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Well, Christmas Day has come and gone. Mine was fantastic, spent with family, and it was just a great day overall. Hopefully yours was the same, but I know some of you didn’t have a wonderful day for various reasons and I am truly sorry for that.
However, if your day was good or not so good, it is over and we are in that week between Christmas and New Year’s. It’s a weird week. Some people work, some people don’t. Some travel and some never leave the house. No matter what you’re doing, it seems as though this week brings with it reflection – reflection on the last year and reflection on how the upcoming year will be better.
Inevitably we start to think about those resolutions, or maybe just ways we can better ourselves and the year and we don’t call it a resolution. The important thing is that we think about it. We really can’t help but to think about it. Well this year, as you think, I hope your mind drifts to the Lord. Exercise is great, diets can be fulfilling, but nothing will bring you fulfillment like following what God has laid out for your upcoming year.
If you do reflect on what the Lord wants for you and search out His will for the upcoming year, of course you will need to pray. This is a great week to spend in prayer searching for the “resolutions” God wants for you. As you pray and look into what God wants, here are three things to avoid that we typically do as human beings. These are things I have struggled with and still do. So together let’s work on avoiding these and see what God can do.
Playing it safe
As we pray and search for His will, we often have a tendency to pray for things that don’t involve any risk for us. God doesn’t work that way. I’m not saying that His will for life is to take risks, but it could be. Look at Jesus’ time here on earth. He didn’t shy away from a risk, not when it involved His Father’s plan. If He is our model of how to be, shouldn’t we be willing to take a risk?
The risks may be different, but the simple fact is the Lord doesn’t want you to put Him in a box, basically telling Him, I’ll follow your plan as long as I don’t have to talk to my neighbor about you. We often pray for God to lead us. However, what we really mean is, God, lead me within my comfort zone. Proverbs 3:5 says, “Trust in the Lord with all your heart; do not depend on your own understanding.” Nothing in this verse screams comfort zone. So as you pray for guidance on what to change this upcoming year, take the training wheels off and know that God has got you.
Fear
Of course if we take the training wheels off, just like the child on the bike, the next feeling that comes is fear. When you take God out of the “comfort zone box” and He begins to lead in uncomfortable directions, fear will rear its ugly head. Satan is a master at attacking us with this emotion. He will use it to get us to flee from what the Lord wants or to fight where God is leading. However we react out of fear, it usually leads to God back in the box.
Of course most of us know Isaiah 41:10, which says to fear not because God is with you. We may know the verse, but living it out is another story. I think Paul sums it up the best in 2 Corinthians 1:8-10: We think you ought to know, dear brothers and sisters, about the trouble we went through in the province of Asia. We were crushed and overwhelmed beyond our ability to endure, and we thought we would never live through it. In fact, we expected to die. But as a result, we stopped relying on ourselves and learned to rely only on God, who raises the dead. And He did rescue us from mortal danger, and He will rescue us again. We have placed our confidence in Him, and He will continue to rescue us.
Wow, that’s a lot. Most of us, as we search for God’s will, won’t be put in mortal danger, but whatever it is, God will see you through. Fear is crippling, but God is the answer to fear. As Paul said, rely only on God because, after all, He has the power to raise people from the dead. So if what you are doing comes from God, there is no reason to fear, because He is right there with you, and He has the ultimate power to see you through.
Delay
A byproduct of fear is delay. Even though we feel like we have overcome the fear, we have a tendency to put whatever it is off. It’s fear’s way of hanging on a bit longer. Look at it this way: how many of you out there have ever heard, “Kids are so expensive. We’ll have them when our money situation is better.” And how many of you have responded, “If you wait to have kids ‘til you can afford them, you’ll never have kids.”
God doesn’t want us to wait for what He has planned for us until we can afford it, or until we get the “honey-do” list finished, or until after we come back from vacation, or whatever excuse you can come up with. God wants us to trust Him and to do it now. Ecclesiastes 5:4 says, When you make a promise, don’t delay in following through… This scripture can’t be any more clear. God knows of our human tendency to put off today what we can do tomorrow, but He wants you to trust Him, to rely on Him and not delay.
I had to step outside my comfort zone and overcome fear to start this blog. What if nobody reads it? What if I can’t keep my monthly commitment? I “what if’d” it to death, which caused a delay of more than a year. When I finally took the step and did what God wanted, this became His blog, not mine, and He has used it as He sees fit. God has used this blog to touch and reach people I could never imagine. He’s done things I can’t believe, but it’s all God.
As we head throughout the rest of this week and draw close to the New Year, I hope you will search for God’s will and consider these three things as you do. I know I will and I also know that I need to work on all three. So wherever you are when the ball drops, I wish you a Happy New Year!
