What does life look like with the perspective of joy that Jesus has?

Serena shares a testimony of how her parents recently encountered Jesus. After decades of prayer, God was faithful to bring her family together and to bless them with new life.

In John 10, Jesus says that as the good shepherd, he comes to the defense of his sheep when they are in trouble. In all the highs and lows of life, our heart posture as his sheep should be to lean on God and trust him. His power and his blood are enough to lead us through anything that may come our way.

In our busy lives the Lord asks that we spend time with him alone. Are you retreating with the Lord?

How are you relying more and more on the Lord and not on yourself?

When we decide to follow Jesus, he brings us through a process of being made perfect in love, so that fear can have no part in us (1 John 4:18). This isn’t an instantaneous process. However, as we walk with God through different stages of life, he invites us to learn how to lay aside our fears and fix our eyes on him.

Are you humbly obedient to the Lord’s promptings?

Like the apostle John, we are called to a life of intimacy with Jesus, not because of our qualifications, but because he loves to be near to us and to share what he’s doing with us. To access that place of intimacy with God, it’s essential that we lay down our priorities and visions of what our lives could look like and come into agreement with his ideas for our lives. God’s plans for us are always bigger and better than anything we could come up with on our own, and we can trust him to lead us every step of the way.

How are you going to hope big and pray big in 2025?

In his epistles, Paul often compares the Christian life to a long race that we run with endurance. At the beginning of the new year, we remind ourselves of the places God has promised to bring us as we keep on running this race. We choose to celebrate those destinations with joy now, before we get there, because we are intended to run forward with hopeful expectation that God will do all that he has promised.