesus.

How does that take place in our lives?  It’s the practical working out in our lives of the fact that we don’t know enough, don’t have enough will-power on our own, and don’t have control in such a way to make change in ourselves.

It’s coming to believe that there is a God who has the wisdom, love, and power for each of us to inform us and even motivate us to live in an entirely new way – God’s way of love and trust.

It obviously has to include the surrender that actually lays down our own understanding and ways of doing things to God, and picking up His new instructions about what reality is and how we should respond to it.

This will be the first day of an amazing new year where the stale and unsatisfying “same old same old” gets left behind if we welcome the freshness of God’s will and care into our lives.  Let’s do that today, shall we?

Heavenly Father, as we enter into this first day of the new year we also want to give ourselves in a fresh way to You.  Here is our will and here is our day – the circumstances around us and our thoughts and motivations and emotions within us. 

We want to become more like Jesus today who loved You with all His heart lived only to do Your will.  Show us how to celebrate this new life with You one moment at a time throughout each day of this year, beginning with today. Amen

Out with the old and in with the new.  Let’s live simple and trusting in the care of our Heavenly Father and I promise you, as we do, there will not be any more “same old same old.”