It’s the first week of the year and that always comes with a lot of anticipation, excitement, and hope for the fresh opportunities that come with it. I’m sure there’s a lot of people who move from one year to the next and don’t really plan for anything to change; but I imagine there are a lot more people who, whether seriously or not, at least give some thought to significant improvements they can make to their lives. Who among us haven’t given thought to losing weight, exercising more, saving money, paying off debt, going to bed earlier, get up earlier, read more, eat better, travel more, etc.? Some resolutions are major while others may be minor, some are physical, some intellectual, psychological, financial, or familial; but the most important resolutions we can ever make are spiritual. So what are some things we can do this year to help us grow spiritually and draw us closer to God?
Speak to God everyday. In fact we really ought to speak to God multiple times a day. We do this through prayer. The New Testament speaks constantly of how prayer was a priority to Jesus in His life and ministry (Matthew 14:23; Matthew 26:36-44; Mark 1:35; Luke 3:21; John 17:6-24; etc.). But what if our prayer lives were more than us only praying by ourselves everyday? What if in addition to private prayer to God our prayer lives were filled with moments of prayer with our wives/husbands? What if we spent time everyday praying with our children? What if we spent time everyday with friends, the sick, the hurting, etc. in prayer? What if we made it a point to pray for certain people each day and let them know that we are praying for them? Saying “this year I want to pray more” is way too generic. We can bring so much more specific purpose to our prayer lives than that. So resolve to speak to God everyday, but let’s bring purpose to our prayer lives and really utilize prayer as the tool it is and can be.
Let God speak to you everyday. No, God doesn’t verbally speak to us. But God does speak to us when we spend time everyday reading from His word. The Bible is inspired by God (2 Timothy 3:16-17). That means that while men might have written the words God was the author. Outside of prayer, there is absolutely nothing we can do that will help us to grow in our knowledge of and relationship with God than spending time in His word. But don’t just generically say “I want to read the Bible more this year.” Don’t read it just to check it off your Bible reading schedule. Bring purpose to your daily Bible reading. Instead of just reading words off a page read looking for certain words, principles, people, or thoughts. Instead of trying to read large sections of text at a time read smaller sections with much more attention and clarity. What if in addition to spending private time in the Bible everyday we spent time reading the Bible with our family? My point is there is a lot of creativity that we can bring to our goals of reading the Bible everyday that can make it that much more productive.
Speak to someone about God everyday. So often we make this a much more dramatic deal than it really has to be. So often we equate talking to someone about God to a fight. That’s because when we think about religious conversations we think about them only in terms of disagreements. Granted there is a lot of disagreements that are going to have to be discussed at some point along the way; but there are also a lot of areas regarding God where rational people agree. Is it wrong to talk about those things? What if we spent more time talking about God’s goodness, God’s provisions, God’s grace, God’s love, God’s sacrifice, etc.? Sure, the more we talk about God and the more people we talk about Him with there will be disagreements sprinkled in here and there. But all of this will only help us work to change lives and move people towards God.
There might be a lot of other areas in your life you want to work on too. I know there are in mine. But what if every Christian purposed to do these three things every single day. How much better would our relationships with God be and how much stronger would the church be? I sure would like to find out. Let’s resolve to do it together to the glory of God.
-Andy