5 Ways to Grow Your Faith
You can grow your faith in 2024. Imagine yourself next year living with more peace, hope, and increased love towards God and other people. Listen to this great promise:
“Being confident of this, that He who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion…”
The fact that you are reading this is a sign that God is at work in your life, and you can be confident that what He has started, He will finish. Here are five simple decisions you can make to grow your faith in 2024:
1. Make Sunday worship the norm. Ever notice that when people travel home to a different part of the country, they bring back their old accent with them? Why? They were with their family, and they recaptured some of their family’s ways of speaking and ways of doing things. The Christian life is a family life, so be sure to show up to your family gatherings each week. Worship will connect you to God, community will strengthen your soul, and serving will give you practice in being like Jesus.
2. Commit to reading your Bible regularly. Along with worship participation, Bible reading is the practice that correlates the most with personal spiritual growth. If you don’t know where to start, try one of these ideas:
Read one chapter a day, starting in the New Testament or the Psalms.
Pick up a “One-year Bible” and try to read through the Bible in a year. Give yourself grace on the days that you miss.
Download the YouVersion app of the Bible and choose a Bible reading plan that fits your personal, spiritual need right now.
3. Add some structure to your prayers. Many people pray, but they don’t get the benefits of connecting to God because the experience gets jumbled up with thoughts, fears, anxieties and whatever else is going on in our highly-activated brains. A little structure, just like in any relationship, can turn prayer from a stream of consciousness to meaningful connection with our maker. Try this acrostic:
P-Pause –Take a moment to settle your heart and mind, relax your breathing and focus your attention on God. Read a passage of scripture, or recite a prayer like the Lord’s prayer, the Serenity Prayer (long version), or a verse you have just read or memorized.
R-Rejoice—Celebrate what God has done in history and what He has done in your life in the most recent days. This is a good way to use a journal to tangibly express your gratitude for the many ways you experience His goodness each day.
A-Ask—Express to God your concerns and your desires for your life and those around you. Be bold, and in this time, learn to trust that God is both very responsive and very wise in the way He cares for us and shapes our lives.
Y-Yield—Listen for the way God would want you to respond to Him, through what the scriptures say or a sense of conviction on the heart. Take a step of courage to trust what you hear. This could be surrendering an outcome close to your heart, obeying a directive that you know is from God or yielding to His way of getting His outcome in your life.
4. Find a spiritual mentor. Relationships are so powerful in shaping our lives. Many of us don’t have enough, or the friendships we have don’t bring the best out of us. If you found someone who has followed Christ longer than you, whom you learn from, make the decision to be around them. Join a small group with others seeking to grow their faith. The Bible says, “If we walk with the wise, we will become wise too.”
5. Practice generosity in a systematic way. Most of the world around us is teaching us to grab and hold. Jesus teaches us to give and to love. Find a ministry or church that you respect, and give to them every single month. Choose an amount of money that you would notice in your life, so that your heart is connected to God’s heart when it comes to resources. Our values are often reflected in where our money goes. Attach your heart financially to the great things God is doing every day through ordinary churches and ministries.
You can DO THIS! Remember, we overestimate what can happen in a week and underestimate what can happen in a year. Don’t try to do everything this month. Just choose one or a few of these key decisions and then hold to your decision. A farmer doesn’t look for a harvest in spring, they hold on and trust that the harvest is coming later. Every single one of us, can see our faith grow with one or two categorical decisions that we hold onto for 2024 but it will likely require a little patience and a little perseverance before the harvest shows up.
Would you like to talk to a pastor about how to grow your faith or overcome an obstacle in your life? Contact info@938.church and share your interest in speaking with a pastor and you can have a coach to help you take next steps to grow your faith in 2024.
