I believe it is important to set goals for the New Year. Jan. 1 is a new beginning with a clean slate. If we do not have goals, we will wander aimlessly. As someone has said, “if we aim at nothing we will hit it every time.”

Our goals for the coming year help us to see where we want to go, and give us a standard by which to judge our progress. These little accomplishments will add up to big achievements.

If we do not set realistic challenges, our goals will be too easy with no growth or too hard with no hope of reaching them.

Our prized trophies of life are what cost us the most.

Before setting our new goals, a review of past failures is needed. We need to determine why they occurred and what we need to do differently this time. Learning from our failures gives us wisdom through experience. We must have hope to reach our finish line or we will give up. Hope is our inner strength to be faithful to our ambition. As long as we have purpose we will be willing to sacrifice for our goals.

Be sure to include the Lord in your New Year’s resolutions. He is the wisdom leading us to the right choice. The Lord has created us and knows what is best for us. He has given us talents and gifts that we may not be aware of. In order to develop these, He will give us the desire to choose His direction. Please do not resist His leadership because we may miss out on life’s greatest opportunities.

His challenges for us may scare or make us uncomfortable, but He will supply the grace for our journey. Obtaining our goal is a learning process we apply to our lives to reach our next challenge. The sacrifice and devotion to reach our destination becomes more important than the goal itself. By obeying Him, we will have greater opportunities. I have personally found the Lord will take us out of our comfort zone causing us to have a greater dependency on Him. When He becomes our source, then nothing is impossible for us to accomplish.

By letting our goals be His, we will never have to go it alone. His fellowship is more rewarding than the achievement. The lessons learned along the way are what we draw from for our next goal in life.

STEVE CONWELL, pastor of Maranatha Baptist Church is heard mornings on WFLO and WVHL in “A Thought For Today.” His email address is SteveConwell@outlook.com.