Message from Tim

"Repent and believe the Good News!" (Mark 1:15) 

Change is sometimes necessary, but nobody welcomes change if it is imposed upon them. Ours is not a society where unquestioning obedience is the norm: people are taught from an early age to think for themselves. Someone who is skilled in bringing about change will enable others to recognise that it is necessary, ensure that their views and feelings are taken into consideration, and so get them to ‘buy in’ to whatever needs to happen. A charismatic leader may inspire people to make personal sacrifices for the greater good. But if people do not willingly embrace change they can easily end up feeling powerless and angry. The less engaged people are in the process, the more reluctant their compliance, and the greater the need for enforcement. True authority is always granted by others: it can never be claimed for oneself. ‘Because I say so!’ is not the way to earn respect.

What about when God tells us to change our ways, or calls us to repent, to use the religious jargon? It’s a tricky one... If this message is delivered by someone who claims to speak in God’s name, we may have good reason to be sceptical about the extent to which they are invoking God’s name to advance their own agenda—that, I suspect, is what is really meant by taking the Lord’s name in vain. Anyway, whether it is done cynically to manipulate people, or as a sincere expression of their own personal moral convictions, in today’s secular society I am not sure how much weight is carried by an appeal to divine authority.

And yet the message needs to be heard because God does call us to change our ways. He calls you to change, to leave past wrongs behind you and to head off in a new direction. ‘Turning over a new leaf’ is an evocative metaphor, once you realise that it refers to leaves in a book rather than leaves from a tree. Starting a new page means that you can no longer read what was on the previous page, and if the book has not yet been written, then turning over a new leaf and giving the pen to God is a way of inviting him to write the next chapter of your life, and to change the plot. It’s a chance to leave behind your failures and anything which makes you ashamed, and to make a fresh start.

And if there is stuff you really don’t want to take with you into the coming year, then that recognition is a good thing, because it means that you acknowledge that there are things about yourself which you want to change, and to change for the better. I am not talking about new year’s resolutions here – we all share a long track record of breaking those. When Jesus told people to change their ways, he also told them that God’s kingdom was on its way, and that there was good news for them to believe. What is the good news for people who have failed? The headline is that, no matter what our failure, God forgives what we have done, he loves who we are, and he offers to change the person we will be in the future. God wants you to take this personally. You might find all this a bit hard to believe because over the years you have become so set in your ways that change seems impossible. That might be precisely why you need God’s help to change – the more poor decisions we make in life, the less capacity we have to alter who we are and how we live.

While some of us have things we can celebrate from 2020, I suspect that most of us will agree that 2020 has been a pretty rubbish year and we will be glad to see the back of it. But does anything really change when Big Ben chimes on the stroke of midnight? What could make a real, lasting, life-changing difference is asking God to release you from your past. That’s a request he always takes very seriously indeed. Next year so many things will happen which will be completely beyond our control. But who you are…that should not be something you can’t control - that’s not how God made you! So God invites you to change, to choose liberty, to choose life, to choose love: ‘Repent, and believe the good news!’