This Year Begins With Good News
Something was already said over this year, and it was said long before you drafted a single goal.
January has a sound to it. It sounds like people talking about what they're going to change, what they're going to fix, who they intend to be this time. Gym parking lots fill up. Somebody at work announces a system. Your own head starts running an inventory somewhere around the second of the month, and the inventory is rarely generous with you.
On the first Sunday of the year somebody hands out reading plans at the door, a folded half sheet with three hundred and sixty-five boxes on it and a verse printed across the top. By the middle of February most of those sheets are in a drawer under the takeout menus. Nobody decided to quit. The boxes just got ahead of everybody, the way boxes do.
Wanting a fresh start is one of the more human things about us, and God has never been annoyed by it. But underneath all the noise there is a quieter word already spoken over your year, and the order it comes in is worth noticing. Whenever the gospel shows up in Scripture, it arrives as a report. The angels over Bethlehem gave the shepherds an announcement and a location. Something had happened in the town while they were sitting in a field, and their part was to go and look at it.
What God Was Doing While You Were Making Plans
A lot of people walk into a new year quietly wondering how God feels about them right now. Are you behind? Did something get missed last year that cannot be recovered? Is this finally the year you pull it together enough for Him to be pleased with you? Paul answers that question in a letter written to a church that had given him every reason to be disappointed in them, and he answers it by describing something already finished.
God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, not imputing their trespasses to them, and has committed to us the word of reconciliation. (2 Corinthians 5:19, NKJV)
Every verb in that sentence is in the wrong tense for a religion of self-improvement. God was in Christ. The work sits in a Person and in a completed event, and the reconciling happened while the world was busy doing something else entirely.
The word Paul uses for imputing is an accounting term. It means to post an entry against an account. God is not keeping that ledger on you. The trespasses were charged somewhere, to a cross on a hill outside Jerusalem, and the account standing in your name has nothing pending in it. Then Paul adds the part that usually gets skipped. Having settled the whole matter Himself, God handed out the announcement.
Reconciliation is a message you were given, already true when it reached you. You didn't wake up today hoping grace would arrive. You woke up inside it.
You Become What You Keep Looking At
You will grow this year, and some of that growth is going to be hard and slow. So what is going to drive it? Measure yourself against a version of yourself that has never existed and you will produce motion, some of it impressive, all of it anxious, and none of it lasting past the week your energy runs out. Paul describes a completely different mechanism, and he spends most of a chapter building toward it.
He had been writing about Moses coming down from Sinai with a face that shone, and about the veil Moses pulled over that face because the shine was already fading. Then he turns to the people he is writing to and tells them the veil is gone, and that what is happening to them now has no fade built into it.
But we all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as by the Spirit of the Lord. (2 Corinthians 3:18, NKJV)
Beholding first, then the change. The order in that sentence runs one direction only. Nobody in it is straining at anything, and the verb sits in the passive voice: you are being transformed, by the Spirit, while your attention is somewhere other than yourself. You do not become new by force of will. You become what you keep looking at.
Which makes the most practical thing available to you this month a longer look at the One who already settled the thing you keep trying to earn. Look long enough and the change arrives on its own schedule, from glory to glory, which is Paul's way of saying it comes in stages and that none of the stages are yours to arrange.
What Holds When February Comes
Some of what you plan this month will slip. The habits thin out around the third week, the discipline goes quiet, and the inventory in your head starts up again with fresh material to work from. Does that mean the plan was a waste? The plan was fine. The plan was simply never load-bearing, and neither was your January.
What was announced over you holds when the plan does not. God was in Christ, reconciling the world to Himself, and He finished that before the year had a name. It was true on the last day of December, it will be true on the next one, and nothing you accomplish or fail to accomplish in the twelve months between them gets a vote on it. Good advice depends entirely on the person receiving it. An announcement only has to be true.
So go find the half sheet in the drawer if you want it, and start the boxes again in March. Open it the way you would open a letter from somebody who has already forgiven you. Nothing in it is a test. The verse across the top of that page was true before anybody printed it, and it will still be true the next time the sheet goes back in the drawer.
