THE New Year has now begun; and I am bound to wish you all a happy New Year. But I am sent here to do more than that; to teach you how you may make your own New Year a happy one; or, if not altogether a happy one—for sorrows may and must come in their turn—yet still something better than a happy year, namely, a blessed year; a year on which you will be able to look back this day twelvemonths, and thank God for it; thank God for the tears which you have shed in it, as well as for the joy which you have felt; thank God for the dark days as well as for the light; thank God for what you have lost, as well as what you have found; and be able to say, “Well, this last year, if it has not been a happy year for me, at least it has been a blessed one for me. It has left me a stronger, soberer, wiser, godlier, better man than it found me.” How, then, can you make the New Year a blessed one for yourselves? I know but one way, my friends. The ancient way. The Bible way. The way by which Abraham, and Jacob, and David, and all the holy men of old, and all the saints, and martyrs, and righteous and godly among men, made their lives blessed among themselves, in spite of sorrow, and misfortune, and distress, and persecution, and torture, and death itself; the one only old way of being blessed, which was from the beginning, and will last for ever and ever, through all worlds and eternities; the way of the old saints, which St. Paul sets forth in the eleventh chapter of the Hebrews; and that is, _faith_. Faith, which is the substance of what we hope for, the evidence of things not seen. Faith, of which it is written, that the just shall live by his faith. But how can faith give you a blessed New Year? In the same way in which it gave the old saints blessed years all their lives through, and is giving them a blessed eternity now and for ever before the face of the Lord Jesus Christ, to which may God in His mercy bring us all likewise. They trusted in God. They had faith, not in themselves, like too many; not in their own good works, like too many; not in their own faith, in their own frames, and feelings, and assurances, like too many; but they had faith in God. It was faith in God which made one of them, the great prophet Isaiah, write the glorious words which I have chosen for my text this day, to show his countrymen the Jews, even while they were in the very lowest depths of shame, and poverty, and misfortune, that God had not forgotten them; that for those who trusted in Him, a blessed time was surely coming.