The Only New Year’s Resolution That Matters
Proverbs 16:1-4
One Sunday while serving at Aldersgate UMC, we had a guest speaker from GA in town for an Evangelism Conference. His message could be summed up as this: to be an effective servant of God, you have to discover God’s will and participate in it. At the close of the service, as I was greeting people at the back door of the sanctuary, one of the members came up to me and said, “What ship did that guy just get off of? How can he stand up there and say what God’s will is. I just turned 50 and I have never known God’s will or would I ever pretend to be able to speak what God’s will is.” I knew this man well. He was one of our most active members and servants around the church. He was in church every Sunday, involved in a Bible study and served in several ministries. He was a good man, and a good husband and father. He had been a faithful Christian all his life. And yet somehow he thought he could never know God’s will for his life. My heart hurt for him that day because if we can’t know God’s will then what’s the point of being here.
My experience is that you can know God’s will for your life. It’s why I stand up before you every Sunday and serve God full-time as a pastor, because of His calling and will for my life. The yearning to know God’s will is one of the deepest yearnings of a person’s heart. And God seeks to meet that hunger and need in your life. The reality is God does have a plan for your life just as He has a plan of salvation for the world. So what is God’s will for your life? This is THE question of life. And it’s at the heart of our relationship with God because we want to do what’s right. We want to please Him and give him honor and glory with our lives. That’s what it means to love God. Anyone who loves God wants to know His will for their life. And yet it seems that the majority of Christians cannot say what God’s will is for their life.
This time of year, we begin thinking about New Year’s Resolutions. Lee Dye writes, “It’s that time of year again when we resolve to get off our duffs and run around the block more often, maybe even cut back on tall of those things which we know we aren’t supposed to eat, or drink or smoke. Ah yes, New Year’s Resolutions which for many of us should be called New Year’s Dissolutions. If you are one of the backsliders who breaks the first rule on your annual list before breakfast on New Year’s Day, you won’t find a lot of comfort in a new study by psychologists at the University of Washington. In a survey, the researchers found that most people keep the promise they put at the top of their list, at least for awhile. But here is the most interesting result of the survey. People are more willing to do something they know is right than give up something they know is wrong. 84% of those surveyed vowed to start doing something like exercising, which was the most common resolution of all. Only 14% vowed to give up something.” Then he offers these tips for keeping your New Year’s Resolutions:
Make only one or two resolution
Choose resolutions you’ve been thinking about for awhile
Choose to adopt a new good behavior rather than trying to shake an engrained bad habit
Choose realisitic goals you feel confident you can meet
If you don’t succeed, determine the barriers that blocked you and try again
Now I want to help you make the most important New Year’s Resolution you could ever make: to discover God’s will for your life. This morning I want to give you 5 words which will not only help you discover God’s will for your life but do it. The first word is process. In our fast food society, you need to realize that discovering God’s will is a process. It’s not something that just comes to us in a one-time event. We usually go through a 5 step process in discovering God’s will. First, we decide what we want to do and then tell God about it. A door may open or an opportunity arise and we take it without ever consulting God. The second step is that God responds by giving us a growing unrest within us and a lack of peace as you live into this decision you’ve made. Step three, I beg God to let me do it anyway. Step four, we finally give up, humble ourselves and begin to listen to God. We finally get to a point where we yield our spirit and our lives to God. Step five, God begins to reveals his will. Even when this happens, we have a tendency to test God. Claiming God’s will is a daily and life process.
Look at those five steps for a moment. We could really save ourselves a lot of time, effort and energy if we would skip steps 1-3 and go straight to steps 4-5. So the journey of discovering God’s will starts with humbling ourselves and yielding our spirits and lives to God.
Second is potential. The potential you have in doing God’s already lies within you, your spiritual gifts and abilities. If you know what those are then write them down on the outline this morning. But if you don’t know what your spiritual gifts are, there is no way you’ll ever know or discern what God’s will is. The calling and will of God for your life will always dovetail with the spiritual gifts of your life. There’s no such thing as a person who has a spiritual gift in one area and God’s will is for them to go in a completely different direction. When you serve in your spiritual gifts you’ll experience four blessings: you’ll be good at it, you’ll love doing it, you’ll have the opportunity to use them and you’ll touch other people’s lives. If you don’t know what your spiritual gift is then the first thing you need to do in the New Year is take our spiritual gifts class.
Third is purpose. God’s will not only fit your gift mix but it will give your life a purpose, desire and passion to see it accomplished. Psalm37:4 says, “Take delight in the Lord, and he will give you your heart's desires.: Taking delight in the Lord is not only seeking to know God’s will but wanting it fulfilled. And when we get there, our heart becomes aligned with God’s. Our sole desire is to do it, be it, live it all to the glory of God. I read an airplane magazine ad which said: “When you understand that you can change the world, your life can never be the same.” That’s a daunting statement. But here’s the Good News: God doesn’t want you to change the entire world, just the part of the world you live, your family, your oikos, your church and your community. That ad raises the question, “How? How can I change the world?” And the answer is by serving through your spiritual gifts. When your life becomes gripped with God’s call to make a difference in your oikos and your community, your life will never, ever be the same.
Fourth is priorities. When we seek to fulfill God’s will, you’re going to have to prioritize your life because the “good” becomes the enemy of “the best.” There are lots of good things you can be a part of in this world but the best is pursuing God’s will for your life. So you have to take the time to sit down and ask yourself what’s important in your life, what fulfills God’s will for your life and helps build the kingdom of God and where are you going to put your time, talents and treasures. Too often we have too many priorities in life. There’s the story of a family who moved back to the country and so they bought a cattle ranch. Some friends from the city came out 6 months later and asked, “What are you going to call the ranch?” The father said, “I want to call it the “Flying J”, my wife want to call it the “Suzy Q”, one son wants to call it the “Bar J” and the other son wants to call it the “Lazy Y.” So we compromised and decided to call it the “Flying J- Suzy Q- Bar J- Lazy Y.” The friend looked over the expanse of land and asked, “Where’s your cattle?” And he said, “None of them survived the branding.” And that’s the way it is when we just keep adding things to our life rather than prioritizing our life. It’s eventually going to burn us and kill us.
Here are six questions to help you in prioritizing: Is it pleasing to God? Is it best for my marriage and family? Does it have eternal value? Will it influence others? Does it utilize my gifts? Will others join me in it?
Fifth is proceed. There’s a difference between knowing God’s will and doing God’s will. Too often we have limited the Christian faith and our spiritual growth to what we know. We think knowing God and even his will is enough. That’s where it starts but if that’s as far as you go, you will never accomplish God’s will for your life. But the Biblical record shows us something completely different. Every time God revealed His will to someone, they did it. When God calls, we need to be ready to go, trusting in His grace and wisdom for our lives. Too often, we want God to reveal the entire path of our lives for his will. In reality, he may only reveal the next few steps. God’s will is like a car with headlights. At night, you don’t say, “I can’t go home because I can’t see my house.” You get in, turn the lights on and drive as far as the lights extend. Then the light that you had on the road you just traveled now extend further rdown the raod. The light doesn’t move down the road unless you move. And so, it’s a process where we see God’s will for the next part of the journey and then we do God’s will. And when we do, then the next section of the path of God’s will is revealed to us. If we don’t move and go do God’s will, then we will never have the next steps of God’s will for our life revealed. When God reveals His will, you’ve got to then step out in faith and do it to make a difference in the world. Bear Bryant had a sign which hung in his locker room which read, “cause something to happen.” That’s what God is wanting us to do when He reveals his will for us: to cause something to happen.
You know why we don’t proceed in pursuing God’s will? Because we don’t think it’s clear enough. We want to see the entire journey but God just needs us to concentrate on what lies immediately ahead of us. The second reason we often don’t proceed is fear. We don’t think we’re good enough, skilled enough, strong enough or accomplished enough. And because of that, we’re afraid of failing. Let’s be very clear here: God is much more interested in obedience than he is success. God can take even the greatest ministry flop and use it in your life and in the building of His kingdom. There was a Garfield cartoon where he’s lying in bed, droopy eyes and thinking to himself: “One of my pet peeves is someone who never finishes what they start. I do not happen to be one of those people. My philosophy is to never start anything.” Many of us never start anything for the kingdom of God because we don’t think we can accomplish it. And the truth is: on your own, you can’t We fall into the trap of thinking, I’m just one person. This problem is so huge, there’s no way I could ever make a difference.
There’s the story of a young man walking along a beach after high tide. As far as the eye could, starfish had washed up on shore and were struggling for their lives. As he walked, he would bend over, pick up a starfish and toss it back into the ocean. An older gentleman came along and ask what he was doing. The young man responded: “See all the starfish on the beach, I’m trying to save them.” The older man scanned the beach and seeing 1000’s of starfish, said “Son, you really don’t think you can make a difference with all these starfish on the beach, do you?” There are 1000’s of them and only one of you.” The young man then bent over, picked up a starfish and threw it into the ocean and said, “I made a difference to that one.”
