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Vol. 12 No. 1 January 2010 |
Page 6 |
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Vol. 12 No. 1 January 2010 |
Page 6 |
D. Gene West
At the stroke of midnight tonight, we shall enter a period of time the world has never seen before. Parts of our globe will enter that time period before we do and other parts will enter after; nonetheless, the whole earth will soon experience a time we have never seen before. When one thinks of this, he cannot help but be fascinated and filled with wonder. The thought of entering a new year is exciting, though many of us have done that seventy, eighty or even ninety times. On rare occasions, it has been done more than a hundred times, but these are rare indeed. There is an old proverb that says, “Time and tempest wait for no man.” That is true. Time relentlessly moves on no matter how much we would wish for it to stand still. God designed it that way, and we should rejoice that it is.
For the Christian, the coming of the New Year will move all of us one more year closer to heaven and all its glories. It will also move us closer to death, for that is the door through which we must pass in order to obtain that heavenly summer land. As we look back over the past year, our hearts think of those saints who have gone before us, and while we wish we could enjoy their company for but one hour, we do not wish to call them back from the peace and serenity they enjoy in that beautiful home of the soul.
This New Year will also present new opportunities for us to serve our Lord and Savior. We will be given golden opportunities to talk to those we know and love about that beautiful home of the soul, and the blessings of spending eternity with the One who shed His warm, red, redeeming blood for us on the cross of Calvary more than two thousand years ago. It will present us with opportunities to worship the Great I Am of our universe and to study the divine pages of the Sacred Volume called the Bible. The more we learn of God, the more we will want to be like Him, and the more we will want to be with Him. God has been so good to us that tongue cannot recite, even if the mind could conceive of all the blessings heaped upon us down through the years. This within itself gives great drive for studying His Word and applying the wonders of His Word to our lives, making them far more pleasant, productive and beneficial for time and eternity.
Let us propose a question. What do you look forward to most in the coming year? Many will say such things as retirement, relatively good health, comfort, spending time with family and friends, traveling and seeing the wonders of the great country in which we live or traveling abroad; perhaps, there would be a different answer for every person. Do you know what this writer looks forward to the most? Work! Someone says, “Work, you must be out of your mind!” I look forward to continuing to do the work that I have done for almost fifty-five years. To have the opportunity to learn those things from the Word of God that one has somehow overlooked is a thrilling prospect. We realize there are those who think they know enough, or even think they know it all and will not consider further digging into the inexhaustible mine of wealth that is the Bible. There are so many things there to be learned that one could not possibly learn all if he were to rival Methuselah in years lived on earth. Just think of the all the gems to be found in the Word of God. Consider the diamonds of determination, the rubies of righteousness and the magnificent sapphires of salvation yet to be known from God’s Word. Think of the thrill of finally coming to an understanding of passages that have stood as mysteries to us for years. We have learned so much from the Word in the last ten years that we have never understood before, that we can hardly wait to work in the wonderful Word again. Nothing is more exciting or rewarding than this kind of work—as a matter of fact; it is not work in the ordinarily accepted sense, but the greatest of pleasures known in this time world. Whatever your goal for the New Year is, we wish you a very Happy New Year.