This can be our greatest year! In the world it will be one of the most challenging, but we cannot have great victories without great battles. Challenges are coming, and we can choose their outcome in our lives by our faith, vision, and resolve, or lack thereof. Thus, for our first few Words for the Week (WFTW) we will review what will help us make the right choices, so this truly becomes the best year of our lives and lays a foundation for making each year thereafter even better.
As world conditions continue to move toward increasing trouble, the kingdom of God is growing. As prophesied in Daniel 2, the statue that represents man’s empires is crumbling, while the kingdom of God is growing into a great mountain. Mountains in Scripture and in prophetic symbolism represent authority or governments. Do we see God’s government? Are we becoming part of what is growing into the greatest power on earth, or are we becoming part of what is falling apart?
Whether this becomes a good or bad year for us is not dependent on what happens in the world but what happens in our hearts. Those who follow and serve the King of kings have a far greater reality than anything that happens in this world. This year we can and must live more in that greater reality. By this, we can become one of the great lights this world so desperately needs.
Last year’s last thirty-two Words for the Week were subtitled “Choices.” A choice was presented in each with clear directions pointing us toward the right choices. The primary goal of these WFTW is to make disciples of Christ who walk in increasing light, peace, and joy. Our peace, light, and joy do not come from external conditions in this world but despite them. They are clear evidence of lives lived increasingly in the kingdom of God without subjection to the kingdoms of this world. They are also evidence of lives built on the Rock which cannot be shaken by any storm.
If it seems the church is crumbling right along with the rest of the world, we can rest assured what is crumbling is not the Lord’s church but the world’s church. In Revelation, this false church is called the “great harlot,” because it married the spirit of this world rather than waiting for the Lord as a chaste virgin. This is a time when we will see every church not planted by Him uprooted.
We should not be discouraged by this, yet there are many of God’s true people in that system. We are about to hear Him say, “Come out of her my people, so that you do not participate in her sins and receive of her plagues; for her sins have piled up as high as heaven, and God has remembered her iniquities” (see Revelation 18:4-5).
If the righteousness, peace, and joy of God’s kingdom are not yet the hallmarks of our lives, we can still get on the right path. We are exhorted in Proverbs 4:18, “But the path of the righteous is like the light of the dawn that shines brighter and brighter until the full day.” If we are prone to making New Year’s resolutions, we should make it our first resolution to get on this path of increasing light so this can become the best year of our lives and make all future ones even brighter.
Perhaps we have been in the world’s church and are still doing well because we have built our personal lives on God’s kingdom. Or perhaps we are in a church planted by the Lord but not doing so well because we are still building our lives on the ways of this world. This year, a clear trumpet call is coming to get our personal lives and church lives aligned. The New Testament makes a clear distinction between the churches God has planted and leads and those He has not. All these things we will review from time to time, not just so we can remember them but so we can live them.
As the time until the end of this age grows shorter, so will the time we have to obey the Lord in everything. Therefore, today is the best day to get started.
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