“Happy New Year!”

Henry Forbes Witherby

online: 01.01.2022, updated: 01.01.2024

We are at the beginning of a new year and new hopes and new promises fill many hearts. Since God has marked out our lives in portions of time, having made the lights in the heaven to be for signs and for seasons, and for days and years, it behooves us as His creatures, to consider our entry into a new era of time.

“What is your life? It is even a vapor, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away,” says the Scripture, and we must not live according to the notion that everyman is mortal but ourselves. Many an one will enter into eternity this year – time will pass away for thousands and thousands of men, women, and children of our own age this year. Let us then enquire, How would it be with me should I be called out of time into eternity? Should the Lord this year fulfill His promise and come again, would His coming rejoice our hearts? There is only one way of giving a practical answer to such questions, and that is by now – this day – being ready. We trust our reader is ready. “Be ye also ready.”

To the Christian may this year be a fresh start, a bright beginning again on the journey. Forgetting those things which are behind, let us reach forth to those which are before. We are nearer heaven than we have been ever before in our lives. It is a time to gird up the loins, and to trim the lamps. Let us look to God, and hope in Him for better things in a spiritual way than we have ever before known.

To our younger friends and readers the new year speaks perhaps more loudly than to their seniors. For the years seem to grow shorter as we grow older. Dear young friend, seek to love the Bible more this year than you have done, and make more time for prayer than hitherto. Many are proposing resolutions for the new year, but if the heart be directed to God by His word and by prayer, the course of each day will be in the right direction. Be not satisfied with being assured you are fit for heaven, but seek so to live and so to think that you may have the Lord’s approval. Remember that a boy or a girl can please the Lord as much as a man or a woman; make His pleasure your great concern, and this will be to you a happy new year.


Original: “The New Year
from Faithful Words for Old and Young, vol. 15, 1886, p. 14


Note from the editors:

The SoundWords editorial team is responsible for the publication of the above article. It does not necessarily agree with all expressed thoughts of the author (except of course articles of the editorial staff) nor would it like to refer to all thoughts and practices, which the author represents elsewhere. “But examine all things, hold fast the good” (1Thes 5:21).—See also „On our own account ...