New Year's Isn't Necessarily Now

LIFE LESSONS

New Year’s Isn’t Necessarily Now

Wallace Alcorn

God never created a calendar; he but glances at ours and grins. Our silliness about the New Year must especially amuse him because we try to invest it with a meaning it can never have. The “right time” to do something has nothing to do with what is artificially displayed on calendars and everything to do with God’s grace and our willingness to respond to it.

Listen with careful skepticism to popular notions, e.g., “This is the time to make New Year’s resolutions.” “This is a new year, and we have a new chance to change.” “We’ve turned the page on the past, and the future is before us.” “The New Year is an empty slate.” Nonsense. The only use for such trite expressions is as artificial devices of sentimental self-manipulation. They’re tricks at best, and often tragic failures.

Consider the printed calendar itself. Taking down the 2021 edition and replacing it with that of 2022 doesn’t change our lives any more than putting down Adolph Hitler’s biography and picking up Billy Graham’s changes our lives from one to the other. A calendar is little more than a misleading graphic of reality.

A new year just does not give us a new start; we enter it burdened by our offenses and failures or enabled by our successes and accomplishments. Disgraced public figures regularly announce disingenuously: “I want to put this whole thing behind me and get on with my life.” Whatever was done cannot put behind: it is his life, and it’s the life he is forced to live. Or she. We cannot escape the past; it can only be forgiven. That will only happen if we own up to the past and sincerely seek forgiveness and use it to build a new life.

The convenient time to make critical decisions is not New Year’s—or your birthday or any other holiday. It is now, and if you act now, it can become forever Now. Calendars distort reality, confuse thinking, and misdirect behavior.

“Behold, now is the acceptable time; behold, now is the day of salvation” (2 Corinthians 6:2, KJV). The Apostle Paul wrote that in about A.D. 52, as the calendars put it, but the calendars have nothing to do with it. The day of salvation is when God’s grace says “Come” and you respond, “Jesus, I come.” The day of becoming fully committed to him as Lord is the first day of your renewed life regardless of the date.

If it should be New Year’s Eve or New Year’s Day, that would be nice but only coincidental. We will experience Now when God speaks to us individually through the Holy Spirit. That is Now. Yet, we must respond while it is still Now. Let’s look into our hearts, not at the calendar, to see what day it is.