December 31st
Yesterday
The God of Israel will be your reward. Isaiah 52:12.
Security from Yesterday. “God requireth that which is past.” God reminds us of the past lest we get into a shallow security in the present. At the end of the year, we turn with eagerness to all that God has for the future, and yet anxiety is apt to arise from remembering yesterdays. Our present enjoyment of God’s grace is apt to be checked by the memory of yesterday’s sins and blunders. God is God of our yesterdays, and He allows their memory to turn the past into a ministry of spiritual culture for the future.
Security for Tomorrow. “For the Lord will go before you.” This is a gracious revelation that God will garrison where we have failed. He will watch lest things trip us up again into like failure, as they assuredly would do if He were not our reward. God’s hand reaches back to the past and makes a clearing-house for conscience.
Security for Today. “For ye shall not go out with haste.” As we go forth into the coming year, let it not be in the haste of impetuous, unremembering delight, nor with the flight of impulsive thoughtlessness, but with the patient power of knowing that the God of Israel will go before us. Our yesterdays present irreparable things to us; we have lost opportunities that will never return, but God can transform this destructive anxiety into a constructive thoughtfulness for the future. Let the past sleep, but let it sleep on the bosom of Christ.
Leave the Irreparable Past in His hands, and step out into the Irresistible Future with Him.
Chambers, Oswald. My Utmost for His Highest: Selections for the Year. Grand Rapids, MI: Oswald Chambers Publications; Marshall Pickering, 1986. Print.
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