Monday
Psalm 40.3 “He put a new song in my mouth, a hymn of praise to our God.”
There’s something psychologically appealing about newness. The Psalm-poet knows about verses, tunes, and the creative mind finding new ways to say and sing his familiar faith. The new song grows out of the soil of his recent experience of the Lord hearing his cry for help and lifting him to a safe place. We’ve all been there – both in the slippery hole and somehow later finding our feet again. That ‘somehow’ is no accident. The new song is just the latest occasion in his life (and ours) when God has ‘turned to me’, intervened to rescue, and established our lives on a firmer footing.
Tuesday
Lamentations 3.22-23 “Because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.”
This is a rare shaft of sunlight in a book shadowed by grief, bewilderment, creeping despair, and the sense that there are some tragedies from which life can never recover. The one non-negotiable of biblical Israel’s faith is the defiant resilience of trust in the Lord’s great love. “Great is your faithfulness” is a confession of faith uttered out of darkness to the one true and utterly reliable source of light. God’s compassions are new every morning. As sure as the sun rises, God’s love is as surely reliable and dependable, unwavering and faithful. Paul’s equivalent confession is “nothing in all creation can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
Wednesday
Ecclesiastes 1.9 “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.”
These words capture a shoulder-shrugging world-weariness that easily slips into cynicism. The same writer tells us that God has put eternity into our hearts. We are capable of hope, trust, love, creativity; so we can be agents of change. Christians can never be people who couldn’t care less; we are called to be a people who care more, give more, live more, because we serve a God who cares, gives and is the Life-giver. Paul’s answer to Ecclesiastes is written out of God’s transforming grace: “If anyone is in Christ they are new creation! The old has passed and the new has come.” On a day when we mark new beginnings, live into that call to be part of God’s new creation!
Thursday
Matthew 9.17 “Neither do people pour new wine into old wineskins. If they do, the skins will burst; the wine will run out and the wineskins will be ruined. No, they pour new wine into new wineskins, and both are preserved.”
Today a New Year begins. There’s some truth in the song line, “Today is the first day of the rest of my life.” But we know we can’t step outside of our own story. Life changes, but it is a changing continuity. Jesus is saying that the Kingdom of God, the rule and reign of God in our lives and in the community of his followers, is like new wine. It needs openness to his teaching, pliability to expand and give space for God’s gift of newness, and glad willingness to accommodate the energy and ferment of a changed heart. May God give us the capacity to contain all that He pours into us!
Friday
John 13.14 “A new command I give to you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another.”
Jesus has just washed his disciples’ feet. Love is an embodied action. He held their feet as they were washed. The Word made flesh handled human flesh with thorough thoughtfulness. To love as Jesus loved, in the same way, to the same extent, with the same enacted compassion – that is the new commandment. This would be some verse to take as the motto for 2026! The love command is only practicable if practice is made possible by God’s enabling grace. “We love because he first loved us.”
Saturday
Colossians 3.10 “Do not lie to one another, since you have taken off your old self, and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in the image of its Creator.”
There are many ways of telling lies. Perhaps the most dangerous is when we live a lie. It’s possible to appear truthful, spiritual, faithful – but deep down we know ourselves as someone else. Paul knows it’s often a struggle to overcome sin, and to follow Christ faithfully. But it’s not all about our strength to struggle; the new self being created in Christ is the work of God. Sanctification is also by grace. Our being conformed to the image of Christ is the work of the Holy Spirit. We are in a lifelong process of renewal. In due course God will complete his work within us, and bring us, in his good time, “to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ.”
Sunday
1 Peter 1.3-5 “Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and into an inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade… kept in heaven for you, who through faith are shielded by God’s power until the coming of the salvation that is ready to be revealed in the last time.”
New birth. Born again. In Christ a new creation. Wherever you are in your life God is there. And where God is there is always the call and possibility of newness. Peter spells out the depth and the range of God’s renewing work throughout our lives.
Leave a Reply