1/6/52

Scripture: Revelation 21: 1-7

Text: Revelation 21: 5;..... "Behold, I make all things new."

There is an appropriateness of timing, that convened the gathering of youth on which we have had Dinon’s report at the holiday season -- at the end of one year and the beginning of a new year. To those who attended, it may have been a spiritual highlight climaxing the experiences of the old year with its joys and doubts, its achievements and its challenges. And that sort of experience almost invariably faces one forward with new light on an old way. And the New Year will be a better one for the consecration, the illumination and vision and hope of the young folk in the Christian Student Volunteer movement.

A New Year is regarded by people the world over as a kind of new start on the life with which they have been familiar. Some of it has been distressing, fraught with disappointment, frustration, personal or social disaster. And we want a new start with hope that this will not be repeated. Some of it has been a great joy. And we hope for a significant part in creating new joy for the New Year.

The New Year is fraught with anxieties; with real conflict and heavy demands. To meet this we need the grace of courage. It is fraught with possibilities; with the necessity of building peace and hope; with all the need for constructive nourishing of the soul of mankind.

We enter a New Year not alone but in company with others. To a degree, we choose our company. In a Christian sense, we look for congenial company in the church. Today as Christians we begin the year with a service of communion. Symbolically, we break bread all together in Christian companionship.

Let me read you a clipping by Webb B. Garrison about communion. It is entitled, "Companion".

In the ancient East is was an unwritten law that the householder must open his doors to any traveler who desired food and shelter. This attitude carried over into Roman times. To do evil to a man after having broken bread with him was considered treachery of the highest order. Our word "companion" is a monument to that view. Almost without change, it comes to us from the Latin com (together) plus panis (bread). Companions are persons who have eaten bread together!-Webb B. Garrison.

But we eat bread together not alone in companionship with each other, but in reconsecration to Christ. And in this service, let us not alone reconsecrate ourselves to him in a general spiritual way, but let us confidently lay hold on his grace.

The New Testament refers again and again to "the grace of Our Lord, Jesus Christ." [Romans 6: 20, II Corinthians 13: 13, Galatians 6: 18, Philippians 4: 23, I Thessalonians 5: 28, II Thessalonians 3: 18, Philemon 1: 25.] This "grace of our Lord" signifies the help given by God, through Christ, enabling us to do and to be what we are not able to be by our own volition, unaided.

I know people, and you do too, who have been through trials and testing this past year, which they would not earlier have thought they could endure. And yet when the testing comes, we find that God has resources for us, and within us, which we had not until then dreamed were present or possible.

(1) The "grace of the Lord Jesus Christ" is a strengthening grace, a grace of courage.

(2) It is, further, a transforming grace. For it can, and does, change lives of people - your life and mine. We can be converted, from what we would rather not be, to what we hope, sincerely and purely, we may be.

(3) The "grace of the Lord Jesus Christ" is a continuing grace. In his fine book, A Guide to Understanding the Bible, Harry Emerson Fosdick point this out, saying "The God of the early Christians was not so much the deity Jesus taught as the deity they believed him to be." The experience of Jesus Christ in our lives is something that recurs and becomes more vivid as we try in sincerity to be his disciples. He came not only to Paul, to Augustine, to Wesley, Kagawa, Niemoller and Berggrov, but he comes to us and will come to our children and to their children’s children. Let his grace grow in us as a continuing grace.

The first Christians felt that Christ saved them from their sins and made clear their relationship to God. Let him live in your heart, in our hearts, with the same saving, changing, encouraging, continuing grace. (end)

[a copy of the church Calendar for 1/6/52 is included with the handwritten manuscript in the files.]

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Delivered in Wisconsin Rapids, January 6, 1952.