I love the New Year for the fresh start it gives us on setting goals and making life adjustments. But in all our preparing and planning, it’s good to remember that our lives belong to God, and we are simply stewards—managers—of what He has entrusted to us.

The average tenure for pastors and assistant pastors is somewhere between three to seven years. There are many reasons why pastors and assistants move on. We cringe to hear of the bad reasons, but sometimes ministry transitions are good for all parties involved.

Here are 15 tips drawn from biblical principles to improve your home that I have found helpful and trust will be a blessing to you.

At the start of a new year, we make goals, resolutions, or commitments. And we sincerely want to transform them into reality over the coming months.

God has put the theme of reaching forth in my heart for 2017. He has many blessings in store for us in the new year!

The final days of the year are some of my favorite—they always have been. There are many reasons that this is the case, including Christmas and extra time with family. But, more recently, this time of the year has become one of my favorites because I have found it to be a time of reflection and preparation for the new year.

If planning counts as productivity, the week between Christmas and New Year’s is my most productive! This is my week for setting goals and planning out the “big rocks” in my calendar for the coming year.

When my son, Matthew, was about nine, he started asking for a puppy of his own. Although we already had a dog, it wasn’t “his own,” and Matt really wanted a personal pet.

“I love to tell the story of Jesus and His love,” declared the songwriter, Katherine Hankey.

We recently had our annual Christmas musical at Lancaster Baptist Church. The amount of work put into these productions is staggering—not just in the thousands of hours given by the choir, orchestra, and drama teams, but also the thousands of invitations given out all across our community in the weeks preceding the musical.