Seven Things You Can Do to Plan Your New Year - 2011

Seven Things You Can Do to Plan Your New Year - 2011

1. Commit every plan you have in the new year to the Lord, He will establish them (Prov 16:3)
This is the time of the year when we start thinking about our New Year resolutions and for those of us who are a bit older can recall so many of those resolutions that were impossible to keep even up till the first week of the new year. For us believers, it is a constant awareness of Our Lord who is at the epicenter of our lives and our plans will be established by Him. Before we do anything, why not write down the list of things you want done this year and commit them to our Creator to help establish them for us. It is by looking to our Creator for guidance rather than looking to the world, we as believer can have our plans established.

2. Examine, Test and Check your daily walk with God. Ask if anything you set to do is God’s will (Eph 5:15-17)
As the weeks and months wear out, very rarely we would remember what our resolutions were. What we can do this year instead would be to put some checks and balances in our life. For instance, how about checking back on the list mentioned in step one every week and see how we’ve made progress and make the required adjustments in such a way that we allow the Lord to work in us to have our plans established. If I want to change the way I react to stress, then I should check every night how I handled stress and how I responded to it. If there was anger as a result of stress then I should ask the Lord Jesus to teach me through His words how to manage my anger. Every time when we examine and check our behavior against the backdrop of God’s righteousness, we tend to correct things that are not according to His will. Making small positive changes by examining ourselves can make us in tune with God’s will for our lives.

3. Delight, Be happy and Content in the Lord and he will give answers to your secret petitions (Psalms 37:4-5)
Worrying endlessly about the things we cannot change will only cause more anxiety than good. Some of us may have been praying those ‘secret’ prayers for years without any answers. Indeed it takes much faith to believe that He is able to answer our prayers. He works on His timeline and not ours. For example, a wife may be secretly praying for her husband to break his bad habits, instead of getting frustrated and trying to lecture the husband , the wife chooses to delight and become content in the Lord eventually the Lord will answers her secret prayers. Often times it is through a change of heart that God causes by seeing a delightful and content wife that the husband changed. Zacharias, the father of John the Baptist may have prayed for a son when he was much younger but as years went by and since his prayers were not answered he may have given up on the Lord. But at the right time, God through the Angel Gabriel announced that Zacharias will have a son. Doubting God as if He is not able to answer our prayers could put us in the same situation as Zacharias who was made dumb and mute for almost nine months until the birth of his son John the Baptist.

4. Know the Power within you and what you can do with that Power (Eph 3:20)
As Christians we believe that each one of us have been blessed with immense Godly power that lives within us. The power to make lasting change within us and to those around us are there for the asking, so when we set our eyes on anything that God wills, why not believe in the power that indwells us. It is not the special skills or talent that we have instead it is how we use them to be productive to assist us to meet our goals.

5. Ask yourself – how much focus you have on earthly things? Where is my heart? (Matt 6:19-21)
What we know is that all our treasures may be trashed one day, some of them even stolen leaving us heartbroken. Placing our focus on things only creates more anxiety than contentment. As worldly people one cannot think about not having focus on the tangible things where one can admire and put a value on it, but it takes more than this to put our faith in our Lord to believe the intangible, the heavenly things. We can check regularly to see where our heart is and make correction. We can ask, ‘Lord help me to hold the things of this world more loosely’

6. Relentlessly Asking/Seeking/Knocking is required until He answers. He is never late nor is He too early. It is His time (Matt 7:7-8)
There are those things you’ve been praying for years and nothing happened. You may have given up on God and lost hope. Is God really listening to me? Will I ever see the answers to my prayers? Questions like these tend to harass you but we can do couple of things this year. Firstly, we can trust that God is able to establish our plans, he will fulfill His promises. Secondly, God works in His timeline and not ours. We cannot twist God’s hands. He knows what is good for us and what is not and finally to become persistent and relentless in asking, seeking and knocking until we get the answers. It is an acting of keeping on asking, seeking and knocking to see our prayers are getting answered.

7. Make sure God has the last word in everything you do (James 4:13-15)
Whatever we do ought to depend on God’s will and He should have the last word in all of them. You may be looking to hop from your current job to another or you may be looking to buy into a new suburban home, whatever may be the case, it is God’s will that we need to fulfill and he will make things happen according to His will.

PRAYER:
Lord God our loving Father, as we embark into a new year, we want to thank you for another opportunity to show to the world how awesome you are. We want to reflect your presence in our lives which you made possible through the power of the Holy Spirit. Help us to delight in you and commit ourselves fully to your Holy will. May we live our lives reflecting the teaching of your Son Jesus Christ in our everyday lives. This we ask in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen