Handbell and Chancel choirs add their "voices" to the worship service.
There is a story about Henry Ford and the Ford Motor Company in its early days in Detroit. It concerns a machinist with Ford Motor Company who had “borrowed,” over a period of years, tools and other automobile parts for his personal use. Although it was against company policy, “everybody did it,” and management did nothing about it. One day the machinist was converted. He was baptized and became a believer who took his baptism seriously. The day after his baptism, he gathered up all the tools he had collected over the years, loaded them into his pickup, took them to the plant and presented them to the foreman with his confession and request for forgiveness. The foreman was so overcome by his honesty that he cabled Henry Ford himself, who was visiting a European plant. After reading through the cable about the event in detail, Ford immediately cabled back this response: “Dam up the Detroit River,” he said, “and baptize the entire plant.”
Starting a new year is like a “mini baptism,” a chance to step away from the old and enter into the new, with all the promise and hope symbolized and conveyed by Jesus Christ. It probably isn’t a stash of “borrowed” tools and auto parts that most of us need to come clean about, need to shake off. But each of us has something that has weighed us down the past year, something that pulls at us in an uncomfortable way.
Whatever that might be for you, January 2012 is your chance for a fresh start. Not because it’s wrong, whatever it is your thinking of, not because its bad for you, not even because you feel guilty about it. The fresh start offered to you and to me is available to us because of who we are as followers of Jesus Christ. No one can step into the promise of a new day if they’re weighted down by the burdens of yesterday. So, I invite you right now, this very moment, to set aside the burdens of your past life and step into the glory of a new life, a life lived in the power of Jesus Christ, who makes all things new again.
Wishing you peace and prosperity in the New Year, Pastor Dave
