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2021!  If only the New Year were like the New Birth — “old things passed away, all things become new!”  Alas, no matter what you were doing New Year’s Eve, “out of a thousand invitations you received” — you “came to” on New Years Day only to find the “worst year ever,” was still with us! 

Coronavirus raging around the world with renewed phases and mutations; debt upon debt upon debt; mutual contempt among polarised idealogues of all stripes — it’s enough to make you wish our world could have a rebirth! If only we could apply some of those great “born again” promises to the world at large!   “According to God’s great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope!” … “You are washed, you are cleansed, you are sanctified!” How ready we are for such a makeover!

But alas, we are in a season of delayed gratification.  While a new world and the messianic kingdom may be looming on the horizon, it takes some faith to keep it in view: “They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore….  He will wipe away every tear from their eyes…  The desert shall rejoice and blossom as the rose….”.

Meanwhile, our problem is in the now.  What are the prospects of radical renewal in the year 2021? One thing is certain, and it has not been deferred: a personal New Birth. Your very own “realised eschatology!” It still shines like the sunrise on a New Years morning, more promising than any stimulus package. Here is what Ezekiel the prophet foretold eight hundred years before Christ: “I will sprinkle clean waters on you, and you shall be clean….  And I will give you a new heart, and I will put a new spirit within you. And I will take away the stony heart …  and I will give you a heart of flesh.  And I will put My Spirit within you and cause you to walk in My statutes, and you shall keep My judgments and do them” (Ez37).

When Malcolm Muggeridge was born again, that seasoned, well-travelled, most erudite British journalist — he called it “rapture…. an inexpressible joy which suffuses our whole being, making our fears dissolve into nothing, and our expectations all move heavenwards…. Music at its best gets nearer to it than words.  it is like coming to after an anaesthetic, with lost faces and voices and shapes again becoming recognizable” (Conversion, 14).

What more could a new year offer! Indeed, 2021 could be the perfect year to do the indispensable, to “haste to the Saviour” and turn the old hymn into a prayer:

“Out of my bondage, sorrow and night, Jesus I come, Jesus I come;

Into thy freedom, gladness and light, Jesus I come to thee.”