New Year
December 26, 1999
Acts 18:18 -- Note: Paul a Christian in the maturity of his life at this point.
I want to address us all briefly, this evening, regarding the new resolves that each of us needs to make concerning our obedience to God, the faithfulness of our service to the Lord Jesus, and our communion with him.
However much we need to be doing this throughout the year and at all times, there is a natural interest on our part in looking to our lives, in considering in what ways, we know full well, our lives ought to be different than they are at the change of year. You have heard me on this point before, of course, but all of us need this challenge over and over again. But perhaps some of you have not yet had any serious thought of new beginnings in the new year, even this year, as the clock turns over a new century, even a new millennium. Let me begin with you.
Is it not time for you to examine yourself? Is it not time to consider in how many important ways your life falls far short of what it ought to be, and what it very much could be, for the Lord’s sake and your own sake and for the sake of your family and the world around you? Is it not time to face the fact that nothing stands between you and far greater and more fruitful faithfulness to God than simply the exercise of your will and the commitment of your heart and the sacrifice of your time and effort? Surely God will bless those who hunger and thirst for more righteousness!
Try this on for size. These are twelve questions for the purpose of self-examination proposed by the famous Methodist missionary John Fletcher of Madeley. He called them "Self-examination Questions for Spiritual People." And he meant that we should ask ourselves these questions each and every day!
Now, I don’t propose those questions to suggest that you ought to ask yourselves all of them every day. Some of the older writers were too intense about self-examination, almost morbid, and, I fear, in their self-absorption, did not always live in the full freedom of the gospel and its peace. But they have a great deal to teach us, nevertheless. I’m not telling you to turn inward and think most of the time about the evaluation of your life. Rather, I read these questions to you to remind you how seriously godly men and women have always taken the matter of the Christian lives they led and to remind you how much any serious-minded Christian will always find that needs improvement in his or her own case.
Surely you know, if you are a Christian, you know in any number of ways that your life is not what it ought to be, given God’s extraordinary gift to you, given Christ’s sacrifice for you, given the summons that has been issued to you to walk worthy of the grace you have received, given the extraordinary resources that are available to you in the Holy Spirit that is within you, and given the specter of heaven and hell that rises above you and above all those whose lives your life has the capacity to touch, to influence, for good or ill.
Is it a lack of prayer in your case? You know you do not pray as you should, as often, as consistently, as selflessly for others as you should. Or is it some sin that you know you should long ago have brought under control by the power that Christ makes available to his own, but that you have toyed with and dallied with out of love for that sin? Is it a failure to practice some part of Christian service: gospel witness or good works or brotherly love? Is it the godly nurture of your children? Is it the forgiveness you know you have not extended to some you consider your enemies, and the lingering bitterness and hatred you very well know, is eating up your soul’s better parts. Is it sincere and willing obedience given to your parents? Is it the Christian use of your money, or time, or energy? You know what it is! You know how important, how memorably important the year 2000 would be if only, for Christ’s sake and by the strength he provides, you were to take great strides in that area of your life.
Here is where the New Year is a help to us. It forces on us a reckoning with the passage of time and teaches us to number our days. It is one thing to always intend to offer this obedience or that to the Lord, to have this blessing or that in our lives, it is another to take the bull by the horns and effect the changes! The New Year reminds us that it is far too easy to while way our years "laboriously doing nothing much at all." Wishing will not make it so – not when the world, our own flesh, and the Devil all conspire to oppose Christ's interests in our lives. Is this not why even the world makes so much of the new year? It is the unwitting tribute of unbelieving men and women to the sacredness, the preciousness of time and of opportunity.
But the New Year also gives us a sense of new beginning, of the possibility of new things. I know it is so with me. Ex abundantia enim cordis os loquitur! Out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks. I need every assistance that I can find to move as I know I need to move and as I am going so much to have wanted to have moved when all my New Years are past and gone forever.
So, let me this evening remind you of two simple truths, truths you know but need to ponder and to give answer to as the new year approaches.
The first is the absolute necessity of "taking steps" if one would grow in the grace and the knowledge of the Lord. It is not enough to hunger and thirst for righteousness. One must also put it on! One must embody the inner desire with steps taken in the outward life designed to foster what we desire. Paul did this. It was not enough for him to desire that the Lord be glorified in his body. No, in order that that might be so, he beat his body and brought it into submission and made it his slave.
And so throughout the ages all the godly men and women who have gone on in the things of the Spirit of God. They have taken steps. They have fasted and they have prayed. They have found a brother or a sister to agree to hold them to account. They have set goals for themselves and measured their progress to those goals. They have introduced new disciplines designed to foster a deeper devotion or a more strict obedience. They began to keep a journal or annotate their Bibles or write down a record of their prayers. And by taking those steps, they put into flesh and blood their hopes for a greater holiness, they proved to God the sincerity of their prayers and strengthened their prayers for this grace or that, this obedience or that, this blessing or that.
Far too many Christians want to be better Christians, sometimes feel quite convicted about their need to be better Christians. But they never do anything that is designed to foster that growth, to bring it to pass. I don’t say that we can grow without the Lord’s help and blessing and working. Without him we can do nothing. But he uses means, and prayers that are unaccompanied by action are weak and ineffectual prayers. Action, always action! Right to the end. To the very last do as Rutherford said and "break a piece of sin off each day." To your last working day, be at work. Dr. van Til's last visit to Dr. Buswell in the hopsital! There he found Dr. Buswell drilling himself on Hebrew vocabulary. The work of a theological professor!
Second, the Bible’s own method for forcing the soul forward in some way is the taking of vows. A vow is a promise that you do not have to make, but once made, it absolutely must be kept. Christians know this and, for that reason, when a vow is made, new obedience is forthcoming in a way that it may not have been before.
Precisely because vows must be kept, they must be carefully made. No one should make a vow to God that he cannot prudently expect himself or herself to keep. To promise God that you will never again sin in some way is a foolish vow. The Bible and the history of your own heart tell you that this is a promise you cannot be sure to keep, indeed can be sure you will not keep! Vows are potent things precisely because if they do not lead to greater blessing, they must lead to greater punishment, for one has made a sacred promise to God – a promise he did not have to make – and then has broken it! He has broken his solemn word to God! He has looked God in the face and lied to Him!
But, to take a wise vow, that lays you under obligation to some devotion, to some obedience, to some act of mortification, to some careful observation of your life, is the Bible’s own way of forcing the issue and leaving you under a sacred obligation to do what you have not done before.
Paul himself took vows of this kind. He once took a Nazirite vow, as we read in Acts 18:18. What was a Nazirite vow but a promise of special consecration of life for a time? It ended with a haircut that Luke recollects Paul getting. If Paul needed to take vows, what of you and me? And he was still making them years into his apostleship! No getting to a certain point and then stopping for Paul!
You might make a vow for your life in the new year. A vow about your reading of Holy Scripture, a vow to fast at certain times – to fast for the mortification of your pride or your lusts or to foster some greater spiritual discipline – . Or you might take a vow to keep a record of your obedience or disobedience in some area of life that is of concern to you – a record that will force upon your conscience a dealing with yourself about that disobedience. Or you might take a vow concerning your prayer, to record how much you pray and for what, or a vow to keep track of how many times in the coming year you pray according to the goal you have set for yourself, or a vow to tell some particular person that you have done a thing or failed to do a thing every time you do it or fail to do it, or a vow that you will do this or that for some other person in the new year, or whatever.
These are promises that are made to God and so promises that must be kept, and because they must be kept, vows send us forward when mere resolves would peter out and come to nothing. There is a danger in taking a vow, but, then, there is also in vows the demonstration of a Christian’s seriousness, his desire to be sure that he really does honor God with his life. Sooner or later, the Bible seems to say, a man or a woman who loves God will take vows simply because he or she cannot stand the thought that he is not going to go much further before his day is done, that she is not going to put on much more righteousness than this before the sand has run out of her glass.
The New Year beckons. The new beginning, the new opportunity. What will you make of it? Surely, you should make something of it. And next year, at this time, you will not be here any longer, but thinking instead of taking another step, beyond the step you took in the days and the months that followed January 1, anno domini 2000.