Photo cred: Jill Heyer

Written by: David Hood

Every year I ask God for direction for the year ahead for our church. In the past, He’s given me phrases like “go back to the basics” and “go deeper”, or words like “more” and “faithfulness”. This year I sense Him wanting me to pray that 2024 would be a year of growth and breakthrough in the presence of God and in community for our church, individually and collectively.

What does this mean?

Growth- The Christian life is about being re-connected through faith in Jesus to the love of God, and then growing every day in our experiential knowledge and understanding of God’s love for us, and living in that love in a way that transforms us. God’s love is transformative. It grows our love for Him, our love for ourselves, our love for other people. It heals our brokenness and restores us to who we were meant to be; who we were created to be. Through His love, we become like and live like Jesus in the world, which then carries with it the potential to change the world. None of this happens overnight or quickly. It is a slow, incremental process that takes our entire lives on this earth from the moment we entrust ourselves to Jesus, and it is often painful. But it is beautiful and the very best life. We must never settle but always be growing. This is what God wants for us and He will give us everything we need to persevere.

Central to our journey of growth is breakthrough. We will need to have several breakthroughs in our lives to truly grow.

Breakthrough- Oftentimes in our lives there are things, frequently unbeknownst to us, that block God’s love from doing its good and beautiful and perfect and complete work in us. There are things that keep us from experiencing all of what God has for us; things that prevent or hinder our growth and maturity, and we need breakthroughs. 

• There are lies we believe. False narratives that we’ve picked up along the way that we’re living out of and that distort our view of God, ourselves, others, and the Christian life. 
• There are people we haven’t forgiven. We don’t know if we can forgive them. We don’t know how to forgive them. 
• There are traumas and losses we’ve endured that we’ve never acknowledged their impact or processed how they have affected us and our view of God, ourselves, and others. 
• There are sins we are refusing to confess and bring into the light because of fear and shame. 
• There are sins we have confessed, perhaps hundreds of times, but we still don’t actually feel forgiven. The unconditional, all-encompassing love of God hasn’t penetrated down to the deepest parts of our shame and regret and we still live with persistent self-loathing and self and/or demonic condemnation. 
• There are generational strongholds, curses, and sin patterns that have been passed down to us and are entrenched in us, addictions, abuse, sexual immorality, insecurity, fear, manipulation, anger, and others that we haven’t broken free from. We’re repeating the cycle. 
• There is territory that we’ve ceded in our lives to demonic control and influence and we haven’t had that “habitable space” reclaimed for Jesus in the name of Jesus. 

I like the way Rob Reimer talks about it. Our soul is like a suitcase or container. There is limited space and the more our souls fill up with unconfessed, unprocessed, and undealt-with issues, the less room there is for God. We don’t have the capacity for more of God. We hit a ceiling and we never go any higher and His love never goes any deeper and we just stall and stagnate and in some cases, we wither or regress.

If we don’t become aware of and acknowledge certain things in our suitcase, or bring our God-given tools to bear on certain things in our suitcase, they will remain and we won’t enter the fullness of what God has for us. 

There are a lot of Christians who are doing alright. They’re OK. They’re not as bad as they were or could be. Christian principles help them navigate certain aspects of their lives. But they aren’t thriving, full of the Spirit, full of the love of God and the joy of the Lord, living with power, and while they’re at church every Sunday and have a lot of Bible knowledge and serve in a variety of ways, they’re immature, unhealthy, and still enslaved to insecurity, fear, anger, jealousy, envy, bitterness, resentment, people pleasing, lust. God wants so much for us. 

But how do we get there? 

We need the presence of God. We cannot change without being with God. As Jesus says: I am the true vine…Remain in Me, and I in you. Just as a branch is unable to produce fruit by itself unless it remains on the vine, so neither can you unless you remain in Me. 5 “I am the vine; you are the branches. The one who remains in Me and I in him produces much fruit, because you can do nothing without Me. 

This is Christianity 101, but we need to keep coming back to it because we are weak and forgetful and sometimes pridefully deluded that we are the exception to the rule and somehow built differently and better than other people.

We cannot produce the fruit, the harvest, of becoming more like Jesus and living like Jesus without Jesus Himself; without His transformative power and presence. We need to be doing the things that keep us deeply connected to Him and drawing His life into ours- Scripture, prayer, silence, solitude, fasting, sabbath, community, service, etc… 

Build without Jesus and it will crumble. You cannot do spiritual things without the Spirit. Religion without the Spirit is dangerous. Our lives need to be informed, shaped, motivated, and fuelled by Jesus, regularly and consistently. We can’t miss this. We can’t sideline this. We can’t put this on the back burner (when I have time, I’ll get to it). We can’t make this the thing we take off our overly full to-do list to create capacity and margin. This is the most vital part. This is everything. Everything else is nothing without this. Don’t neglect this. We need to be with Jesus. It is unbelievably hard in our noisy, busy, frenetic culture, and the enemy will throw everything he can at us to keep us distracted, but we have to fight for it. Our life depends on it. 

We need community. We need each other. Why? 

• Because God often speaks to us through others. God works through us talking and processing things with others.
• Because community is often where we become aware of the stuff in our suitcase. Community is where we have the reactions and feelings that show us that something is off. We’re not OK. Something is going on inside of me. Community confronts us with our pride, selfishness, pettiness, irritability, impatience, anger, insecurity, fear, defensiveness, and idolatry, all of the symptoms of a deeper sickness. And as uncomfortable as this is, it is the grace of God revealing where there is brokenness.
• On the other side, community is where we can tangibly see that we’re getting better, like when we’re able to acknowledge our negative feelings, know why they are there, work through them, and respond more like Jesus.  
• But most importantly, community reminds us that we’re not alone. We’re not alone in struggling. We’re not alone in our doubts, our fears, our temptations, and our difficulties, and we can come around each other and pray for each other and lift each other up. Community is unbelievably hard, but it is worth it and we have no hope of making it without it. 

We cannot experience growth without breakthroughs, and we cannot experience breakthroughs and then growth without the presence of God and community. And so, my prayer for all of us for this year is that we would prioritize the presence of God and community so that we might experience (or start to experience) the breakthroughs necessary and truly grow in the love of God and enter into the fullness of what He has for us. 

May we have the power to understand, as all God’s people should, how wide, how long, how high, and how deep his love is. May we experience the love of Christ and be made complete with all the fullness of life and power that comes from God, that through his mighty power at work within us, He might be able to accomplish infinitely more than we might ask or think.

Amen.