2024 is rapidly coming to a close. The days are beginning (barely) to get longer. Christmas has come and gone. In just a few days we start a new year, 2025. We will be a quarter of the way through the 21st century!
This week would be an excellent time to look back, to evaluate the last year and see if you have grown. That evaluation is challenging, but a very valuable experience. Maybe take some time and look back through your calendar, remember the events of the year, and see what lessons God has brought you through.
Have those experiences drawn you closer to the Lord? Or have they driven a wedge between you? Or are you living in neutral, just letting life happen?
We are not meant to live life in neutral. God wants us to be growing, maturing, and producing fruit. Remember when we looked at 2 Peter 1:5–8? Peter reminded us “Now for this very reason also, applying all diligence, in your faith supply moral excellence, and in your moral excellence, knowledge, and in your knowledge, self-control, and in your self-control, perseverance, and in your perseverance, godliness, and in your godliness, brotherly kindness, and in your brotherly kindness, love. For if these qualities are yours and are increasing, they render you neither useless nor unfruitful in the true knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Applying all diligence! Not just coasting through life, but intentionally seeking to grow, to mature. Intentionally seeking to increase our faith, our moral excellence, our knowledge, etc.
As we enter this new year, let us encourage one another to be more the people God called us to be.
Pastor John
