New Year's Sunday: Top Verses 2025

To see the full message, scroll to the bottom and click through.  

Our annual look at the most engaged Scripture verses online.** 

Understanding the Bible is not just memorizing helpful bits, or pretty poetry, or even powerful challenges; it is a journey—an adventure—of learning for a lifetime. 

Engaging with a single verse of Scripture should prompt us to dig deeper to discover where a given sentence fits with the other 30,000 verses in the Bible?  

To understand that, we ask ourselves two questions.  

  • What are the particulars? 

Who was this verse actually spoken to? Who said it and when? What was happening in the room? Who heard this person say it? How did they receive it? What did it mean to them? 

  • What is the pattern? 

How does this one sentence fit in with the rest of Scripture? Are there echoes of this idea in other places in the Bible? Are there contrasts or contraindications? 

______ 

Do not fear, for I am with you. Do not be afraid, for I am your God. I will strengthen you. I will surely help you. I will uphold you with my righteous right hand. Isaiah 41:10 

Sounds good! Amen! I'm down with that. Give me a big helping, yes please.  

That sounds awesome. It is encouraging. It is emboldening. It can give me courage to step out into what I believe God is calling me to do.  

But Isaiah wasn’t talking to me. They were recorded for my sake, but they were not spoken to me.  

  • Particulars: 

This message from God was delivered three or four thousand years ago, not to an individual, but to a nation in exile. The people of Israel had been conquered by Babylon. Generations before these words were recorded, thousands and thousands of their people had been taken into captivity. Ordinary people, the royal household, religious leaders, wealthy, poor had been taken away across the desert.  

The people who heard these words for the first time had been in captivity for generations. Most were not alive at the time when they had been taken from their home. Most of them had never seen Jerusalem.  

Those kinds of griefs, of frustrations, of uncertainties don't always fade with time. Or even with generations. Sometimes they get hooks in your heart, and they burrow. Become part of a people's identity, having lost their homeland and not knowing if they would ever regain it.  

And now—in their lifetime—they faced a new fear because their captors, Babylon, were under threat from another, stronger empire: the empire of Persia, under the leadership of Cyrus.  

Ultimately, that would be good for the Jewish exiles, but they didn't know that yet. The people who had enslaved them were in danger of themselves becoming enslaved. So what happens to Israel?  

This was God's message through the prophet Isaiah: a warning and a promise.  

The warning: Life was going to be tough. They would need to be strengthened. Need to be helped.  

The promise: God had a plan, and would not abandon them.  

  • Pattern: 

I found it interesting to reflect on the example we saw recently in the Christmas story.  

Joseph, son of David, don't be afraid to take Mary as your wife. For the child within her was conceived by the Holy Spirit. Matthew 1:28 

God's message to Joseph through that angel? Things are going to be tough. Things are going to be difficult. This is going to be hard work for you... but God has a plan.  

When Joseph obeyed, he received God's help. He received two more angel messages, neither of which begins, “Don't be afraid...” I think that's because Joseph had been strengthened. He was learning what he needed to learn: that God was here, and would walk him through no matter what. I think that maybe Joseph wasn't afraid anymore.  

Later, in Jesus' adult life, shortly before he left and returned to eternity, Jesus said something very similar to his disciples. 

Be sure of this. I am with you always, even to the end of the age, forever. Matthew 28:20 

He had spent the previous three years warning them that things were going to be tough, that their life of following him was not going to be easy, but he had a plan and he would never leave them.  

God tells us—along with Isaiah's friends and neighbours—time and time again through the recorded message of Scripture that we serve a God who is with us, who will strengthen us, who will help us, who will uphold us in his strong and righteous hand.  

Isaiah’s message speaks truth to us as well as to the Jewish people millennia ago: don't let fear stop you from being who he has called you to be. 

______

(**Note: we also looked at Jeremiah 29:11, and Romans 12:2. With thanks to YouVersion for their Top Verses for 2025) 

 


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