GOD GIVES US A NEW BEGINNING

Richard Kirkland

Have you ever longed for the chance to start life all over again? Just to forget about the mistakes and failures and disappointments of the past and make a new start? Join the club! Most of us think about that from time to time.

When we think about the number of ignorant mistakes we have made, the times we have exercised poor judgment or times when we have allowed our sinful nature to get the better of us, we long for a chance to erase what has happened and start all over again. But the truth is that what we have done is done. We can’t change it because it is indelibly written upon the page of our life.

But wouldn’t it be wonderful if there were a place like the one described by Louise Fletcher: I wish that there were some wonderful place/Called the Land of Beginning Again/Where all our mistakes and all our heartaches/And all of our selfish grief/Could be dropped like a shabby old coat by the door/And never be put on again.

Brother Gus Nichols, the late, beloved preacher of a previous generation once said, “When you have tried and failed, try starting over again." But life isn’t always that easy. Mistakes become a part of our permanent record. The best we can do is to apologize for the mistake and try not to repeat it again. And even that may be impossible. We find ourselves making the same stupid and foolish mistakes again and again.

But in reality, God has given us the opportunity to enter into a land of new beginning. Here we are—old, dirty, ugly sinners. We keep on making the same old mistakes, sins. We don’t like what we are and we try to change. We keep on trying to overcome those mistakes of the past and not repeat them for the future. But we really don’t know what to do. Even if we could overcome them, the sins have still ruined us. We have broken relationships, destroyed dreams, worst of all, we are alienated from God. What are we to do?

Listen to what Paul said to the church in Ephesus, “And you were dead in your trespasses and sins…But God, being rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in our transgressions, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved) and raised us up with Him, and seated us with Him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus”(Ephesians 2:1-6). In Christ! “Baptized into Christ Jesus” (Romans 6:3), “so we too might walk in newness of life” (v. 4). The land of beginning again is just as near as obedience to the gospel of Jesus Christ. “Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature; old things passed away; behold, new things have come” (2 Corinthians 5:17).