How Can We Guarantee A Great 2008? - Scotty Smith
What is it about watching that calendar page flip from the last day of December to the first day of January that sends us on an internal mission to change our lives for the better? There's something about the dawn of a new year that motivates us to take stock and reflect upon ways our lives can be improved. The annual custom of setting New Year's resolutions begins again.
"I need to lose weight and improve my health."
"I want to be a better husband and parent."
"I hope to save more money and take control of my finances."
But why do most of us find that maintaining these new goals each year becomes more and more difficult? Perhaps our emphasis is in the wrong place. In his classic text
My Utmost for His Highest, Oswald Chambers says:
We have the idea that God is leading us toward a particular end or a desired goal, but He is not. The question of whether or not we arrive at a particular goal is of little importance, and reaching it becomes merely an episode along the way. What we see as only the process of reaching a particular end, God sees as the goal itself.... His purpose is for me to depend on Him and on His power now...
God is not working toward a particular finish-His purpose is the process itself. That doesn't mean, however, that we shouldn't set goals at all or strive to make improvements in needed areas of our lives.
The Worshiper asked Scotty Smith, senior pastor of Christ Community Church in Franklin, Tennessee, to share some of his thoughts on how we can resolve to live better in the new year.
Resolutions... By Way of The GospelReflecting on the idea of "living better in the new year" has revealed, unfortunately, just how much the early history of my New Year's Resolutions, as a believer, mirrors the history of my pre-Christian dating life: Too much ado about me!
For more years than I care to number, guilt, self-sufficiency and pride compelled me to finish each annum with an earnest commitment to try harder to please Jesus in the upcoming year. But now that I think about it, most of my resolutions had more to do with personal vanity and self-righteousness than anything else. "Taking better care of the temple" through diet and exercise was a thinly veiled way of wanting to fit into my favorite pair of jeans again. New regimens of rigorous spiritual disciplines were usually short-lived and sorely ineffective in dismantling the idol structures of my heart.
How I thank God for the day I heard my newly adopted spiritual dad, Jack Miller, say, "I'm too big of a sinner to be tricked by a celebration of discipline. What I need is accountability to believe the gospel more and more. My biggest problem is not a lack of discipline, but a lack of believing the gospel. The grace of Jesus is alone sufficient to change somebody like me!"
The odd thing about Jack's statement is that I never knew a more disciplined believer. In time I realized that his discipline was fueled by God's grace and not by performance-based spirituality. He loved reading the Scriptures; he loved to spend hours in prayer; he loved to worship Jesus and share Him with anybody, anytime-all because of a deeper understanding and experience of the gospel. The longer I knew Jack the more he became allergic to self-reliance, abhorrent of legalism and allured and compelled by the hope of the gospel.
Jack modeled for me what nineteenth century Scotsman Thomas Chalmers called "the expulsive power of a new affection." How does God change us? What is the way of the gospel? We don't become more like Jesus through new commitments to live for Him, but through new affections cultivated for Him. We will love other things less idolatrously by loving Jesus more consumingly.
What then have I come to accept as appropriate New Years Resolutions because of having had Jack Miller as a spiritual dad and mentor for 21 years? Here are a few to ponder:
- I resolve not to trust in the power of resolution, but in the faithfulness of my Savior, Jesus.
- I resolve to become as familiar as possible with the lyric and the music of the gospel of God's grace-its content and its beauty. May God give me an informed mind and an enflamed heart for Jesus.
- I resolve to take greater advantage of the "means of grace," the conduits of the grace and truth of which Jesus is full-the Bible, prayer, the sacraments, fellowship, the worship of God, missions, etc. I repent of using these things to fuel my pride and to gain a greater opinion of myself.
- I resolve to trust in Jesus alone, plus nothing, not only for the forgiveness of my sins, but also for the transformation of my heart, and for the gathering of His people from every nation, and for the ultimate restoration of His broken universe.
- I resolve, by the grace of God, to become more preoccupied with Jesus' preoccupations. I want to enter more fully into God's story, for God's glory, with God's joy.
Scotty Smith serves as senior pastor of Christ Community Church in Franklin, Tennessee, and mentor to many of Nashville's Christian music artists. Author of the best-selling Objects of His Affection
, Smith's latest book is titled Restoring Broken Things
(Integrity), co-written with recording artist Steven Curtis Chapman.
