Whenever New Year’s Day rolls around most people are busy making new goals for the coming year. As a Christian we should be no different when it comes to making new goals each year. However, the one thing that should remain the same for all believers in Christ and for every New Year is that our number one goal should always be the same: “Making the pursuit of His glory our highest priority in everything we do!”
Paul David Tripp puts it beautifully: “The Psalms welcome us to a faith where God’s agenda is more important than ours and where we are asked to live out our faith in the context of a disastrously broken world. But this is also precisely where we experience the highest personal joys, as we put our hope in the covenant love of the Lord and make the pursuit of his glory the goal of our lives.”1 I love this quote for several reasons.
First, Tripp states that God’s agenda is always more important than our agenda. My friends we were not put on this earth to just live comfortable and happy lives. We were created by God to carry out His perfect and wonderful agenda and understand that life here is training grounds for eternity. And the closer we get to Jesus we will want to make His agenda ours because what can be more awesome than lining up our agenda with His. When we do this, we will find something amazing – which brings me to my second reason why I love Tripp’s quote.
Second, the highest level of personal joy we can experience in life is when we make sacrifices to advance God’s kingdom here on earth. You see as Tripp states we live in a “disastrously broken world,” and as such the way we get real joy is to sacrifice our time, talents, and treasury to help others and in so doing we glorify God. Our world because of sin will not get fixed, but we can play a powerful role in shining the light of Jesus wherever we go thus bringing glory to God and the only message of hope to our dying world. I have found in my own walk with the Lord sacrifice is the pathway to real joy and that this joy only comes when we make helping others and glorifying God our highest priority.
And third, when we do everything we can for the glory of God our most important goal, our highest agenda item, the pathway to the greatest joy, and our greatest desire in life, we will put a great smile on the Lord’s face! Too often, even as Christians, we make obtaining creature comforts, status in life, and wealth our main motivators. Instead, I have found that (Psalm 37:4) allows me to pursue and make God’s desires my desires, and thus live life with maximum joy, purpose, and enter into an amazing relationship of intimacy with Jesus. This powerful verse states: “Delight yourself also in the Lord, and He shall give you the desires of your heart.” When we delight in the Lord God’s desires become our desires, and our desires become His desires. And isn’t this the cry of our hearts that we line up our lives to reflect the glory of God in everything we do.
My sincere prayer is that we all realize that as we make God’s desires our desires and know that as we do this, we will find such joy in our journey that we will no longer view the sacrifices we make for Jesus as sacrifices but as a glorious privilege!
1 Quote by Paul David Tripp: “The Psalms welcome us to a faith where God’s ag…”