Welcome again to Things Unseen. I can imagine many regular members of our podcast community may possibly have missed the last couple of days

Christmas Day and Boxing Day.

But here we are in a kind of no man's land between the Christmas Day celebrations and the beginning of a new year.

Still feeling the events of Christmas and maybe trying to get some energy back, and we are not yet at the fullness of the end of the year and the beginning of a new one.

At least I suspect most of us aren't quite there emotionally. You probably know that the month of January

is named after the Roman God Janus. Incidentally, isn't it odd that despite the impact of the Christian faith, we still use these pagan names, both for the days of the week and the months of the year?

It's always intrigued me.

And yet perhaps in God's providence it's a reminder to us that we live between the times,

like between Christmas and New Year, between the coming of Christ and then the return of Christ.

We're part of God's new creation, we're new men and women in Christ,

but we are still living in a world that is alienated from him. And even the names of the days of the week and the months of the year are a constant reminder of that to us. But back to Janus, he's the God who faces both ways. He looks backwards to the past and he looks forward to the future.

So even if we don't especially like the fact that the coming month is

named after a Roman deity I think we can understand the experience and here's the interesting thing there's a very

specifically Christian version of it because as Christians we too live facing both ways. Not in the sense of being a hypocrite, but in the sense of living

looking back to what the Lord Jesus did in his first coming and looking forwards to what he will do at

his second coming. And so we sometimes say that we live between the times. We live the Christian life between the already of what Christ has done and

then not yet of the completion of his work. And actually we're reminded of that every time we have the Lord's supper.

We proclaim his death until he comes again.

So for a moment today let's look back.

You know, that's actually one of the practices our spiritual forefathers encouraged.

If you've ever read John Flavo's wonderful book, The Mystery of Providence or a similar

Christian book from the past, you'll know that these wise old pastors often encourage

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