Let me begin by wishing you all a very Happy New Year!! I pray that your holidays were filled with the joy of the Lord and that God’s peace and love were evident in them in a powerful way! 🙂

Many of you may have already made this comment to someone or even thought it to yourself: “Can you believe it that it’s another year!” I am sure that many of you welcomed the New year 2011 as I did by watching it come in on your TV in the comfort of your home, with family or close friends. 

As you watched the New Year come in on TV,  you surely saw those many brave souls as they hit the streets on that very cold New Years Eve night celebrating the coming of 2011, and you thought to yourself there was no way in the world anyone would catch you in the middle of all that mess and in that cold.

Yet, after all the  celebration was over and a lot of the people we saw on TV were nursing a huge headache the next day; the thought that a New Year had come in for many was, “Oh well, it’s just another year and soon I’ll be back to my same old boring life and nothing will have really changed.”

Many of the people we know or work with feel that way but the unfortunate thing is that many of God’s people feel the exact same way. Many of God’s people go about their simple church life, by maybe attending church once in a while and a Bible study here and there, with little anticipation for the Lord to do a new work in them or worse than that, even desiring that.

Psalm 98:1a“Sing to the Lord a new song, for He has done marvelous things.”  Sadly, many of the Lord’s people, have become very content with their mediocre Christian life and they really don’t want the Lord to mess it up by actually doing something marvelous, something spiritual in their life; I mean really!

Jesus said in Matthew 9:16-17 “No one sews a patch of unshrunk cloth on an old garment, for the patch will pull away from the garment, making the tear worse. Neither do men pour new wine into old wineskins. If they do, the skins will burst, the wine will run out and the wineskins will be ruined. No, they pour new wine into new wineskins, and both are preserved.”

The Lord desires to bring such a wonderful newness to our life not only in 2011 but in each and everyday of our lives that cannot be confined within our old way of thinking, our old wineskins, but sadly many of us resist that.

Solomon writes in Ecclesiastes 1:9b “There is nothing new under he sun.” There may be some in the church who say they want to experience the Lord in a new way in 2011 or that they want a greater experience of the Lord in their lives, and to those I would ask, have you first gotten down the things the Lord has already spoken to your heart in 2010 to get right in your life.

As I look at my own life, I sadly see there are still many areas in my life that need much work. I truly believe that I will not be able to move forward in what the Lord would desire for me in 2011 until I seriously ask Him to do that spiritual work in my life so I can overcome those areas of my life that I struggle in so I can be truly be effective for Him. 

The danger that can come upon the church in this New Year is that we begin to think and act as just our worldly friends do. The Apostle Paul declares in 2 Corinthians 5:17 “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!” Paul also writes in Galatians 6:15 “Neither circumcision nor uncircumcision means anything; what counts is a new creation.”

2010 had many challenges for my life and I am sad to say that I didn’t do so well in a lot of them. 2011 will have its own challenges for me as well as for you, but we must earnestly desire to be more victorious when we face those challenges then we were in 2010; but that will only happen when we allow the Holy Spirit to do His work in our lives.

Are you asking the Lord to pour His new wine into your old wineskins? Trust me when I say this, He will not do that for His new wine is far too precious to be wasted in our old wineskins.

My brothers and sisters, don’t let 2011 be, just another year for you my friend. Allow the Holy Spirit to make it a life-changing year, then watch the mighty things the Lord will accomplish through you. Happy New Year!! 🙂