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.

What does cultivating hope look like in your life?

In Luke 21:1-4, we get a glimpse of what it looks like for one widow to give all she has to God. God’s priority, in her life and in ours, is not about finances; rather, he is looking for people that are willing to empty themselves in worship, holding nothing back from him. God will always provide all that we need; our part is to agree with him and surrender our lives to him in faith.

God gives us his grace so that we can live a holy life. This isn’t just a life where we follow all the rules, the “dos” and “do nots.” Rather, holy living is a life fully surrendered to God, where we allow him to speak into any area of our lives so that he can call us into greater freedom and life in Christ.