This One Thing (Nehemiah 6:1-4, 15-16)

Happy New Year everyone! I hope you had some wonderful fun and relaxing time spent with your family and friends over the Christmas break. Isn’t it interesting that every New Year brings new resolutions, new beginning and new hope? Realistically, it’s just a flip of a calendar or “just another day.” But for some unknown mystical reasons that we tend to treat every start of a new year as a big deal, as if everything in the past is history and we can finally turn that page to new adventures. Therefore we make lots of resolutions, and we promise ourselves that this year is going to be different, that this will be the year I start to… or I will quit doing… and then we find ourselves back in the same old routine a couple months later.

The fact is we all make resolutions. And we all break resolutions. But if we’re really honest, there really is something in each of our lives—a habit, a relationship, a debt—that deserves our attention this year. What would it take for you to follow through with this one thing this year? So that next year comes you will say I did it! I finally did it! Today we will look at an Old Testament story of Nehemiah and draw out a lesson that can be the key to finally accomplishing the one thing we each need to put our mind to this year.

Moving Forward

You can do a lot of things this year. You will do a lot of things. But what’s the one thing you need to do?

What’s the one thing that will make an extraordinary difference in your life? Begin to do it today.

Discussion Questions
1. What New Year’s resolutions have you made in the past? Did you follow through on them?

2. Talk about a time at work or in your family life when you couldn’t focus on something important because your time was consumed by something else. How did the important thing suffer as a result?

3. After today’s message about focusing this year on the one thing that is most important, would you change your New Year’s resolution? What would your revised resolution be?

4. What urgent thing robs you of time to focus on your most important thing? What can you do to shift your priorities?

5. Who do you know that can hold you accountable for following through on the goal you set? What is the greatest barrier to asking that person to do so?