The year of our Lord 2022

A happy new year to you. May our ambition in 2022 be to "grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. To Him be the glory both now and forever" (2 Peter 3:18).

What will 2022 bring? God knows - and God does know. And he knows that it will be good for his people, to accomplish his goal of conforming them to the image of his Son. 

"Those who have ears, let them hear," is ever his word to us. He speaks, and he tells us to take up the cross and to follow him; to rejoice in difficulties because they teach us patience and ultimately to find joy in his eternal love to us; to understand that this world is full of vanity, but that he has prepared an eternal kingdom for those who love him, through the death and resurrection and ascension of he for whom all things are, Jesus Christ. We keep filtering this message through our own false ideas that we are owed a life which is reasonably comfortable, that suffering should have a limit which is reached quite soon and then must pass away, that any sort of radical measures in serving Christ would be over the top and aren't really called for, and that it is quite reasonable to indulge our sinful natures to some extent day by day.

One thing that a new start - day, month, year, etc. - gives to us is the reminder that his mercies are always new. Despite all that folly and slowness, yet he still seeks patiently again to teach us the lesson: take up the cross and follow Jesus, through the cross, to the grave, to the eternal glory. Die to self, and you will live with him. That's the only route, and that is the route, and if we keep plodding, we will get there, through his mercy.