Have
you made any New Years resolutions? Ought you to make new years
resolutions? Whatever your opinions are regarding this matter, there is, I believe much merit
in thinking carefully and prayerfully
about the year ahead. We, at
Eastside Baptist Church use most of the
month of January to do this, culminating our desires and plans for the year ahead with a prayer week.
On
a more personal level I also wish to
recommend to you a helpful set of questions compiled by Don
Whitney, which I have been using for a few years now to
help me to get focused on
the year ahead. Here are his first ten diagnostic question:
1.
What’s one thing
you could do this year to increase your enjoyment of God?
2.
What’s the most
humanly impossible thing you will ask God to do this year?
3.
What’s the single
most important thing you could do to improve the quality of your family life
this year?
4.
In which
spiritual discipline do you most want to make progress this year, and what will
you do about it?
5.
What is the
single biggest time-waster in your life, and what will you do about it this
year?
6.
What is the most
helpful new way you could strengthen your church?
7.
For whose
salvation will you pray most fervently this year?
8.
What’s the most
important way you will, by God’s grace, try to make this year different from
last year?
9.
What one thing
could you do to improve your prayer life this year?
10. What single thing that you plan to do this year will
matter most in ten years? In eternity?
These
are all very good and relevant questions
and I
want to encourage you and I to put these diagnostic questions to
good work, for we will surely
benefit much on a
personal and also on a church -corporate level if we seek to get these things right.
There
is one problem however. We might take
these questions and treat it as a “to do”
list, and use it as an end in
itself and become legalistic
about it and in the end, loose
the joy and the heart in it all,
and worse still, give up good
resolutions such as these. What I want to do with the help of God’s Word therefore
is to provide you with the most
essential and fundamental motivation to keep good
going!
I
will put it to you like this: We need no one less than Jesus Himself
to be our Motivator.
My
model for this thought is the apostle
Paul who
himself had expressed many desires
and goals in the writing of His letters. The book of
Acts reveals that not all of Paul’s plans
came to fruition e.g. Acts
16:6ff, where the Holy Spirit re-directed
Paul who was desiring to go to Asia to
go to Macedonia instead. This re-direction
by the Holy Spirit led to the
conversion of Lydia and of the Philippian jailer and
the establishment of the
Philippian church.
What
I am saying is this; Paul had goals, ambitions and desires, but these were
always subject to the direction in which
God the Father and the Holy Spirit and Christ would direct him. Paul was primarily a
slave or
servant of God. God could change
his agenda at any time. He saw himself
as an apostle (messenger) of God and Christ,
always led by the Holy Spirit
to do the work to which Jesus had
called him on the road to Damascus (Acts 9).
Paul’s resolutions were motivated by his deep love for Christ. A
classic expression of his love for
Christ is found in 1
Corinthians 2:1-5, and in particular in verse 2: “For I decided
(NIV “resolved”) to know nothing among you except
Jesus Christ and him crucified.”
Now
whilst this was not Paul’s new
year’s resolution, it was
nevertheless a fundamental resolution which undergirded his life and which
therefore his motivated his actions. This is what I want you to see. Underlying our resolutions is a primary
resolution. It may be called “our heart’s desire”, and that heart’s
desire will determine how you
apply your new year’s resolutions. Paul’s
one desire was Christ. See this
also in his letter to the Philippians:
·
Phil. 2: 21 ” For me to live is Christ…”
·
Phil. 3:7-11
Paul’s
commitment was driven by
the central place that Christ
occupied in His life! That is really
the secret to making Christian resolutions that will last. The rest of the information contained in our Scripture reading in
1 Corinthians 2 flows from
that primary resolution! Let us use
this as an illustration to show how Paul’s love for Jesus moved his resolution to share the gospel in
the Corinthian context.
1 Corinthians 2:1–5
Paul
reminds them from his first visit (Acts
18:1-17), when he planted this
church, on what resolutions this church was founded!
First,
notice what Paul did not do in
establishing this church:
• V.1 “ I …
did not come proclaiming to you the
testimony of God with lofty speech or wisdom …”
• V.4 “my
speech and my message were not in
plausible words of wisdom…”. Here he basically repeats what he had already said in 1:17.
What
is the point that he is trying to make? Well, the Greeks loved
wisdom …persuasive oratory. They
delighted in debate and in speech contests. But Paul is eager to make the point that the gospel is not primarily
about human wisdom or pervasive speech. So, his goal was not to become better
trained as a public speaker in order
that he might get through to them and to
be ‘culturally more relevant’. The
gospel of God is about something far
greater! Do think that Paul did not have reasoning capacities? Of course he did (Phil. 3), but it was not this capacity that he employed and trusted
in, in order to plant or to maintain a church.
Second,
notice his strategy for establishing this church!
• V.3:
"I was with you in weakness and in
fear and much trembling.”
• V.4: “… my
speech and my message were… in demonstration of the Spirit and of power"
What
is Paul trying to prove here? From
a worldly perspective
this resolution seems to be a recipe for disaster. A man
who is weak, uncertain and
trembling must after all have low self- esteem! In 2
Cor. 10:10 his opponents were saying this of him: "His letters are weighty and strong, but his bodily presence is
weak and his speech is of no account." Evidently
Paul in his person did not have a very strong, appealing appearance. In fact
there may have been something physically
wrong with Paul – something which
made him chronically weak. We have a hint of this in Galatians 4:13–14 where he tells us, "You know it was because of a bodily ailment [or weakness] that I
preached the gospel to you at first; and though my condition was a trial to
you, you did not scorn or despise me, but received me as an angel of God."
Paul
wants the Corinthian Christians to see
that they were not born out of human strength or resolution or strategy. They were born out of human weakness, but this weakness (not only in Him, but in them also) was used by God
to bring about a wonderful change
in the lives of these Corinthian
Christians. We can see this in in 1:26-29:
“For consider your calling, brothers:
not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were
powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the
world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the
strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are
not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in
the presence of God.”
The end effect of
this is that we must ask “well
if this is not of Paul… then what is it?“. The answer is, this is
by the power of God! A man or woman becomes a Christian not because they are persuaded by human speech or personalities.
They are not converted because they are clever enough to understand the gospel. People become Christians when God’s power, through the agency of the Holy Spirit makes them alive to see
Christ for who He really is!
And
it goes further. In this case Paul’s
goal or resolution was to restore a
church that was hopelessly divided. What
must a weak preacher do to
bring a divided church back
to its senses? Here is Paul’s
primary resolution:
V.2 “I
decided (resolved) to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and Him
crucified.”
This
doesn’t mean that all Paul spoke
about was the Lord’s death on the cross.
We know from his letters that he spoke
about many and practical things
pertaining to living the Christian life, even the things that I am encouraging
you to think about today, but the fact remains that
all this was subject to Paul’s primary desire: His love for Christ and His work on the cross!
All
he ultimately did was related
to bringing people
to the Christ of the cross. His tent making profession by which he kept
himself financially supplied was
ultimately so that he could bring people
to look at the Lamb of God. His teaching
and preaching ultimately was aimed to
bring people to the word of the cross. His relationships were
conducted towards that end (1 Cor.10:24). Even his eating and drinking was to the glory of God (1 Cor.10:31)
The
secret of the power of
Paul’s message was not found in Paul, but in something
external to Paul. The secret
power of the Christian gospel
lies not in the messenger, but in the Lord of the message. That is why
Paul calls himself an apostle (a
messenger) of Christ Jesus (1 Cor. 1:1). Paul’s life changing message of the cross is found
in the fact that he is a messenger in the hand of the Holy Spirit,
and therefore that message through
him will be a
powerful, inspired, God breathed authority that comes
with life giving force to its
hearers.
So, even though Paul was a well trained as a Pharisee, he did not
allow his own wisdom or the conventional wisdom
of the day to get into the way. All he
did was to preach Christ crucified, and thus he became a vessel that
the Holy Spirit would use so very
powerfully in His day and even today. Many people today are still
converted by the words of Paul.
I have shared this message with you on this first Sunday in 2016 to show you two things:
1.
That it is good to make godly resolutions when new beginnings arise.
2.
That we need a solid foundation for these
resolutions i.e. Christ at the
center and the heart of our lives and therefore of our convictions. If we
merely use our human willpower, then our
resolutions usually do not get very far.
Now
go back to the 10 resolutions, and humbly, and with the help of God and rooted in
Christ and empowered by the Holy Spirit ask God to bless your year as you abide in Him, seeking to glorify Him in all
that you do.
Amen!
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