A Focused Resolve

It is always interesting to hear what people are making resolutions about as the New Year is just around the corner. I have been guilty of making some difficult if not weird resolutions in the past. Like the following:

1. I resolve to win the lottery and if I do I’ll give most of it to my friends, family and charity.
2. I resolve to live in my own little world, because at least they know me here.
3. I resolve to not make any resolutions, because nobody is perfect.

I ran across a place on the Internet where you can make your new year’s resolutions online, and they will email you a monthly reminder of what your resolutions are. What I found interesting was seeing what resolutions people were making for 2012. Not surprisingly, exercise and dieting topped the list. Also near the top were things like becoming a better person and a better spouse.

How can we move beyond just making resolutions and begin creating solutions for our lives? We do it by working on the core issues of our lives instead of just making cosmetic changes. We have to go to beyond the symptoms to the source of our problems. Losing weight may only be a symptom of the core issue of a lack of self-control in your life (around which there may be many other symptoms).

Perhaps you are using food to sedate yourself. Controlling your drinking may only be a symptom of the fact that you are looking for something to deaden the pain and disappointment in your life, instead of finding your comfort and strength in God. Controlling your anger may only be a symptom of a deeper need you have to control life and the people in it with your rage. We need to focus on the core issues rather than the present problem.

We need to focus on personal development. I am talking about something more here than running out and getting yourself a new abs exerciser so you can get ripped abs. You can be the perfect weight and have a perfect body, and still miss the point of what it means to be a human being. You can read all the self-improvement books on the shelves of Grace Family Church’s Bookstore “The Source”, and still be out of control. You can be the best educated person in the world, and still be clueless about how to live life.

You might know a lot about a broad range of subjects, and still be ignorant when it comes to things that are ultimately and eternally important. You may have all the right investments and be set for life financially, but be bankrupt spiritually.

You cannot have victory and freedom in your life if you are holding some things back from God’s control. It isn’t going to happen. If you are saying, “I will obey God in everything except this,” you are blocking God’s work in your life. This is not so much personal development as it is allowing God to do a work in you.

Paul realized this when he wrote: “So I find this law at work: When I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?”

But then he answers his own question when he says, “Thanks be to God — through Jesus Christ our Lord!” Romans 7:21-25. It is through Christ that we are delivered from our own wretchedness — not our own effort.

But what if you have failed so many times before that you have given up even trying? Take seriously the words of Paul when he wrote: “Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already been made perfect, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me.

Brothers, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus” Philippians 3:12-14.

Forget the past with its failure, and press on toward the future where God has called you. Every day is a new beginning with God. We need to focus on building relationships. None of us can survive this world alone. Nobody gets out alive anyways! We were not created to live in isolation. There are no spiritual superheroes that can live isolated and insulated lives. There is no such thing as an army of one. We all know that the loner who needs no one else, and saves the world singlehandedly, is the stuff of movies only.

“For none of us lives to himself alone and none of us dies to himself alone” Romans 14:7.

The church is not an organization, it is an organism. When we are together, God meets us in ways that he does not meet us when we are alone.
For where two or three come together in my name, there am I with them” Matthew 18:20.

We need to focus on a life of service. One of the great tragedies of the world is people who live only for themselves. Their whole world centers around them. Everything is measured on how it affects them. The only effort they put forth is on things which will benefit them. Their focus is on getting instead of giving. They want to be served rather than serve. But the mark of true disciples of Jesus Christ is people who want God to use their lives.

Is your life being prepared for works of service?

God has created me, to do him some definite service; he has committed some work to me which He has not committed to another. I have my mission — I may never know it in this life, but I shall be told it in heaven. I am a link in a chain, a bond of connection between persons. He has not created me for nothing. I shall do well, I shall do his work. Therefore, I will trust him. I cannot be thrown away.

You have a part to play in God’s plan for the world.

Focus on it.