Happy New Year RBC!
As a Leadership Team we have chosen the following as Ruddington Baptist Church’s Verse for the Year, 2025:
If my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land.
2 Chronicles 7:14 (New International Version)
Below, we each offer some brief thoughts and reflection on this choice and where we are as church as we enter this new year. We’ll also say a bit more in the Service on Sunday 5th January.
Wishing you all a peaceful, humble and blessed start to 2025,
Chris, Mark, Tony, Rosemary & Rachel
Rosemary:
As I look back on 2024, I’m remembering that our verse for the year has been Psalm 119 v 105 “Your Word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path”. As we have sought to follow His Word, I believe he has guided us and blessed us. As we go into 2025, our focus is humbling ourselves and praying. I think that these things really go together, and have gone together – we’ll not forget his Word and we will give ourselves to prayer, discerning his will (especially as far as a new minister is concerned), but also for our church, our community and the world. I’m looking forward to learning more about the power of prayer!
A few years ago, I believe I shared on the WhatsApp the poem by M L Haskins, and I share it again:
I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year
“Give me a Light that I may tread safely into the unknown”
And he replied
“Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the hand of God.
That shall be to you better than a light and safer than a known way”
Tony:
As we wave goodbye to 2024 and welcome in 2025, I think we can look back over the last 12 months and say we did OK. RBC remains a Jesus-loving, people-welcoming, community of believers where everyone mucks in, and Helen and I are blessed to be part of the RBC family. I sense that prayer needs to be at the forefront over the next 12 months and not just because of the Verse for the Year, although I believe that is very timely. I believe we need to be very disciplined and deliberate about prayer (I’m directing this at myself here) not only as we seek a new minister and move forward with the purchase of a house for use by Hope Into Action tenants, but also because of the state of the country and the world. God Bless.
Mark:
The verse for 2025 came at a high point for the Israelite nation. At that time they were being faithful to their God, had a leader known for his God-given wisdom, had relative peace and stability with neighbouring nations, and had just completed a huge architectural and religious milestone in building the Temple. God gives them this promise of his faithfulness: follow Him and they would be saved and flourish forever. Simples! Sadly, after this their faithfulness and their leader Solomon were compromised. They succumbed to the surrounding culture, they were defeated in battle, ended up in exile and the Temple was eventually destroyed. An opportunity missed. God’s message remains the same to His people at RBC now. We must understand our relationship to God, listen, and live holy lives without compromising with the culture around us. We have a God who promises to be faithful and has always delivered, and we have God’s Spirit to help us. With God’s help let’s take the opportunities and promises He offers in 2025.
Rachel:
I’m excited for how we can grow together in faith this year through actively humbling ourselves, focusing on developing our collective and individual prayer lives, and turning towards God – and away from ‘wicked ways’! That bit of our verse for the year is a phrase I sometimes find a bit hard to relate to as it’s language that’s fallen out of use in today’s world and the word ‘wicked’ either conjures images of West End musicals or 90s urban slang for ‘cool’. To describe our day to day lives as ‘wicked’ maybe sounds a bit melodramatic to us now. But then again, when I think about the hatred, division and violence we saw abroad and at home in 2024 and it makes me think we do need to hold on to God’s promise to forgive us our collective wickedness and heal our land. Perhaps if, like me, ‘wicked’ as a word trips you up sometimes you could replace it with ‘broken’ – or another word God places on your heart to describe some of the sorrows you see in the world? Perhaps that’s a thought to explore as you pray this passage. Another question I’m going to pray on this year is ‘what would it look like for our context here in Ruddington for our land to be healed?’
Chris:
In a lot of ways, I think the bible is quite a hard book (or set of books) to deal with, and this was one reason why I wanted us to engage with it head-on in 2024. Early in the year I read two books by Tom Wright which I’ve found super-helpful: “How God became King” and “The Day the Revolution Began”. They give a rich 1st-Century-Jewish appreciation for God in Jesus which is helping me to read the rest of the bible in a more integrated and positive way.
And if the bible is the most important account of God’s covenant relationship with humanity (and the cosmos), then prayer is our response to God. So, as we focus more explicitly on prayer in 2025, I hope that we will encounter and experience God in fresh ways. And I pray that these encounters will be life-changing, not only for us, but also for our community and our world.
