From Pastor Rod - A New Year Message -From January 2019 Newsletter
As we move into the New Year, it is natural to turn our attention toward resolutions and new beginnings. These things are well-intended, but so easily broken. In our house, we have started to speak of “directions” instead of resolutions.
A resolution can be broken quickly and then easily put aside. A “direction,” however, is something we can work towards all year. We may veer off course sometimes, but we can always keep turning back into “the direction” of where we want to be. Recently, we’ve also chosen to come up with a single word that sums up what is our overall intention for the year. This word helps us focus on our direction for the year.
If I were to choose a word for our church this year, I would choose the word “vision.” I believe it is time for us to really focus on what is our vision and our mission for Auburn Presbyterian Church. Several of my sermons over the past months have touched on this, and sometime this Spring, we will become very intentional about this.
I would hope that central to this vision will be Jesus’ great commandment to love God and love our neighbor. We know that a church will grow deeper and wider when it makes a firm commitment to the great commandment. As a community of believers, we also need a mission – a stated purpose of what we want to do as a church – how do we put our words into action. In other words, how specifically are we engaged with God’s work out in the world. We will have a few gatherings where we can learn to identify just exactly how God can be uniquely shaping us for a specific action or mission.
It is my hope for you that you will find 2019 to be a tremendous year to discover once again the goodness of the God who has called us to new life in Christ. Don’t start your day with the broken pieces from yesterday. Every day is a fresh start. As cliché as it may sound, every morning we wake up is truly the first day of the rest of our lives.
So today, help us Lord, to redeem the time wisely. Help us to use the 8,760 hours given to us in this new year in the wisest way we can for your glory. I wish each of you enough wisdom to make every day of this new year better than the day before!
Happy New Year!
Rod