Happy New Year!

I hope you had a wonderful night ringing out the old.  Now it's in with the new.

Every year, I have a list of goals I want to accomplish in the new year and almost every year 90% of them never happen.  I have good intentions but life gets in the way and old patterns are hard to break.  This year I decided not to make any goals without really praying and seeing what it is God wants me to do.

Dan preached on goal setting this past Sunday and one of the things he talked about is the faulty thinking that many Christians have in trying to group your life into categories.  So when we set goals or resolutions, we'll say these are my financial goals, health goals, personal goals, family goals, spiritual goals.

Do you see the problem here?  When we do it this way, we put God in His own separate category and He tends to get left out of every aspect of our lives.  We lump him into a spiritual goal of perhaps having personal devotions for 20 minutes every day and then move on with the rest of our day as if we've done our duty.

Yet, if we thought of our life as a circle with God in the center and then each area of our life coming out from the center (like in the spokes of a wheel), we would continually go back to the thought of God being the center. 

So as we set our goals, we then begin to think things like...

How can God be in the midst of our finances?
How can I honor God with good health?
What does God want me to do in my personal life this year?
How can I reflect Christ's love to my family?

See the difference?  It's subtle but it's there.

So this year, if you do set goals start seeing how you can keep the Lord as the center of each aspect of your life.  Spend some time reflecting and praying and asking Him what it is He wants you to do in the new year.