The new year is a time of contemplating the past and looking ahead into the future. What of the old year had been good and is worth preserving and what in our lives might need a new direction.

Thus it is a time to cultivate gratitude for all the good things we have received, the people in our lives who love us and have helped us, and also a time of making resolutions how we can turn the future into an even better time, not only for us but also for the people around us.

It gives us the chance to figure out how we can become part of solutions rather than being part of the problems that might be there.

Living by faith

For Christians it is a good time to check what our hopes are actually based on. We know that we are Saved by Grace Alone, not by our own doings, our works and deeds, even though those are important. We are responsible for how we live and will be held accountable. However, God’s love and grace are even bigger than anything we might do.

That is not just hope for the afterlife, but motivation and purpose for the here and now. First and foremost we are saved because God loves us. What could happen to us with a God like that?

Thus even in outrageous times like these we can look into the new year with confidence, that God’s love is stronger than any evil around us.

Nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus.

The apostle Paul put it in Romans 8 this way (verses 31-32 and 37-39”, NIV): “What, then, shall we say in response to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all — how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things? … No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

I love these verses from Paul. Paul knew that there is evil and suffering in this world. He was not writing from a comfortable sofa behind a warm oven. He had put his life to service, going on one mission trip after the other to preach the Good News to all the people.

By the time he wrote his Letter to the Romans he had been persecuted and prosecuted multiple times though all he had done is preaching the love of God. Several times he “slipped of death’s shovel” already.

Paul accepted his suffering and chance of becoming a martyr knowing that even in suffering and death he was still sheltered in God’s love.

In his early years, when he still was called Saul, he had been part of the persecution of Christians himself until he had his conversion. The resurrected Christ had appeared to him when he was on his way to Damascus to persecute the young Church there.

He gave up his former name, which bore the pride of the first king of Israel, and chose the name Paul, which means “the small one”.

In Ephesians 3:8 (NIV) he says about himself: “Although I am less than the least of all the Lord’s people, this grace was given me: to preach to the Gentiles the boundless riches of Christ.”

Since then, Paul saw his purpose in preaching the Gospel to the gentiles. He had come to understand that the Christian faith and hope will change the world, and all people of all nations needed to hear about God’s love in Jesus Christ. All negativity, all darkness is in essence nothing, it is just the lack of love and the lack of light.

Faith is trusting God with the whole heart

The God of the universe, who put everything into place and gave nature its own laws and who called us into life, is in control of everything. His love will prevail and reach every human heart.

With this hope we can go into every new year and every day ahead of us, confident that God is with us, just like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, pastor and opponent of the Nazi terror regime, had put it in his most famous poem, written in prison in December 1944 just less than four months before his execution:

“By gracious powers so wonderfully sheltered, and confidently waiting come what may, we know that God is with us night and morning, and never fails to greet us each new day.” (translated by Fred Pratt Green)

We don’t know what 2026 will bring. We can though make the resolution to help love to spread, to help our neighbour in his struggles, and to “be the change we would like to see” (after Nelson Mandela).

We have the power to change the world with God’s help. His love is stronger than practical constraints, the market, or any human being, even stronger than presidents, kings or other kind of lords. Christ is the Lord of lords, and with him all things are possible.

• Karsten Decker was the pastor of Peace Lutheran Church in Bermuda from 2010 to 2017, and after returning from Germany is now the temporary pulpit supply at Centenary United Methodist Church in Smith’s