My Goals

Call them New Year resolutions if you will. I personally don't make New Year resolutions because they've always been a joke with me. I find the guilt trip on every 31st of December inhumane, and making a practice of setting myself up for failure every year seems needless.

I do however believe in setting goals, of making a plan, of evaluating my life in light of areas to change. Maybe that's the same thing as what a New Year resolution is supposed to do, but for me, doing it on a day other than the transition between December and January somehow makes it seem a little less doomed.

Another difference--I'm not looking at the year as a whole. These are my goals for today. Tomorrow, they will be my goals for tomorrow, and as God enables me day by day, I pray they become a habit that will last through the year and then another and another. For now, today will suffice.

• To depend daily on God, to seek Him as my only sustenance from moment to moment, to never stop needing Him (Psalm 63).
• To daily meet with God, to be in his Word that I might know Him, that I might obey Him, that I might grow to be more like Him (2 Timothy 3:16-17).
• To make Him my delight (Psalm 37:4).
• To be obedient in prayer, to learn how to pray according to His will, and to make prayer a discipline in my life (Philippians 4:6).
• To choose daily to be thankful, knowing that when I cease to honor Him and cease to be thankful, it is the turning point away from Him (Romans 1). For me, it's making a literal list of thankfulness and keeping myself accountable in it.
• To submit to the divine authority of those who hold me accountable, to approach accountability with honesty and without preconceived prejudice (Romans 13:1-2; 1 Peter 5:5).
• To honestly ask God to search my heart and point out areas of idolatry and unconfessed sin (Psalm 139:23-24).
• To be sincere in my motives (Colossians 3:23).
• To rest within God's sovereignty (Matthew 11:28-30).