Great Beginnings

The New Year, it comes on us like a new dawn of a new day or a blank canvas waiting for paint or like a blank page in a journal.

And so the question is, what will you write on the blank page that God gives you on January 1st? Coming up later this week. Will you write the same things you've been writing on that page for the whole year, the same hangups, the same worries, the same anxieties, or will you intentionally write something new?

Will you intentionally invest in your faith, in your hope, in your love? That is what this new series is all about.

My name's René, another one of the pastors here at Twin Lakes Church. And before I dig into our new series for the new year, what I wanna do is show you some highlights of what happened here on Wednesday Tuesday of this past week. How many of you were here for one of our candlelight services?

Phenomenal. I loved how they started by having a band and a choir outside, the greeters, welcoming people. Love to see all the fellowship and all the beautiful people making it into the service. It was so beautiful to see them all packed out.

And then the lights and the sound and the orchestra and the musicians and the craftsmanship that went into this. I don't think I've ever been more overwhelmed, more emotional than I was this year, looking at the orchestra, Connie, all the choir members and so on, about the team that we have here at Twin Lakes Church.

I mean staff and volunteers, all the greeters, the lighting technicians, the sound technicians, everybody worked over in the children's department as well. We had 7,000 people come to all of our services put together. Praise God.

But what I would love to do right now, can we just thank everybody who volunteered to work on these services and the staff members, the facilities team, it was amazing. I am so grateful to you guys. It was a wonderful experience.

I talked to some people who this morning, I talked to a young woman who said that she came for the first time to this church at our candlelight service and now she's back. So that may be where you are at as well.

and I just want to say we welcome you. Great Start is a series that we're launching the new year with here at Twin Lakes Church. And here's why, I want to invite you to grab your message notes, you can open them up to the inside and there's an outline there that you can follow along with.

But here's why, I kind of figured it's a pastor that we needed this. So this came across my news app a couple of days ago. This week, National Geographic had an article And the headline was, "Why Most Resolutions Fail." This is like, it must be like legally required that every newspaper and magazine runs this story this week, right?

And it's not like this was like psychology today. This was National Geographic, like come on, just show me cool pictures of animals. I don't need to hear this right now. Don't even bother making resolutions, they're just probably gonna fail.

But the article actually had some pretty good points. It went on. Every January, billions of Americans resolve to improve, right? Many start with dramatic overhauls, cutting out entire food groups, committing to daily workouts, bowing to reinvent the routines overnight.

By February, those overly optimistic resolutions unravel. Thank you so much. However, the article says that does not mean it is a lost cause. shows that the New York in fact can be a great time to rethink your habits.

Watch this next sentence. The challenge is knowing which habits. The article went on to describe how so many of the habits that we decide that we wanna change, like I'm not gonna be late to things anymore, I'm not gonna procrastinate anymore, I'm gonna stop smoking.

A lot of those are symptomatic habits. And the way to get to those habits is instead start changing what they call keystone habits. There's just a few habits that if you change those habits, they're like dominoes that trigger all kinds of other positive habits.

For example, what? Well, getting enough sleep, for example, one of the things that they pointed out was eating a good breakfast is a keystone habit. And in fact, the article said, And it doesn't even really matter what your breakfast is.

As long as it's a reasonably healthy breakfast, the key is eating the same thing every morning because it's a routine. And starting your day with a routine like this just is like the hub of a wheel and every other habit is a spoke that comes out of it.

Now this happens to be my own personal choice. I love this, this I always put together some milk, some yogurt, some oats, almonds, some berries. This is my morning routine. This is called, this is a Swiss thing. The Swiss people call this, "Bierre muisli." Let's say that together.

"Bierre muisli." No, you're not getting the "chh," say it again. "Bierre muisli." Nevermind, all right, you can just eat this every morning. In that spirit, what we're doing here in this series is learning how to start every single day with another keystone habit a healthy spiritual breakfast every single morning.

So many of us will say, "I wanna get into that habit of Bible reading "every morning prayer, every morning, "daily devotions every morning, "and you'll hear pastors say that you should do it." Well, I wanna equip you to do this. I wanna get you to start this as a keystone habit.

I want you to trade five minutes of doom scrolling every single morning for five minutes of Bible reading and devotion time, because that's gonna be a keystone habit If you do it for every one of the first 31 days of January, and that's gonna domino into all kinds of great habits in your life, here's one of the reasons I wanted to do this.

The church today, Twin Lakes Church, has on average every weekend about 700 or so more people, depending on the weekend, five to 700 more people than we had two years ago, which is wonderful. This is regular, weekly attenders, not just people who call Twin Lakes Church their home.

And if you judge by the baptism numbers and the baptism testimonies, about 325 of those 700 are new believers, have newly committed their lives to Jesus Christ in faith in the last couple of years, 325. And that's so that means there's probably three services, there's probably 100 of you here this morning.

Can we just put our hands together and say, man, we're so stoked that you've started your new life in Christ here. But as your pastor, what I want to do is get all of us on the same page together and start this new habit that it's really gonna reinforce your faith.

And veteran Christians need to get back into the habit. A lot of us used to have a daily devotional habit and we've just gotten out of it. So here's the way we're going to do this. I put together this book, Great Start. It's free and it's available for you in baskets outside.

This starts January 1st. It has a daily devotional reading every day for the first 31 days of the year. And the way this is cohesive is it goes through one book of the Bible. Just verse by verse by verse, the book of the Bible is called First Thessalonians.

This is one of the most encouraging books of the Bible. It's one of the shortest books of the Bible. It's one of the easiest to understand books of the Bible. So it's a great entry point. If you've been saying, I'd love to start the new year by getting back into the Bible reading habit, I don't know where to start.

I don't understand the Bible. This book is gonna help you through it. All you need is this and a Bible that you opened the little book of First Thessalonians and it'll be great. Now, if you don't have a Bible, we have some free Bibles like this in paperback available at the Info Desk.

And we have the Bibles at cost available at the bookstore as well with study guides and so on. So can we just pray and ask God to bless this? I am excited about getting you all, getting me into a great start together for the first 31 days of the year.

Heavenly Father, I just pray that your Holy Spirit as we dig into the book of First Thessalonians in the Bible. I'm so excited about getting us all into this, and I pray that this would become a habit that would affect positively the whole rest of our year. Help us get to a great start in Jesus' name, amen.

Here's why this is a keystone habit for you. Number one, if you start your day like this, it sets the day's tone. What you focus on, first thing, Every day shapes your entire day. So you get to choose weirdo, stressful headlines, or God's word.

I'm not telling you what to choose, it's your choice, but you choose every single morning. Secondly, it gives you a framework for how you perceive every single, every other thing that's gonna happen to you throughout the day. It gets you seeing and thinking and reacting to what happens to you in a Christ-like way.

Third, it has holistic impact. It affects you cognitively because you're learning things, it also affects your emotions. It also affects your behavior. Studies show you'll be more patient, kind, you'll make better choices when you start your day with prayer, meditation, Bible reading, and it builds other habits.

Research also shows that people who start the day with a quiet time in the Word are more apt to exercise, to plan well, to socialize, to volunteer, to do all these other things that are really good for you. So again, both the sermon series and this book are going through this book of the Bible called First Thessalonians.

And here's why this is the perfect book of the Bible to start your new year. There is a great story behind it. It's a story of a small group of Christians in a Roman city about 2,000 years ago who had the odds stacked against them. But somehow we're still able to get off to a great start and they were able to keep going.

Here's the story behind this book. The apostle Paul goes on a long circuitous journey that ends up in the city of Thessalonica in Greece. Say Thessalonica with me. Thessalonica. Now say bierchmerzli. Bierchmerzli. Forget it. So Thessalonica is a major port city on a beautiful harbor on the Aegean Sea. kind of a lot like San Francisco is today.

And it was a major city back then too. In fact, just recently they were doing some apartment building there. And while they were digging the foundations, they discovered the long lost ancient Agora or marketplace of Thessalonica.

This is the very place that is mentioned in the Bible. In the book of Acts chapter 17, where the apostle Paul gets into some trouble. He's been preaching here in Thessalonica and he has, you could say, a mixed response to his preaching.

Some people love it, but other people are not so sure. They decide they need to oppose Paul, they need to oppose. He starts getting people who believe in Jesus Christ. It says a number of prominent local business people, prominent local women are specifically mentioned by Dr. Liu who writes the book of Acts in the Bible.

But these opponents, they really hate this new Christian movement. It says in Acts 17, verse five, "They rounded up some bad characters from the marketplace," what I just showed you, "and they formed a mob, "and they started a riot in the city." Some Christians are arrested. They're accused of treason against the Roman government, which is a capital offense in those days.

And the mob starts hunting for the apostle Paul and Silas and Timothy. So as soon as it was dark, the Bible says, the believers sent Paul and Silas away to Berea. Berea was a mountain village that was safe. Do you know how long Paul had been with the Thessalonians before he was run out of town like this? Three weeks, that's it, say three weeks.

Three weeks, that's all the instruction they had. So you'd think that with that short of a time to really get started. And that great of institutional oppression against them, that little church didn't stand a chance. But instead, they keep growing.

And they keep gathering momentum, even though the opposition against them continues to mount. It gets worse, it gets worse. And around 300 AD, one of the co-emperors of the Roman Empire, a guy named Galerius, he decides that he and the other emperor Diocletian, they are going to wipe out Christianity. I mean like wipe it out.

And so they collect Bibles, the scriptures, and they burn every single one that they can. They arrest Christians and kill probably tens of thousands of them, it is the worst persecution that Christianity ever endured in the history of the Roman Empire, and it starts right there in Thessalonica.

And Galerius decides he's going to build a temple there to himself, it's called the Rotunda of Galerius. He decides that when he dies, they're gonna put his body in there so that everybody can come and worship the divine co-emperor, just this horrible guy.

Well, when Galerius dies, just a few years later, Christianity is legalized. In fact, the Roman emperor decrees that all the property that's been stolen from Christians need to be restored. If there's Christians who were killed, the Roman government needs to make restitution to their families.

But nobody wants this thing. Nobody wants to honor the memory of this despot. So the government decides to put it up for sale at a bargain price, there's no takers, until one small group of people gets it. At a cut rate deal, guess who? The Christians.

And the Christians turn it into the first large church building in Thessalonica, the largest church building on the planet to that date, and it still exists to this day. You can go see it and the church in Thessalonica just kept thriving and kept growing.

So my question is, how did they do it? The church in Thessalonica is one of the only places mentioned in the Bible where there's been an uninterrupted presence of Christians since Bible times. For 2,000 years there has never not been a thriving church in that city.

They got off to a great start against incredible odds and they kept going, I wanna know what was in their DNA to do that. And here's why this is relevant to you and to me. Do you ever struggle with being the person that you know God wants you to be?

I do. Maybe right now there's some habit that seems to kind of have its claws in you. Or maybe there's been some challenges in your marriage or maybe the pressures on you as a mom a dad or as a worker or as a boss or as a student are just draining you.

Or maybe you wanna stop a crippling habit or maybe you wanna get healthier, whatever it is, we all know anybody can change for a day or for a month. The question is how do you succeed in the long term?

How do you not only get a great start in January, but how do you keep going? You know, I love to read business books and like Harvard Business Review and stuff. of the stories of businesses that succeed, books like Built to Last, Good to Great.

But there's one problem that all these books have, unavoidably really, and that is they're stuck in their place and time. They can only look at what's successful when the book is being written, their time, their culture.

The problem is that often those successes don't last. Like, of the 11 companies held up in Good to Great as great companies, nine of them have now failed, don't exist anymore, or are completely flatlined. Nine of the 11, anybody heard of Circuit City lately?

For example, that's one of the companies that they mentioned. So instead, why not get advice on how to succeed from people whose success has lasted against formidable odds? I mean, the Thessalonians faith has lasted now for 2,000 years. What can we learn from them?

Well, the good news is we know what the Apostle Paul saw in them a few months after Paul has to run for his life. He writes them the letter of First Thessalonians. It's kind of a pure pep talk from Coach Paul. And what he does is he points out the things they're doing right.

Mostly all he does in his letter is here's what you guys are doing. That's great. I keep doing this. Oh, keep doing that. That's also good. Keep doing that. That's why it's such an encouraging little letter of the Bible.

So with that background, let's dive right into the first chapter for four tips on how to get a start that lasts. What does Paul see in them? And the first tip is probably the most important of all, I need to root myself in grace.

When I say grace, I mean, God's unmerited favor that's just lavished on you in Jesus Christ. You need to be motivated by, fueled by, rooted in grace. Look at how Paul starts his letter, chapter one, verse one. "Paul, Silas, and Timothy to the church of the Thessalonians and God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

"Grace and peace to you." We always thank God for all of you and continually mention you in our prayers. than verse three.

If all the rest of this letter had been lost and only verse three survived, this would be enough to just meditate on and be inspired by and to think about for the rest of your life. We remember before our God and Father, your work produced by faith, your labor prompted by love and your endurance inspired by hope in our Lord Jesus Christ.

Note, they didn't just work labor in door. All of that was produced by faith, prompted by love, inspired by hope. In my observation, if this verse had been written for most modern Christians or many modern Christians, it would read something like this.

We remember before God and Father, your work produced by a sense of obligation. Your labor prompted by guilt, And you're endurance inspired by some bad dog sermon from your pastor, right? And you know what? That kind of motivation will burn you out.

I should know because it burned me out. What else can motivate you other than guilt and, you know, money or what? And what kind of motivation is there? Well, Mother Teresa was once told by a journalist pulling dying people out of the sewers.

I wouldn't do that for all the money in the world. And she responded, "Yeah, neither would I." Great answer. And she went on, "I do this for Jesus, who did this for me." You see, she was motivated by, rooted in the grace of God to her.

This sentence here in verse three goes right to the core misunderstanding of the gospel that so many people in our culture have, including Christians. They think our message as Christians is work, labor, endure, try hard to be better, make those resolutions to improve.

But that's actually not the gospel. That's hopefully one of the eventual effects of the gospel, but the gospel is faith and love and hope because of Jesus Christ.

And that produces, it prompts, it inspires the change in behavior. That kind of grace motivation is what will keep you going. Guilt motivation, saps your strength. Grace motivation gives you strength.

And Paul isn't done just lathering grace on them. Next verse he says, "For we know brothers and sisters loved by God, you are loved by God." And not only that, he has chosen you. God doesn't just love you because like he has to, He's chosen you to be an object of his divine affection. Love all this grace.

Now, if you read almost any of the books of the Bible written by the apostle Paul, including first Thessalonians, he does eventually get to things like, control your temper, be a faithful spouse, be generous, live a generous life, be self-controlled, right?

But this is always in the latter half of his epistles. He always starts with things like, "You know what, you are loved by God. You're chosen by God. You've been graced by, you've got a new identity. You got a new destiny from God." This is like the first half of every one of his letters because that's the reality that produces this result.

It's kind of like DNA therapy. Have you heard about this gene therapy? Where when there's a disease that's genetic, What they're learning to do now is to change people's DNA. And so the DNA produces different results in them.

This has amazing possibilities for curing genetically linked diseases. Well, what the apostle Paul really is talking about is what Jesus does to us is he changes sort of our spiritual DNA.

We no longer think of ourselves in one way. We're thinking of ourselves in a completely different reality and the changed DNA produces different symptoms, you could say, but it all starts with establishing your core DNA, what's actually true of you, and that's only possible by grace through faith in Jesus Christ.

So, as I write in the book, this year, before you resolve, you need to relax into what is true of you in Jesus Christ. You're already loved unconditionally. You're already chosen sovereignly. You already have every spiritual blessing in Christ.

Pardon me. What this does is this takes the focus off of you and your performance and onto God and his provision. And again, this is very, very personal for me.

I've told some of you before, I used to live like this. I am gonna be a better husband and father this year. I'm gonna be better, I'm not gonna fail again. I'm just gonna put my nose to the grindstone.

What's the problem with this? What word do every single one of these sentences start with? I, it's all about me, my strength, my willpower. So really, this is really rooted in insecurity, isn't it? Because it's all based on the implied reality is, well, I keep failing. So I'm gonna just try harder this time.

So essentially these are sort of hopeless vows for my future. But when I start instead with God, God loves me, God empowers me, God shows me, then it's based on a foundation of security because what's the first word in every one of these sentences? It's God.

The source of power is God and not me. And in my experience, this shift changes everything. My wife used to tell me when I was in this phase of my life, you are the most guilt-oriented person I know because everything really was focused on me and my performance and how I'm failing and how I need to do better when it shifted.

This was a big shift for me. This is what I thought Christianity was, essentially. Like you accept Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior, but after that moment, it's all just back to up to your own self effort again.

But when I understood finally that no, it's a shift to this, that's what finally changed my life and honestly gave me so much more joy than when I lived that guilt-oriented existence. Because then you're more gracious to yourself when you fail too.

You've got to be rooted in grace You not only want a grace, guilt can work for a while to get you started. But to keep changing if you're guilt motivated, you have to keep feeling guilty. And that's a miserable place to live.

Keep feeling convicted all the time. But to change from a grace motivation, man, that just gives you so much joy. Well, I could go on for hours and hours about grace, but I've got three more points to get to.

So very quickly, there's a second crucial key to lasting change, and that's reflect Godly models. Reflect the lives of Godly role models that inspire you. Paul says, verse five, pardon me, you know how we lived among you for your sake.

You became imitators of us and of the Lord Jesus. Find people to imitate. This is so crucial to lasting change. I do this all the time.

Sometimes when I feel like quitting or making the wrong choices, I think of what would Jesus do, but I also think of what would a human being do that I honor as being a very godly person. Honestly, the person that the last couple of years I've been thinking of most often is an elderly woman who goes to this church named Edna Mae Kibbey.

And I think, what would Edna Mae do? And that's how I'm turned from really responding to life sometimes the wrong way. And I go, now Edna Mae, she'd respond this way. She's such a gracious Christ-like woman.

Now, here's the thing. You have got to be very intentionally about choosing who you're going to imitate, or you will accidentally end up imitating whoever it is you're watching or reading or listening to.

Even if you are opposed to them, even if you're disgusted with how crude or crass certain celebrities or whatever are, if you're looking at the clickbait of their latest outrageous behavior because that's what's being driven to your newsfeed, you are still allowing their behavior to pattern your brain.

And you're going to start acting like the very people that you love, your character will be like theirs, even in opposition to them, because that's what you're looking at. So you've gotta be very deliberate about this. Expose your brain to the best.

Don't constantly expose your brain to the worst. And another great way to do that is to get your day started every single day I read in great start. Again, that's free, right?

Then the third key to a start that really lasts is I need to learn to reframe my troubles. Refrain not deny. I'll never forget a conversation I had with a trauma recovery expert at Stanford University who also worked at the Palo Alto VA hospital.

And what I always like to do when I'm talking to people that are experts in their field as I ask them, what does a lay person not know about your field? What do lay people kinda get wrong or miss?

And he said when it comes to trauma recovery, he said lay people will talk a lot about post-traumatic stress. Post-traumatic stress, PTSD, he said it's real.

But he said what I never hear anybody talk about is what I call post-traumatic success. Post traumatic success. I said, what do you mean by post traumatic success?

He said, what I see at the VA hospital all the time is veterans who've been through really tough things in their lives, but they frame them as, yeah, but that turned me into a better person. That was a wake up call for me. That was a catalyst for positive change in my life.

And when he said that, I realized that as a pastor I hear this all the time, hundreds of times. I've heard people say, well, that illness or their time in prison or in jail or the loss of a loved one or a divorce or a job loss or a financial disaster, a stroke, a cancer diagnosis could be any trauma.

But they say, it was awful. But that actually brought me to Jesus or changed the course of my life for the better.

In fact, if that has ever happened to you, could you just slip up your hand right now and just leave those hands up and everybody else look around. Look at this field of raised hands. Let that be a testimony to you that God can work.

Look at this verse. Paul says, "You welcomed the message in the midst of severe suffering with the joy given by the Holy Spirit." How did the Thessalonians have joy? Even in the midst of all that suffering, I described.

Well, I think I found a hint. You know, every chapter of First Thessalonians ends with a reference to the Second Coming of Christ. Every single one, including the end of chapter one here, Paul talks about how they wait for his son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead, Jesus, who rescues us from the coming wrath.

Every chapter has an emphasis on this. So they knew everything's eventually somehow going to be all right. This captured their imaginations. This was how they framed history.

In fact, earlier I mentioned that Caesar's mausoleum that had been made into a church. If you go inside and look at the very ancient art on the walls, every single painting in Bozeic in there is about one subject, the second coming of Christ.

Do you see Christ coming in the clouds of glory here in this one? Or they even use symbols like the phoenix, which was a symbol of resurrection, or you see Gabriel announcing the return of Jesus Christ, every single chapter in the book, every single piece of art in their church, I think this is why they had joy and suffering.

Now, some of them went a little bit overboard with end times thinking as we will see in this series. Paul has to correct some of them. They weren't perfect, but they knew there was one more key to really lasting change. And that's number four, realize I'm setting an example for others.

That is super motivating when it comes to you making right choices about anything in your life. It's not just for you, it's also for everybody who's watching you. It's very motivating.

Look what Paul says in verse seven. And so you became a model to all the believers in Macedonia, northern Greece, Achaia, southern Greece, the Lord's message rang out from you. Not only in Macedonia and Achaia, your faith in God has become known everywhere.

He says, "We don't even have to talk about it. "Everybody else is talking about it. "We don't need to say anything about it." They themselves report what kind of reception you gave us, how you turned from God to idols to serve the living God. Everybody knew their testimony.

Everybody was talking about these Thessalonians. Now they weren't perfect. If you are, whether you're a veteran believer, whether you're one of those 325 new believers here at church, you might be thinking, "But I can't really be an example. "I can't really serve God, "can't really serve at church, go on a mission trip, whatever." Because I don't know a lot of Christian doctrine.

I'm young in my faith. They didn't know a lot. Remember how much education they had in Christian, how long was Paul with them before he had to leave? Three weeks. They didn't know a lot, but they knew the basics.

God loved the world so much, he sent Jesus not to condemn the world, but to save the world, and now he calls us to love our neighbors. We can overcomplicate the Christian message, it's actually pretty simple.

So don't give up, you can't live your life as an example to others. Maybe you're just three weeks in, like the Thessalonians. You can still live your life as an example to other people.

And knowing that is going to propel you forward. My stepdad, who ended up being a minister as his career, he said one of the best things that happened to him was the day he became a Christian in a church in Tennessee.

The pastor said, great, now I'm gonna put you into our children's ministry as a volunteer during one of our services. Day one, learning, I'm an example now to these kids. That propelled his faith forward, and that's what happened to the Thessalonians as well.

And keep doing it even if it feels like it's not having a positive effect. I'll close with this story. There's a well-known Christian speaker named Ken Davis who I've had the privilege of meeting.

He said he was sitting in church when he heard an announcement about how the church was starting a program for men to mentor fatherless young boys. And all the kids in the video were little and cute, so he decided he'd sign up for the program.

He gets his assignment, he reads the application form the kid filled out. Ken's dreams were like of a cute third grader, and instead he got a teenage Satanist. Literally. The questionnaire asks, "Favorite sport?" This teenager scrawled, "None." Hobbies, "None." Greatest strength, "None." He only answered two questions differently.

Name, Josh Blay. Favorite music, Death Metal. Josh's father had been sent to prison for life as mom was trying to raise four kids alone and Josh was in trouble. But Ken starts hanging around with him.

For two years, has him over for meals, on some vacations, But no deep discussions, no heartwarming conversion. One night the phone rings, it's midnight, it's Josh. Can I come over and use your computer? Turns out he was late writing a report that was due the next day for school.

So Ken's angry, he keeps it to himself, right? And he drives to Josh's house, brings him over, says, you know, I'm going back to bed, call me when you're ready for me to check your work, he goes to sleep. Couple hours later, Josh wakes him up, Can you proofread this?

Ken reads the first three lines and bursts into tears. Here's Josh's report. The person I admire. The person I admire is my mentor Ken Davis. He teaches me things I didn't know. He teaches me to do better in school by giving me $20 for every bee.

He thinks I can do better than I think I can. Sometimes Ken has found me jobs to help me help my family. I met him through a church program that I didn't wanna do but my mom made me.

So instead of putting the truth on the application I put down all this satanic stuff so nobody would pick me. My plan almost worked, but I'm glad Ken stuck with me. Without him I'd probably be getting into a lot of trouble.

In conclusion, I respect Ken for all the things he does and for the many things he has taught me. Josh Blay, period three. Don't give up. You're an example to people whether it seems like it's working or not.

So you're not perfect, So you don't have all the answers. Neither did the three weeks old in Jesus Thessalonians. But you know God loves you, you know God loves them. You love God, that's really all you need to know.

And spending five minutes every day soaking in that is going to change your life and it's gonna change the life of everybody around you. And in the next four weeks, we're gonna find out even more keys to a great start.

Let's pray together, would you bow your head with me? I just wanna invite you to pray in your heart these words, "Lord, I just wanna give you my year, every day of it, "and I want to start it intentionally "with this keystone habit of being in your word every day.

"I want your truth to be my frame for how I see the world." So help me to root myself in grace to follow good role models, to reframe my problems, to be a good example to others.

But mostly, help me start not by resolving, but by resting in your grace, which comes through faith in Jesus. And it's in His name I pray. Amen.