Sermon Tone Analysis

You might think it odd that I speak of New Year when 8 months have gone, and 4 months to the next one but it is to illustrate a point now that we know where we are with those things we said we would change.

How did we do?!

For when a New Year beckons it is a time to reflect on where we have come from to where we are going.

Reflection is good as long as we do not linger there too long for we should always be moving forward towards the goal of the upward call of God, the joy of meeting and greeting our Lord Jesus Christ and being with Him forever.

With a New Year comes New Year Resolutions.

Did you make any?

You know, those annual decisions to slim down, shape up, sort through, and generally get our lives back in order?

There’s something about starting a new year that drives us to make resolutions.

We like the idea of leaving behind an old year, with its mistakes and frustrations, and beginning afresh.

Of course we know that New Year’s Resolutions are like friends.

They are easier to make than to keep.

And a New Year’s Resolution usually goes in one year and out the next.”

Morgan, R. J. (2001).

Nelson’s Annual Preacher’s Sourcebook (2002 Edition., p. 396).

Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers.

This is what this passage is about.

Except not just at New Years but with New Days.

The same excitement that comes with New Years should be how it is everyday for this is the day the Lord has made and we will rejoice in it.

It is good to start the day well.

It is also good to end it well.

One of the practices I have is at the end of most days is to reflect on what went well that day, what didn’t go well and if I had the day again what I would do differently – all this in the space of 1 minute.

This makes it do-able and it is only between God and me.

Each day then is considered thoughtfully and not mindlessly.

This should also lead to greater communication with God and asking Him for help in the coming day so that there will be more in the things that went well than those that didn’t.

We lose too much of what goes on in a day.

Don’t most of us have trouble remembering the previous day?

Paul is full of energy, he was not one of being passive and let God do it.

Paul expected God to be at work as he moved forward.

He knew that God permitted him into the race qualifying him for the race he had to run.

Of course, we know that none of us have reached perfection including Paul, including me, including you but what is expected is that we grow in Christ.

We are all on a journey or as Paul would say; a race.

Paul is keen to press on to lay hold of the fullness of that which has been given us.

We must now become what we are.

We are caught in tension.

The demand is that we live in the now as those who have “died with Christ” to sin, yet are still sinners.

We have been reckoned by God as righteous and He has accepted us by our faith in Christ.

Yet we are in fact unrighteous and any claim we make to righteousness is “as filthy rags.”

We are in a tension, a struggle between what we are now and what we will be, between what God says of us now and what we are.

In all this we are drawn into a closer relationship with Christ for he has already made us His own.

The result of a closer relationship with Christ is that we don’t want to have anything in our lives that will mar it.

This means that we start to deal with those things that have long been neglected because they are part of us.

So it is time to put down the bad habits in our lives; we have to be intentional, deliberate about it.

Make New Year Resolutions but start today, don’t wait four months to create new and good habits but these things only happen when we are more interested in our relationship with Christ.

There are three things needed to get to this place:

1.

First we need to realise how good a Saviour we have.

We remember His birth, coming in human form, born in a stable to poor parents, living an exemplary life doing good among the people and teaching repentance and then dying in our place because of our sins.

There is no better passage of Scripture for this than:

How can we not be moved when we consider all He has done for us?

Constantly remember His love for us.

This should spur us, who are His, to better habits.

We love because He first loved us.

2. The second things is to realise we have to answer for our daily lives, for our moment-by-moment thoughts and actions.

And if we know that we have to give an account of everything to God life takes on a different perspective:

Shouldn’t this thought change the way we live?

Well, it should.

It was effective in changing the way Paul lived day-by-day for he himself admits he has not attained perfection.

It seems that it took effort and daily rededication to Christ, of knowing Him and making Him known.

We are then motivated to push forward and think of ways we can do better, to make the Gospel known.

Paul was all about Christ remember; ‘for me to live is Christ’.

How close are we to this?

Is our living for Christ or is it for ourselves?

God is watching us and this very knowledge is a strong motivator.

And just as when a manager at work is watching us we actually do some work – so it is with the fact that God is always watching and therefore we will work for Him and not do anything that would bring shame upon ourselves.

We should get to the place where our love for our Lord is such that we do everything in our power to see that we do not offend Him because we love Him.

The Psalmist understood this.

It was His love for the Lord that made him say:

3.

And the third thing that spurs us on to better habits is to realise that we no longer have to have bad habits for we have been set free from the bondage of sin, that we no longer have to sin.

There is no half-way house.

There’s a term being banded about and you may have heard it: A ‘gay Christian’ or ‘LGBTQ Christian’.

Why would you wear such a title?

A lying Christian.

Would you wear this with pride?

Just because we may have an inclination to such sin?

How about a worldly Christian?

Is that something we should own just because the world gets more of our attention than it should?

Of course not.

When we become a Christian what we were is dealt with and we have been given new life.

How do I know this?

We are now Christians.

We have been made perfect in His sight.

Of course, the tension is there, we still are not perfect, not one of us.

It is not to say the struggle is over.

We will never achieve perfection in this life for when we think we have got it sorted some other fault of ours raises its head and most likely in areas we are not even looking at such as ego, pride or coveting or the old one crops up in an unexpected way.

This is important to realise for some think that perfection is possible but, and this is not to be used as an excuse, it will not be so in this lifetime:

However, we are clothed in His righteousness; we have been made right with God and that cannot change.

Christ has made us new creatures but we confess humbly that we have not become in fullness what Christ wants us to be.

We are on the road to holiness.

So whilst we normally wait for the New Year to make resolutions we needn’t do so.

Every day is a new day, a day to start afresh for:

Paul mentions two further things that we need to take account of in Phil 3.13:

1. Forget the past and

2. Strain forward

The Christian, drawn by the powerful impulsion of a personal relationship with God through Jesus Christ, is uniquely equipped to leave the past behind.

Yet, how many of us do not.

The dimension of our past that continues to drag us back, weigh us down, and make our movement stumbly at best, is our sense of failure, our guilt over past sin, our pain from past hurts.

Very often we find ourselves remembering the past but it is this very thing that can prove to be a hindrance for moving forward, it is attached to us like a ball and chain.

We all have regrets.

If someone says they have no regrets they are liars.

The best we can do is to learn and move forward.

If it is sin then we have the promise of Scripture: