Hope for the New Year

From inside the fish Jonah prayed to the Lord his God.
Jonah 2:1 (NIV)

Like Jonah, you may have been swallowed by life’s experience and are lying in the dark recesses of the fish’s belly, so to speak. But here is the good news that Jonah’s example offers: God can bring you back.

It doesn’t matter how submerged you are. He can bring you back.

He is the escape out. He is the path back. And He is the destination as well.

As we begin a new year, I want you to stop being so hard on yourself because you can’t offer a perfect performance every day. Your testimony is not the sum total of perfect performances in life. Your testimony is the gift of resurrection that you have received. We are all going through these Jonah-type experiences, being swallowed by life’s realities. They’re draining, they’re perilous, and they’re threatening. They hit us hard, and they make enormous withdrawals causing large human deficits. And if you don’t know Jesus, if you don’t nurture the revelation that Jesus shares, you’ll never ever believe or experience reemergence.

We know people like this, don’t we? We know people who have gone through things and the season has passed, but the emotion remains. We know people who have gotten past something they just can’t get over something. God has taken them from grace to grace, but they have dragged along from grace to grace the baggage of all of the regret and the mourning and the horror and the abuse and the hurt. And even though he who the Son sets free is free indeed, too many people are in a prison.

But take this lesson from Jonah into the new year:

There is a path back from death. There’s a path from darkness. There’s a path from draining experiences. There’s a path from depleting encounters. Only Jesus offers it. That path is resurrection. When your doubts and suspicions are high, Jesus is in your life to give you liberty and to give you license to walk in Him by faith and make your journey from death to resurrection.