Happy New Year! New clothes, new calendar, new car, new baby, new job, new start, new friend, new invention, new crops, new book, new school, new detergent, new medicine, new doctor, new house, new outlook, new day, new dishes, new sidewalk, new president, new new new new new!

The strange thing about new is that it quickly gets old. Every one of us is on a path where the world promises something better just over the next hill, in the new prescription, the new relationship, the new politician. We know how quickly our hopes are dashed. Not much new in any of it, is there!

We are not God. We can only rearrange the same old stuff or try again to make something work. But when God says "new," he means new. Why is it that we are so dead set on remaking the newness that he offers in the forgiveness of our sins and a new relationship to honor and praise him into something old, trite, useless, trivial, when compared with the new plans we have? God warns the Israelites again and again about the "new gods" that their fathers did not know, but which would seem to promise something really new and improved. God calls people fools who want to live apart from what he makes new (Deuteronomy 32). Most of Israel ended up apart from God forever.

Behold I make all things new. New hearts for the wicked! New lives for the believers! I will make a new covenant, not like the covenant I made with their fathers (Jeremiah 31:31). If anyone is "in Christ" he or she is a new creation (2 Corinthians 5). Take eat and drink, for this is the new covenant in my blood (Matthew 26). Destroy this temple (of my body) and I will make a new one in three days!

Each day offers us time to start anew, to quit playing god or acting as if we can live without him. All of what allures is old stuff, decaying and worthless. Like little children, hungering for a parent's love, is what we can be anew in Christ. Let us recommit ourselves to confessing our sin against the true God when our old self-will creeps into our lives and messes up again and again. Let us recommit to honoring God with our time, talents, treasures, with each Sunday being a time for us to gather to honor the God whom we ask to make us new and love us dearly. Let us lay aside every "old sin and hurt - against God, ourselves, and each other," and pray that others will do the same. Let us start afresh in the power of the One who will open our graves to an eternally new today. To our God be honor and glory forever and ever. May nothing old be more important or central! That is Good NEWS!

In Christ our Lord and Savior,
Pastor Thomas Trapp