When the New Year begins, people tend to set new goals or plans and try to carry them out. When it comes to cultivating good habits in everyday life, it can be helpful to be intentional in this way. But when it comes to the larger direction of life, what matters most is trusting and following the Lord’s guidance. When I was serving in a young adult ministry in Korea, I experienced many times that the Holy Spirit spoke very specifically about the path we were to take. After those experiences, I stopped trying to determine the direction of my life on my own. That does not mean, of course, that I wait for God to speak about every single decision. In many cases, God says that it is fine to live by making decisions based on common sense and biblical principles.
What is certain is that whether God speaks to me clearly or not, He is guiding our lives. Because of that, I always live with a sense of expectation about how God is at work. I pay attention to what God may be doing in my life right now. Most often, He leads very naturally through circumstances and situations. At other times, He gives strong conviction while I am meditating on Scripture.
What God led me to last year was coming to know the Nepali church deeply and serving them. This was not something I had planned at the beginning of the year. It was never part of my plan. It simply happened, almost by coincidence. This is how God works in my life. What matters, then, is recognizing that God is continually at work around us with His amazing purposes. Our lives do not work in a way where we make plans for the Lord, pray for Him to fulfill them, and then achieve them through our own effort. God moves before we do.
“Jesus said to them, ‘My Father is always at his work to this very day, and I too am working’… ‘Very truly I tell you, the Son can do nothing by himself; he can do only what he sees his Father doing, because whatever the Father does the Son also does. For the Father loves the Son and shows him all he does. Yes, and he will show him even greater works than these, so that you will be amazed’” (John 5:17, 19–20).
Even Jesus, the Son of God, did not live in this world by setting His own plans for the Father and striving to carry them out. As this passage shows, because He clearly knew that the Father was at work in His life, He did not try to act on His own initiative. Instead, He constantly watched to see what the Father was doing and followed Him. The reason this was possible, as the verse says, “the Father loves the Son and shows him all he does,” was that Jesus lived in a complete relationship of love with God.
If we grow into people who love God with our whole lives, we do not need to strain ourselves to discover God’s will or desperately seek to hear His voice. Just as we breathe air, our souls will naturally come to recognize it. When people are in a loving relationship, they do not need many words to understand each other’s hearts. Acting in step with one another becomes natural. God will continue to work without ceasing in the new year as well. Expect it. And to experience it, let us commit ourselves to our relationship with God. If we walk together with the church, we will surely grow into such people. The life of a Christian is a surprising one.
