-Strength for Today- "2021 is the Year to Rise Up!" - 2 Corinthians 5:20-21.
It’s New Year’s Eve, and this is our “watch night.” So instead of “New Year's Eve,” it should be termed, “Freedom’s Eve,” because we’re about to enter into “an area” and “a time,” which no human being has never been explored. So, instead of “wallowing in the troughs of yesterday’s disappointing traumas,” it’s time to “rise up,” and look forward to the “freedoms” that’ll be won in the year 2021, the and years to come.
“Freedom” should resonate throughout this nation, as well as through the depressed souls throughout the world. Freedom tells a story, that’s as old as humanity. From the beginning freedom was our “birthright,” (Genesis 1:26) until the “serpent” tarnished Adam’s mind with “disobedience.” We’ll have to admit that it’s the “spirit of disobedience” that’s causing us to be “spiritually enslaved to the circumstances we’ve faced here in 2020, (Exodus 20:1-17), because none of these are permissible, if we’re to step onto the shores of 2021 in the "light of our destiny.”
Jesus said, “You are the light of the world.” And this light can’t be constrained. Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness can’t overcome it. Light isn’t meant to be hidden under a “bushel basket” but put on the lampstand, so it can “glow” and “shine everywhere.”
And so, it is as we’re standing here on this “New Year’s Eve, "watching” December 31,2020, turn into January 1, 2021. January is named for the Roman god, “Janus,” the god of beginnings,” who had “one face looking backward” and “another looking forward.” If we’re to look back at 2020, we can see that at best, it was a year of incredible “fear”, “trauma” and “loss.”
But listen “fear paralyzes,” “fear lies to us,” saying that we’re not salt, and that the “blandness of these lies is all there is and all we need ever expect. Paul said in 2 Timothy 1:7, “For God hath not give us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind.” Therefore, we can rest knowing that “this isn’t the year of fear,” neither is it “the year of “anxiety,” nor “the year for the abusers of humankind,” either in or out of the womb.
The year 2021, “isn’t a moment,” “it’s a movement” where God’s “attractive bouquet of human beings,” in spite of the previous year’s “opposing oppositions,” is going to “rise up,” and like Moses led the Israelite; at midnight, cross over and claim the “opportunities” God have for us to serve and glorify Him in the year 2021!
Author: Plez Lovelady,, Jr., PhD