Start Your New Year Jesus’ Way: 3 Pillars of Personal Growth

Start Your New Year Jesus’ Way Luke 2:41–52 What I like about New Year is that it allows me to start over again. It’s like a fresh new diary book to write another 365 pages of my dream journey. Whether you regard 2024 as a successful year for you or not, the new year gives you another starting point to renew your dream. Another thing I like about the New Year is that it marks a new milestone in an incredible miracle in history. Our calendar is a testimony to Jesus Christ. We often neglect the significance of the calendar we see every day. 2025 means it has been two thousand and twenty-five years since the birth of Jesus Christ, more or less. It’s a miracle because it was about a child born to a young peasant woman in an obscure town behind an obscure inn in a probably smelly manger. After his birth, his king tried to murder him, so his family had to escape to Egypt. He was a refugee kid. Even the town he grew up in later was so obscure that people in those days believed nothing good could come out of Nazareth. With all the obstacles and obscurity, this child broke human history into two parts: BC and AD—BCE and CE to make it politically correct. No matter how you call it, 2025 still points back to the birth of Christ. Each time you put down your signature, you refer to Jesus Christ by putting the date next to it. Even the atheist communists must make reference to him. Christmas is not just a joyful winter solstice celebration or a year-end commercial festival. We must not see it any less than the immense impact of an obscure child that divided our history into two parts. Each time I look at the calendar, I see the evidence of a miracle that only God could have done. As we prepare for the New Year and take another shot at life to make it more fruitful, I believe we can learn significantly from this divine child who has made the maximum impact in the world. This Sunday’s scripture lesson gives us a clue on how Jesus grew in three aspects of life: Wisdom, Maturity, and Charisma, which I call the three pillars of personal growth for maximum impact. According to Luke, that’s how the divine child grew up, and we can use these three pillars as our reference when making New Year's resolutions. Let’s check it out.