We need not fear the future

“And a happy new year” will have a hollow ring for millions of people, if a recent Populus poll is to be believed. According to this snap survey a worrying one in five adults have stated that they are dreading the new year, with money worries predictably figuring high among their concerns.

It’s at moments like this Christians have most to offer, for if there ever was a moment for sharing our good news it’s now. We have the antidote to worry for example, for when we learn to trust God as Father and seek to do what he wants of us we can rest assured that we will have what we need.

“So don’t worry about these things, saying, ‘What will we eat? What will we drink? What will we wear?’ These things dominate the thoughts of unbelievers, but your heavenly Father already knows all your needs. Seek the Kingdom of God above all else, and live righteously, and he will give you everything you need.

“So don’t worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring its own worries. Today’s trouble is enough for today” (Matthew 6 NLT)

My wife and I have found this to be true time and time again, not least when I responded to God’s call to train to be a pastor. We had three young children and no assured income. Many, including my mother thought we were crazy (she told me I should have been a monk), but we always had everything we needed, even though it did get tough at times. We discovered that God can, and does, keep His promises, often in the most remarkable of ways. And that’s because He’s always in control.

Police Officer Chip Gillette came to understand this a few days after a crazed gunman killed seven young people in Wedgewood Baptist Church, Fort Worth, Texas. As he walked around the sanctuary trying to make some kind of sense of the tragedy, Gillette had ‘a strong feeling of the presence of God’ just prior to finding a bullet stuck between the pages of a hymnal.

He recalls: “I read the words of the chorus where the bullet had come to its final rest ‘…King of Kings and Lord of Lords and He shall reign for ever and ever’. I began to cry and to realise that Christ was telling me that He is Lord – before the shooting, during the shooting and forever more." (Night of Tragedy Dawning of Light: Dan Crawford. Waterbrook Press)

Faith then offers us a sense of security. We need not fear even when the earth gives way and the mountains fall into the heart of the sea, for God has assured us He will be a constant source of help and strength whatever the new year brings. We may not always understand all that’s happening to us, but He has promised to be with us, and that He will work in and through all things for our ultimate good.

We can also face the New Year in the confidence too that the Lord can and wants to use us. And we can do that knowing that He is operating on a completely different time scale to ours. As the prayer often attributed to Archbishop Oscar Romero reminds us:

It helps, now and then, to step back and take a long view.
The kingdom is not only beyond our efforts,
it is even beyond our vision.
We accomplish in our lifetime only a tiny fraction
of the magnificent enterprise that is God's work….
We cannot do everything, and there is a sense of liberation
in realizing that. This enables us to do something,
and to do it very well.

Happiness then, as Martin Robinson and Paul Griffiths have argued is “not the goal so much as the outcome of particular ways of living”, ways that “enable us to connect the physical with the spiritual in creative, life-enhancing ways”.

Happiness, they show, is birthed in the lives of those who are thankful and generous, who learn to forgive and invest time in family and friends (The Eight Secrets of Happiness’. Lion).

If Robinson and Griffiths are correct we will reap what we sow and that means that far from being depressing 2012 could turn out to be a very happy year indeed. It simply means we have to take God at His word, and put His theory into practice.



Rob James is Executive Chair of the Evangelical Alliance Wales and Pastor of Westgate Evangelical Chapel