Now I am reasonably sure there is not a man or woman or a child within the sound of my voice, who understands my words, who is not very much aware that today marks the first day of the year …Now in many ways, as one of my own children was commenting, “What’s the big deal?” In a sense, New Year’s Day is like any other day. It is comprised of twenty-four hours, each one of those hours comprised of sixty minutes, each one of the minutes comprised of sixty seconds. It’s a day in which we must breathe if we’re to live, in which we attend to the basic necessities of life, and in many ways it’s true that it’s no different from any other day. It’s just one among the 365 days that comprise an ordinary year.
However, New Year’s Day is not like every other day, particularly in this one respect: it forces upon all of us who are conscious of the day that time is relentless in its forward advance. New Year’s Day underscores the fact that the gearbox of time has no neutral and no reverse. All the things that modern technology has been able to produce, even helping us to send men to the moon and send them orbiting about our earth and accomplishing all kinds of marvelous things, all of the king’s horses and all of the king’s men, all of the most sophisticated computers combined, cannot produce a gearbox for time that will make it go into neutral or reverse. Time moves inevitably forward and only forward. Because of this fact, the beginning of the New Year provides a very natural occasion to take stock, to evaluate, and to ask ourselves where are we in this inevitable advance of time.
The text that appears above is a lightly-edited transcript of the first few minutes of “Biblical Priorities for the New Year,” a sermon by Dr. Albert N. Martin. The full sermon is available below:
Biblical Priorities for the New Year by Dr. Albert N. Martin
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