Happy New Year.
On Sunday we were thinking about how we can be prepared to grow in 2022 – not simply to survive another year of uncertainty, but to grow and see lives transformed. If you’ve not had a chance to listen yet you’ll find it here: https://youtu.be/ZOuOj1qbEWY
I find this a challenging topic to talk about because it can be hard to get the right balance. It’s right that we think about our faith in terms of a relationship with Jesus. That’s why we started with Hebrews 12:1-2 – the importance of fixing our eyes on Jesus. We’re called to follow Jesus. That’s why we use the language of walking in our Vision. It’s also right that we talk about ‘being’ and not only about ‘doing’. Afterall the gospels are littered with people who on the outside did all the right things but didn’t have the heart attitude to match.
And so it’s not about finding the things that you need to do in order to grow in your faith. It’s about catching a fresh glimpse of how much God loves us and what Jesus has done for us on the cross and wanting to respond to that love. But how we respond is important.
It’s about recognising that when it comes to people who grew in their faith – there are common things that they did which helped them on that journey. It’s about not seeing these as things that I need to do in order to become more like Jesus, but that as I become more like Jesus these are things that I am going to increasingly do.
Another way of thinking about these things is that they are a bit like scaffolding. They are not the tower that is being built but they will help you as you build. They provide a framework for what is being built.
It’s also important to remember that healthy human relationships don’t just happen. Even healthy marriages don’t just happen. They take work and effort. When a relationship is new, spending time together is not really an issue – you put considerable effort into being together. But after some time you might find that you have to deliberately and intentionally make sure that certain things happen.
If you want to go out for a meal with your partner you have to plan weeks ahead, arrange childcare, put it in the diary, write it on the calendar. You will discover that there will be times when you don’t want to put the bins out but you choose to do it because of love. You recognise that you need to put boundaries in place to protect your relationship.
And so it is with our relationship with Jesus – it won’t just happen. Especially when you consider that we are in a spiritual battle and we have an enemy who wants to do everything in his power to derail our attempts to spend time with Jesus. Whether that be a distracting thought the moment we sit down to pray, or pointing out that we’ve already failed in our New Year resolution to read the Bible every day and it’s only the 5th January so what’s the point…
Or else our enemy goes the other way and we get so absorbed in the box-ticking of our Bible in a Year reading plan that all the joy and time for devotion is sucked out of the experience. We churn through the chapters with no time to speak or listen to God. We read God’s word but we don’t allow it to change us.
Whatever it is that you need to put in place to grow closer to Jesus can I encourage you to do it today. Start small if you need to. Be encouraged by the thought that Jesus wants to spend time with you. Like the father in the story of the prodigal son he is on the lookout for the first signs that we are making a bit of space, and a bit of time to sit with him.
