It somewhat puzzling why, less than two weeks into the new year, the USDA would come out with a report that says fad diets don’t work.  As if we don’t know that already and as if knowing it is going to yet keep millions from spending billions on diet fads this year.  It’s why they bothered telling us this week that is beyond me.  If they’d waited just a few days, there wouldn’t be more than a small percentage of American people still sticking to their New Year’s resolution to lose weight anyway.  Here we are, fourteen days into the new year, weighing more, not less, and even more weighted down by the frustration of yet one more failed attempt to gain any ground on losing weight.  The United States Army just dropped its two-decade old advertising slogan, “Be All You Can Be.”  That won’t stop some of us from getting there anyway.  It’s a never-ending cycle, isn’t it?  Good intentions.  Genuine effort.  Miserable failure. 

Listening closely to the apostle Paul, he’s saying the same thing.  It’s difficult to believe that he was in any way concerned about losing weight.  But, something was troubling him very deeply.  It wasn’t an ignorance of the difference between right and wrong that had him troubled or that he was less than passionately committed to doing what was right.  It was just his miserable inability to do what he knew was right when he knew it or keep from doing wrong when he knew that, too, that had him all wound up when he said, “I can will what is right, but I cannot do it.  For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.  Wretched man that I am!  Who will rescue me from this body of death?”  It’s interesting that some have found this testimony of Paul’s so earthy that they’ve concluded it must have been his pre-Christian testimony.  I couldn’t disagree more.  This is the cry of a man feeling the full weight of his fallen humanity even though he has already trusted Christ to redeem him from it.  We’ll get back to that in a moment.

For now, the question I’d like to address has to do with how we should live despite our tendency for living in ways we shouldn’t.  Is there something we can do, should do, even though we will find that growing in Christ is sometimes more like two steps forward and three steps back?  Some just give up trying.  And, there is deep sadness down that road.  I’m looking for some options to that and I think I’ve found some.  By the way, I don’t do New Year’s resolutions anymore.  It seems that if something is worth resolving it shouldn’t matter what day it is on the calendar.  So, I do not offer these to you as resolutions.  I’ve given you two weeks to blow all of those before I shared these thoughts with you.  Perhaps we should call them “How To Live When You’ve Already Blown It.” 

The truth is, there are two fundamental reasons I think people don’t keep New Year’s resolutions.  For one, when doing the self-improvement math, they don’t factor in their humanity.  Hal Haralson tells the story of going to a cattle auction with his father and brother when they were little boys several decades ago.  When their dad stepped away to handle a chore and they thought he wasn’t looking, they put a plug of Red Tag in their mouths only to turn around and find that their dad had come back sooner than they had anticipated.  Since they weren’t supposed to be chewing tobacco at their age they had two choices.  They could spit it out in front of him and take the punishment or they could swallow the plugs.  They chose to swallow and, after several stops along the road on the way home, their dad told them that he’d known all along what they’d done but also knew that the consequences would be punishment enough.  (Hal Haralson, “Pappa’s Punishment,” Christian Ethics Today, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 2000)

It is amazing, though, what we will do when think our heavenly Father isn’t looking.  It’s amazing what we’ll do when we know he is.  Moral resolutions are more often than not stillborn because we don’t factor in our humanity.  The apostle Paul makes it clear from his testimony that, in the chemistry of moral dilemmas, one part knowing better plus one part wanting to do better doesn’t equal two parts doing better. 

The other reason people don’t get to the end of the year with New Year’s resolutions still intact is because, more often than not, they try to take impossibly giant leaps from where they are to where they ought to be.  I do believe that one of the distinctive characteristics of a true Christian is that, regardless of past failure, the Christian keeps “forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead” and always reaching for “the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus.”  (Philippians 3:13-14)  And, in that spirit, I’d like for you to consider the wonderful grace of just a little. 

First, turn a little bit loose.  Even if downsizing in the most visible places is proving impossibly difficult, I decided over the holidays to downsize where I could.  So, we’re replacing a four-drawer filing cabinet with a one-drawer filing cabinet at home.  Over the holidays, I went through all the old files I’ve kept for years and I couldn’t believe all the stuff I’d been holding onto.  Of course, there are old letters and even pictures that are priceless beyond words.  But, there were old files that reminded me of days I’d just as soon forget.  Old financial papers that have no meaning any longer and so on.  So, just after Christmas, I filled two large trash bags with the shredded reminders of a past that is no more.  Strangely, I feel lighter even though I’m actually afraid of stepping on the scales.

Under the category of “forgetting what lies behind,” are there any old files you need to shred?  On another occasion, this same apostle Paul who struggled with coming to moral maturity came close enough to define it for us.  In a letter he wrote to a first-century Corinthian church in which he said that he was learning to think more like a spiritual adult than an immature child, he said that, “love keeps no record of wrongs.”  (1 Corinthians 13:5, NIV)  Of all the files that you could shred, there are none that would make a more positive impact on your life than those that contain the records of those things others have done to hurt you.  Jesus said that we should ask God to “forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.”  (Matthew 6:12)  Before you pray that prayer, you might look to see if you’ve been keeping some old files full of the records on the wrong others have done to you.  That is unless you actually want God to forgive you in the same way you forgive, or don’t forgive, others. 

Just this week I ran into a preacher friend of mine whom I’ve known for about twenty years now.  I’ve told you about him before and I’ve told you about how angry he was at how life has not worked out for him as he thought it would.  No matter where he’s ever moved, which he has several times, within a year or so he’s miserable and it seems to be everyone else’s fault.  Nothing has changed.  Except, this time, I finally heard him say, “I’m not even sure God is in this anymore.”  He was talking about the church.  I’ve never seen him except to note that he is always carrying this huge bag full of anger at all the things everyone, including God now, has done to make his life miserable.  (Sometimes forgiving others begins with accepting responsibility for our part in the mess we’ve made of things.)  Anyway, my friend seems to be paying a terrible price to carry that anger.  His career and, more fearfully, his soul, may never recover.  

I’ve said it before.  You’ll hear it yet again.  One of the greatest indications of how far God has gotten with you is how far you’ve gotten in the work of learning to forgive others.  If the mountain you must climb in order to be faithful to God seems impossibly high, first try the toehold of extending to others the same grace God has extended to you.  You won’t get where you need to be in one step.  But, if you don’t get there with a forgiving spirit, it won’t matter how high you climb.  And, those who are committed to hauling the weighty bag of unforgiveness with them to the summit will discover that they weren’t even on the right mountain when they get there anyway.

First, turn a little bit loose.  Second, tuck a little bit in.  Foy Valentine has been one of the finest Christian ethicists on the Baptist scene for years.  He has this incredible gift for pithy sayings and one of my favorite is, “We’ve spent so many years learning to let it all hang out, maybe it’s time we tucked some of it back in.”  I’ll let you figure our for yourself what’s hanging and what needs tucking in your own life.  But, his words ring true, don’t they?

This past week, ABC debuted Temptation Island.  This is entertainment genius at its best!  Four committed, though unmarried, couples are put on a deserted island in a contest to see who can overcome the temptation to stray.  They had to put people on a deserted island to figure that out?  Anyway, ABC denies there is any intention for this to become a sexual thing although all of the people involved were tested for sexually transmitted diseases before being allowed to participate.  Among the many signs of a culture’s moral decay are those things that culture uses to entertain itself.  Any chance it’s time we tucked a little back in?  We mock first-century Rome for pleasuring itself by watching Christians being eaten alive by lions.  Have we really made that much progress?   

The grace of God is not just about being saved from hell.  It is about God’s investment of his very life in ours so that we might become all he created us to be.  Under the category of tucking it in, listen to a definition of grace with which we ought to familiarize ourselves even more.  “For the grace of God that brings salvation has appeared to all men.  It teaches us to say ‘No’ to ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright and godly lives in this present age.”  (Titus 3:11-12, NIV)  If we claim to have accepted the grace and forgiveness of God and yet knowingly pursue lifestyles, public or private, that dishonor his name we are not only poor students of the grace of God, we mock Christ’s death on the cross.  Our greatest problem, though seemingly more obvious, is not our physical flab but those places in which we’ve allowed moral flabbiness to go unattended.  It’s not our double chins as much as our double standards that kill us.  It’s time to tuck a little bit in.

Turn a little bit loose.  Tuck a little bit in.  Last, give a little bit back.  I was visiting with Gary Cook, president of DBU this past week.  We were talking about the fact that, in all of our lives, there are people who drain us and people who energize us.  Some want more than we have to give or are willing to give and yet demand it anyway.  Others, if only observing at a distance, inspire and encourage us.  Gary asked me who the people are who energize me.  Without so much as a breath’s hesitation, I told him about the people of this church who give so much of themselves.  The people who, for no other reward than the joy of serving, invest and invest and then re-invest themselves in others and in the work of God in this place.  People, I told him, who wear me out, yet energize me, just watching them give. 

The apostle Paul wrote, “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways.”  (1 Corinthians 13:11)  He wrote those words in the context of describing what it means to be a loving person.  Part of what he meant was that the more lovingly we behave the more we are moving from spiritual infancy to spiritual adulthood.  Immaturity, regardless of age, thinks primarily of itself and what others should do for it.  Maturity, looking out upon all that has come its way free gratis, starts looking for ways to give a little bit back.

You won’t believe what I’m about to say.  But, here goes.  Sometimes, in my most private moments, I worry about my salvation.  I look at all the sin in my life, all the things I have done and still do.  I feel that weighty bag of unforgiveness on my shoulder and wonder how it got so full.  I look at all that I know I should do and don’t and all that I don’t do and should and wonder how in the world there could be a place for me in heaven.  That’s why Romans 7 is one of my favorite chapters in the Bible and Romans 8:1 is one of my favorite verses.

“There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.”

I’m not committing myself to living a better life because I believe that’s what gets me into heaven.  Jesus will get me to heaven.  It’s just that, when I realize how much God has done to make room for someone like me in his heaven, I don’t want to live one more day taking his grace for granted.  So, tomorrow and then the next day, I’m going to get up and, by his wonderful grace, turn a little bit loose, tuck a little bit in and give a little bit back. 

Care to join me?