Becoming Your Best Me In 2023!

Becoming Your Best ‘Me’ In 2023

MGCC – welcome to the year 2023, I’m glad you made it!

Happy New Year!

AND LISTEN – there is no better place to be to kick off the very first day new year, than in His House... AMEN?!

A few Scriptures as we begin...

For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well... Your eyes saw my unformed body; all the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be. – Psalms 139:13,14,16

For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future. – Jeremiah 29:11

For we are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do. – Ephesians 2:10

QUESTION...

Whose workmanship are you?

Your friends? Your spouse? Your parents? Yourself?

UNDERSTAND B/S – you are not ‘your’ workmanship; your life is not your project. Your life is ‘God’s’ project.

God thought you up. He created you.

And He knows who you are intended to be, and what you are intended to do?

Get It?

NOW – this morning... the first day of the new year (Happy New Year!)... BTW – did you know that the January the first will not be on a Sunday again until 2034...

MGCC – today as we begin a new year together, we are going to unpack a conversation, that I am calling...

Becoming The Best ‘ME’ in 2023

Prayer

QUESTION... – 12 am this morning, when the…

• The ball dropped in Times Square

• The peach dropped in Atlanta

• The giant 400 lb. peep dropped in Bethlehem, PA

• The huge chunk of cheese dropped in Plymouth, WI

• The pickle dropped in Mt Olive, NC

• The massive potato dropped in Boise, ID

• The guitar dropped in Memphis, TN

• The stuffed muskrat wearing a top hot and bowtie named Marshall P. Muskrat dropped in Princess Anne, MD

AND – everyone cheered, shouted and celebrated.

DO YOU - think that anyone who was shouting ‘Happy New Year’ was hoping that their 2023 would be one of their worst years ever? Of course not.

INSTEAD – they (like us in this room/online) were hoping that the year 2023... would be a great year, the best year ever.

QUESTION... of the billions who shouted ‘Happy New Year’ what percentage do you think will actually have one, have a Happy 2023?

NOW – one of the things that people do in an effort to make the new year better, is they make news years resolutions.

Ever made any? Are you making any for 2023?

NOW - the tradition of the New Year's Resolutions goes all the way back to 153 B.C., when Janus a mythical god of early Rome was placed at the head of the calendar.

Janus was the god of beginnings and transitions… and presided over passages, doors, gates and endings, as well as in transitional periods such as from war to peace.

He was usually depicted as having two faces looking at opposite ways, one towards the past and the other towards the future.

Over time Janus became the ancient symbol for resolutions.

OKAY...

BUT - whatever the history is, we all know that January the first, is the time that many people make new years resolutions…. (~ 60% of Americans make them)

So, what are we all wishing for in 2023?

Here are some of the top New Year's resolutions according to a recent survey….

QUESTION – are there any of yours on the list?

NOW - statistics indicate that…

• 60% of Americans will make them

• after only week, almost 25% of us have bailed out on whatever it was we had resolved to do;

• after a month, more than 80% have given up;

• and by years end only 8% actually kept them.

Reasons for failing to keep them

• 35% set unrealistic goals

• 33% did not track progress

• 23% forgot about them

• 10% made too many resolutions

There is an old Irish toast that says, “may your trouble in the coming year be as short as your New Year’s Resolution.”

BUT LISTEN - even though people fail to keep them (at a pretty massive rate) most people still keep making them… Why?

I THINK BECAUSE - there is something in us that looks forward to new beginnings, do-overs and fresh starts, isn’t there?

YEAH - there is something deep within us that...

• desires change, longs to reach higher and

• dreams of a better more fulfilling life