A New Year’s Challenge

By After Edmund • Jan 23rd, 2009 • Category: Artists in Residence

Happy New Year to you all. It appears that we’ve successfully completed yet another lap around the Milky Way (not the candy bar). It’s the start of the year, and that means we get to think about our goals, diet, taxes, etc… And to think they put this right after the most joyful time of the year. Nuts! I hope you’re all recovering well from that smorgasbord of tasty holiday treats enjoyed during the past month and a half. And I’m sure that most of us have higher hopes for our behavior in the coming months, than the precedent we’ve set for ourselves in the past years.

I’ve never been one for ‘New Year’s Resolutions.’ In fact, I don’t know that I’ve made one since I was twelve, but, whether you want to call them resolutions or not, we all have that feeling that along with the changing of the year we can make a positive, lasting change in our lives. So I just want to lay out some challenges for you and me, of changes that we can make that will have eternal impact. Let’s not make church attendance the end to our spiritual goal – satisfied with the faith we feel on Sunday morning. If we surveyed most Christians about the satisfaction versus frustration of our relationship with Jesus, most of us would decidedly fall in the frustrated side of things. And if we’re honest with ourselves and each other about what we’re doing to change that frustration, and grow our relationship with Jesus, the answer is honestly very little.

We’re like farmers who know that there are weeds in the field, and those weeds will choke out part of the crop if they aren’t removed. But instead of getting up and walking out to the field to remove the weeds, the farmer lies on the couch and during TV commercials he hits the mute button and says: “God, I really need your help. You see, there are weeds coming up in my field, and if they keep growing they are going to kill some of the crop. Oh God, in your infinite power, could you eradicate those weeds? Really stick it to them so I’ll have lots of fruit at harvest time.” And that’s us. That’s our effort to have a closer relationship with God. We just pray for God to take care of it and magically make us into super Christians.

Even people who are really, deeply in love with Jesus are guilty of happily accepting His grace and living in His joy without taking the time to know who God really is and what He really wants to do in our lives. (These analogies and most of everything else I say here are adapted from the 12/28/08 sermon by Matt Chandler at The Village Church in Dallas. Go to thevillagechurch.net to hear him say it ((only much better))). So this is my challenge: That we stop praying that God do the work in our relationship, and for you and me to use our love for Christ to inspire us continually to know Christ and His word better.

Does it Resonate with you?

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