In itself New Year's Day is no more than any other day. Every day lengthens our history by so many hours, and shortens it by just as many. It adds one to the days that are past: subtracts one from the unknown number yet to come.
But it is none the less true that such a new beginning as New Year's Day may well be made a time for sober reflection. Who can forbear taking a glance backward? Who can say that he does not also take a significant look forward?
But how we are affected by such reflections is what should concern us. When a man is unconverted, the less the distance his mind's eye carries him, whether backward or forward, the better for his present enjoyment. He may have been all too successful in forgetting God, but he dreads the thought of eternity. And to look too far into the future would only remind him of a day of righteous reckoning for the past, and would spoil his present pleasures.
What makes the difference is whether we reckon with God, or without God. He who reckons with God can as calmly take eternity into his calculations as a schoolboy can contemplate his return to the love and shelter of a happy home.
The believer's future embraces an "eternal weight of glory," a share in God's own pleasures— "pleasures for evermore" and all this without the smallest shade of uncertainty. He has tasted here the love of Christ, and he knows no future but an eternity of its unhindered enjoyment.
The death of Christ was the clearest possible declaration that all hope in man naturally was over, and over forever. But His resurrection proclaims with equal clearness that God has found a new beginning for man and that beginning in the Man who glorified Him on the cross and who has been exalted to highest heavenly honor in consequence.
If the reader would have such a beginning for the New Year, he must begin with this man—with Jesus the exalted Savior, who has been made Lord and Christ. Have your past "beginnings" resulted in wearying, heart-saddening disappointment? It is all because you have begun with the wrong person—self instead of Christ. In that new creation human effort and human merit have no place at all; and he who begins with God's new beginning, and looks alone to Him, shall never be disappointed—never be put to confusion.