The Curse of the New Year
“New year, new me.”
That’s the saying that has been touted for years, and years, and years, and years, and years, and years, and years before.
It gets repetitive, doesn’t it?
Since I was a kid, I’ve heard this New Year’s saying, and thankfully, to the point of my prose this evening, it's now seen as more of a joke, a self-aware commentary on the inability of Man to change his ways despite his deep-seated desire to do so.
“New Year? New me.”
This statement is nothing more than a slogan that serves as an advertisement for the true, generally understood, and inescapable message: you will not change.
You will do the same thing you did last year and the year before that and that. This is the curse of the New Year, dooming us to an endless, repetitious walk, like the children of Israel who walked forty years in the wilderness on their path to the promised land.
Funnily enough, much like the children of Israel, the path to paradise was and is straightforward. There is no grand mystery in God’s simplicity; it is simply that the gate is strait and the way is narrow.
This being said, on the subject of change, the only actual change is found in simplicity, yet rejected in complexity that is found in the human mind. We believe we know better, which is ironic and almost humorous compared to God's omniscient, omnipresent, all-powerful mind.
But I digress.
If you want to change and receive blessings rather than curses, then you must receive Christ. What law of man has changed a man’s desires to a permanent degree? What self-help book, guru, or religion has freed a soul that addictions have bound? If we were to examine the master of our lives who sells us to wicked slavers, we would see that we are addicted.
We are addicted to drugs, alcohol, sex, and money, which is more than an addiction to materialistic and stimulative things, but rather an addiction to the disassociation, distraction, and depression they offer.
We may want to change but desire the stimulant of the wicked wasp's stinger. We call these stimulants ‘good,’ but even in this, we find irony given these things, even to a scientific degree, are damaging to the body and mind and, to a spiritual degree, the spirit and soul.
We are masochists made by putrid powers, but the Master with a capital M does not subscribe to that philosophy nor those actions. “Therefore, if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.”
“New Year? New me?” No! This is a new year, but it's the same ‘me’ unless I choose to be in Christ, for I am a new creature in Christ.
I catch so much flak for, quote, ‘being a simpleton’ or ‘oversampling complex issues with something as simple as God.’ Some of God’s greatest revelations are found in His simplicity. Mankind makes things complicated, musing up the waters and obsessing over knowledge to the point of insanity, drastically confusing all with their many lies.
The answer is simple; it’s always been simple, and it’s so simple it can be summarized in one word, one proper noun: God.
The world needs God, not laws or politicians or laws of man, though all those things have their place. They need Jehova—we all need Him.
To beat the curse that plagues our years, months, weeks, days, hours, minutes, and seconds, we must give every second, minute, hour, day, week, month, and year to him. We must be in Christ to become new, and when we are made new, living in Christ, we receive every blessing written in his book!
We are no longer cursed by the master of evil but blessed by the Master of good. Now, we go forward on the straight and narrow, changed, breaking the chains of the generations before us, no longer stung and in pain, depressed and angry, or addicted to the whips of this world, but free.
We are not made free by the standards of the world and their manmade ‘freedom,’ but by the blood of Jesus Christ, the standard that all men who strive to be better should follow.
