This morning my mom, Kaelin, and I were reflecting on the new year.

At one level, I find celebrating the new year kind of silly, since it is simply celebrating the passage of time on an arbitrary date set by our calendar.  But my mom pointed out how it reflects a part of how we were created.

Every night we go to sleep and then wake up to a new day, leaving yesterday’s anxieties behind.  I know that one!  Many a night I’ve gone to bed anxious and lacking faith, but I woken up refreshed and encouraged.  Just like resetting my computer.  Not sleeping caused serious damage.  We were created to require a reset!

The new year provides us with a mental reset.  We can put last year behind us and look optimistically to the new year.  We can make resolutions and feel empowered to change because we are in a new time.  What a wonderful thing compartmentalizing does for us!  I have a friend who refers to his hard “season of ‘08″.  He is still dealing with the repercussion of what happened then, but somehow leaving it back then allows him to face the new reality of today.  The reset does not erase the past pain, it just puts it into perspective and allows us to move forward.

me getting baptized in the caribbean on our honeymoon

This “resetting” is one reason I love baptism and why it should happen early in a believer’s walk.  It provides that marker showing that the old has passed away and the new has come.  It proclaims “I am born again!” and emboldens us to walk in newness of life with Jesus through the Holy Spirit.  Just like in the song Amazing Grace when it says “I once was lost but now I’m found, was blind but now I see”.  I know in my life I continually look back at the contrast of the old me – enslaved to sin – and the new me, a new creation by the blood of Christ.  I’ve hurt many people and committed many evil sins; but there is now no condemnation for me because of Christ’s resetting, redeeming work in my life.

God created us to reset.  We reset daily, reset yearly, and reset in life when we are born again.  Allow God to you help reset!

Some Bible passages to meditate on:

Not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect, but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. Brothers, I do not consider that I have made it my own. But one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.  (Philippians 3:12-14)

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. (2 Corinthians 5:17)

For if the blood of goats and bulls, and the sprinkling of defiled persons with the ashes of a heifer, sanctify for the purification of the flesh, how much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish to God, purify our conscience from dead works to serve the living God.  Therefore he is the mediator of a new covenant, so that those who are called may receive the promised eternal inheritance, since a death has occurred that redeems them from the transgressions committed under the first covenant. (Hebrews 9:14-15

(14how much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish to God, purify our conscience from dead works to serve the living God.

15Therefore he is the mediator of a new covenant, so that those who are called may receive the promised eternal inheritance, since a death has occurred that redeems them from the transgressions committed under the first covenant