Prayer for the Year

A number gathered at my home last evening to pray for this new year. After food and warmed punch, we prayed for the nation, for Martin Top and Hetton chapels, for sick individuals and unsaved persons. Though not in a church building, it was good for us to meet and commit 2025 to the Lord’s good keeping. Much will happen of which we may not approve or endorse, and some of us will be afflicted with trial and temptation, but believers know that

…all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose. (Romans 8:28, New King James Version)

Perhaps our prayers were not so much asking for God to do this or that, but a lively reminder to us that our Saviour is going to achieve much good in 2025, despite the horrors and pains it will also host. There are people who will have their sins forgiven in 2025 who were hell-bound in 2024. Although some churches closed last year, new ones this year shall open. Jesus will either come back in the next twelve months, or He will continue His practice of calling His individual children home, rendering their death days greater than their birthdays.

I leave you with A Prayer for the New Year: “My times are in Your hand!” (Psalm 31:15), by Cheshire Presbyterian minister and Bible commentator, Matthew Henry:

Firmly believing that my times are in God’s hand, I here submit myself and all my affairs for the ensuing year, to the wise and gracious disposal of God’s divine providence. Whether God appoints for me…

health or sickness,

peace or trouble,

comforts or crosses,

life or death–

may His holy will be done

All my time, strength, and service, I devote to the honour of the Lord Jesus–and even my common actions. It is my earnest expectation, hope, and desire, my constant aim and endeavour –that Jesus Christ may be magnified in me.

In everything I have to do –my entire dependence is upon Jesus Christ for strength. And whatever I do in word or deed, I desire to do all in His name, to make Him my Alpha and Omega. I have all from Him–and I would use all for Him.

If this should prove a year of affliction, a sorrowful year to me –I will fetch all my supports and comforts from the Lord Jesus and stay myself upon Him, His everlasting consolations, and the good hope I have in Him through grace.

And if it should be my dying year–then my times are in the hand of the Lord Jesus. And with a humble reliance upon His mediation, I would venture into the eternal world looking for the blessed hope. Dying as well as living –Jesus Christ will, I trust, be gain and advantage to me.

Oh, that the grace of God may be sufficient for me, to keep me always a humble sense of my own unworthiness, weakness, folly, and infirmity –together with a humble dependence upon the Lord Jesus Christ for both righteousness and strength.