As the new year arrives, we sense a feeling of great potential and power within us.
The power to make a real and lasting change in our lives.
And because we’re just coming out of Christmas, filled with good vibes from the season of celebration, we are likely to drastically overestimate our ability to drive positive change in our lives for the next year.
While on the one hand, that’s a good thing, because it spurs us on to make bold calls about how we want to change, it’s also a significant danger, because we are much more likely to over-sell our changeability to ourselves, and end up making a whole host of change-related decisions that we simply fail to follow through on, leading to disappointment and despair, which leads us to further failure in living the life that we want to live.
How tragic, that this surge of over-optimism that promises to spur us onwards and upwards into living our best life ever, instead generates the potential to drag us backwards into more of the vices and base instincts that constantly plague us.
The Apostle Paul, writing during the height of the Roman Empire, reflected on this fickle aspect of human nature that actively resists our progress into better versions of ourselves.
“I know that my selfish desires won’t let me do anything that is good,” he wrote.
“Even when I want to do right, I cannot! O what a miserable person I am. Who will rescue me from this body that is doomed to die?”
But in the midst of his despair about his own ability to change, Paul remembers the Great News of Christmas, that God decided not to leave us on our own, struggling to live our best lives, but ever doomed to fail and only dig ourselves deeper and deeper into futility and misery, so he writes, “Thank God! Jesus Christ will rescue me.”
Paul is able to write with real confidence because God became human at Christmas in the person of Jesus.
Jesus lived among us, experiencing the frustration, temptation and pain of life, and He did something about it.
He realised that what was holding each one of us back was the power of Sin, that ultimately leads us to death.
And so, living with the power of God, Jesus achieved the impossible, living a life completely free from sin, and full of love, mercy and self-giving.
Of course, this life stood out and posed a threat to those in power, so they arranged to have him executed.
But that was Jesus’ plan all along, because in order to free us from the power of sin and death, he needed to experience death himself, and having died, he was then able to use his power as God to defeat death by raising to life again.
Now, having defeated the power of both sin and death, Jesus offers the power of life and righteousness to us.
What Jesus offers us is far more powerful than a heady, optimistic, arbitrary season for making life resolutions.
Instead He offers us the power to make real, lasting change in the deepest parts of our lives, and what’s more, He offers us the certainty of a real and concrete hope in a future that is better than anything that we could ever dream: life forever in the presence and power of God!
This new year, switch your power source to the One that really works! Trust in Jesus and Live in His power!
Farewell and happy new year!
Ps Donovan Jasper, New Life Baptist Church
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