We’re all unfinished people. You. Me. We. We’re people who are becoming.

So I embrace this perennial season of hope and resolutions. I love how every one of us can begin a new chapter with our lives. We can end bad habits and begin new ones.

We can change. God can modify who we are.

I once thought God left this sanctifying work up to me. Like a fool, I behaved like I could alter my core spiritual DNA.

So I analyzed and scrutinized myself, and set out trying to fix what was broken.

If I came up short on love, I played the girl who loves like an actor. And during those years I smiled, a lot. But one day I realized this faux love wasn’t the agape I thought it was.

So I asked the God who defines himself as love to show me what loving people really looked like. He did.

I learned that I can’t accomplish anything apart from God. The spiritual growth we try and drum up in the flesh ends up looking like a Play-Doh “Gumby,” when God wants to create in us something akin to Michelangelo’s David.

If you’re New Year’s resolution is spiritual growth—Bible reading or prayer, don’t try to accomplish it on your own.

• Start with God, and commit this goal to him only. Don’t make it about you. Make it about worship, not work.

 

• Know that God can do in a year what it could take us 30 decades to do on our own. He’s that kind of Person, and he loves to do miracles for those who believe.

 

• Just ask. “You don’t have what you want because you don’t ask God for it” (James 4:2 NLT).

 

• And keep asking. If you’re hoping for spiritual growth, it’s the will of God. Let’s take Jesus’ advice this year:

“Keep on asking, and you will receive what you ask for. Keep on seeking, and you will find. Keep on knocking, and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks, receives. Everyone who seeks, finds. And to everyone who knocks, the door will be opened” (Matthew 7:7-8 NLT).

I would love to hear from you. What are you in the process of becoming?

I’m in the process of becoming a worshipper and not a worrier. I’m also learning the daily habit of writing. Life tastes sweeter when I string words together on a page.

What about you?