After the decadence of December, January calls for necessary and often relieving temperance. We tighten our money belts and aiming to loosen the tightness of our waist-belts.
Tis the new season of feeling our poverty and the consequence of indulgence.
And so, with the New Year come obligatory fresh resolutions. Renewed commitments.
Enforced willpower and determination to set new routines, new agendas, goals. A sense of self, ownership and control after a season of indulgence and letting go. A sense of order as we pack down and pack up the Christmas decorations. Storing away the glitter and sparkles we have decorated our homes and dinner tables with. Creating space in our homes once again.
However, before long, we fill the void, fill up the spaces, we long for the sparkles and the dazzling lights that entice and adorn so beautifully. Our new year resolutions soon become the focus of our designing efforts as we begin decorating ourselves, our lives.
New cleaning routines, self-care steps, getting fitter, slimmer, more age and health conscious, decorating our faces, bodies, our environment to achieve our goals.
January can soon become the season in which we slip into self just as steeply as December. We congratulate ourselves on our efforts, renewed capabilities, and congratulate ourselves on jobs well done. We decorate ourselves and our lives instead of Christmas trees.
Luther has some timely words for us this New Year season in his Christmas Day sermon:
'Left to himself man lives only by his natural abilities and reason, which sometimes glitter so very beautifully that not even the true saints glitter so much. But in this they seek only their own.'
For those in Christ, New Year is the time not for renewed self-effort, or for feeling poor. It is the season to live in renewed commitment to our reliance on grace, and renewed commitment to living in receipt of our rich inheritance in Christ.
Over December our hearts have sung, worshipped and welcomed the appearing of God’s saving grace towards us in Christ. But over January and beyond, we need to hold this truth live out the reality of God’s purpose of sending his Son for us, that we might then live in this light and given life. Not merely a truth to be received, proclaimed, but then a truth to be lived out in restored, renewed and ever refreshing relationship with God.
As Luther preaches:
‘Saving grace has appeared to graceless people so that they would become rich in grace and rich in God, that is that they would believe, trust, fear honour love and praise God and thus transform ungodliness into godliness’
This is the message of Titus 2.
New year is not the time for self-resolve, but for self-humiliation.
A renewal to follow the pattern of our Lord Jesus who, though he was rich became poor, that we in our poverty, may become rich. Living in the joy and power of the grace-filled and sustained life and inheritance Christ has given us as his co-heirs.
Finding in Him alone our confidence and boasting, not in ourselves, our own assessments and resolutions.
Glorying and praising in His work alone, not ours, in the favour and delight that God has for us, not that we need to snatch from the world, others or ourselves.
Left to ourselves, we will merely glitter in our hypocrisy.
Leaning on Christ, we shine with the glory God gives us in our dependent, humble state. The work required of us from God can only be accomplished from within our union with Christ, from bended knee.
This work of entrusting our hearts and souls to Him who knows us better than we know ourselves. The work of living confessionally before Him in our resolve to renounce ungodliness.
We have work to do, we have resolve to cling to this New Year, but it is a work given and achieved only in Christ, with the firm foundation of His grace for us, and the ongoing reliance on this sustaining grace.
We cannot have the grace and favour of the world and of God. Luther shows how God allows no room for both: ‘Whoever wants to have God's grace and favour must give up all other grace and favour’
As we confess our addiction to ourselves, the world and others, our habit of seeking grace and favour there, so we plead God’s grace to cling us to Him alone, and plead His grace continues to hold us fast. To flee and renounce ungodliness, we must fall into the welcoming arms of Christ and take up his promises and gifts for us. We can only put to death the deeds and desires of our sinful hearts by falling before the One who died for our sins.
Looking up and looking out of ourselves onto the One who descended, died and defeated death and sin because of pure, perfect love for us.
As we fill our hearts and minds with the love of God in Christ, so then we lose our appetite for the love of the world.
As we wonder at the grace of God appearing to us, so we lose our confidence in the grace of the world.
As we shine with the favour of God, named His own children, so we increasingly recoil and resist the world’s attempt to dazzle and entice.
Resting and resolving in Christ alone, we do not merely receive and proclaim a happy new year, but an eternity of rich, perfect and true blessing.
All Luther's notes can be found in Luther’s Christmas Day Sermon, in Church Postil 1, p178-188.
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