New Year's Resolution 2011: Quit Sinning

Whether you set any or not, I'm sure that "resolution" is a word we hear more in the week before and after January 1 than in the rest of the year combined. I have no idea why there’s a page on the U.S. Government's official website about New Year’s Resolutions, but here it is. These are the ones it lists: Drink Less Alcohol, Get a Better Education, Get a Better Job, Get Fit, Lose Weight, Manage Debt, Manage Stress, Quit Smoking Now, Reduce Reuse and Recycle, Save Money, Take a Trip, Volunteer to Help Others... pretty much the normal list. If those are the resolutions that everyone sets, I thought I would do something different. So, after much deliberation, I am about to share with you my list of New Year’s Resolutions for 2011. Actually it isn’t a list. (The dictionary said I had to have more than one for it to be a list.) So, instead of my list of New Year’s Resolutions for 2011, here is my bullet point of New Year’s Resolution for 2011:

• Quit Sinning.

Just incase you didn’t get all of that. I’ll give you my bullet point again:

• Quit sinning.

Some of you may think I’m being silly, and I'll grant that this may take me more than a year, but it is my hope and my plan that anyone who knows me well enough to know the difference will be able to say when this year ends that I have made significant progress toward completely getting rid of sin in my life.

If I can convince you that I mean this, I am sure that many of you, especially those of you who know me well, are thinking, “...Yeah, that’s not gonna happen.” Or maybe your reaction is even a little more aggressive, like, “Who does he think he is?” Or perhaps aren’t convinced that I’m not joking or playing some kind of word game. But I mean it. I intend to quit sinning, and nothing else is coming in the remainder of this blog post to let me off of the hook on this one.

And I’m not just talking about the big, obvious sins that come to our minds, but I’m talking about completely giving it up: everything that in any way reflects anything less that complete, whole-hearted love for God and love for other people, I intend to stop.

I can’t take credit for coming up with my bullet point of New Year's Resolution all by myself. I had some very good help. In fact, I pretty much stole it (which may have been a step in the wrong direction if I’m talking about giving up sin, since stealing is high on the list of obvious ones). But Dallas Willard talks about this, and it’s so good that I'll quote a few paragraphs directly. He says:

If one day I assure my Christian friends that I intend to “quit sinning” and arrive at a stage where I can perfectly follow Jesus Christ, they will most likely be scandalized and threatened- or at least very puzzled. “Who do you think you are?” they would probably say. Or they might think, “What is he really up to?”

But if, on the other hand, I state that I do not intend to stop sinning or that I do not plan ever to follow my Lord in actuality, they will be equally upset. And for good reason. How can Jesus be my Lord if I don’t even plan to obey him? Would that really differ in substance and outcome from not having him as Lord at all? My Christian fellowship circle will allow me not to follow him and even not to plan to follow him, but they will not permit me to say it.

Yet, I must do one or the other. Either I must intend to stop sinning or not intend to stop. There is no third possibility. I must plan to follow Jesus fully or not plan to follow him. But how can I honestly do either? And does not planning to follow him really differ, before God and humanity, from planning not to follow him? (From The Spirit of the Disciplines, pp. 12-13)

Now, brothers and sisters, it’s not just me on the hook for this. We’re all on the hook for this. Most of us have likely never considered the possibility of just quitting sin, because if we realize it is part of our lives at all, we know how deeply ingrained in us it is. Yet that does not change his point: that we cannot become free of its domination without a grace-dependent plan for doing so.

There are plenty of good things to look at incorporating into our plans, but one that I've enjoyed focusing on during the past week has been the old Methodist practice of renewing our covenant with God at the beginning of a new year. If you're interested in using a modern version of part of the service for your own commitment, click here.

A Tribute

[This is one of the posts telling a story from the life of my Dad. Click here to see the others.] I wrote this on behalf of my two brothers to be read at my Dad's funeral service last Tuesday:

Our family would like to express our deep gratitude to each of you for being here today and for the words and acts of kindness that so many of you have shown to us during my Dad’s illness and in the days since he passed. Whether you are relatives or friends, your presence here today is of unspeakable value to us.

The experience of you all being here and the things you have said to us about my Dad have reminded me that I’ve had to admit to myself that I was sorely mistaken some years in the past. I used to fear that, when this day would come, there would be very few people who would have know my Dad well and been impacted by his life. I have always counted myself fortunate as one of the chosen few who was able to know him closely and have a lot of time with him, but my fear was that others had no way of recognizing what kind of man he was.

Yet it is truly remarkable how someone of so few words, who spent 90% of his time alone (and loved it that way) and had a deeply seeded aversion to writing letters or making telephone calls could still manage to influence such a number of people. He certainly had an effective way of communicating things that go beyond words; things that many of the rest of us are left grasping at, trying to convey with forceful words or strained actions, somehow he was able to get across making use of nothing more than who he was and how he lived.

Many of you have shared your stories of these things with us over the past days- of his kindness, his integrity, his love, and his wisdom, and these have very rarely had anything to do with words. For example, one of my wife’s favorite memories of him is of going to the ranch after he had been to the feed store to stock up on feed for the cattle in the winter. As we unloaded the feed sacks from his truck, Dad realized that the feed store had given him one more sack of feed than he had requested or paid for. Rather than writing it off as their mistake, as most of us would have done, he made the hour-long round-trip drive back into town to pay for the extra sack of feed, commenting that he hadn’t been helping them count like he should have when they loaded the feed into his truck.

As much as all of us who knew him admired things like that which we saw in my Dad, we also have admired him for the things that we did not see in him- like the fact that I have no memory of him ever being in a hurry or treating another person badly, neither with his words nor his actions. I honestly have no recollection of him ever speaking negatively to me about anyone (with the exception of politicians he disagreed with.)

Think with me for a moment how many troubles would be left in our world if these characteristics of my Dad were the norm rather than as exceptional as they are. What kinds of problems would be left to solve if, as he did, we put aside our need to be angry with others and treat them harshly in order to teach them a lesson? Or if we were always resolved to do the honest thing, by instinct doing whatever our equivalent would be to returning to pay for the sack of feed? Or, how different would we all be if we shared his commitment to leading lifestyles that we love and that are good for our souls rather than giving in to the hurry, hustle and bustle of the world around us?

I will always celebrate these things about my Dad, and in the midst of our pain it has been a joy to celebrate them together with you during these days.

Yet I want to caution us against making a mistake. It’s common for us to praise a quality that we admire in a person, or even as I am doing, to thoroughly praise a person’s character, without taking into account the things done by them that formed that kind of character in them. In my Dad’s case, it would be a mistake for us to recall his integrity, wisdom, patience, and love and not also speak of the role that his faith played in shaping those qualities in him.

Many people were surprised to see our family together in worship here at this church this past Sunday morning, after my Dad’s passing on Thursday. Although I understood their surprise, the ones who said anything to me about it simply had not known my father very long. In his house, if it was a Sunday, we were in church. Again, he never had to lay this rule out for us verbally. It was just in him, and he, in his indescribable way, simply gave it to us. Even on the last Sunday that he was alive, he was here in worship only 14 hours prior to being admitted to the hospital’s hospice unit where he would spend his last few days. His faith was nurtured by the church, and his faith led him to an extraordinary degree of commitment to the church. Being in worship each week, reading the Bible that he had sitting on his desk at the ranch, and all of the hymns that he knew by heart were simply such a large part of how he chose to shape his life that we cannot dare to separate them from his other qualities that were so admirable.

My Dad was never one for telling others what to do, and doing so is no way my desire in sharing this with each of you today. He would have simply kept going about his business, letting every one of us make our own decisions. But, as he always did, he got his point across to me and my brothers without having to say much, and that is a large part of why we will always continue to serve God, and to be faithful to the church, so that, hopefully, we will also always have what it takes to return to pay for the sack of feed.

Again, on behalf of all of our family, our sincerest thanks for being here.

Rest in Peace, Dad

Sunset last Saturday on Dad's Ranch

[This is one of the posts telling a story from the life of my Dad. 

Click here

to see the others.]

As you roll across the trestle

spanning Jordan's swelling tide,

you'll behold the union depot

into which your train will glide.

There you'll meet the Superintendent: God the Father, God the Son,

with a hearty, joyous plaudit: "Weary pilgrim, welcome home!"

Please read: 

There's a Better Solution than Telling Your Kids You Love Them

Completely Unhelpful Things to Say to Someone in Grief, Part 2

[This is part of a series of posts on completely unhelpful things to say to someone in grief. See the others here.] Two other options for titles for this post were:

• Completely Unhelpful Gifts to Give to Someone in Grief
• Plaques You Shouldn't See at the Christian Bookstore

Although, apparently, there are plenty of people who will disagree with me on this, as evidenced by the fact that my wife pointed it out to me in an actual Christmas gift catalog. I guess there is (and always will be) a market for bad theology, particularly when it comes to trying to console people. If there's a market for this, maybe I should try to do something with my scripture plaques.

Ug. As my wife said, "It makes me want to be sure I'm not the best."

Scripture Plaques You Won't Find at the Christian Bookstore, #9

[This post is one of a series of potential Christian plaques that we would never find at a Christian bookstore. See the rest of the list here.]

Of course the point of these posts is that we wouldn't find these things at a Christian bookstore, but perhaps if one did carry this plaque, it would be packaged together with a new CD titled something like:

"The Best of the Mega-SuperStars of Worship, Volume XIX"

What it Means to be a Methodist

It's a common expression to hear someone described as having "grown up in church." While we understand that normally means they've been involved in church from childhood, I can take it even farther. I literally grew up in church, not only for the reason stated above, but because before being a house, the house that I grew up in was Pioneer Memorial Methodist Church for about 15 years in the 50's and 60's. The community it existed to serve was made up of oil camp workers. The camp closed, leaving no one in the community, so the church closed as well. A few years later, my parents were married and eventually remodeled the church building into their house. They have now lived there 40 years, and it's the primary place where I "grew up in church." As an adult, it has come to hold a lot of meaning for me not only that I grew up in church, but that I grew up in a Methodist church, because my roots there are strong and deep, and surely I don't know the extent to which they have shaped me. I think it's accurate when I say to people that I've been a Methodist a lot longer than I've been alive: my great-grandparents started a Methodist church in their house before moving to this part of West Texas; my grandparents helped start the Methodist church that eventually became the home I was raised in; my parents helped start a new Methodist church in the late 80's. And I began my first staff position in a Methodist church fourteen years ago.Despite my deep roots in Methodism, it wasn't until adulthood and having already been on staff for some time in Methodist churches that I began to understand and treasure the immense value to be found in the "method," or the lifestyle, that originally came along with claiming to be a Methodist. Methodism was a very significant movement in the histories of England and the United States, and largely so because it was such a reliable guide for the development of people characterized by love for God and for one another.

I'm not going out on any limb to say that it no longer serves as such a reliable guide. Yet this is not because the original method of the Methodists has failed or been found lacking, but rather because the way it was intended to shape our lives has been left in our history rather than continuing to be emphasized as standards among us. In conversations with people at my church, the most common reasons that people give for being Methodist are things like, "I was born one," "I like it that we don't have all of the rules like other churches," or from many of the most honest folks, "Because I can be a Methodist and still drink."

Virtually nothing remains in Methodism in our culture today of the practical shape that it once gave to people's lives. Yet writing something like this doesn't accomplish anything good if I only use it to bash my church. Rather, the hope that I have for all of my Methodist family across the world is that we can recover the riches of our heritage and find the best ways to put them into practice in the 21st century.

A couple of years ago, I came across this quotation from Methodism's founder, John Wesley, while re-reading Paul Chilcote's book, Recapturing the Wesleys' Vision, and although the language is old, it is every bit as applicable today as it was when it was written in 1745:

"If you walk by this rule, continually endeavouring to know, and love, and resemble, and obey the great God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, as the God of love, of pardoning mercy; if from this principle of loving, obedient faith, you carefully abstain from all evil, and labour, as you have opportunity, to do good to all men, friends and enemies; if, lastly, you unite together to encourage and help each other in thus working out your salvation, and for that end watch over one another in love- you are they whom I mean by Methodists." (John Wesley, Advice to the People Called Methodists)

If we only had this single paragraph to learn what it means to be a Methodist, we would still have plenty to guide us more fully into "the life that is really life." Just in these few words from Wesley, we learn to:

• Continually endeavor to know, love, and resemble, and obey God
• Abstain from all evil
• Do good to everyone with every opportunity
• Watch over one another in love, helping and encouraging one another to work out our salvation

I want to be one whom Wesley meant by Methodist and live this way, and I deeply want to be part of a community of people committed to doing so as well.

Pray This

You re-create us in Christ, O God, to be holy, to be loving and generous, merciful, kind, and just in all our relationships in life.You re-create us in Christ, O God, so that we might be able to look you squarely in the face, to live with you and enjoy you forever. You re-create us in Christ, O God, simply because you want all of your children to be truly happy now. (Paul Chilcote, from "New Birth" in Praying in the Wesleyan Spirit) One of my favorite guides for praying with other people's words is to use this book by Paul Chilcote. In it, he takes each of John Wesley's 52 Standard Sermons and turns them into 2-3 page prayers. Wesley's sermons are brilliant, and Chilcote mentions in the introduction, if people were to read Wesley's sermons many lives would be changed (not to mention many Wesleyan churches!). But the problem is that you've got to have quite a bit of endurance for 18th century English built up to get through any of them. (Incase you're feeling adventurous, here's the text of the original New Birth sermon.) So, what he's done in this little book is great for anyone who wants to pray, particularly those of us in Wesleyan traditions, as it gives us a chance to dig into Wesley's sermons in a way that he would have been very pleased with: opening ourselves to God through prayer.