There is a member of our church who never fails to participate in a morning meditation. It has been about a year since he believed in Christ, and when I hear his sharing, I am glad to see his longing for the Lord and how the Lord is working in his life.
He reads out what he meditated and noted that day in the morning, and his sharing on the first day of 2021 lingered in my heart: “Christians are not those who pursue hope, but those who pursue Christ.”
It may be more so because the past year was exceptionally difficult, but as the new year comes, people exchange messages of “hope” everywhere. I definitely hope the new year to be the year when such hope comes true.
Hope is what I want. If hope is what started from me, I want to classify what comes from the Lord as wish. Christians, like Paul who prayed for the Spirit of wisdom and revelation in order to know the wish the Lord has called him (Ep 1:17-18), should live with the wish that the Lord wants, which He will surely fulfill for them.
In that sense, as the member shared, we should live a year in search of Christ, who prepares and fulfills his wishes for us, rather than living a year hoping what we want to achieve.“Relent, O LORD! How long will it be? Have compassion on your servants. Satisfy us in the morning with your unfailing love, that we may sing for joy and be glad all our days.” (Psalms 90:13-14)
This week, when last year and this year overlap, I decided on some must-do lists and started doing them. Since there are young children in my house, when they wake up, the house becomes noisy and it is not easy to control my mind. Therefore, I decided to make good use of the morning time. Steady four hours a day from 5am to 9am is extremely important and certainly can have surprising results. However, the key is to do it until the end, but I will rely on Him rather than being confident in myself. I would like to start by checking in every month, and if I figure I cannot do all the list as my passion cools down, I would still like to carry on with some of my plans, unlike the last year.
It is not easy to plan something as it is not easy to control my schedule during the day and as there are certain things to be done every day for church ministry, but I decided to make good use of the tight time. If I stay away from social media, I will be able to save a lot of time.
All these plans are all about finding the Lord. I want to find, follow, and serve Him more in the new year. Rather than pursing hopes that are not certain whether they will come true, I want to spend a year living in pursuit of Him who is a definite wish. This year, I want to make a breakthrough and make a new path, rather than thinking about holding out. It is not because I worked really hard, but because I am looking for him and pursuing him.
“Christ in you…the wish of glory” (Col 1:27)
