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New Year Toast


I hope 2016 has been a great year for us all. It was indeed a year of blessing in every way, particularly on the spiritual side. We look back and wonder on the way that God lead us. What can we do for God for leading us. The psalmist in Psalmist 116:13 also is in bewilderment mode.
‘I will lift up the cup of salvation and call on the name of the Lord….’
He enumerates all that God has done for him. He begins it with his prayers and how God answered his prayers.
‘I love the Lord, because he has heard my voice and my pleas for mercy. Because he inclined his ear to me, therefore I will call on him as long as I live.’ (Psa 116:1-2, ESV).
Then he goes on to list the specific answers to prayer that he received.
He had been to the extremes in his life. He had come to a point his whole life was threatened. He was at the point of death.
‘For you have delivered my soul from death, my eyes from tears, my feet from stumbling; I will walk before the Lord in the land of the living.’ (Psa 116:8-9, ESV).
His predicament what can he do render to God in return for what God has done for him. The cup of salvation is the experience of deliverance in his life.
Cup of salvation is that experience of thanking God. Enumerating what he means to us this year. Doing it in the presence of other people is the only thing that we can do to God.

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