The Resolution
In his book, “Holy Sweat” Tim Hansell writes of a close friend who attended his 40 year high school reunion. For months he saved to take his wife back to the place and the people he’d grown up with. The closer the time came for the reunion, the more excited he became, thinking of all the wonderful stories he would hear about the changes and accomplishments these old friends would tell him. The night before he left, he pulled out his old yearbooks, read the silly statements and the good wishes for the future that students write to each other and wondered what ol’ Number 86 from his football team had done. He even tried to guess what some of his friends would look like, and what kind of jobs and families some of these special friends had. The day came to leave and Tim drove them to the airport. Their energy was almost contagious. “I’ll pick you up on Sunday evening, and you can tell me all about it. Have a great time.” When they returned, Tim watched them get off the plane and his friend seemed almost despondent. He almost didn’t want to ask, but finally he said, “Well, how was the reunion?” “Tim, it was one of the saddest experiences of my life.” “Good grief, what happened?” “It wasn’t what happened but what didn’t happen. It has been 40 years, 40 years!—and they haven’t changed. They had simply gained weight, changed clothes, gotten jobs…but they hadn’t really changed. And what I experienced was maybe one of the most tragic things I could ever imagine about life. For reasons I can’t fully understand, it seems as though some people chose not to change!”
That can happen to us too: relationally, emotionally and vocationally. But where it often happens is spiritually. Throughout my early appointments to churches I served, I used to ask people, “So how have you grown in your faith the past year?” The people would hem and haw and scratch their heads struggling for an answer and some sign or evidence of growth in their spiritually lives. It got so bad that I stopped asking the question. I think part of the issue is that it is so easy to put our lives and our spiritual journeys on cruise control. We get in the habit of attending church and a Bible study, giving a certain amount and even serving in one or more places in the life of the church but we never really take intentional next steps in our spiritual journey. And so in many respects, we just go through the motions, and even though they are good things, our faith can stall and we unknowingly stay the same people year after year. And yet, that is not what God wants for us. For Paul writes in 2 Cor. 5:17, "Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!"
This issue is not something new. 1 John 2:12-14 uses the analogy of the stages of human development for the three levels of faith.?The first level of development is as children. The Greek word he uses is literally translated “babies” meaning we begin as an infant in the faith. What is the first thing a child recognizes? His parents. A brand-new Christian realizes that he is a child of God. But just as toddlers try to mimic their parents, they try to mimic Jesus. Spiritual children know only the basics of the faith. The second level of development is a teenager. This level is strong in the Word of God and understands it but the challenge is in applying it and wrestling between what you want to do and what God wants you to do. The third level of spiritual development is as an adult. It’s one thing to know that you belong to the family of God and to know the word of God, but it’s another thing to know God intimately. Spiritual adults not only know the Bible, but they also deeply know the God who wrote it. Spiritual growth progresses from knowing you are a Christian to knowing about God and doing for God to knowing God personally and becoming like Him.
The writer of Hebrews speaks of our tendency to stall spiritually, “We have much to say about this, but it is hard to make it clear to you because you no longer try to understand. In fact, though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you the elementary truths of God’s word all over again. You need milk, not solid food! Anyone who lives on milk, being still an infant, is not acquainted with the teaching about righteousness. But solid food is for the mature…”
If we’re meant to be growing in our faith, how do you know if you’re growing spiritually? We’re given two good benchmarks in the New Testament. The first is when Jesus summarized the Jewish Law with “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.” So you can ask yourself: are you growing more loving toward God and others? Perhaps even more important is to ask the people closest to you because they can often see things we can’t see in ourselves. A fair question to ask is, ‘How is this helping me love God? How is this helping me have room in my heart this year for someone that I didn’t have room for in my life last year?’ Another set of benchmarks to measure spiritual growth is recorded in Galatians 5:22-34: the fruit of the Spirit. So you can ask yourself and those around you, are you becoming more loving, more joyful, more peace-filled, more kind, filled with more goodness, more faithful, more gentle and more self-controlled?”
Today begins the New Year and most of the time when we think about the New Year, the first thing that comes to mind is ____________ (New Year’s resolutions). We all make resolutions in January but by Mardi Gras, they’re usually forgotten. Lee Dye writes, “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.” Then he offers these tips for keeping your New Year’s Resolutions:
Make only one or two resolutions
Choose to adopt a new good behavior rather than trying to shake an engrained bad habit
Choose realistic goals you feel confident you can meet
If you don’t succeed, determine the barriers that blocked you and try again
So if you’re going to choose only two or three resolutions, what if one of them would be to grow spiritually in 2017? But how do you do that? One simple step. In 2007, Willow Creek Community Church concluded a multi-year study of 1500 churches to determine what actually helped people to become spiritually mature. Up to that time, they had been encouraging people to grow in their faith through worship attendance, participating in a small group Bible study, serving in ministry and participating in the programs of the church. Much to their surprise, the study revealed all of their spiritual activities and programs really weren’t helping people grow. Their growth model, in simplest terms, was that involvement in church activities and programs, over time, leads to growth…but for the most part, it just wasn’t happening! It does early on the spiritual journey but there comes a point when people stop growing spiritually and either keep going through the motions, become dissatisfied with church or even worse just drop out of church altogether. http://image.slidesharecdn.com/reveal-5237-lordoflifelutheranchurch-090810214645-phpapp01/95/reveal-results-29-728.jpg?cb=1249940848 And so in what became known as the Reveal study, they identified four stages of spiritual growth: Exploring Christ, Growing in Christ, Close to Christ and Christ centered. Then they asked what caused the movement or growth from one stage to the next. On the screen you will see the catalysts for spiritual growth they identified in each stage and when they compared them, they found one common thread through each of them: Bible reading and reflection on Scripture. Cally Parkinson and Greg Hawkins in their book, Move write, “Of all the personal spiritual practices—prayer, confession, tithing, journaling, solitude, serving or worship we find that one stands out. Scripture reflection—more than any other practice—moves people forward in their love for God and love for others... Scripture reflection has twice the power of any other spiritual practice to accelerate growth in spiritually mature people.” The Psalmist 2500 years ago agreed: “I have hidden your word in my heart that I might not sin against you.” Psalm 119:11 Paul writes to Timothy (3:16-17) “All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work." James 1:23-25 declares, " But the man who looks intently into the perfect law that gives freedom, and continues to do this, not forgetting what he has heard, but doing it - he will be blessed in what he does."
So today, we’re asking you to make a spiritual resolution to grow in your faith by committing to read Scripture every day through the E100 program. The E100 is a carefully selected list of short Bible passages -- 50 from the Old Testament and 50 from the New Testament and enables a person to get the big picture of the Bible without getting bogged down. The readings are usually one to two chapters in length and can easily be read in 10 minutes or less. It will provide the tools and resources to assist you in leading a Bible reading program that will have a profound impact on your spiritual growth. They say it takes anywhere from 21 to 66 days to form a habit. By the end of day 100 which will take you through Easter, you will have a new, good spiritual habit which will reap dividends beyond measure in your life.
Brian Hardin tells the story of traveling a lot for work with his friend Bobby. As they travelled, he’d read the Bible aloud to him. But he wasn’t reading the Bible to gain deep insights… or to solve theological quandaries. He was just reading it… yet even then, it often said something that got stuck in a corner of his mind and loitered there for days. Stuff like, “The person who plants selfishness, ignoring the needs of others—ignoring God!—harvests a crop of weeds. All he’ll have to show for his life is weeds! But the one who plants in response to God, letting God’s Spirit do the growth work in him, harvests a crop of real life, eternal life” Galatians 6:7-8 MSG. This was his life right there on the page, echoing prophetically over a couple millennia. It not only contextualized what he’d been experiencing; it gave him a north star and a measure of hope that he couldn’t rationalize but also couldn’t deny either.
Brian was working tirelessly at work but by the end of the year he found himself sitting alone on his couch, devastated. All the work he’d built had crumbled before his eyes in a matter of months, and now he was in a crisis of faith. As New Year’s approached, he tossed up a prayer about wanting to get closer to God, but it was all but forgotten by the 2nd week of January. Then God spoke to him to really read God’s Word and so he obeyed God’s direction and began to read through the Bible, taking in a portion of the Bible every day. When he completed his first full revolution through the Bible, he recalled one day looking in the mirror and realizing that he didn’t see anything the same. He had been unwittingly transformed from the inside out, and he looked at just about everything through different eyes. And then he writes, “My friendship with the Bible has taken me the scenic route from who I was to who I was created to be. My path began with an act of obedience to read the Bible every day, and it wound its way almost backward to the beginning, forcing me to deal with the stresses and compulsions of trying to carve out an identity that was mine alone with God relegated to a back-up plan. It took me back to the wounds that life can bring and invited me to compare what they were saying about me with what God was declaring over me. It (transformed me and it) can do the same for you.” My hope and prayer is that you will join me, the staff and the leaders of this church to grow spiritually by committing to read Scripture every day through the E100 program. Amen and Amen.
