A New Year Message

by R. Darke, Vancouver, B.C. | Category: General | Jan 1967

What is your aim? If this question had been asked of the apostle Paul he would have answered, "We make it our aim to be well-pleasing unto Him" (2 Corinthians 5.9). Has this been true of us during the past year? Can we make it our goal for 1967?

Paul lived a full Christian life, and in so doing he encountered similar temptations, disappointments, and discouragements to those which beset us. He wrote to the Corinthian church, "We are pressed on every side, yet not straitened; perplexed, yet not unto despair; pursued, yet not forsaken; smitten down, yet not destroyed" (2 Corinthians 4.8,9). His desire to please the Lord remained unchanged despite adverse circumstances, and so he pressed "on toward the goal unto the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus" (Philippians 3.14). With the eye of faith he looked onward, allowing nothing to deflect him from the path set out for him by the Lord. Failures and discouragements of the past were not allowed to hinder progress for the future, "one thing I do," he wrote, "forgetting the things which are behind, and stretching forward to the things which are before, I press on" (Philippians 3.13,14).

What a triumphant Christian experience awaits us in 1967 if we make it our aim to be well-pleasing unto the Lord! It might mean forsaking some private ambition, sacrifice, or even loss, but against all this we should weigh the personal joy and satisfaction which comes from wholehearted service for the Lord, and the divine recompense which will be ours at the Judgement-seat of Christ. It is significant that, after telling the Corinthians that his aim was to be well-pleasing unto the Lord, Paul mentions the Judgement-seat of Christ. He says, "we must all be made manifest that each one may receive the things done in the body" (2 Corinthians 5.10). If we make it our aim to be well-pleasing unto the Lord, we can anticipate that day without qualms or anxiety.

The challenge of how we intend to live our lives has to be faced by all men of God. Moses, for example, weighed the treasures of Egypt against the riches of the reproach of Christ, and he chose the latter, making it his aim to be well-pleasing unto God. Enoch and Noah chose to walk with God; Abraham made it his aim to trust God in all the circumstances of his life, and he "waxed strong through faith... being fully assured that what He had promised, He was able also to perform" (Romans 4.20,21).

What is our aim going to be? Do we intend aligning ourselves with the worthies of old whose life's work was to be well-pleasing unto the Lord, who had promised to be with them? May God help us to make great resolves of heart, as they did at the watercourses of Reuben. May the keynote of our lives be, "For to me to live is Christ".

R. Darke, Vancouver, B.C. | Jan 1967
General