OUT WITH THE old, in with the new. Every year brings its own unique challenges. Some things we got right; others, well, not so much. There are things we wanted to do but didn’t. We have our missteps and regrets.

Each day, the calendar simply moves forward whether we want it to or not. Days or weeks may blur into one another. Someone asks brightly, “So, what did you do this weekend?” — and we can’t remember, because nothing significant distinguished those days from any other days.

And yet, somehow, New Year’s Eve can feel different. The turn from one year to the next seems weightier, more significant than the way one day slides into another. It symbolizes both endings and beginnings, the closing of one chapter entitled 2024 and the start of a new one.

Where will that chapter take us? Where will the story go?

Sometimes we make promises to ourselves and call them resolutions: This year, I will… and we fill in the blank with whatever way we want to improve. Sometimes that works, but mostly not. It’s not enough to say “I ought to do this” if we can’t also honestly say “I want to do this” — and sometimes that begins with asking ourselves honestly why we don’t want to, why we haven’t done it already, why we sabotage our own resolutions. That kind of self-examination may reveal that we don’t truly value the things we say we do or, perhaps, we value other things more and haven’t owned up to it yet.

So let me just put it out there: if you are a follower of Jesus Christ, if you believe that God has given you the Holy Spirit, then you are already both new and constantly being made new. But the question isn’t simply what strategies we can use to remake ourselves into Me Version 2.0. The question is what keeps us from choosing, from one day or moment to the next, the newness that the New Testament declares is ours already.

“If anyone is in Christ,” the apostle Paul told the Corinthians, “the new creation has come. The old has gone, the new is here!” (2 Cor 5:7). When Paul says “if,” it’s not because he’s unsure as to whether anyone fits the bill. Rather, he knows that people are already in Christ by grace through faith, and is playing out the implications. Look around you, he’s telling the church. Is anyone in Christ? Of course there is. You know that already. But do you know what else that means? It means that God’s new creation has come.

Older translations may have “he is a new creation” instead. But contemporary translators generally agree that Paul is saying something broader, something grander than that. Yes, there is a sense in which each person who is in Christ has been individually created anew. But this is part of a bigger picture and a more astounding truth: God is even now in the process of renewing a broken creation, of restoring it to the goodness with which it was created.

Why does this matter?

Think of it this way. The world was created to be a place of goodness and beauty, wholeness and peace. But that beauty can be shrouded by the shadow of sin. We were created in the image of God, but that image can be hard to perceive behind the veil of our brokenness. We see it all around us, if we dare to look: the brokenness of individuals, of families, of neighborhoods; of churches and organizations; of governments and nations.

But what if God broke into our brokenness to shine a light into shadowy places, to lift the veil? What if the light of truth were to dawn in a way that heralded a new day? Would we walk out into the light, or linger in the familiarity of the darkness?

To say that “I am a new creation,” while true, risks making it too much about me — especially if I’m already too accustomed to running from my own brokenness on a treadmill of shame on which I huff and puff but get nowhere.

To say that “I am a new creation,” though true, gives me something I may feel the need to defend against my critics, indeed, against my own relentless self-criticism. And if or when my well-intentioned resolutions fail, it’s too easy to fall backwards into a dark place of discouragement and doubt and defeat.

That’s why we need to know the grander truth of the gospel. It’s not just that we have been made new; it’s that God is making all things new. It’s not just that we are new creations; it’s that by the grace and mercy and love of God, new creation has come.

It’s not just a new year, but a new day. We can choose to act in newness. We can choose to believe in newness no matter what; even when our resolutions fail, we can trust God’s resolve. Even when we feel the pull of darkness, we can face toward the light.

My prayer for you, for me, for all of us, is that we would choose newness.

Have a blessed New Year, in celebration of the dawning of a new day.