Real Hope: Aligning Our Heart With God'sSmakprov

Complete Joy

I love the new year. Staring down a fresh 365 days with a heart full of hope and a mind full of ideas. This year is a significant one because Luke and I will have been married for 20 years. As most marriages go, we’ve had significant ups and downs. It’s sometimes been easy and sometimes lots of work. Each year, we pause to look at what we want our lives to look like, feel like, be like now, in six months, in a year, in five years? As I look back, I can see the hardest times have been when we’ve started living out of alignment with each other – prioritising ‘me’ above ‘we’. In the end, we generally don’t end up doing the ‘me’ stuff well and meanwhile it’s cost us significant emotional energy dealing with the ‘we’ stuff.

In verse 11, John reveals a beautiful truth about Jesus’ hopes for us while we’re on earth. We know Jesus speaks only truth – He IS the truth. We know He loves us – He declared it in verse 9. So, when He says He wants us to experience complete joy, we can trust Him.

If I get to the end of the year, look back and see a year full of complete, deep-seated joy, I’ll consider it a year well-spent. So, how do we get it? Like a good marriage, seeing God’s heart for us fulfilled rests in us aligning our heart with His. As we follow His ways, such as to, ‘Be still and know that I am God’ (Psalm 46:10), and step away from the things that are not His best for us, such as, ‘Do not be anxious about anything, but… present your requests to God’ (Philippians 4:6), we move closer to His best for us. Therein lies His perfect joy, made complete. May you know His complete joy in the new year!

Written by SUSIE HOLT