2019—A Year in His Presence

Happy New Year! I don’t know how you rolled into this new calendar year…beat up, battered, and bruised from 2018 or excited, full of joy, and ready for another 12 months with a clean slate…but we all got here, somehow and someway. We’re here now, and we all have the same opportunity ahead of us…a new year with new beginnings filled with new opportunities and new hope.

I, for one, am so excited to dive into this new year, especially with all of you in this Neue Thing community. As a ministry, we sit smack dab in the middle of our 7th year…seven years of pursuing the Lord through His Word and with each other! Seven years of discipleship and growth and community. Seven years of God’s hand of favor and faithfulness all over this ministry. Seven years!

As I look back or “call to mind” as Jeremiah did in Lamentations 3:21, I can’t help but remember God’s steadfast love, His never-ending mercies, and His great faithfulness.

There can be such beauty in remembering the right things.

Isaiah 43:18 instructs us to not dwell on the past and to not remember the former things because verse 19 goes on to say “Behold, I am doing a new thing, and now it springs forth!” Neue Thing was built on this verse. It’s the biblical foundation for who we are a ministry, and I love how it is preceded by verse 18.

So which is it? Remember and call to mind or do not dwell on the past? Well, it’s both. Remember God’s faithfulness in the past, and when you look to the past, do so with the pursuit of finding His presence there, not to rehearse your pain or your circumstance. See the difference? Is your aim and your pursuit Him, just Jesus? Because when we choose to remember Him, everything else comes into the Light of who He is. Our perspective of our circumstances changes in the pursuit of His presence.

This leads me to this new year together as the Neue Thing community. We are going to pursue His presence this year. We’re going to run after Him. We’re going to steep ourselves in His Word. We’re going to memorize Scripture. We’re going to study the Bible together. We’re going to dive in deep because as far as I’m concerned, there’s no other way to do it than going all in with Him.

What do you have to look forward to this year with Neue Thing? I’m so glad you asked! For starters, we are doing a Bible Verse Memory Challenge this year, our very first one as a ministry, and I would so love for you to be a part of this with us. Every Monday, I will be posting that week’s memory verse on Neue Thing’s Instagram and Facebook, so make sure to follow us there! We will pursue the presence of God through memorizing His Word in 2019, one verse each week, totaling 52 verses by year’s end! I am so excited about this! Who’s with me?

Next, we have prepared a Bible study calendar for the blog this year, and we’re going to start by studying three “Little Books” of the Bible in depth. For the first three months of 2019, we’ll be diving deep into the “Little Books” of Jude, Philemon, and 3 John…Little Books with a Big Message. I hope you’ll join us in this further pursuit of His presence this year through the in-depth study of God’s Word!

So, who’s ready? It all starts this coming Monday, January 7th with our first Bible verse of the year. The blog will be posted each Wednesday, and I’ll go Live on Instagram and Facebook each Thursday to do a short teaching on the content of both for that week. It’s going to be such a great year in the Word with you all! Let’s do this!