We find ourselves only days away from the end of the year 2013 and the beginning of a new year. The end of a year which was full of significant international events of deep political ramifications but also of ramifications to the moral course of the American and global society. We live in times that will have a radical impact into the future of our world. With the unthinkable technological advances from the last fifty years, even the last twenty five years, our society has transformed in a way that was totally unpredictable in the interpersonal dynamics of relationships.

This past week I spent a week in the company of a young man whose heart and faith in humanity has been utterly destroyed by a person he never even had the chance to meet in physical life. The strongest powers in the universe, of faith and hope, eroded at their core. How sad must God’s heart be as day after day He witnesses the use of the many talents and abilities given to us humans in the making of us in His own image, used not to bring us closer to Him but to take us further apart.

We are living on the edge of a cliff in a spectacular feat of balance between our love and hunger for the comfort and convenience and the dissolution of those things within us that God has placed in the imitation of Himself.

It is our custom to be wishful and wishing at the turn of every year so I find myself at this time not only wishful but also grateful. I am grateful for the group of souls God has brought together at the Troy Church. I am very grateful for your passion for Jesus, for your generous hearts who have blessed so many during the past year. I am grateful for the changes I see among us, the love and unity that I see and feel in our midst. I am amazed to see God’s work in spite of all that we don’t have.

So now, as we welcome 2014 I wish to you, my dear family, the same wishes the Apostle Paul wished the Church at Colossae. If I may paraphrase: To God’s holy people in Troy, the faithful brothers and sisters in Christ: Grace and Peace to you from God the Father. I always thank God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, when I pray for you, because I have seen your faith in Christ Jesus and the love you have for all God’s people. For this reason, since the day we came to you, we have not stopped praying for you. We continually ask God to fill you with the knowledge of His will through all the wisdom and understanding that the Spirit gives, so that you may live a life worthy of the Lord and please Him in every way: bearing fruit in every good work, growing in the knowledge of God, being strengthened with all power according to His glorious might so that you may have great endurance and patience, and giving joyful thanks to the Father, who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of His holy people in the kingdom of light. For He has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son He loves, in Whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins. May the year 2014 so find and so bless us Troy Church.