New Year, New You!

We interviewed nine regular people just like you to find out what they want to put into action this year. Here’s what they said:

Levi (23) — “This year stewarding looks like in my life, giving the time and resources and knowledge, that God’s given me the ability to achieve and possess over the years regarding things like photography and creative outlets, and imparting that onto other people with no expectation of anything in return. That’s one of many ways that I think I can steward appropriately this year.”

Abi (26) — “A word fast is a choice to not say anything negative about yourself or about other people over a whole day. Now, this is something I want to try this year because I think it’s important when people look at you as a Christian to see that you’re different in a certain way. There’s a Psalm I love that says, “Take control of what I say, O LORD, and guard my lips.” So, this is my resolution this year.”

Laura (21) — “The word God gave me for 2018 was light and then in 2019 it was trust. For 2020, I believe He has given me the word intimacy, straight out of Psalm 63. “I sing through the night under your splendour-shadow, offering up to you my songs of delight and joy! With passion, I pursue and cling to you. Because I feel your grip on my life, I keep my soul close to your heart.” So practically for me, that looks like for this year, opening up my Bible, hearing what God has to say to me and writing that in song. For me, I find my intimacy in worship; I find my intimacy in reading His word. So I’m going to write. I’m going to put it down on paper and I’m going to write my heart to Jesus.”

Matt (23) — “I work in a Christian workplace and also have a church community. There are friends of friends who I know, who don’t yet know Jesus. This year I want to be really intentional about inviting them into my world and introducing them to Jesus.”

James (18) — “My New Year’s resolution is to step out more in faith into the wilderness. When I go to college, I am taking a big step of faith to go down to Sydney, to a city that I’ve never been before and I’ve never moved out of home. What courage looks like is: spending more time with God, being more intentional with my own time, setting aside Bible college and my social life and just getting deeper into the Word with Him. I believe having more time to pray with Him is where I’m going to find that courage and faith with God.”

Tim (37) — “Hope and resilience. Those are the two words that came to my mind. Hope is a good thing resilience is a harder thing. But I feel like if you have a hope for something you will endure and you’ll be resilient. There’s cool scripture in Romans where it says, “Patient endurance will refine our character, and proven character leads us back to hope.” Obviously our hope is in Jesus. This year I am going to put my hope into something so that I can be resilient.”

Jamie (21) — “This year I really want to focus on just understanding the word of God more. I want to make sure I’m living each day so that it’s for God’s glory and not for myself. Making sure I’m doing everything in a way that would make God proud for me to be known as His. That I’m showing Jesus’ love in everything that I do and not just doing so that people recognise me but so that people recognise God through me.”

Reuben (33) — “Extravagant generosity doesn’t make sense. My New Year’s resolution this year is to be generous. Generosity confuses people and opens up the question to “why would you do that?” I want to be generous this year to open up conversations about Jesus.”

Bella (19) — “I definitely think my New Year’s resolution would be: fasting. When Jesus talked about fasting, He didn’t say, ‘if you fast’ he said ‘when’. So knowing that God’s word implies I’ll be doing it, I just want to focus on that and really dig in deeper to what His word says.”

What’s one thing you can put into action this year to grow your relationship with Jesus and talk to others about Him?