Looking Back on the Year

The days between Christmas and the new year offer opportunities to look back as we prepare to move forward. Today, Sinclair Ferguson highlights the importance of recalling—and even recording—God’s past providence in our lives.

Welcome again to Things Unseen. I can imagine many regular members of our podcast community may possibly have missed the last couple of days, Christmas Day and Boxing Day. But here we are in a kind of no-man’s-land between the Christmas Day celebrations and the beginning of a new year, still feeling the events of Christmas, and maybe trying to get some energy back, and we are not yet at the fullness of the end of the year and the beginning of a new one—at least, I suspect, most of us aren’t quite there emotionally.

You probably know that the month of January is named after the Roman god Janus. Incidentally, isn’t it odd that despite the impact of the Christian faith, we still use these pagan names both for the days of the week and the months of the year? That’s always intrigued me. And yet, perhaps in God’s providence, it’s a reminder to us that we live between the times—like between Christmas and New Year—between the coming of Christ and then the return of Christ. We’re part of God’s new creation; we’re new men and women in Christ, but we are still living in a world that is alienated from him. And even the names of the days of the week and the months of the year are a constant reminder of that to us. But back to Janus, he’s the god who faces both ways. He looks backwards to the past and he looks forward to the future.

So, even if we don’t especially like the fact that the coming month is named after a Roman deity, I think we can understand the experience. And here’s the interesting thing: there’s a very specifically Christian version of it, because as Christians, we too live facing both ways, not in the sense of being a hypocrite, but in the sense of living looking back to what the Lord Jesus did in His first coming and looking forwards to what He will do at His second coming. And so, we sometimes say that we live between the times. We live the Christian life between the already of what Christ has done and then not yet of the completion of His work. And actually, we’re reminded of that every time we have the Lord’s Supper: we proclaim His death until He comes again.

So, for a moment today, let’s look back. You know, that’s actually one of the practices our spiritual forefathers encouraged. If you’ve ever read John Flavel’s wonderful book The Mystery of Providence or a similar Christian book from the past, you’ll know that these wise old pastors often encouraged their people to observe God’s providences in their lives but then also to record them because they knew how forgetful we are.

Maybe like you, I’ve sometimes experienced things and thought at the time, “I’ll never be the same again after that.” And yet, before too long, it’s as though the event never happened. The other day I was reading about ministers, roughly contemporary actually with John Flavel, who kept journals of God’s dealings with them. And one of them transferred to another book a selection of God’s providences that he said he could reflect on in his declining years because, as he wrote, they were “things that might be of use to me from what I have found of God’s love in the days of old, and He is the same, and His compassions fail not.” He was like a squirrel storing up nuts for the winter of old age.

And you know, that would be a good spiritual exercise for all of us in these between days, between Christmas and New Year, when some of us will have a little more leisure. In fact, if you remember, it’s something you were probably taught to do as a youngster if you were brought up in a church or a Sunday school and you learned to sing “Count Your Blessings.” And you sang this:

When upon life’s billows you are tempest tossed,
When you are discouraged, thinking all is lost,
Count your many blessings, name them one by one,
And it will surprise you what the Lord has done.

I know that’s not the greatest poetry in the world, but it’s terrific counsel. So, I suspect it would be really helpful for you and for me to find time later today or in this in-between-Christmas-and-New-Year time to do a bit of spiritual counting of the blessings of the past. And perhaps it will surprise you what the Lord has done, and then you’ll be able to say with the psalmist in Psalm 126:3, “The Lord has done great things for us, and we are glad.”

Well, I hope you’ll join us again tomorrow on Things Unseen.