Rev. Dr. M. Taylor Bach

Ephesians 1:3-14 John 1:1-6, 10-18

I wonder how many sermons have you heard at the beginning of the year about making New Year's resolutions? Well, here is another one! (Laughter) I heard on television yesterday a fascinating fact. That is that 70% of Americans make New Year's resolutions and 6% keep them. Holy Cow! Why is that? What happens? We know from psychology that there are steps in bringing about change.

The first step is Anger usually, a discovery that “I could be different. I can make a change and, doggone it, nobody told me I was capable of this or I could change this or that this behavior I was into that was harmful to me.” I am angry about it enough to go to the next step and the next step is Make a Decision. All change is decisional. You are exactly where you decide to be. When we make a decision, then we are really into the process of change. Following the decision step is a Stage of Phoniness. Now I am doing the new thing but it doesn't feel like me. It feels really phony to be doing it. Let's give the example of someone giving up smoking. Let's say a person gives up smoking. The first thing is they are angry that they became a smoker when they were thirteen or fifty years old in the first place. Then they make a decision, “OK, I'm going to quit. The surgeon general told me this is bad for my health and besides that, so does everybody in my family.” The next thing is, “I feel really phony not smoking. I don't know what to do with my hands. Whenever there is an external stimulus like drinking a cup of coffee, I always follow that by a cigarette.” Maybe it is getting in my car or just waking up in the morning, there are stimuli that are triggers where the person almost always had a cigarette and now they are not responding to them and it feels like& “This isn't me at all. I'm at a loss. I feel phony in doing this.” It is during this phony stage that most people give up and quit making the change that they want to make. Then after the phony stage, a person becomes Skillful in making the change. Now they can do it. It still takes will-power and effort but now they are capable of it. And then finally after thirty to forty days, (interesting  forty days is a good Biblical number), the change becomes Integrated. Now I can call myself a non-smoker. It is no longer part of me. It is just who I am and I made the change. This is true with any change that we try to make. It follows these steps. When we don't succeed with the New Year's resolution, it is because during that phony stage, we don't persevere and we drop out.

There are plenty of Biblical examples for perseverance. God has said, “My grace is sufficient for you. I will help you make whatever change it is that you want to make.” So if we call upon God, put Him in the center of our life like Bob Girard said last week, we have within us the grace and the help, the power to make any change that we want to make. Will it be easy? No. Will it be possible? Yes! “For all things are possible with God.” That is a Biblical quote, too. But remember, clearly it is with God all things are possible. On my own alone, I am not as capable of making changes, but with God, I can make a change, whether it is to give up something or to become new at something or to change a personality trait. With God, it is possible. So we want God to be there.

One of the New Year's resolutions that I made several years ago after reading Bruce Wilkinson's book on the Jabez prayer was to say the Jabez prayer every day of my life. And I pretty well do that at this point of my life. I would like to recommend it to all of you. It can be found in your Bible in I Chronicles 4:10 and it goes like this&This is the new International Version of it.

Praying to God& “O God, that you would bless me and enlarge my territory. Let your right hand be with me and keep me from evil that I may do no harm.” (And God granted this request.)

I think that is a wonderful prayer for all of us to say. I changed the translation a little bit and put it in modern English. I do believe that there is a communal value in it so I pray& “God bless me, but not only me, but God bless all of us in this coming year as a community, as His faithful people here at Pilgrim Church.” Where Jabez said, “Will you enlarge my territory?” I pray, “Will you enlarge our church? Will you grant us new members? Will you grant us an enlargement in spiritual values, too? Will you enlarge our walk with you, our life with you, our spiritual approach to things?” Then Jabez says, “&so that your right hand may be always with me.” As Christians, we know that is a way of saying, “Will your Holy Spirit be with us?” So I always pray, “Will you allow your Holy Spirit to be with us as we go through this?” Then the last fascinating part of this prayer is, “Will you keep me from evil so I can do no harm?” Wow! I love that. Don't you? “Will you keep me from evil so I can do no harm?” “Will you guard my mouth that I speak no evil and never hurt others?” “Will you guard my actions so I do no evil that creates harm or injury to others?” This is a wonderful prayer and I recommend it to you all. Again, it is found in I Chronicles 4:10.

The key with anything like this, any New Year's resolution, is then to get through the phony stage and persevere, to hang in there, to go for it for a long period of time, to stay at it thirty or forty days that it takes to get through the phony stage. I've recently come across some people who succeeded with this kind of thing that I would like to share with you just so they can be a good example for you. One of them is Sharon Prestimon who is the Executive Director of the Back Bay Mission. Back Bay Mission is a mission that we in the United Church of Christ support and here at Pilgrim, some of our OCWM money and some of our just plain mission money goes to support the Back Bay Missions. When Hurricane Katrina hit, the Back Bay Mission which is located in New Orleans was just totally obliterated. But in a letter she sent to our church, it says that she recently stood there in the middle of what was once the Back Bay Mission and saw the whole thing as totally reconstructed, all brand new. It happened because a lot of UCC members volunteered to go down on their vacation time at their own expense to rebuild the whole place. The Back Bay Mission exists again because people persevered for the last three years, rebuilt it and made it new. Now it serves the impoverished people on the Gulf Coast once again. Perseverance was the trait that they had and we, too, can live in that tradition and persevere in whatever we need to do.

One of the things that occurred to me as I discuss this with you this morning is growing personally and making resolutions, I've wanted you to perhaps make a resolution that you would get your finances in order this year. We've gone through tough economic times. It is time for each and every one of us to get out of debt, to not use credit cards except in emergencies and to pay them off as rapidly as possible, especially at the end of the month if you can do so. But get your finances in order. Why does God want our finances to be in order? So that we can be generous Christians. That is one thing I want to invite you to consider this morning.

Secondly, I'd like to invite you to consider getting your health in order, checking out what you need to do to be a healthy person. Give yourself a birthday gift. Each time you have a birthday, get a physical, get a check-up. Make sure all your body parts are doing what they are supposed to be doing. If they are not, see if you can't get them repaired in one way or the other.

Finally, and most importantly, give yourself a spiritual check-up. Check how things are going internally with you, your thoughts, the purity of your ideas, and also externally to the degree that you give yourself to God's work inviting other people to come to our church and volunteering here at Pilgrim or somewhere else. I am not saying that you have to volunteer here although it is a great place to volunteer; you can volunteer outside of this place. The key is to get outside of yourself this year and volunteer some place and make that one of your New Year's resolutions and a priority.

As I was thinking about all this, my wife and I attended a movie this past week while I was on vacation. If you haven't seen it yet, I want to recommend it to you. It is called The Blind Side. It is a movie starring Sandra Bullock and an unknown actor, a young black man. It is about the life of Michael Oher (pronounced Orr), the left tackle of the Baltimore Ravens. I've never been a fan of the Baltimore Ravens but as long as the Bengals beat them, I'm going to root for them this year now that I've seen this movie. The gist of the movie is that Michael Oher was a poor black boy whose mother abandoned him to drugs, his father basically committed suicide through alcoholism and he was left to fend for himself. At the age of thirteen, a rather wealthy white family took him in to their home and basically raised him. It is a true story. It is fascinating. It is extremely touching. The one thing that struck me about this was the perseverance that was modeled by everyone in this story. Michael Oher was sent to a Christian high school with absolutely no idea how to think or how to study. He was almost like an infant although he was thirteen or fourteen years old. His teachers for the next four years of high school didn't give up on him but they believed in him and tutored him. The family hired a tutor who hung in there with him. Together, they would show that he could succeed. He would study from the time he got home from school until 11:30 at night trying to play catch-up with his fellow students, and also so he could qualify for college athletics because he needed to actually attain a straight “A” scholastic record in his senior year. The family that adopted him hung in there through all kinds of adversity. So it is a great movie. If you haven't seen it, I urge you to go see it. The major lesson is all these people persevered in bringing about the changes in this young man so that he could succeed at life and today he is the left tackle for the Baltimore Ravens. As you know, the left tackle is the one who protects the quarterback's blind side and hence, the name of the movie. It is really a good movie and it is a good example of perseverance.

Elizabeth Bolton was the daughter of a minister. Elizabeth decided to go on a mission vacation to Haiti. While she was there, she decided that she would go see a famous waterfall that exists in Haiti. With a group of people who were on her mission trip, they began to strike out to find this waterfall. They did have a Haitian guide who took them there. As they walked up the mountain, they began to become exhausted yet the Haitian guide would say, “Just fifteen more minutes. Just fifteen more minutes we'll get there.” Two hours later, the guide was still saying, “Just fifteen more minutes. Just fifteen more minutes, we'll get there.” She's reporting, “I'm so exhausted. I can hardly move. Every muscle in my body aches. This is awful.” The guide says, “We have a saying here in Haiti. That is&Behind every mountain, there is another mountain to climb.” She says, “Now you tell me.” Finally, about two hours and fifteen minutes, they found the waterfall and she said it was worth it. But the message she gave in telling her story was that the guide was very clever in getting them to persevere by giving little increments and these little goals to meet. By moving in these little increments and meeting these little goals, they finally achieved the great big goal. So every time you hear a New Year's Day sermon (and many of you have done it for many New Years), and every time you are aware that it's the message& to become spiritual again&to put Christ at the center&to change your life&to get rid of the bad habits&to create the new life within you that Christ has promised, be aware that it is only “fifteen minutes” away. It is only just over the next hill. Hang in there with perseverance. You can do it. You can make these changes. You don't have to give up in the phony stage. You can make whatever change you set out to make if you persevere. And with God's help, not only is that possible, it is probable.