Welcome 2024: Four Questions to Consider

We have turned the page on the calendar and have welcomed a new year – 2024. Of course there are practical implications such as the simple thing of remembering to change the year when we sign documents, such as checks. On the other hand, there are spiritual implications of a new year as well. Let me suggest four primary questions that will benefit you as you consider them in this new year to better gain perspective. Use them to look back at 2023 to see what changes were made in your life. Are things better or worse? Have you progressed or digressed? Is there growth or no growth?

Once you determine the answers to your questions, you can make a plan to go forward in the new year. At the end of the day, it is not about resolutions; rather, the new year is about next steps. Where can we move forward loving and worshiping Christ and serving others? How can this year be a “next step” year?

Let me suggest four primary questions with some additional commentary to help you assess the past year and think forward to the next.

Question 1: How has your Passion for Christ changed during this past year?

Where does Christ fit in your affections, thinking, and behavior? How often do you reflect on Christ and the Gospel? Would you say you are more or less in love with Christ than the beginning of last year? Do you think about the presence of Christ as you go about your day in daily activities, responsibilities, and free time?

Question 2: How is your practice of the Spiritual Disciplines?

When you look at the past year, how are you doing on your spiritual disciplines? How often do you read your Bible, pray, and meditate on God’s Word? Are you more consistent now or last year?

Question 3: How often do you Serve Others?

What does your service to others look like at the end of the year in relationship to the beginning of the year? Have you invested an appropriate amount of energy in others? How do you use the energy God grants you each day by His grace? Are you sacrificial in your service? This year have you turned inward where you think primarily about yourself or have you maintained a spirit of service toward others even in the midst of life’s pressures?

Question 4: Do you regularly practice Self-Counsel?

Are you taking time to do any kind of self-assessment? Do you take the truth you know from the Bible and apply it to and in your own life? Are you seeking to contemplate your walk with God in the Spirit?

Next Steps: Where do you go from here?

Take these four questions and spend a few minutes in prayerful consideration. This may take more than a day or two in order to work through these four areas. Where you are weaker than last year, in light of your season of life, what should you do to take the “next step” in the coming year?

The great news is that God has granted you everything you need in Christ to give all diligence to grow in 2024.

Grace and peace be multiplied to you in the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord, as His divine power has given to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of Him who called us by glory and virtue, by which have been given to us exceedingly great and precious promises, that through these you may be partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust. But also for this very reason, giving all diligence, add to your faith virtue, to virtue knowledge, to knowledge self-control, to self-control perseverance, to perseverance godliness, to godliness brotherly kindness, and to brotherly kindness love. For if these things are yours and abound, you will be neither barren nor unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. (2 Peter 1:2-8)