Next Step #32 – Living in the Holy Spirit in the New Year!

Hi Everyone!  As we resume our weekly “Next Step” message, I want to urge each and all of us to live in the Holy Spirit in 2008. At worship this morning, we spoke of the importance of planning in our lives. We emphasized that as we plan we must make certain that God is the one we turn to in order to confirm or change our plans, before we implement them.  As we move into the second week of the New Year, remember that the Holy Spirit living in us is a sure means of letting God be in charge of our plans. As we have mentioned so often during our Next Step series, being filled with the Holy Spirit is an on-going experience in our lives, not something we do once. (See Ephesians 5:18) Thus, each and every day of 2008 we need to call on God to fill us with the Holy Spirit and, then we must let Him guide us.  How?  We let the Holy Spirit internalize God’s word in our lives. As we read the Bible, we must call on the Spirit to “write” it on our hearts, that we may remember it and live it. As we do that our plans will be lived out in 2008 to God’s glory and the advancement of His Kingdom.