[AI translation] There are still a few hours left of this passing year, and then it will be closed forever, it will be gone, and a new year will follow. And soon we will say to each other with a smile, Happy New Year! And maybe we are not just saying it out of habit, but we mean it, we really do wish each other and ourselves a Happy New Year. But is it possible to start a real New Year with an old heart? The happiness that we wish for at this time is not caused by a better development of our circumstances, but something must first happen in us, in our hearts, in our souls. God's Word is very clear here about the prerequisite for true renewal, for a happy new beginning. (Psalm 32:1-2a) Believe God that happiness depends on it, that is what happiness depends on, nothing else! So:forgiveness of sins - and nothing else comes with it! Sounds bold, but if God says it, it must surely be so.And in order to receive the gift of forgiveness of sins, which makes one happy, one must first of all feel the need for it, and the existential need for it, like a drowning man reaching out for a hand to save him. And I believe that at the end of the year, when one is trying to take a serious spiritual account, these words used by the Psalmist take on a special reality: falsehood, iniquity, sin! Looking back on the time that has passed, it is impossible not to conclude that we have had these things in our lives, oh, so many! Full of it every day! And indeed, it would be very good if we could be very seriously occupied with the problem, the reality of our sins! And it would be good if we could see within the reality of our sinful past all the other things that come to us at this time from the memory of the past year. For we are preoccupied with our worries, our sorrows, the various difficulties of our lives, and everything that cannot be called sin, that is, what we did wrong, what we would like to do differently if we could start again, if we had the chance. Then we are preoccupied by the painful hours we have cried through, by the memory of dear, human faces who started this year with us but have not come this far with us. And we have had our joys, our moments of happiness, our moments of joy. Yes, we are concerned about all this, but we are only concerned about it correctly if we see it within the reality of our sinful past, if we are aware of the full weight of our sin.
For what is sin? Let us not think here of such and such a sinful act, but of sin itself, the only sin in fact, from which all other sinful acts spring as from one source: and sin is nothing else than our separation from God. Sin is the absence of communion with God. It is the separation of our thoughts, our will, our actions, our whole self from the reality of God. This is our very sin. For it is not communion with God to think about him for a few minutes a day, perhaps to read his Word, to say a few words to him in prayer, to turn to him and ask him for something - and to spend the rest of our lives practically apart from him. It's like when you live abroad: you think about home, you write letters and receive letters from home, you have some connection with home, but you are not at home!
That is how we are with God. We are not living in His country, but in a spiritual foreign country. And that is our sin! It is not that we do something wrong, wrong, but that even what we do well and right, we do not do it at home, not in His kingdom, not under His rule and direction! We are separated from home! Sin is not a moral evil, it is a situational evil. It is incongruity, a false existence. We are not sinners in the sense of being evil - though that is perhaps one way of putting it. But in the sense of being far from home, living in a foreign land!
If God were not our Lord and Father, this would not be sin. If God were only fate, or some impersonal power over us, then there would be no sin at all! There would still be much pain alongside the joy, there would still be mistakes that can be made up for, and mistakes that can never be made up for. But this one thing would not be: sin! It would not be the inner pain of being separated from Him! From this one sin, the sinful actions, the missteps, the misdirections of our lives, come. We have let go of God's hand and we follow our own head, we follow our own footsteps, driven by our instincts, forced by circumstances, tempted by temptations, or compelled by duty. This is why we end up in all kinds of misguided, embarrassing situations, desperate situations.
We can see that if we look back even to the days of the past year! How many times we have messed up, how many times we have missed the mark, how much pain we have caused! How many people we've alienated instead of reaching out to! Yet we knew the great commandment to love God and to love your neighbour as yourself. Why did our actions have quite different motives, why not this one divine command? Why did we not go in the direction it points: to love God with all our heart and strength, and to love man as ourselves? And if it is sin to be separated from God, then our so-called good works are also sinful virtues, tainted good works. For what is not by faith - that is, what is not done in communion with God - is sin! Moreover, when we succeed in something, when something good and right increases our sense of self, the danger is even greater that we will be even further separated from God, because we imagine that we can do it with Him! We can do something valuable ourselves! We are much more willing to do without God when something goes right than when something goes wrong!
Our Word does not say happy are those who now, at the year-end reckoning, say to themselves, "Good for me, I am not burdened with the weight of any particular transgression. Although I didn't do everything as I should have done, compared to this or that person I know, my life wasn't that bad! According to our word, the blessed are not those who are now making a good year-end reckoning in their souls according to their own estimate, but the blessed are "whose iniquity is forgiven, whose transgression is covered." So the happy one is not the one who is made happy now by the imagined or real results of his own life, but the one who is made happy by God through the forgiveness of sins! The one with whom God can do the greatest good, that is, to cover all his sins! So whoever is forced to admit that he not only has faults that he can still atone for, but also a fundamental, great sin: he has lived the past year without God! And he cannot make amends!
Our Word adds: blessed is the man "whose soul is without deceit". Only now let us have no deceit, no self-deception! For man is inclined to protest instinctively against this exposure. He is willing not to admit it completely, to conceal something of it, to excuse himself: I am not so godless, for wherever I have made a mistake, I meant it well in the first place, but it has not worked out! Blessed is the one who has no such deceitfulness, no such false self-consolation, who does not try to make himself beautiful, who does not try to hide something from God, because this would only make him run away from God even more. If happiness lies in God's restoring the relationship between us and Him through forgiveness of sins, then the most unfortunate thing man can do is not to be honest, to hide something else, to avoid God who wants to forgive his sins! Oh, it is so difficult to truly admit one's own total failure, one's own bankruptcy!
And it is not good to conceal it, it is agonizing to keep it silent! Behold, the Psalmist himself says: "While I kept silent, my bones were hardened by the wailing of the day. While day and night Thy hand was heavy upon me, my strength failed me, as in the heat of summer." (Psalm 32:4) The psalmist sees the reason for all the wailing, the complaining, the wasting away of vitality, the weariness, the exhaustion, the nervous disorder, as being that he has kept something from God, that he has concealed something from Him, that he has not revealed to Him his true nature. He has clutched the mask of purity and integrity to his face. He dared not be before God what he was: a lost, bankrupt, sinful man! He wanted to keep up appearances! It was in this convulsive effort that his vitality faltered. And so it is with us! We are in the situation of the prodigal son who has left home, and when he gets into trouble, life becomes a mess, he blames everyone but himself! He looks in every other direction for a way out, except the one that will bring him back to the Father! Nothing is harder for him than to say this one thing: I have sinned, Father, against you! And yet, life would be easier if we would at least keep silent about our sins before God! If only once we would honestly and truly admit and confess that we are irretrievably separated from Him, living in sin!
If only we would believe that what the Psalmist experienced would happen to us: 'I have confessed my sin to you, I have not covered my iniquity. I said, 'I will confess my iniquity to the Lord,' and you have taken away the burden of my sins." (Psalm 32.5) That's all! To confess sin, not to cover sin, and God will immediately take away the burden of our sins! This is what we dare not believe, just as the prodigal son did not believe that his Father would come before him. He did not even believe that forgiveness was possible for him when his Father simply took him in his arms as he arrived, dirty and ragged, and embraced him. And yet forgiveness is so simple and so complete! All it takes is to confess, to cover nothing. Anything else we want to add means we don't believe that God is really such a good Father Superior! And He has really done everything He can to make us believe it! In the death of Jesus Christ He proclaimed universal amnesty, in the person of Jesus crucified He has already punished all sin, all iniquity, covered all sin with the holy blood that was shed there! As it is written, "The blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanses us from all sin." (1 John 1:7) This is free grace! And for every confessed, repented, confessed sin, this grace applies! By confessing sin, we put our sins and our whole sinful nature under the covering of the divine blood, as it is also written, "If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness." (1 Jn 1:9) Let him therefore also take away from us all the burden of the sins of the past year.
"Let them therefore pray to you in all good and acceptable times." The psalmist speaks of a season. When is this opportune time? At the moment when God so calls us, so sets us before Him, as He does now. So now is the opportune time! Now, when He comes to us with His forgiving grace! Let us not pass by the opportune time! Let us not miss it! Now, as we are, as we came from 1953! If we can pray to Him in true repentance, we are saved, like Noah and his companions in the ark, around whom great waters flowed, but could not reach them. Even though the great waters of our iniquities, our sins, our failures, our sinful lives, may flow and swirl after us, we can now rejoice because we are under the protection and shelter of God's grace!
"Blessed is he - O blessed is he - whose iniquity is forgiven, whose transgression is covered. Happy is the man to whom God imputes no sin." So now the Lord wants to make you happy, to close with the grace of forgiveness of sins that which is past. To restore us, to bring us back into fellowship with Him, so that we may begin a truly happy new year, existentially new, in the true form of our human life: with Him!
Amen
Date: the evening of 31 December 1953.