Monday, January 8, 2018

What is the One Perspective and the One Attitude That Will Move You Boldly into this New Year?

Hold on a moment….it’s gonna be just a second (as I look at my phone).   Oh, it’s taking forever!   Has that ever been you when it comes to something you’re looking for on your phone or computer? If something takes more than a few seconds to appear, does your irritation start to rise.   Maybe it happens in the check-out line.  You make your best guess for the fastest line.  But then it happens. Someone in front of you has an issue, like God forbid, a price check.  And you see the other lines moving along as you stand stranded in a line that is lasting forever.  The injustice of it all!

Have you grown more impatient?  It seems that everyone has, that it has gotten harder to wait for well, most anything.  Everything in the world today seems to be about, going faster, acting quicker, seizing the moment.  But does that impatience really lead you to success, to satisfaction, to a complete life?    Or does the marshmallow test tell a truer story?

In the late 60s and early 70s, the psychologist Walter Mischel, came up with this interesting experiment.   His researchers interviewed about 600 or so preschoolers. During the interview, the researcher put a small marshmallow on the table.    He then told the child, that if she waited until the researcher came back, she would get two marshmallows.    Some kids just went ahead and ate the marshmallow.  But a number waited.  They came up with ways to distract themselves from looking at that marshmallow.  They counted their toes.   They covered their eyes. They even turned their chair around to avoid seeing the marshmallow.  Some even stroked the marshmallow like a pet.   But they waited for that second marshmallow. 

Mischel then tracked the kids who waited and those who didn’t through high school, into college, even into middle age.    And the ones who waited had higher SAT scores, greater success in school and career.  They even had a better body mass index than those who didn’t.   Waiting worked not only for that second marshmallow but for the rest of their lives.

Yet, the world can lead you to do the exact opposite.  This world, with its bewilderingly fast pace, can terrify you with the prospect of waiting too long, with missing out on the opportunities you need to take.  And let’s be honest.  Waiting might be good.  But you can’t wait forever.  Life requires action.  So, how do you know?  How do you know when to move forward in a way that gets you to where you truly need to be?    In these words written thousands of years ago, God shows you the way.  Let’s listen and hear what God has to say. 


This world can drive you to move simply for the sake of moving.  It can equate action with success.  It tells you that a full schedule leads to a complete life.   But is that the way?   Does action always mean success?  If it doesn’t, how do you know when to act or when to wait?  What truly leads to a complete life?

In these words, God tells you.   God says.  Moving toward a complete life doesn’t begin with you and it won’t end with you either.   God began that work, and if you are willing, God will complete it.  But you have a role in that completion.   It is letting God lead you to a place where you act not out of fear but out of love.   
Do you know from where Paul was writing this letter to the church in Philippi?   Paul was writing it from prison, a prison from which he knew he would never leave.  He had begun this small community of Christians in Philippi not all that long ago.   And now he knows.  He will never see them again.    Yet Paul isn’t worried about their future, about their ability to stick it out, to stand up for their faith. 

Paul understands.  God began the work in them, and God will finish it.  And God doesn’t need Paul to get that done.  In fact, Paul assures them with just those words.  The One who began a good work in you will bring it to completion in the day of Jesus Christ. 

And what Paul says is of course true.   When you were born, did you choose your parents?  Did you pick the nation in which you were born?  Heck, did you even choose your own name?   No, all that work began, and you had nothing to do with it.   Nobody even consulted you. 

Even now, much of your life remains beyond your control.  And that’s a good thing.   Who wants to have to remember to breathe or keep your heart beating.   Your body keeps countless things going, without any from you.  And that works.  Your lungs keep breathing. Your heart keeps beating.   Think about this.   Last week, it was 80 or so degrees outside.  A few days ago, it was 40.   But do you know that in the middle of those dramatic changes, your body temperature hardly changed at all?  Your body did that, without you even thinking about it.  And that’s amazing, miraculous even.

In the same way, God maintains those physical systems, God is working to shape your life, to make it more than you could have ever dreamed it to be.  And that means in the seeming chaos of life, including your life, God is working, working to make you complete, whole, everything God intended you to be.  

But does that mean you do nothing, just let God do it all?   It means that, no more than it means that just because your body is taking care of all sorts of functions, that you have no job there either.  I mean.  To keep that heart beating, you’ve got to eat, to exercise, to rest, to do all sorts of things.  And what is it that fuels God’s deeper work in your life, God’s moving you to completion?   Paul points to it in his prayer for the Philippians.   What does Paul pray for?    Paul writes this: And this is my prayer, that your love may overflow more and more with knowledge and full insight.   Why does he pray this?  It’s because Paul says that is what will produce the harvest.

Too often today when people act in their lives, they act out of fear, out of anxiety.  Sure, people might be busy, that’s easy enough.   Anyone can be busy.  But what are you busy about?   What drives you?   If you let your inner fears, your personal anxieties drive the movement in your life, then you will be moving, but you won’t be going anywhere or at least anywhere good.   And sadly the world around us seems more caught up in that sort of movement than anything else, grabbing the first marshmallow because they’re afraid the second one will never come.

But God has a different vision, a different path, one that leads you to completion, to becoming who God intended you to be.  And that path leads you away from acting in fear to acting out of love.   And the more love drives your decisions, the more God moves you toward completion, towards becoming the person that God intended you to be.  And in that love, God can do more in you, in this world, than you could ever have imagined. 

What does this look like?  To take one example, it looks like over $11,000.00, the largest Christmas offering in the church where I serve’s history.   God did that, but God did that through countless people acting out of love.   It started, when I moved past my own fear, and made a call to a member with a bold ask for a $5,000.00 match.   I’d like to tell you the call came easily, but I found myself getting “busy” with all sorts of other tasks to avoid it.   But then I realized, that I wasn’t making that request, I was simply sharing what I sensed God wanted.  And if that member said no, God would still love me as much after as before.   So, I made that call, and that member responded out of love.  He and his wife not only committed the money, they wrote the check even before we’d made the match.    But so many here responded that the church blew that match away.  And because they did, God is going to do some great things through us in Puerto Rico, in our county in Florida, Broward, and through the church’s own ministry.   

In this passage, God was reminding that church of two things.   First, God began the work at First Church long before any of the folks there now had gotten there.  In fact, each week we worship in a building that the generosity of others raised up around us, and most of the folks in our congregation had nothing to do with that.   And what God began, God will complete, in ways that no one in our church can see right now, but God will.  As the pastor, I see the challenges that lie before that church.   But God has brought this church through challenge after challenge in the past.   And God hasn’t changed.  God can overcome the challenges now just as God overcame them back then.  And as God will work in that church, God will work in your life.

But for God to do that work, to move it towards completion, both in that church and your life, God wants folks that don’t live in fear, but that act out of love.    And when we do that, God works.   For example, with First Church’s financial situation, our leaders could have limited that Christmas offering only to meet the church’s needs.  But they didn’t.   They said for every dollar that stays here for ministry, we will send a dollar out to our community and world.   They didn’t live in fear.   They acted out of love.  And God blessed that.  


It’s why that church invested funds to create a website to share with the world what God is doing there.  It’s why that church took a risk, and pulled funds out of reserves to bring a new staff person, James Potts, to share God’s love with families in our church and community.   And when our church took that risk, God blessed it.  A member stepped up and gave everything we needed to renovate an apartment in our building where James could live and an office area where he could work.   And in the coming months, God will lead that church to take other bold steps.   But, in those steps and in the steps that you take, God wants you and I to remember that God is working always in ways you and I can’t see.  This is God’s work, not ours.   We don’t need to be driven by fear in the decisions we make.   We can be moved by love, love for the God who gave out of love everything for us, even God’s very life.    So move into this New Year, not driven by fear, but moved by love.   And as you enter that year, may that love move you to love your neighbors, to love your community and world, and to love one another as never before, to love even as God loves you.   And as you do that, Jesus will stun you at what he will complete in you, more than you could ever ask or dream or imagine!                     

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