New Year’s Eve Worship

Dear beloved in Christ, why is the New Year’s Eve worship special and meaningful?

For all of us, the New Year brings a ray of hope, imagining and anticipating something good. If we could, we would all completely bury all of our dirtiness, foolishness and sinfulness with the passing of 2009, so that in 2010, a new "Me" would arise from the ashes. Wouldn’t it be awesome if by the marking of the new year, changes actually came into our lives? Our smallness, our easily hurt hearts, our meanness, our unwillingness to forgive or ask for forgiveness, our unwillingness to change, if all these things that trouble and pain us would vanish when the clock strikes midnight tonight, wouldn’t that be the greatest thing ever?

My dear friends, you know the change of time or calendar year cannot produce such an incredible miracle. Therefore, for most people, the anticipation, the hope, the good is short lived, because it has no sustaining power. Neither we nor the new calendar year have the power to cause a transformation in the hearts and lives of the people.

As impotent this night will be in bringing about change in us, we do not gather to worship time or hope. Our gathering is not to pour champagne and wish for the very best. Sweet words indeed, but hollow nonetheless.

No, we gather to worship our living God. We gather to lay all of our burdens, our sinfulness, our smallness, our pains, our unwillingness to change, to forgive, to love at the feet of Jesus, because there the Lord actually buries them away, like the passing of last year. He can vanish our ugliness, for when He went up to the cross, that was the price He paid for. So, what the new year cannot do, what our resolution cannot cause, our Lord can and does.

That is why, this New Year’s Eve worship is meaningful and special. We acknowledge Him to be King and Ruler over our hearts and lives. To Him, we want to bow the knee and offer our hearts. So, don’t let sleepiness, don’t let lateness, don’t let your children, don’t let your emotion prevent you from worshiping and bowing to our God this night. God is God, and He must first be worshiped. So, come tonight, let’s spend the last minutes of this year and the first minutes of the new year, worshiping, bowing, praying, looking to our God, for He alone is worthy to receive all praise and honor.

May the Lord bless us richly in the new year, especially by helping us to love Him more than anyone or anything in our lives!