Have you applied the spiritual significance of the New Year?

Has the new year taken off and left you without a spiritual new beginning? If this is your condition, you may find this post a practical help to enter into the experience of a real spiritual new year.

Through some fellowship I received this week,  I was enlightened to see what is the spiritual significance of a new year. By applying the vision contained in this post, I believe you’ll receive much spiritual profit and be able to advance more quickly in your Christian life and service as a believer personally and with the church corporately.

Genesis 1:14 says, “And God said let there be light-bearers in the expanse of the heaven to separate the day from the night, and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and for years.” All these signs, seasons, days, and years are shadows of Christ (Col. 2:16-17). At the end of the Bible, Revelation 21:23 says concerning the New Jerusalem, “And the city has no need of the sun or the moon that they should shine in it, for the glory of God illumined it, and its lamp is the Lamb. Christ is the real light of the people in the world (John 1:4) and people can only touch real light when they touch Christ.

Days, months, and years are opportunities prepared by God.

Our God is a God of new beginnings as evidenced by His divine characteristics displayed in His creation. God created the universe such that there would be days, months, and years. Every twenty-four hours the earth revolves on its axis in such a way that we have a night followed by a new day. Similarly, the moon revolves around the earth in such a way that we have new moons, new months for new seasons. The earth revolves around the sun in such a way that we have new years.  All these days, months, and years are opportunities prepared by God.

 In the physical universe, God ordained that all the living things should be regulated by days, months and years, whether plants or animals.  For example, farmers plant their seed in the spring in order that they may reap in the fall. Children grow, year by year, making progressive advancement in their education. Such a natural principle also applies to our business or career as well. If we had difficulty in our education, career or business in one year, we still have a new year with a new opportunity to start again. Because there is always the opportunity for the next year, we should not be discouraged but grasp the opportunity for a new beginning.

Spiritually, we have such opportunities not only year after year, but month after month, and even day after day. God is constantly presenting us with opportunities to grow.

Every day, month and year is a new beginning.

In our spiritual life there should be days, months and years. With the Israelites there was the Feast of the Passover as a great beginning in the first month of their sacred calendar, the month of Abib (Exo. 12:1-2). “Abib” means sprouting, budding and denotes a new beginning of life. So from this we can see the spiritual significance of a new beginning being for sprouting, for growing.

For example, we may be short in pursuing the Lord, reading the Bible, poor in prayer, loose in preaching the gospel and unfaithful material offering like the waning of the moon. However, then we can let this failure pass and have a spiritual new moon.

We can also have a spiritual new day. We may have experienced a failure one day. Yet, after resting for the night we can have a new beginning when we rise up in the morning. One of my favorite verses concerning having a daily new beginning is Lamentations 3:22-23 which says, “It is Jehovah’s loving kindness that we are not consumed, for His compassions do not fail; they are new every morning; great is Your faithfulness.” We need to be like Jeremiah who realized His need to contact the Lord afresh every morning, putting our entire hope in Him, waiting on Him, and calling on His name (Lam. 3:22-25, 55).

It’s regrettable that as Christians we may enter into a new calendar year without entering into a new spiritual year. While celebrating the beginning of  a new calendar year, we may fail to prepare ourselves for a new spiritual year and thus have no proper ending and no new preparation for a new spiritual beginning.

We need to keep a spiritual new year before God.

In order to have a spiritual new beginning before the Lord, we need go before God to review and settle our condition before Him from the passing year. Just as a business owner who must settle his outward accounts at the end of each year, we must settle our inward accounts with the Lord. May we all learn this spiritual lesson.

That is, from this year forward, I hope that we all will have a proper spiritual conclusion  to each passing year and a proper beginning of each new spiritual year. May we all consider before the Lord how we have spent our time, the things in which we have failed and those in which we have overcome. Then we need to have a thorough clearance so that we may have a new beginning.

There are two very important principles concerning days, months and years:

Their relationship to light-bearers

God in Christ is our light-bearer (John 8:12; 9:5). Every change in our spiritual condition depends on our meeting God. So in order to experience a new spiritual year, we need to seek God’s face and meet Him. We need to bring our spiritual condition, our past and our present to Him.  We need to place it before Him to receive His shining. We need to open ourselves to Him so that as the Spirit He may come and shine on the items that we place before Him. It is only such encounters with God that bring in the changes signified by days, months and years. Every change in our spiritual condition depends on our meeting God.

Their relationship to death and resurrection

May we be those, who at the end of the year, go before God, bringing our life and work and our spiritual condition from the previous year to Him in prayer in order to receive His enlightenment. Then when we encounter His shining on our shortages, failures and mistakes, we simply confess them to Him such that we receive His forgiveness and cleansing (1 John 1:9). In this way our past is terminated and we experience death.

Then as we pray, we will receive God’s fresh grace, fresh enlightenment, fresh power and fresh promises. In this way we will have a new beginning before God and will experience resurrection.

Our spiritual journey is a continual process of such death and resurrection even as Paul expressed in Philippians 3:13, “Forgetting the things which are behind and stretching forward to the things which are before.” This refers to an ending and a new beginning.

The changing of days, months and years depends on God Himself.

The changing of days, months and years is the issue of our contacting God as light and of death and resurrection. Whenever we contact God we are in the presence of light and when we contact Him we enter into death and resurrection. So the proper ushering in of a new year is to have a new beginning and a new beginning is the issue of touching God and meeting God.

We are separated from the people of the world to experience a new spiritual beginning.

Such a new beginning is not according to the festivities of the worldly celebrations but one of spending sober time to meet God at the beginning of each new year. In such times we may even come to Him with sorrow, fasting, confession, regret, and repentance. We may also ask Him for His mercy and His grace with prayer and petition. In this way we will truly have a new beginning of a new spiritual year.

“Lord Jesus, thank you for showing me the spiritual significance of the new year. Lord, I come to contact You as the Source of newness. Be my new beginning for a spiritual new year. I open my whole being to You. Enlighten me concerning the things that I need to confess one by one. Terminate the old things in Your death. Lord, fill me with Yourself as God’s fresh grace, fresh enlightenment, fresh power and fresh promises. Make this year one full of spiritual newness.”

This post is my chapter review of Chapter Four, “The Spiritual Significance of the New Year” in God’s Need and God’s Goal, by Witness Lee. I would strongly encourage you to prayerfully read this chapter for yourself.