Not Just Another New Year's Day

Uh I want to uh come to this marvelous weekend and for us to open the Word of God and to look at this passage of Scripture as I speak to you about not just another new year.

And I want to say that on the basis of something I'll take a few moments to seem highly academic, not to attempt to impress anybody with scholarship, but to make clear I didn't just concoct this as an idea because of the occurrence of the word certain.

Look with me if you will.

Now it happened on a certain day.

Say that with me, will you please?

Now it happened on.

That's about as heartening as the comfort you gave me a few moments ago.

On a certain day, please.

On a certain day.

I want to talk to you from the text in its entirety, which we'll read more.

But on the basis of that word certain, because there is something profoundly distinct about it that is not concocted to invent a sermon on the basis of saying it was a very special day.

But to say that the structure of the Greek text is profoundly clear in noting that this was a day that would hardly have any the likes of it in the days of the ministry of Jesus.

There are remarkable occasions, most notably, of course, the date of his death for humanity and the date of his resurrection.

And those are distinct in their own right.

But in the many years, the three years of his ministry, there were all kinds of phenomenal things that take place.

But both the Gospel of Matthew and the Gospel of Luke reference this in a way that leaps out of the Greek text and says, this was an extraordinary one.

And I want us to come to it because since the gospel writer goes to the point of saying there were a lot of wonderful things that happened in the life of Jesus, and we have four times the record, some of it overlapping and repeating things, but certainly a manifold panorama of the life of our Savior that shows the wonder of his life, that there is a highlight in the fact that it says, this was a day that would not be like any others unless there were one or two possibly.

And the meaning of the word, the phrase as it's constructed in the Greek, in the Greek text, both in Matthew and in Luke, is specifically clear in that regard.

There's more that could be said just from the academic point of view, but I wanted to lay that down to say that I speak to you as not just another New Year's Day.

I want to talk to you about recognizing what is true for all of us, that life is a package of years.

And that's a package of days that constitute then the eventual package of years.

And that each of the days that we come to as we step into this year is something I believe the Lord wants us to become conscious at the onset of the uniqueness of each moment, the distinctiveness of what is being given us, and the fact that in that environment he is ready to do what is distinctive to the moment unless we fail to capture the fact that the nature of his life, not only in the Bible record, but the life he comes to live in you and me is a life that he wants to have a certainty to it.

Not certainty simply in the sense of confidence, but certainty in the sense of distinctiveness.

That we are never a same o sam people.

That we are never, well, it's another New Year's.

Here we go for another year.

I've been this cycle.

And the cycles are fulfilling in their own right, or they can be very problematic depending upon the circumstance of your life.

And that can become a self-fulfilling prophecy if you think in terms of the same ol se-mo.

How many people this weekend will come to the celebration or the observation with no celebration other than what is it or kick up your heels about now?

Many people will go to a party and will come away stoned out of their minds because they're looking for an escape from just some more, the same o se mo.

When we come to this passage, it says, It happened on a certain day that Jesus got into a boat with his disciples, and he said to them, Let us cross over to the other side of the lake, and they launched out.

I want to rephrase that.

Jesus says, I want you to join me.

And I want us to strike out and cross over from this beginning of January through the course of a year.

That I want to do something in you, that I want to breathe in you in ways that there comes a day-by-day awareness of the uniqueness of what I have given you in each day.

The living God who says I will give you mercies new every morning is because He is offering us something fresh with each day.

And certainly a freshness with a whole package of days called a year that is set in our lap as we come to this juncture.

All of us together.

Many friends that we have here, the joy of fellowship that God has allowed Anna and me, and by the way, I need to stop and have this pretty girl stand up, honey, and turn around, and everybody wants to see you.

They say, Where's the good-looking one?

Go ahead.

Stand up.

She's struggling to her feet as we speak.

All the way around.

There she is.

Fifty-seven years of marriage.

57 years of marriage.

Mother of four, grandmother of eleven, and we both now are en route to number nine and number 11 and 12 of great-grandchildren.

And look how young we appear.

The text that we look at, let's cross over to the other side of this of this year, Jesus would invite us to.

But as they sailed, verse 23, you fell asleep and a windstorm came down on the lake.

They were filling with water and were in jeopardy.

They came to him and awoke him, saying, Master, master, we are perishing.

He arose, rebuked the wind and the raging of the water.

They ceased.

And there was a calm.

But he said to them, Where is your faith?

And they were afraid and marveled, saying one to another, Who can this be?

For he commands even the winds and the water, and they obey him.

Drawn to this text, because I want us to first see that there is a year, a new year before us, or a day, a season.

Days for learning how to walk differently from the enculturation that so characterizes our society, characterizes our humanity.

Twor-hour cycles spin by just like that.

And how, for how many does it become the doldrums, and even those with the freshest approach to every day?

There's still a commonality today that easily we can fail to recognize what we often say in our circles is the prophetic moment or the prophetic possibilities of each day.

I say prophetic in the sense that God wants to come by his spirit and breathe something of life in a uniqueness, in a distinctiveness, and something that characterizes what is true of the factuality of all creation, that nothing is ever really truly a redundancy, a repetition.

Every moment is new.

These days have never happened before.

It seems so obvious it would seem just wasted verbiage to go to it and through it.

But as we step here into this new year together, I want to invite you to think with me about two ideas.

The first is the, along with this day for learning, that it's a day for living, and that it is a day for leading.

And coming to the point of leading, irrespective of what degree you would perceive of your leadership being.

Perhaps you may have the oversight of a number of people.

You may have a corporation you serve, or in fact that is your own.

You may have a person that your neighborhood would be seen as one of the more ordinary people there.

But the uniqueness of the place we've all been given is something that is a summons, I believe, of this text, as we avoid the patterns of a world that will this day make a high celebration, but in making it all, it is simply for the sake of the celebrating and not for the sake of the receiving of the implications of what is given to us.

A fresh package called a year, containing days, every one of which the Lord would say, it has a distinctiveness, and I want to make you aware of it and walk in that availability to me.

I believe the Holy Spirit wants to bring us to that.

The whole idea of the life in the Spirit being a river, a flowing of a river, is something that is very much to the awareness of each of us, I suppose.

Out of the inner beings, the Bible says, of each one of us who open to the life of the Holy Spirit of God, there's rivers, plural, that he wants to flow.

I would suggest that maybe as much as to say a fresh stream for every day.

Something of his touch and presence.

But it calls us to look at a setting in the scripture where the Bible says, I just want you to see one day, the gospel writers point it out.

He said, I want you to see Jesus in one extraordinary day and what he did.

And looking at those things, there comes bursting out the edges, if you will, of that one day, so many depictions of all that he is and all the kinds of things he wants to do, where hearts will open to him and say, Lord, help me to walk in touch with you in the confidence of a relationship that says, Lord, you can have me work through me and do things that fulfill certain days in your purpose through me.

Can I hear an amen in the house?

Let there be something of your sovereign grace and purpose happen in that fashion.

The precision of language that is used in this text indicates that this remarkable day that Luke notes has two particularly distinctive things about it, to my observation.

There are the phenomenal things that took place.

Let me say the four things primarily that took place that one day, at which Luke says all these happened the same day.

First, there was the stilling of the tempest, which we just read of, but it goes on as you continue the reading of the text that having come ashore on the other side of Galilee, there is the deliverance of the demonic demoniac of Gedera.

So the stilling of a tempest, and then the stilling of the raging storm of demonic bondage in a human.

Then there was the healing of the woman who had suffered for twelve years with an exhausting drainage of just low, slow hemorrhaging of blood from her body.

And she'd sought every kind of medical help and not be able to find it.

And Jesus, the healing, she reaches out and touches his garment and is healed in a moment of divine grace.

And then later on the same day, message comes to Jesus of a home where the daughter has died, a 12-year-old, and Jesus goes to the home and raises her from the dead.

All those things happened the same day.

I want to tell you a fifth thing that perhaps is the key to our understanding and receiving the implications of that are inherent to those things he did that day.

Because those things that happened through him have things that are analogous to the circumstances of our life, maybe not this moment, certainly not the cluster of all at once.

Maybe not this moment, or even in their specificity, any of us in the course of the coming year.

But they are kinds of things I want us to note, because they're the kinds of things where the Lord says, You are the me, you are the Him, Jesus.

You are the me, he is saying, that will be in settings where I want to do certain things that are extraordinary and change the fabric, the texture of the days of people, if you will walk with a consciousness of my life in you and my readiness to turn uncertain circumstances into certain days when the love and power of God manifests through his people.

There is something about this fact that is here in the text of Scripture saying Jesus wants to overflow through his church.

Because while there may not be four grand things happening through any of our lives any given day, can you imagine the hundreds and the thousands of things that would happen through the body of Christ where human need is spread in so many places if God's people walk with a consciousness that they are people of, and these are the words that I want to come to, a prophetic moment.

That we are people of a prophetic moment.

The fifth thing I said that took place this day is the thing we would perhaps be inclined to least notice.

When you talk about the stilling of the tempest, the deliverance of the demoniac, the healing of the woman with the issue of the blood, and the ref the resurrection of that girl.

Those things just explode.

But the day began with a teaching time with Jesus.

And in that teaching, he gave the parable of the sower.

I don't want to reiterate it except to say, if you're unfamiliar with the terminology, it's that a man that went forth to sow a field.

It's the classic picture of the rural farming of that ancient day.

And as he went out sowing seed, Jesus describes the way that the seed responds, or the ground responds, as the case may be, to the different circumstances.

Some where people are walking all the time, others where birds come and take the seed, some comes up among plants that are thorns and they suffocate it, and then some that become unto a harvest, and the harvest comes to different degrees, as he says, 30, 60, and 100 measure.

And this spectrum of possibilities all have to do with what Jesus' point in the teaching was.

Because the parable of the sower is really about the hearers.

Really about the hearers.

It wasn't about the sowers, it's about the soil of our soul.

Say those words, will you?

But put my in the soul of my the soil of my soul.

Say it again, please.

The soil of my soul.

How I receive the word that God speaks to me.

The word that I read, the word that I hear on this occasion.

How do I receive and respond to that?

And my response determines to what degree there will come the advance, the fruitfulness of what is there.

The day began, this day like no other.

It's as though Jesus begins by teaching his disciples, says, the secret to your life will be how you hear.

He says, take heed how you hear.

Read the companion passage in the text.

We've only read just one of the four of the four certain things that are so dramatic, but they're preceded by a profoundly grand statement that iterates, that, that, that, that declares what is basic to every one of us being what he wants to be, where he has for us to be.

And it has to do how we receive the word he speaks to us.

The Holy Spirit is looking for people who will hear.

It begins with people, perhaps some in this room this evening, people who need to hear the love of God for you, as it was shared so beautifully around the commemoration of his death for us.

That we open up to the life and the love of God.

The truth that says, Forgiveness is yours.

Come receive my embrace.

Come into the hope of eternal life.

For the majority of us who have begun that walk with Christ, the Lord constantly draws us along the way.

Just like the disciples saying, and for us, he says us to us tonight, I'm bold to say, He gave me this word to bring to you as you step into the threshold of the new year.

Into this day, many who will hear me bring this message will be New Year's Day.

For some, it's New Year's Eve.

And as the word comes forth to you, the message is to speak and to declare, this is your moment to decide if you will let me do certain things in you, things that are unique to the moment, because you are uniquely available, hearing my spirit at work in your life.

Tuned to me.

Take heed how you hear.

And as you listen to the word, then you can step forward and move ahead with him, just as they did.

He said, Come, let us cross over to the other side.

I hear the Lord saying, What is it that looks like the other side to you right now?

Now the easiest thing to apply this is to say, the Lord's saying, Step in at this launch of the new year, and let's move through the weeks and the months and go all the way through to the other side of the year.

Because that's what I believe the heartbeat of the message is.

We live in a culture that is so committed to being analytical rather than catalytical.

The Lord wants people who would be not just analysts of circumstances, but catalysts in the middle of it.

Take, for example, the fact we're entering an election year, and I constantly hear, I weary, honestly, I have no less political interest than anyone else.

It is something that ought to be much on our mind, much on our life on our hearts as we pray, much as we move through the days, but moving away from the argumentation, looking for a debate, watching for the next thing to criticize another candidate, and make up our mind how to pray and seek God to what we ought to be as agents of his life at this hour in the history of our nation and how we would go about praying.

Nothing is more catalytic than the people of God at prayer.

Nothing is less productive than sitting and parroting the obvious points of analyses about feelings that we have, especially when you can find a person who is obviously as wise as you because their political opinion is exactly the same as yours, and because they don't like who you don't like and they favor who you favor.

And when you find that harmony of heart and know that you have someone of truly sound mind, then you can together just go further in analyzing, though you're agreeing, and harp and pick about all the things you don't like about those who are seen as opponents in political stancing.

The Church of Jesus Christ has never been called to away from a world with its political situations and its needs, but that it would be penetrate that world with a different mindset and would be catalysts for the manifestation of the life of God, the righteousness of God without.

Being mean about it, without becoming harshly judgmental, without a snooty, a superior attitude, to come with the grace of God in our lives on our knees before his throne and in the boldness of prayer against the works of darkness in our world.

We're going to come also into very, very stormy times when they got on that boat.

They didn't know what was ahead.

One of the things this text says, if it doesn't say anything else, is no matter what the future of the year ahead of us holds, and we've been through some stormy years of recent years, if nothing else, economics.

Folks, I think that it doesn't take a profit.

It just takes the ability to read the papers and make any kind of projection of the global scene.

But we could say without fear and without cynicism, that we ain't seen nothing yet.

That's right.

The storms are out there.

Tell somebody next to you, but if you've got Jesus in the boat, you're going over and you're not going under.

Go on, tell somebody.

You got Jesus in the boat.

You're going over and you're not going under.

There will be death scenes around us, but Jesus has you there.

As on that certain day, in the face of the death of that child, that Jesus comes and introduces resurrection life.

We're called in the middle of a world that is fading so many different ways with so many expressions of the death syndrome.

The Lord says, let the breath of my spirit awaken you to the uniqueness of your place, the uniqueness of your qualifications by reason of my life in you.

And let that breath course through you, just as it brought life to Jairus' daughter.

Bring life into every circumstance where you are.

And when you come to the woman who reached out and touched, and the healing of God came, oh, that God would make us aware of the fact that these stories are not simply to recite the glories of our Savior, but to hear what God by His Spirit did in the incarnate expression of His Son, that His Son coming to redeem a people to Himself may replicate the life and the touch and the breath and the workings of Jesus in and through them where they go.

And that may not manifest in the precise same way, but the same characteristics will be there.

Life comes instead of death.

There comes strength instead of weakness, where people are being drained of meaning, just as that woman's issue of blood was wearing her out to the bone.

She reaches and touches.

It could be the 3rd of February, it may be the 14th of April, it could be July the 12th, it could be September the 30th.

There would be days that the Lord Jesus' life in you would bring about that uniqueness like no other by reason of his, because we live, listening to his spirit, living in the flow of the river of his spirit, and growing in the effectiveness of being people of the moment because this one of this day.

And now the one that we are five seconds after in the same day.

And so we process life, recognizing people of the certainty of a confidence, but awareness that we are to be a people of days the Lord wants to make certain in the sense of this text, like no other.

Five great things took place that day.

Thousands are needed every day.

And that's why the Lord has come to breathe his life in you and me, so he can do them through us.

I want to conclude by saying that the beauty of the whole text summons us again to that classic text of scripture that says the forever now, now is the accepted time.

That word accepted is the word that reflects the Jubilee year.

It's the word for God's intervention with something that transcends the ordinary.

Now is the accepted time.

And that now is an ever-present stream of life.

Now is the accepted time.

Today is the day of salvation.

Just a moment.

And as he does, I want to say that there are always people who need the Savior.

And as we come as believers to be fed and nurtured unto recognizing our place in our day and in a year, of saying, Jesus, freshly fill me.

Let me hear you.

Let me keep tuned into you.

I want to go in the boat with you.

I want to have people touch me that something of life comes.

People come with the death syndrome somewhere around them, that the breath of life happens through me because of you in me.

That there comes that uniqueness of you that makes the uniqueness of a new year.

It is not just another day ever, and this is not just another year.

Would you affirm that before the Lord with me right now?

Not just another year.

As Tom is coming, I want to tell you a story that I just heard this week.

It's true and especially meaningful because it concerns one of our great-grandchildren.

His our grandson Kyle was telling us that about three weeks ago, little Sammy came to his mother's five years old.

Came in the kitchen, he says, Mama, he says, sometimes would God speak to you in a dream at five years old?

And she said, Well, yes, he does that.

He said, Mama, the Lord spoke to me in a dream last night.

He said to me, Sammy, he said, if you will turn from any sin and always do what is right and ask me into your heart, I'll come in to live there.

And he says, Mama, the Lord said that to me.

And she said, Sammy, would you like to do that?

And that little boy said, Yes, I would.

And they prayed.

And just three weeks ago, five-year-old Sammy Bauer opened his heart to Jesus.

And the Lord had spoken to him, and he listened to the word.

And he responded ever so simply.

That rejoices this great grandpa's heart.

But I want to say that the Lord speaks to all of us first to call us to himself and through his word to call us to be his people.

We come into this new year.

Let the door open.

Like Sammy said when she said, now you want to ask Jesus in your heart.

And before he prayed the prayer, he said, then I open my heart like this.

And he went, would you put your hands in front of you?

You don't need to make the creaky sound, but would you just go like this with me and say, Jesus, come in.

Come into this year.

Come into every part of my life.

In your holy name.

Amen.

God bless you.