When God called Abram to leave his country, his people and his household and “go to a place I will show you,” Abram did not have a clue as to where God was going to lead him, what he would face, or what the outcome would be. Facing the New Year is a similar experience. We don’t know where we are going in 2019. We don’t know what we will face. We don’t know what the New Year will bring or what the outcome will be.
The Great Baptist preacher/statesman George W. Truett coined the phrase, “I don’t know what the future holds, but I know who holds the future.” We live in the present. The future is unchartered territory. We can plan, hope and dream but we cannot see past the moment in which we live. God in his wisdom created us in a marvelous way – “In His image,” but He wisely choose not to give us vision into the next moment or tomorrow. Why? Because he wanted us to walk by faith, not by sight. God created us to be dependent upon Him and to trust him with all our being.
When our youngest son was old enough for me to take him on short or long trips, I would often ask him to go with me. Inevitably, he would ask, “Where are you going?” If I was going somewhere that he wanted to go, there was no resistance. If I was going somewhere that he didn’t want to go, he would decline my invitation. To tell the truth, It hurt my feelings when I invited him to go with me and he refused. My rationale was that “He ought to want to be with me, to go with me without question. He ought to love me and trust me enough to go anywhere I was going just to be with me.
Through my son’s rejection of my invitation, God taught me a powerful lesson. When God invites us to go with him it should not matter where. What truly matters is that I should want to go with God wherever he goes, wherever he leads. It’s a matter of relationship, love and trust.
We walk blindly into a New Year. We don’t know what we face. We may walk blindly but we never walk alone. God invites us into new country, new territory, a new page in life, a new adventure. Those who trust God and follow his leadership have nothing to fear. As the song says, “God will take care of you, through every day, O’er all the way; He will take care of you.”
Our challenge for the New Year is to accept God’s invitation, walk with him, trust Him, walk by faith leaving all unanswered questions and unbelieving resistance behind. Why? Because He is God, because he wants a personal relationship with us. Because He knows where he wants to take us, He knows how he wants to mold and shape us and He will never lead us down the wrong road. He is with us all the way, even to the end of the age and beyond. Walk by faith with God and have a blessed New Year!
In His Love, Charles
