A New Year a New Resolution

Hello 2010, glad to meet you.  Are you about ready to kick this thing off?  2009 is so…well, 2008!  Out with the old, in with the new.  Baby New Year needs a bottle and a diaper change.  Let’s party like it’s 1999!  OK, OK, enough. 

 

Everyone gets excited for the new year.  A chance to change, a chance to break bad habits and start new ones.  It’s a fresh start.  But the one thing that will be on almost every ones mind is the New Years Resolution.  OH YEAH!  Time to promise to do something that most of us will never do.  Time to lie to ourselves and our loved ones.  From my in-depth (Google) research, here are the top ten New Year’s Resolutions-

1. More time with friends & family

2. Get Fit

3. Lose weight

4. Quite smoking

5. Enjoy life more

6. Quit drinking

7. Get Out of Debt

8. Learn Something New

9. Help Others

10. Get Organized

All great ideas.  Each one would make a better you.  The problem is that they aren’t specific enough.  Instead of “More time with family and friends” how about, I will clear Tuesday and Thursday nights and half a day on Saturday and Sunday to spend time with my family and friends.  Or, I will quit smoking by January 30th.  I will be in the gym and actually do something three days a week.  “Enjoy life more”?  Sorry, I got nothing for this one, it’s to vague.  Instead of “learn something new”, how about- I will sign up for a class on pottery or underwater basket weaving (inside military joke).  For “help others”, I will volunteer once a month at a homeless shelter.  I think you get the idea.  We have to be specific.  We have to make resolutions on purpose.  Don’t be wishy-washy.  Be firm and set a date.

That was on the house, but not what I want to write about today.  What I want to talk about is your Spiritual New Year’s Resolution or SNYR for short.  There is such a thing you know.  It’s the same as a regular resolution only, you know, spiritual.  Pretty simple huh?  So what do you want to accomplish spiritually next year?  And don’t say, “Grow Spiritually”.  That’s as lame as “Enjoy life more”.  We need to be specific.  We need to be precise.  One thing I think we all need to resolve to do is read/study the Bible more.  I know I do.  I have been slipping in that area lately.  While I was away from my wife and kids with the military for 6 months I had all the time in the world to read, pray and study.  Then my family moved up to live with me and all that time seemed to disappear faster than Kanye West’s career after he interrupted Country music’s darling, Taylor Swift.  VIDEO HERE!  I have been trying recently to wake up earlier, 4:30 am, to read and pray.  I’m doing pretty good.  It’s important to me that I spend time with God and in His Word.  I think Paul really gives us the outline and reason for this specific New Years Resolution in Hebrews.  Have a look.

^11-14I have a lot more to say about this, but it is hard to get it across to you since you’ve picked up this bad habit of not listening. By this time you ought to be teachers yourselves, yet here I find you need someone to sit down with you and go over the basics on God again, starting from square one—baby’s milk, when you should have been on solid food long ago! Milk is for beginners, inexperienced in God’s ways; solid food is for the mature, who have some practice in telling right from wrong.   ^1-3So come on, let’s leave the preschool fingerpainting exercises on Christ and get on with the grand work of art. Grow up in Christ. The basic foundational truths are in place: turning your back on "salvation by self-help" and turning in trust toward God; baptismal instructions; laying on of hands; resurrection of the dead; eternal judgment. God helping us, we’ll stay true to all that. But there’s so much more. Let’s get on with it!  Hebrews 5:12-6:3  The Message

How long have you been a Christ-Follower?  A year, 10 years, 20?  If you are less than a year old spiritually then you get a pass from me on Paul’s admonition, everyone else should have felt bad when they read the first verse, “By this time you ought to be teachers yourselves.”  Unless you are a teacher, then you get a pass as well.  However, I am a teacher and I didn’t learn as much new stuff about God last year as I should have.  I think most of us would stay the same.  Some of us are stuck on the basics.  We are still drinking milk like a baby and not eating spiritual steak (or spiritual tofu for all my vegetarian readers).  We are fingerpainting instead of creating works of art. 

A friend of mine is an artist.  She is a fantastic painter.  But she doesn’t only limit herself to one medium, she makes art out of all kinds of stuff.  She also has a young daughter named Lo.  She loves art as well.  Lo started out making messes more than art but with her Mom’s careful and patient (and fun) instruction she is learning how to create art not just messes.  Allow me to give a little “Link Love” to Aimée.  Her art website- Mazer:Design and her blog- Lo Mama Adventures.  Stop by and say “Hi”. 

Just like little miss Lo we started out “making messes” but with the tutoring of mature  Christ-Followers and the Holy Spirit we should have began making “works of art” out of our lives.  We do this by going deeper.  Re-read the last part of our passage, “But there’s so much more!  Let’s get on with it!”  The time to start is now. 

 

 

Let’s make the New Year’s Resolution to spend “X” amount of time with God every day.  There’s so much more!  Let’s get on with it!

---

FYI-  This will be my last post of the year.  The fam and I are heading to Mom and Dad’s house for some home cooking, home grown fun and home-made chocolate chip cookies! 

Merry Christmas to all and to all a good rest of the year!

 

It’s all about Him,

Shawn

---

Did you like this post? Did you hate it? Please share it with your friends and leave a comment below. I would love to read your thoughts and opinions.

You can also check out the Other Resources page for Bible Study Helps as well as links to media downloads, all free!

Want to show God’s love in a practical way and let people know where they can go for more info or help? Take a look at the DUO page.

Questions? Don’t forget to visit the Questions??Questions?? page and let me know. I will try to answer it the best I can. No Quantum Physics or Time Travel questions please!

I’m not Einstein!

Diapers in the Wash

    I am going to give any new parents out there a little advice.  It is important so I need you to pay close attention.  Don’t wash disposable diapers in the washing machine with your clothes.  Pampers and jeans DON’T mix.  Here is what happened, I opened the washing machine to be a great husband and help my wife with the kids laundry, we have three kids so there is always laundry, and as I pull the clothes out there is this fuzzy, grainy, slimy, not sure how to explain it, stuff all over the clothes.  I ask my wife, “Baby, what in the world is all over these clothes?”  She comes and looks and says, “I washed a diaper with the clothes.”  To which I reply, “On purpose???”  For which I get a smack on the arm, I get hit a lot!!  Generally I deserve it.  She says,”No not on purpose, one of the kids must have thrown it in there.”  WHOA, whoa, whoa, I can’t blame the kids when I pass gas but she can blame them for this.  That is wrong on several different levels.

Here come the fun part.  She tells me all the clothes have to be taken outside and each one has to be shaken out, turned inside out and shaken out again.  She, of coarse, has a headache or some other debilitating sickness, so I gamely say, “I’ll do it Honey.”  She smiles a knowing smile and walks away.

I get all the clothes out of the wash and go out on the porch and begin to shake the clotes out.  This is a horrible job.  Each piece of clothing has to be shook out individually, remember these are kids clothes, which means there are approximately 1,352 pieces of clothing in the laundry basket.  Onsies, long sleve onsies, jeans ( with lots of pockets that have to be turned inside out), sweaters and jackets with hoods, socks, more socks and socks after that.  I think you get the picture.  I was out there for what seemed like an hour.  The other problem is that as you shake the clothes out the little diaper boogers fly all over the place, on me, in my hair, on my glasses.  Nasty work.  Thankfully it was a pee diaper and not the alternative!

I got to thinking, isn’t our spiritual life the same way?  Stay with me for a minute and it will make sense, or at least more sense than it does now.  Lets say the diaper represent sin and the clothes represent different areas of our life and the washing machine is the world.

We are going through our cycle of life and somehow a diaper of sin gets thrown in, a few minutes later, boom, it explodes and shoots sin boogers all over us.  They are every where, in the creases, in the folds, in all the cracks and crevasses.  The only way to get rid of them is to stop the cycle and shake each part of your life out, turn it inside out and shake it out again.  We should constantly be examining ourselves for sin boogers.  The Bible tells us in Romans 3:23 “For everyone has sinned; we all fall short of God’s glorious standard.”  We all have sin boogers, not one of us is perfect.  But that is ok, God gave us a way to get rid of sin, in Romans 6:23 He tells us “the free gift of God is eternal life through Christ Jesus our Lord.”

If you are already a Christ-Follower you should always check the laundry of life to see where the sin boogers are.  Maybe they are in your work laundry.  You should be living right at work but your not.  You claw your way to the top, stepping on anyone that gets in the way, or maybe you steal from work, pens, tools, how about time?  When you should be working your goofing off.  Maybe it’s your home laundry,  you should be spending time with your family but you are always out with friends or at the bar. How about your marriage laundry, are you washing someone else’s clothes with yours?  Then there is the internet laundry, did you visit a site by accident and then another and then another?  Take a look at your laundry, are there sin boogers on it?  Does it need to be shaken out and rewashed?  Stop the wash cycle and take a break, look at each piece carefully, sometimes sin is very small and hides from you.  Once the sin is found the only thing left is to shake it out, ask God for forgiveness.  1 John 1:9 says “But if we confess our sins, he will forgive our sins, because we can trust God to do what is right. He will cleanse us from all the wrongs we have done.”

If you are not a Christ-Follower and would like some more info on becoming one go here,  Christ-Follower.

Remember- Sin is the path of least resistance, but God’s forgiveness is the way to a fulfilled existence!