The Christian’s New Year Testimony

The Lord appeared to us in the past, saying: “I have loved you with an everlasting love; I have drawn you with loving kindness.” Jeremiah 31:3.

And so we know and rely on the love God has for us. God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in him. 1 John 4:16

The Apostle John could say, “We know God’s love for us” because he experienced it. He had comforted his head on the bosom of our Lord. He had been with Him in the Garden of Gethsemane and with Him on the Mount of Transfiguration. He had been with Him when Jesus worked special miracles and he had been with Him at the Last Supper. What great memories John must have carried of his experiences with Jesus after His death, resurrection and ascension!

Would you not agree that there has been times when we have also experience this love? Have we not had fellowship with Christ? There have been times when we were not as near to our loved ones as we were to God. There have been times when we were as sure of God’s presence as we were of our own existence. Times when we were with our Lord, talking to Him spirit to Spirit, and somehow, we felt His overwhelming love for us.

It is true that we Christians have our Egypts, but it is just as true that we are delivered out of the bondage. It is true that we have our sins, but it is just as true that we have an all sufficient Savior who overcomes our faults and failures. Christians will not deny that at times, we may become despondent and bogged down in the quagmire of spiritual restlessness, but we have not remained there. Our pains, grief, and disappointments cannot diminish our praise, the deeper our troubles, the louder our praise and prayers to our Father. We never forget that He has led us through all these many years and has preserved us to this very hour. Our difficulties are not disturbers of our worship. We may be thrown into the lions den and yet we will declare, we know and rely on the love God has for us. I cannot think of any greater honor God can receive from the trusting faith of a cast down, but not destroyed soul than, we know and rely on the love God has for us.

Our testimony to an unbelieving, dying world, to poor lost sinners is we know and rely on the love God has for us. This is our testimony and we will tell it everywhere as long as there is breath in our bodies.

We must testify of His great love for we realize that it is undeserved. We know that there is nothing in us by nature that God could love. We were the unlovables, or as Paul says, in our flesh dwells no good thing; and as C. S. Lewis once said, “God loves us the way we are, but too much to leave us that way.” So God sent His Son into this world, to the forum of slavery to sin and redeemed us, buying our freedom with the precious blood of Jesus Christ. We know and rely on the love God has for us.

Oh, what stories some of you could tell. You remember how God delivered you out of many afflictions. Some of you know the pain of losing loved ones to death, but your faith only strengthened. Some of you have experienced attacks of Satan, you have had doubts and fears, you have been assailed by man and assaulted by demons, and yet, you have been able to chant, “When trouble like a gloomy cloud has gathered thick and thundered loud, He near my soul has always stood, His loving kindness, O how good.”

Christians perceive problems differently from the world for we understand that our difficulties draw us closer to God. We realize that it was not our blessings that taught us God would make a way out of no way; it was our troubles. It was not our successes that taught us the power of prayer, it was our failures.

We thank God for His blessings of good health, activity of our limbs and articulation of tongue, but our Lord taught us some powerful lessons when we were sick. On our beds of affliction, we talked to Him and He talked to us. We may have a full refrigerator, but God taught us some potent lessons when the cupboard was bare. God taught us what it means to trust in Him, lean, and depend upon Him.

Yes, we have known and we rely on the love of God. We have changed, but God has not. We have doubted Him, but He has remained faithful. We have sometimes been in the depth of despair, but never too low for His long arm to reach. We have sometimes run so far from Him that we could not see Him, but He could always see us. There is no end to His all-sufficient grace or limit to His omnipotence. We may have gone to the bottom of the mountain, we may have suffered many trials and tribulations, but we bear witness that in the final analysis, He has been a mighty good God. We know and rely on the love God has for us. This is our testimony.

O Love That Will Not Let Me Go

O Love that will not let me go,
I rest my weary soul in thee;
I give thee back the life I owe,
That in thine ocean depths its flow

May richer, fuller be.
O light that followest all my way,
I yield my flickering torch to thee;
My heart restores its borrowed ray,

That in thy sunshine’s blaze its day
May brighter, fairer be.
O Joy that seekest me through pain,
I cannot close my heart to thee;

I trace the rainbow through the rain,
And feel the promise is not vain,
That morn shall tearless be.
O Cross that liftest up my head,

I dare not ask to fly from thee;
I lay in dust life’s glory dead,
And from the ground there blossoms red
Life that shall endless be.

George Matheson