New Year -
As we travelled around on holiday we saw these signs here and there = You are now entering Southland district - Lakes district and so on.
On the journey there came a point where we had left one district behind and had entered another.
January is the month when it is drawn to our attention that we are now entering a new era in our lives - 2001 is in the rear view mirror of our lives and 2002 has already begun and takes on more and more meaning as we journey through January into February.
As christians we might well learn from the attitude reflected in Philipians chapter 3 verse 13
13 Brothers, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, 14 I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.
Such a scripture may well draw us to want to make fresh resolutions and vows about the year ahead as we face up to the glorious gift of another year.
There are of course some fairly fickle vows made in january that actually have very little meaning I am reminded of a story: told by -
MELVIN M. NEWLAND,
Have you heard about the man who moved into a retirement
community to spend the rest of his life there? It wasn’t long until he had
made a number of friends among the other residents. There was one lady
he was especially attracted to, & she was attracted to him, also. So they
spent a lot of time together. Finally one evening he proposed, asking her
to marry him.
The next morning he woke up remembering his proposal, but he couldn’t
remember her answer. So he went to her & said, "I’m really embarrassed.
I proposed to you last night but I can’t remember if you said `Yes’ or `No."’
"Oh, thank goodness!" she replied. "I remembered saying `Yes’ but I
couldn’t remember who asked me."
The point is some of the vows and promises we make can be shallow and have very little meaning.
But the beginning of a new year can be a profound opportunity to consider the direction our lives will take over the Next Year and also to look in the rear view mirror of our lives and to decide what things God would require us to leave behind in the year ahead.
The verse I would like to do some reflection around is found in the book of Deuteronomy in the Old Testament.
7 Break camp and advance into the hill country of the Amorites; go to all the neighboring peoples in the Arabah, in the mountains, in the western foothills, in the Negev and along the coast, to the land of the Canaanites and to Lebanon, as far as the great river, the Euphrates. 8 See, I have given you this land. Go in and take possession of the land that the LORD swore he would give to your fathers--to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob--and to their descendants after them."
At this time frame in history the people of Israel were in a safe place - God had rescued them from a life of slavery and humiliation - he had rescued them by miraculous deliverance through the red sea and now they were parked as it were at the foot of the Holy Mountain -
But now God says break camp - move on - there is more.
What he has in mind for the Israelite people is to move in and take the land known as Israel to be a land set apart for God.
It was full of prosperous strong people but they were idol worshippers - they had abandoned God and so God had given their land over to the Israelite people.
His plan was for them to go virtually straight in and take the land - but as you know they rebelled and as a result of that rebellion they wandered in the desert for forty years.
Fear crippled them and an entire generation failed to live out their God given destiny.
At Horeb The Israelites had gained a certain position - and they faced an exciting and yet certain future.
There are three positions where the Israelites were in that we can identify that help us to consider where we are in the purposes of God as we face a new year.
The first position is that they had escaped from slavery into freedom -
GAL 5:1 It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery.
GAL 4:1 What I am saying is that as long as the heir is a child, he is no different from a slave, although he owns the whole estate. 2 He is subject to guardians and trustees until the time set by his father. 3 So also, when we were children, we were in slavery under the basic principles of the world. 4 But when the time had fully come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under law, 5 to redeem those under law, that we might receive the full rights of sons. 6 Because you are sons, God sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, the Spirit who calls out, "Abba, Father." 7 So you are no longer a slave, but a son; and since you are a son, God has made you also an heir.
Before we can consider, then, the more profound purposes of our lives this year we would do well to review whether we are standing in the freedom that Christ has won for us.
This
New Year is a good time to stop being chained to your past failures. God
is saying here in His Word that he doesn’t want you to go through your life
branding yourself as a failure.
On the Cross died so that he could forgive. When we become Christians
on purpose that forgiveness becomes a reality in our lives. When we have
received Christ’s forgiveness it allows us to forgive ourselves and forget our
failures.
Do you need to do that? Right here this morning do you need to accept
Jesus forgiveness and then forgive yourself?
The reason the generation of Israelites who escaped from slavery from Egypt failed is they failed to recognise the completeness of their salvation. God was not only adequate to rescue them from Egypt that is the past he was also adequate for the situations that lay ahead that is the promised land.
When they were terrified they wanted to go back to Egypt because they wouldn’t trust god for the circumstances that lay ahead.
In that position they muttered against their God and their leaders;-
, "It is a good land that the LORD our God is giving us."
DT 1:26 But you were unwilling to go up; you rebelled against the command of the LORD your God. 27 You grumbled in your tents and said, "The LORD hates us; so he brought us out of Egypt to deliver us into the hands of the Amorites to destroy us. 28 Where can we go? Our brothers have made us lose heart. They say, `The people are stronger and taller than we are; the cities are large, with walls up to the sky. We even saw the Anakites there.’ "
What so often happens with christians who do not discover their full destiny is that they go back to the thinking and attitudes of their previous lives -
that is the danger of not going on in the christian journey livng out god’s call on your life - the result - you want to go back to Egypt.
Point two - Horeb - this is the second position of Israel. - At Horeb - where Mount Sinai is Israel pauses. to take a breath after the exciting events that had delivered them from 400 years of slavery - During that time of taking a breather - Moses goes up the Mountain and meets with God in what is a defining moment in the life of Israel - He meets with God and receives the ten commandments.
There is a position after salvation of learning how to live again - it is a time of readjustment - reassesment and repentance - here Israel makes the mistake of making an idol and is bought to a place of repentance - After we are born again there is a place where we take time to learn to live the new Christian life - here in this church we teach the 211 course that covers many aspects of christian living - just as a child does not get born and learn the life skills of living as a human being without the guidance of a parent so a christian needs to learn how to live a completely new life. PR 23:12 Apply your heart to instruction
and your ears to words of knowledge.
What we need to understand though is that this time of learning is to be deeply valued - of course such a season lasts all through our lives but there is a season of learning intensley how to live as a christian that is to be fully grasped.
Respected Bible scholar D. A. Carson said this:
People do not drift toward holiness.
Apart from grace-driven effort, people do not gravitate toward
godliness, prayer, obedience to Scripture, faith, and delight in the Lord.
Having decided to follow Jesus there are all manner of lessons that the christian needs to learn - it is interesting to read in the life of the early followers of Jesus
-AC 2:42 They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer.
It may greatly profit us to review in this New Year just what it is god might want to teach us -
what is it that we need to learn about how to live the christian life.
i have been struck how many great opportunities there are to learn about God here in our own community - christian radio and christian television programmes greatly suppliment but do not replace the Sunday by sunday preaching of the word here in our own church.
Someone once said:-
It’s possible to be a follower of Jesus without being a disciple; to be a
camp-follower without being a soldier of the king; to be a hanger-on in
some great work without pulling one’s weight. Once someone was
talking to a great scholar about a younger man. He said, "So and so
tells me that he was one of your students." The teacher answered
devastatingly, "He may have attended my lectures, but he was not one
of my students." There is a world of difference between attending
lectures and being a student. It is one of the supreme handicaps of the
Church that in the Church there are so many distant followers of Jesus
and so few real disciples.
To take some Horeb time - to grow you need to understand that your goal is to be a disciple of Jesus - get a picture of some great heroes of the faith Paul - Mary - Wigglesworth - ten Boom - talyor - but most of all Jesus whoever - aim at your goal and spend time becoming a fully fledged disciple of jesus -
CT Studd: "If Jesus Christ is God and died for me, then no sacrifice
can be too great for me to make for Him."
The third point is to break camp.
7 Break camp and advance into the hill country of the Amorites; go to all the neighboring peoples in the Arabah, in the mountains, in the western foothills, in the Negev and along the coast, to the land of the Canaanites and to Lebanon, as far as the great river, the Euphrates. 8 See, I have given you this land. Go in and take possession of the land that the LORD swore he would give to your fathers--to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob--and to their descendants after them."
break camp - there comes a time in your christian journey where you begin to fulfill your christian destiny - God’s call on your life - you live your life up to a certain point and it is o.k - but you come to a point where you need to go and to the kind of things that being a follower of Jesus involves.
The Israelites were told to break camp - behind them was their time of salvation and their time of receiving God’s teaching but now they were set out and to fulfill God’s call on their lives -
history records how this generation of Israelites failed to do what God had called them to do =
fear stopped them.
We are not going to do that
The scriptures say 366 times fear not!!!!!!!!
If we as Christians together fail to fulfill our God given destiny the church becomes a log jam of frustrated people.
One of the great things about the early church is that it was daily winning people for God -
the reason that was happening was that people were fulfilling their destiny.
Is God calling you to break camp in some area in your life this year.
In Jesus’ ministry we see a definitive time when he moves from being within his parents household to beginning his adult ministry in Israel.
