Happy New Year! Welcome to the first day of 2024. It’s that time of year when you have to learn to write 2024 on all of your documents instead of 2023. Many people around you will be making their New Year’s resolutions and goals for the upcoming year. But what does this mean to you? I’m sad to say that for many years in the past I have made big, life changing goals for myself. Do you want to know how many of them have actually come to fruition? A whopping zero. Why is that? It could be because I didn’t know what my purpose or drive was to reach this goal. Many of these goals included vigorous Bible reading plans, weight loss, healthy habits, or saving large percentages of my income. Each year, I get a few weeks in, or sometimes just a few days, and realize that this goal was way too out of reach. Sadly, this results in my feeling like a huge failure every single time.
However, I want to encourage you. We are human beings, and we will never be perfect, no matter how far into the year you make it with your New Year’s resolutions. But you know what? God is perfect. If we had the willpower and drive to achieve all these goals on our own, why would we need Him? I want to see my shortcomings and failures as my desperate need for His unending power. I want to let Him use the joyful seasons, painful seasons, and every season in between as a way for me to grow in deeper desperation for Him.
My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever. Psalm 73:26
God is refining us and sanctifying us from the day we begin our walk with Him until the day we see Him face-to-face in glory. It’s not our job to sanctify ourselves! Our job is to submit ourselves to His unending grace and mercy.
We don’t need what the world has to offer. We don’t need the results of a New Year’s resolution if the sole purpose of it is to point to and glorify ourselves. We want to point to and glory Jesus!
Fortunately for us, it’s not a new year with a new God. It’s a new year with the same God. The God that is the same yesterday, today, and for eternity to come. I pray we draw closer to Him, that we get to know Him more, and we love Him more than ever before.
