Belated happy New Year! By now, you are tired of hearing it, and you’ve quit saying it. So that’s why I said belated happy New Year. Well, like you, we’re all prone to make resolutions as we advance into a new year. And by now, I think there’s a quitting date and many of them have just abandoned on the effort of fulfilling the resolutions. So let’s do something different. Let’s have New Year’s reminders.
At a time like this, we need to pause and remember what is basic and what is true. Personally speaking, I had an “aha” moment during the holidays. I was doing some devotional reading in Psalm 39. And if you look at verses four through seven, you find three salient reminders, which are apropos for this occasion.
First, the brevity of time. The psalmist speaks of handbreadths, which is about the size of your actual hand, a measurement, and then a vapor, which is echoed in that of James 4:14, a vapor that vanishes. The brevity of time. Also, the futility of things. He further says, “People spend time heaping up riches.” Real quickly, let me tell you, just to be sure of something together, that what we treasure will be someone else’s trash. If you have a lot of good things, they’ll be in an estate sale. If you’re like me, they’ll probably have a garage sale. The futility of making things our God and making things important in our lives beyond its own importance can be so addictive. The brevity of time, the futility of things, and then the necessity of trust. The psalmist is so transparent. He says, “What will I wait for?” and the word wait in Hebrew literally means hope. What will I hope for? And then he answers his own question when he says, “My hope is in you.”
In the future, we need to be reminded of the necessity of trust. No matter how long we’ve served the Lord, we need to trust and obey, for there’s no other way to be happy in Jesus but to trust and obey.
