Resoutions

Dear gracious and heavenly Father, thank you for today—a new year! Thank you for all you did in and through us in 2022. We are thankful and proud of our accomplishments, both individually and as a church, but…help us look forward toward the future. Give us the wisdom now to use the guidance You provided to us in the past to help us navigate the future. Above all, Lord, help us live for You every single day. Holy Spirit, open our hearts and minds to be receptive to what You have for us this morning; push me out of the way and speak through me. In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.

If you received my email on Thursday, you’ll know that I am not a fan of making New Year’s resolutions. I don’t need a new year to realize I should probably hit the gym or call my parents or brothers more often. No, those are things that I know I should do. When we put a stipulation on things that we already know we should do, for me, it becomes more frustrating and feels less attainable. We talked about promises a lot the few weeks leading up to Christmas. I love the promises of God and appreciate all He has done for me this year. I like the word promise more than I like resolution.

But it’s the new year and the term “resolution” gets tossed around quite a bit, so I wanted to address that this morning. What exactly does “resolution” mean? According to the dictionary, it means, “a firm decision to do or not to do something.” Okay, so it makes more sense when we look at the definition. But a “firm decision” kind of sounds like something that we have set in stone, right? Like, I made a firm decision to drive to church this morning. I’m here, I followed through. A resolution should be something that isn’t easily thrown out or quit. A poll in 2020 says that it takes just 32 days for Americans to ditch their resolution(s). Basically, by the first of February, gyms should be back to their pre-New Year’s capacity, people are biting their nails again, energy drinks are being consumed…whatever it is people resolved to start or stop ended up stopping or starting back up. That does not follow the “firm decision” definition.

So, this morning, I want to talk about a resolution we should have no problem keeping. There are a few areas we need to address before we get to the big ticket item of this message, so if you’ll indulge me for a moment, let’s get started.

We Can’t Live in the Past

There are times in our life when we might prefer to live in the past. Perhaps you had an amazing 2022 and want to continue to hang your hat on this past year. To be clear, I don’t think there is anything wrong with remembering our past accomplishments and failures, both of which we certainly were given an opportunity to learn from but living in the past won’t allow us to focus on the future.

I’ve sent a couple emails over the past week or so about how great 2022 was and what I believe God is calling us to do in 2023. If I continue to look at our collective accomplishments last year instead of focusing on where the Spirit is leading us in 2023, we won’t move very far and I wouldn’t be leading well. There are things that happened last year that I wish didn’t, but I’ve learned from those experiences and mistakes and resolve to move forward armed with those lessons learned so I can be better this year. To highlight this point, we are going to start off with Philippians 3:13-14 which says,

Brothers and sisters, I do not consider myself to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and reaching forward to what is ahead, 14I pursue as my goal the prize promised by God’s heavenly call in Christ Jesus.

What is Paul saying here? He did not regard himself as having obtained the final knowledge of Christ and the fullest conformity to him. So, one thing was the consuming passion of his Christian life. Using the metaphor of a footrace, Paul describes it as involving the continual forgetting of “what is behind” and the relentless centering of his energies and interests on the course that is ahead of him. “Forgetting” did not mean obliterating the memory of his past but was a conscious refusal to let it absorb his attention and impede his progress.

Now, what’s important here, among many things, is that Paul did not let his past get in the way of was ahead of him. I think there are a lot of different things in our own lives that we could easily allow to get in the way of our future. I’ll use myself as an example. All things considered, I think Grace Fellowship was pretty successful in 2022. I might define success a little differently than you, but all-in-all, we did pretty well. Our giving closely matched our obligations, our First Fruits was amazing (of which, about $20,000 was given to people in our community), we started new ministries, we began a Wednesday evening time of study…I could go on and on. I could also say, you know what, we did pretty well this year…why don’t we just do exactly the same thing we did in 2022 in 2023?