Making Rosh Hashanah Resolutions

You've heard the old expression: "Dumb and in love." I wouldn't exactly want to apply the "dumb" part to any relatives of MINE, but when you're giddy enough as husband and wife to have five sons in the space of five years, there's another expression that's going to bounce around the Melashenko homestead up there in Saskatchewan. And it's this: "Well, Lonnie — or Joedy, or Dallas, or Eugene, or Rudy — I HOPE YOU'VE LEARNED YOUR LESSON!" We heard that a lot, I'm afraid. When there are lessons to be learned, times FIVE, that's a powerful lot of educating. My poor mom and dad both had Ph.D's in lesson-teaching before the five sons of the tribe of Joseph finally moved out of the house.

We've been studying biblical truth all this week about why Christians sometimes spend a lifetime NOT learning their lesson. A cute story came in the other day over some Comedy Central web site about a petty crook named Duane J. Babcock, working the circuit up in Portland, Oregon. This guy took a taxi to a B of A branch, which he held up. The cabbie, not knowing what was going on, waited for him out front, and gave him a ride away from the scene of the crime. Well, the FBI, tracking down the details afterwards, called the driver in and got what they could from him: description, clothes, etc.

Now, get this. That same evening, this thief, Duane Babcock, has some other errand to run. I don't know if he was going to hit on Wells Fargo the same day, or just go out for ice cream, but he calls up for ANOTHER taxi. Same company. AND . . . same GUY! He gets the exact same driver he had in the morning. I don't know how nervous that cab driver was, knowing he had Al Capone there in the back seat, but he kept his cool. He took Babcock where he wanted to go, then went around the corner, called the FBI, and three minutes later they had the brilliant Duane J. Babcock in custody. This poor chump even had the holdup note from that morning still in his pocket, which made for very convenient courtroom evidence. True story . . . and talk about "Why don't you learn your lesson?"! Even the FBI must have been cracking up as they put the handcuffs on him.

Well, friend, there's nothing in the world funny about the fact that many of us, even professed Christians, spend a long time making the same mistakes over and over and over. We call the devil's Yellow Cab company repeatedly ourselves, in one form or another. And then wonder why we're behind bars. It's amazing how often God comes down to the county jail with bail money for us, but it IS a depressing pattern. Why can't we learn our lesson?

I shared with you the other day a wonderfully comforting quote from the classic book, Mere Christianity, by C. S. Lewis. If you're discouraged because inner demons have plagued you for DECADES, he writes, just keep on. HANG on. Don't give up. Jesus knows all about it. One of these days — or years, or CENTURIES — He's going to make it all better. Never, never, never give up.

He also writes some words of straight counsel we should heed when we tend to look across the fence and think someone ELSE is stuck on the slow track. Mr. Duane J. Babcock, for example. How can anybody be so dumb? we wonder. Why can Deacon So-and-So make NO spiritual progress in so many years? Here's what Lewis writes about that:

"What can you ever really know of OTHER people's souls — of their temptations, their opportunities, their struggles?" We don't, do we? "One soul in the whole creation you DO know: and it is the only one whose fate is placed in YOUR hands. If there is a God, you are, in a sense, alone with Him."

Even Jesus once said as much to one of His disciples, who was asking about some OTHER disciple. "What about Him, Lord?" And Jesus said to him, "Just mind your own business, Peter. That's between him and Me. But YOU, Peter . . . YOU'RE one-on-one with Me too. Your job in life is to follow Me. That's it." Friend, we can't know the reasons why someone else in your world is experiencing fast progress or slow progress or NO progress in their own journey with the Lord. My concern is MY journey; your concern is yours.

And with that in mind, I want to say here in closing that progress and growth and reforming and doing better . . . are good things, but not the greatest thing. It's wonderful to GROW in Jesus, but that comes second to ABIDING in Him. Yes, salvation does lead to growth, but the emphasis is salvation FIRST, and growth SECOND. Always.

In that same passage in the book Mere Christianity, Lewis adds this additional insight:

"A world of NICE people, content in their OWN niceness, looking no further, turned AWAY from God, would be just as desperately in need of salvation as a miserable world — and might even be more difficult to save," he writes. "For mere IMPROVEMENT is no redemption, though redemption always improves people even here and now and will, in the end, improve them to a degree we cannot yet imagine."

I think what he's saying is this. Improvement is a good thing, certainly, especially for Christians. Christianity SHOULD improve a person; in fact, if we keep on surrendering to Jesus each day, He surely WILL improve us. Dwight L. Moody once remarked:

"Of one hundred men, one will read the Bible; the ninety-nine will read the Christian."

So behavior and growth are important; they tell a watching world about the power of God. But improvement is still not the main point of it all. Calvary is.

Unfortunately, we often find ourselves FOCUSING on improvement. A strong person, on December 31, makes a list of things to do better. Lose weight. Stop smoking. Control the temper. Read the Bible more each day. Attend church. And because they happen to be rather strong-willed, or have a disciplined kind of personality, come January 1, they do all those things. They do them rather well. Their performance curve goes up and up and up — they're tracking it rather carefully, of course, on a laptop computer — and they see it going off the chart. And they're quite pleased. Pleased with whom? Well, very likely with themselves. "Look at this! I'm growing! I'm doing okay!" And that upward tick of the graph — which is a pathetic little nothing in heaven's computers, by the way — might lead that person OFF their knees, AWAY from the foot of the cross, away from total and complete dependence on the saving blood of our merciful Savior. Sometimes the better we do, the less we think we need that mercy. In Luke 18, Jesus told His disciples about two men who came to pray. One of them had made great progress in his spiritual life; he was fasting and praying and paying tithe and the whole nine yards. Fantastic! And he prayed a rather glowing prayer ABOUT his fantastic religious progress. Most of the glow came from the medals he'd pinned to his own shirt, by the way. The second man, a cheating, thieving tax collector, fell on his face in the temple, and groaned to heaven: "God, I'm a miserable sinner. I'm not making any progress at all. THE PATIENT SHOWS NO IMPROVEMENT. Please help me." And Jesus told the 12 disciples that it was the second man who got forgiveness and help, not the first one.

Friend, it's amazing how the time slides away, but let me share with you this one powerful verse in closing. Growth and improvement are wonderful things, but only on these two conditions: one, they come from Jesus. And two, they're gratefully accepted ONLY in the spirit of using that growth to bring glory to God. I absolutely LOVE this verse, Matthew 5:16 — and I need to look at it several times a day.

"Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your GOOD WORKS, and glorify your FATHER which is in heaven."

Friend, I don't know where you are today. You may be flying high; you might be in prison. Growing fast, or going backwards. In either case, God loves you. Dr. Louis Felder, a psychologist who wrote an insightful book called The Ten Challenges, makes this observation:

"One of the Hebrew words for God's loving compassion that you will find in many prayers is rakhaman. Rakhaman means compassion, but also it can mean 'womb' or 'womblike.' So, in essence, when you bare your soul to God you are surrounded by warmth and caring, much like the kind of nourishment you find in the womb."

And friend, once you know you're in the womb of His love . . . I believe you WILL grow. That's where a newborn does a good share of its growing, in the safety and security of that womb. C. S. Lewis observed, in that same book:

"Handing everything over to Christ does not, of course, mean that you stop trying. To trust Him means, of course, trying to do all that He says. There would be no sense in saying you trusted a person if you would not take his advice. Thus if you have really handed yourself over to Him, it must follow that you ARE trying to obey Him. But trying in a NEW way, a less worried way."

Friend, I can't tell you how much I like that. "Trying in a new way, a less worried way." We're abiding in the womb of God's acceptance, surrounded by His INFINITE grace. And then we try to OBEY . . . but in a new way. And sometimes, when you try it a new way, it actually works.

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