New Year

New Years are like new Sabbaths, new morning mercies, new opportunities to allow rivers of grace to flood our senses and bring fresh glimpses of heaven to our horizons. We write truth on the doorposts of our hearts because we're forgetful, and even when we remember we still forget. We forget that the glories of the kingdom are present and available to us now, and yet still to come. We forget that the agony of a broken creation reminds us we were meant for another world. We forget that the road to a sanctified life is often a rocky and hazardous one. We forget the depth of our fallenness. We forget that striving for our own peace is never successful. We forget that we'll never truly comprehend the immeasurable breadth of His desire to be near us and how that desire was satisfied on the cross. So that's why we wake up to new mornings and new years so that we can learn and remember the gospel all over again. Praise the Father for never ceasing, never tiring of telling us the story again and again. 

"His mercy is not calculating and cautious, like ours. It is unrestrained, flood-like, sweeping, magnanimous. Our haunting shame is not a problem for him, but the very thing he loves most to work with. Our sins do not cause his love to take a hit. Our sins cause his love to surge forward all the more. On that day when we stand before him, quietly, unhurriedly, we will weep with relief, shocked at how impoverished a view of his mercy-rich heart we had."
-Dane Ortlund