New Year, New Me
Notes
Transcript
How’s it going everybody? I hope everyone had a great Christmas break. I’m excited to be back with you guys and to be looking forward to a new year ahead. Every year, at the beginning of the year, millions of people make what is called a “New Year’s Resolution”. How many of you know what a New Year’s Resolution is? How many of you have made a new year’s resolution? The definition of a New Year’s Resolution is a promise to do something differently in the new year.
Let’s play a little game: I have a list of the top 5 resolutions for this year and I want us to guess to see if we can get all 5 in order
. Here are the answers:
Improved fitness
Improved finances
Improved mental health
Lose weight
Improved diet
So looking at this list, do you notice anything about the answers that people gave? They are all about “improving” themselves. Nobody decided they were going to do something differently this year and steal more cars. Nobody made a resolution to eat more Taco Bell? Why? Because the point of the New Year’s Resolution is to do something better than you did last year. The goal is to improve something about yourself.
Something else that is interesting about these resolutions is that, other than mental health, they are all physical things, or things that have physical results. Improved fitness = you look better, you’re stronger; improved finances = you have more money; lose weight/improved diet = you see the change in size, you buy different size clothes. There are physical elements to show that a change has been made. These results are typically why people make their goals, to make their “outer appearance” look the way that they perceive to be the best that it can be. This is not a bad thing! It is good to want to be healthy, but my point is that typically when we want to make a change in our lives, we focus on the things that result in a physical, tangible result.
But there is another part of ourselves that we typically choose not to focus on. That would be our character. In fact, we may avoid acknowledging the fact that we need to make a change to our character because we don’t want to stop doing the things we know are not good for us. But our character - who we are in Christ, how we act towards others, how we treat ourselves, how we treat God, is entirely more important than improving our physical self. Rick Warren put it this way:
God's ultimate goal for your life on earth is not comfort, but character development. He wants you to grow up spiritually and become like Christ. - Rick Warren
I may have mentioned this before, but Kaitlin and all of her family went to Texas A&M for college and a really big part of the culture at Texas A&M is their football team. Growing up, my small school didn’t have a football team and I was more interested in baseball, so I never really watched a lot of football, but marrying into Kaitlin’s family one of the first things I had to do was to learn to watch football. I still don’t understand everything about football, but I have come to enjoy watching the Aggies play and recently the Aggies played in a bowl game against Oklahoma State University.
Now the Aggies have had a lot of trouble lately with their Quarterbacks getting hurt, and their third string quarterback Jaylen Henderson was starting this game. I’ve got a picture of him right here.
On the very first play of the game, Jaylen throws a pass and gets hit by one of the defensive players and falls awkwardly on his arm. Breaks his arm, has to get helped off the field with an air cast and eventually had to have surgery. Jaylen Henderson has dedicated most of his life to this sport, he is able to get on the team at an SEC school even though he is behind two other quarterbacks he is making moves. And then, through a crazy turn of events he begins starting at Quarterback for the Aggies and and eventually gets to play in a bowl game. I can imagine the excitement and the vision he has for his future as he starts to feel the emotions of doing the thing he loves.
And then everything comes to a sudden stop, all due to one play. How devastating must that feel? And on top of that the Aggies ended up losing the game. He must have felt like he let everyone down, like all he was working for came to a screeching halt.
Do you want to know something about Jaylen Henderson? Jaylen Henderson is just as much Jaylen Henderson after he broke his arm as he was before he broke his arm. Jaylen Henderson’s life was not football, but football was a part of Jaylen Henderson’s life. If he would have sustained an injury that would have made it where he could never play football again, he would still be Jaylen Henderson. Listen, we can get so caught up in what we do, that we do not focus on who we are. We can create an identity through the temporary things of life, instead of our identity influencing how we live our life.
So what does that look like? What does it mean to improve our character? Let’s look at Ephesians 4:21-24 to learn about our character in Christ.
Since you have heard about Jesus and have learned the truth that comes from him, throw off your old sinful nature and your former way of life, which is corrupted by lust and deception. Instead, let the Spirit renew your thoughts and attitudes. Put on your new nature, created to be like God—truly righteous and holy.
So lets break these verses down and look at what it means to do something differently with our nature and how that effects our character.
“Since you have heard about Jesus and learned the truth that comes from Him…” Ok let’s stop here for a second. Before you can make any changes in your character, before you adjust how you live your life down to the core of who you are, you must have a relationship with Jesus Christ. It is impossible to get rid of our sinful nature on our own. It is embedded into us, trapped in our DNA. We cannot escape this sinful heart no matter how hard we may try. And in reality, we don’t want to get rid of it. Before we have an encounter with Christ we are perfectly content in our sins. Look at what Romans 8:7-8 says:
For the sinful nature is always hostile to God. It never did obey God’s laws, and it never will. That’s why those who are still under the control of their sinful nature can never please God.
If you are here tonight, and you have never placed faith in Jesus, you will never be able to be good enough or be strong enough to overcome the evil desires in your heart. You may be able to use your will power to stop a symptom of your sinful nature, but you cannot remove it. If you believe in Jesus, and you have given your life to Christ, you will never be able to be good enough or strong enough to overcome the evil inside of us. Nobody in this room can remove their sinful nature, Jesus, and Jesus alone, is our only hope of finding freedom from sin. God, with grace and mercy, sent Jesus to the cross to die the death we owed and He raised Him up in victory so that you, me, and all of the people in the world could be redeemed. We can be given a new nature. We can be born again.
22 throw off your old sinful nature and your former way of life which is corrupted by lust and deception
Let’s talk for a second about what is our sinful nature? What am I talking about when I say “sins”? I think Galatians 5:19-21 gives us a good idea of what our sinful nature looks like.
When you follow the desires of your sinful nature, the results are very clear: sexual immorality, impurity, lustful pleasures, idolatry, sorcery, hostility, quarreling, jealousy, outbursts of anger, selfish ambition, dissension, division, envy, drunkenness, wild parties, and other sins like these. Let me tell you again, as I have before, that anyone living that sort of life will not inherit the Kingdom of God.
Without Christ, this is what we are left with. And if you don’t think so, just look at the world around us. Everyone out only looking out for themselves. We’ve created idols of actors and musicians and other celebrities. The culture encourages lust and views it at a positive thing as long as it feels good to you. We have created division after division and turned fellow human beings into devils if they don’t believe exactly as I do and as soon as someone makes a mistake we will show no grace or mercy and shun them from any chance of redemption for the moral superiority that it brings us. This is NOT how God intended this world to look! God wants so much more for us than temporary happiness. He wants us to experience life, and life to the fullest. If we continue in Galatians, we can look at the opposite of our nature:
But the Holy Spirit produces this kind of fruit in our lives: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against these things!
Those who belong to Christ Jesus have nailed the passions and desires of their sinful nature to his cross and crucified them there.
Through Christ, our sinful nature that produces death can be replaced with a new nature where the Holy Spirit lives inside and produces fruit that gives us life and gives life to those around us. But we must nail the old self to the cross, and leave it there.
Instead, let the Spirit renew your thoughts and attitudes. Put on your new nature, created to be like God—truly righteous and holy
The new nature we receive from God gives us something we could never get on our own, freedom to be viewed as righteous and holy. Romans 3:10-12 talks about our righteousness:
Romans 3:10–12 (CSB)
as it is written: There is no one righteous, not even one. There is no one who understands; there is no one who seeks God. All have turned away; all alike have become worthless. There is no one who does what is good, not even one.
It’s not looking too good for us, is it? So how can we become righteous? Paul continues later in this chapter:
But now, apart from the law, the righteousness of God has been revealed, attested by the Law and the Prophets. The righteousness of God is through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe, since there is no distinction. For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; they are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.
We are unworthy to be called righteous or holy, but Jesus’ blood, His sacrifice on the cross, covers us and allows us to walk in freedom of what once owned us.
“Instead, let the Spirit renew your thoughts and attitudes. Put on your new nature, created to be like God—truly righteous and holy.”
So, now that we know we have freedom in Christ, how can we live our lives this year, in 2024, how could we use this fresh start at the beginning of the year to not make resolutions for just the physical aspects of ourselves but to make resolutions to put off the “old self” and to produce the good fruit that we talked about earlier? Here are 3 things you should do to help focus this year’s goals on Christ.
3 things you should do to help focus this year’s goals on Christ 1. Get Real
Before the Spirit renews your thoughts and attitudes, you must review your thoughts and attitudes. Be honest with yourself, and with God, about what areas you struggle with. It’s not like God doesn’t know, you’re not surprising Him with what you say. It’s not like God is like, “You haven’t been praying? Really? That is so bizarre, I had no idea. I thought maybe I forgot to take my prayer phone off ‘Do Not Disturb’ while I was playing basketball against Paul and Peter.”
God knows where we fall short, but He desires to pick us up, not push us down. Look through the list of the sinful nature vs fruit of the spirit that we talked about earlier and see what things on each list stand out as something you feel you need improvement on. Trust God that He can give you the strength to give up the things that need to be given up, or to be consistent with the things we should be doing.
3 things you should do to help focus this year’s goals on Christ 2. Get Specific
Measurable goals turn into attainable goals. One of the most common mistakes I have made over the years when trying to make a goal to help me grow closer to Christ is that I did not make a specific goal. Let’s say you want to read the bible more this year. If you just pull out a list and write, “Read the bible more this year” and close the book, when you wake up the next morning you have no direction to know what it means to read the bible more. At the end of the year you will open that book back up and look at that list and not know if you actually reached your goal or not because there were no specifics on your goal. There will be no way to measure your progress toward more consistent bible reading. This is why when you make your goals for this year, you need to make them measurable and I would also include writing why you want to move toward that goal, or what you will gain by focusing on that area this year. So instead of writing, “Read bible more”, you could write, “I want to read through the whole bible in one year by following a bible reading plan, because I want to grow closer to Jesus and have a time each day where He can speak to me.”
Your goals should stretch you, but not stress you out so much that you can’t keep moving forward. Your goal cannot be something so easy that it’s almost impossible NOT to attain it. “My goal this year is to be nice, to one person, one time, in this whole year, WOO HOO I did it! Goal completed”. This kind of goal is not going to help you strengthen your relationship with God. On the other hand, setting a goal that is unattainable is just going to make you feel like a failure when you mess up and don’t reach your goal. “My goal this year is to work on my joy, so I am not going to stop smiling all year. Literally, every second of every day I’m going to be smiling. Even when I’m sleeping, I’m going to tape my mouth to my forehead so I can smile all night. If I sneeze, I’m just going to keep on smiling, ACHOO!!!. If I stub my toe, I’ll just smile through it all, then people will know that I have joy.” There is no way this goal is going to happen. And even if it did, it wouldn’t achieve the ultimate goal, which is to grow closer to Christ.
3 things you should do to help focus this year’s goals on Christ 3. Get Going
Start today on your goal, don’t put off starting your goal because it’s not the 1st or it’s the middle of the week, or whatever other reason you might have that will delay you getting started. Because the longer you put off starting that bible study, or working on your self-control, Satan will be giving you more and more ammunition not to do it at all. Start now, build the habit, know you may have to make some adjustments along the way or you may miss a day or an opportunity, that’s ok, don’t let that slow you down or stop you from following after Jesus this year.
Before we close, I want to make it clear that this message, all this talk about setting goals and trying to follow Jesus better, is not self-help, you can do this on your own, make you feel good about yourself, inspirational talking. What I want you to learn from this more than anything is that as you surrender your life to Jesus, as you continue following after Christ, you will be made aware of your shortcomings. Jesus loves you right where you are at, but also loves you enough not to leave you there. As we get closer to the Light of Jesus, what was in the dark will be exposed, the parts of us we didn’t know we had that are evil will be revealed. And it’s not very pleasant to feel as if someone is staring right through you to your soul and bringing to your attention the things that we know we should give up, but just don’t want to.
But all I am asking is that this year, this group, right here, right now, will make a commitment to walk closer to the light. It will not be easy, but it will open our eyes to the love that God has for us and the “abundant life” He has for us. It will not be perfect, but it will be perfecting us in the image of Jesus, that the world around us will see the change in our lives and wonder how we are able to live in this world with the “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control” that the world so desperately wants but keeps looking to everything but Jesus to get and because of that they come up short. God does not want to be a passive observer of our lives, but wants to work in our lives so that we may live in the “righteous and holy” life that Jesus has bought for us on the cross.
*Prayer*