What Would Be Your One Thing?

This end-of-the-year sermon provides the setting for looking ahead to the new year. In looking back at the story of Jesus's childhood in Luke and how it parallels the story of Samuel from 1000 years earlier, we are encouraged to anticipate what will be discovered in the coming weeks and months as we explore the story of Jesus in the Gospel of Mark. But we are also encouraged by Hannah's prayer before Samuel's birth and in the prayers offered on behalf of the church in Colossae to take this consistent spiritual practice of the Church and deliberately make use of it over the course of 2024. What might we discover if we consider and regularly pray about one particular thing that we will trust God for in the upcoming year? What answers to such prayers might we see? And what might we find developing in ourselves as we do this?