In order to rightly orient my thinking to see how I can best use my teaching and writing gifts this month, I’m finding it helpful to look back on what the Lord taught me in 2025. I’m going to divide up the specific things he taught me into categories such as Personal, Societal, and Church, so we can better file these insights into our minds. I hope that what I learned this past year will teach you how to become a better follower of the Lord Jesus in the beginning of the 2,026th year of our Lord.

Personal Lessons

            I see myself as more sinful, but the Lord as more forgiving

I learned this past year that I’m more sinful than I realized, but that God’s grace is more lavish than ever. He taught me that I have more weaknesses than I perceive in myself, and that I must be on a constant watch to guard myself against temptations. Prayer, as always, came to be more valuable and needed than previously.

I see myself as more useful to God, and Him as more able to use me

On the flip side, the Lord also revealed to me that I have the ability to do more good than I realized. As selfish, weak, prideful, and pathetic as I often am, the Lord has still equipped and empowered me to do increasing good in this world for the spread of the gospel, and the equipping of the saints. He enabled me to start an extensive evangelistic ministry at a local college, to teach the Bible to some young men who attend there, and to disciple even more young people through a young church group and my weekly Bible study. I also ramped up my writing, and was able to reach my bus driving co-workers and clients with the truth.

I see my church family as more valuable, and our encouragement of each other as more needed

This year also gave me many instances of the goodness and life-giving character of my church family. I can honestly say that we’ve grown in our love, appreciation, and encouragement of each other through the year. And the Lord has also shown me how I often miss opportunities to encourage, comfort, warn, and learn from my brethren in Christ. My devotion to their conformity to Christlikeness is greater than ever.

I learned that I can still learn to do things that I never imagined myself doing in the recent past

This year, I learned how to drive busses, and earned my Commercial Driver’s license, so I could take jobs as a school bus driver. This is an occupation I never thought I would do, but now it looks like my money-making career in the immediate future. And it’s the most enjoyable technical job I’ve ever done. However, this won’t lessen my vision to eventually become a full-time teacher, author, and biblical educator. Do what the Lord puts in front of you, but continue to use every opportunity and gift you have to serve others according to truth.

I recognized more of the dangers and degradation of social media and the Internet

Finally as part of my personal lessons from the Lord, He showed me that I’ve been far too dependent on social media and the Internet for my social engagement and intellectual stimulation. Whereas I used to immediately resort to Facebook during mealtimes alone, I’ve now developed the habit of perusing encouraging and inciteful Christian blogs and journals instead. I’ve found that the Facebook news feed rarely satisfies my hunger for social engagement, and almost never interact with people on that platform. As part of my intellectual and social development, and my education in what believers are thinking about and dealing with, I’ve found it helpful to survey the leading writing influencers and thought-leaders in the online evangelical world. Facebook is now mainly a platform for sharing my insights, writing, and recommended resources with the people I’ve befriended in the past. My social life is now oriented around my real-life friends, church family, Bible study students, and immediate family. I’ve given up trying to develop deep relationships with people through the standard social media.

Societal Lessons

The Constitutional and Christian Principles of the first United States are worth promoting, practicing, and defending

            In terms of lessons about the society I live in, the Lord led me to the realization that the U.S.A. is still the most biblically aligned nation in the world, and that its foundational principles on which it was established must be protected and recovered at high cost. I was reminded by the Trump presidency, the anniversary of the start of the American Revolution, and by the national response to Charlie Kirk’s assassination that this country still has beautiful, righteous, and biblical qualities built into its traditions. Obviously, American society is largely depraved, degraded, and disordered, but the increased promotion of constitutional conservative values, beliefs, and practices shines a ray of hope on this dark land. That’s mostly politically speaking, but there’s even more to be encouraged by societal trends that we saw in 2025.

I saw that the Lord is in the process of preparing Americans for another great awakening

            Like many believers, I noticed with optimism the dramatic rise in public interest with Christianity, the Bible, Jesus, and the gospel. Prominent public figures, such as Russell Brand, Joe Rogan and Jelly Roll (most recently), have given generous praises to biblical Christianity and the gospel. And as part of this, we also saw a surge of conversions and preaching on public colleges and universities this year. One of the evidences of this is that the generation of 20-something’s has increased in church attendance within the last year, and that specifically with young men. The Lord has been awakening and converting many people in the U.S., and I see this as a preparation for the body of Christ to mobilize for evangelism, and reap a harvest of souls comparable to that of the First Great Awakening of the 1700s.

            In addition, I’ve seen firsthand that 20 year-olds are rising to roles of service and evangelism in their churches and general communities. There’s a generation of young believers that are being equipped to disciple and lead succeeding generations of Christians.

            I saw that one of the means for strengthening American Christianity, conscience, and culture is to learn from the traditional American values and traditions that upheld biblical standards.

            Finally for my 2025 realizations about society, I saw that I and God’s children in the U.S. need to model and encourage the traditional American values that were engendered by the biblical Christianity once widely practiced by its people. What are some of those values? First of all, raising strong, loving, and productive families. This starts with the body of Christ honoring marriage among all, and teaching young people to grow up and set up to be able to marry young, and raise several children. Second, I saw that appreciating your local heritage and culture is also important to preserve the biblical beliefs and customs that our American forefathers once sincerely believed with conviction. This means being happy with the ways you were taught and raised according to the local culture you grew up in. For me, this means enjoying the outdoors; stewarding wildlife and the land through hunting, fishing, and gardening; and staying in touch with the communities that you grew up around. In other words, we should seek to develop strong local neighborhoods, communities, and businesses centered around our church fellowships. And this can now usually best be done in rural areas, not cities – unless Christians in cities can organize into small communities that are promoting biblical American values.

A final American value I want to mention is a diligent, productive, and vocational attitude. Basically, we need to follow and teach the Protestant work ethic that eventually made the U.S. the wealthiest, most prosperous, and healthiest nation in the world. This means recognizing, developing, and sharing your giftedness in the service of others’ needs. That is, wisely steward your gifts, abilities, and resources so that you can serve your neighbor, and promote the virtues and values of God’s kingdom.

Church Lessons

            I saw that smaller, intensely diligent churches, need to raise up strong, zealous, and wise leaders.
            This year further confirmed my belief that one of the main answers to the disorder, compromise, and confusion of the majority of North American churches is for the more biblical, smaller assemblies of saints to lead the way in carrying out the New Testament teaching on Christian community and leadership. This will require that gifted men who are fit for the leadership office (aka “elder”) step up and use their gifts to shepherd, teach, oversee, and counsel their congregations. If we want to see a reformation of biblical discipleship, mentoring, training, and communing together, mature Christian men who have been convicted that the biblical model for church is far removed from the popular framework need to do all they can to equip the congregations under their care to demonstrate excellent Christian discipline, love and wisdom, to provide models for other less faithful bodies.
            I saw that uniting in prayer on a regular basis will be essential for corporate and individual growth in holiness.

            My Christian assembly prays for prayer requests every Sunday, but not in the intimate, communal, and concentrated setting that’s needed for deep prayerfulness and fervency. In the middle of December, we finally agreed to meet together on a Saturday for a focused prayer meeting, so we could pray for specific areas in our body life that needs the Lord’s guidance and empowerment. What followed was real change in our attitudes and plans for how we would work together to conform more closely to the apostles’ teaching. We are now on track to formally recognize elders, and we have decided to meet for prayer on the last Saturday of every month. If your church doesn’t have a designated prayer meeting, then you need to seriously consider if your prayer concerns are getting sufficient group attention in prayer. The prayer meeting is truly a necessity in most cases, at least as a part of your regular Sunday gatherings.

            I learned that specific attention usually needs to be given to intentional evangelistic efforts.

            In spite of my brethren’s love for the Lord and zeal for His glory, we’ve only seen a couple of confirmed converts within the past two years. I’ve learned that a focus on sharing the gospel and helping others to do so is almost always needed for local fellowships, since evangelism often doesn’t come naturally to believers in our culture. I believe that’s why Ephesians 4:11 says that the Lord gave “some apostles, and some prophets, and some evangelists . . . to equip the saints for the work of service.” The “evangelist” is a definite role in the body of Christ, and I’ve long seen myself as exercising its ministry to the saints. If our fellowships don’t specifically pray for salvations and evangelism, and talk about it in our regular conversation, then we’ll usually fall into complacency about making sinners into disciples.

In Closing

These are just some of the many lessons that the Lord taught me in 2025, and I look forward to living in light of them in 2026. I hope you can resonate with most of these lessons, and that you’ll be diligent to grow in your discernment, so you can choose the best decisions for the Lord’s glory, and your good.

By the way, based on the last lesson in this article, I’ve been working on a new overview of New Testament evangelism that I plan on publishing by the end of January. Until then, you can go to bearingchrist.blog for tons of devotionals and Bible studies, and look up my most recent book, The New Testament Revival of Western Christianity on amazon.com.

Until the next article, keep knowing Jesus more and the power of His cross, until you see Him.