Out with the old

As the house is cleaned up from the Christmas festivities, my mind turns to the new year. Over the next few days I'll take a look at 2008, figure out what worked and what didn't and set goals for 2009.

Part of that process involves getting my new quiet time notebook ready for use. The book itself is a moleskine datebook, one page per day. The layout makes it easy to see if I've skipped any daily Bible readings. In addition to the calendar pages, there is a small address book in the back pocket and several more or less blank pages up front. I've a number of things I print out and attach to these pages.

The first thing to be pasted in the book is the following list, which I typed out from a Truth for Life broadcast a number of years ago. It's a convicting list to meditate on when thinking of the year past, and a great daily reminder. It is called "things to repent of":

1. An ignorance of God and a lack of nearness to Him.
2. Exceeding great selfishness in all that we do.
3. The fact that we are glad to find excuses for the neglect of our duties.
4. The fact that we neglect the reading of Scripture in the secret place.
5. The fact of our refined hypocrisy, whereby we desire to appear what indeed we are not.
6. The fact that we are readier to search out and censure faults in others than to see or to deal with faults in ourselves.
7. Our foolish jesting away of time with useless conversation.
8. The existence of bitterness rather than zeal.
9. Too much eying of our own credit and applause, being pleased with it when we get it, and unsatisfied when we don’t.

Our repentance needs to be clear and deliberate. Our sins, after we are converted, are not forgiven until we repent of them.

Keep short accounts with God.

The astounding thing is the relevance of the list to modern times, given that it was originally written in the seventeenth century. For all of our declarations of progress and change, it seems people haven't changed all that much in the last four hundred years. But I keep the list and pray through it often in the hopes that for this year, this day I may be just a little bit better than the one before.

Out with the old.