When we come to the New Year observation, we naturally look back and also look forward as Christians. Paul did this (though from prison, not a New Years!) when he wrote in Philippians 3:13-14, “But one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.” We do this from the perspective of our relationship to God and the revelation from God, seeking to learn from what He has done in our lives in the past, and also to prepare for what He may intend to teach us in the future. We can do that with the aid of our hymnody in this wonderful (but not too well-known) hymn by John Newton (1725-1807), “I Asked the Lord That I Might Grow,” written in 1779.
While this hymn may not be familiar to many, most will have heard something of Newton’s amazing testimony, and the hymn that chronicled his deliverance from sin into glorious union with Christ, the hymn “Amazing Grace.” In it, he reviewed how the Lord had allowed him to endure much suffering in order to bring him gospel comfort, and the privilege of preaching the gospel he “had once labored to destroy” (as he directed to be written on his tombstone).