Thinking Christian

Christians often pray, “God, let us see you work in power.” We may not understand what it is we ask. God does His best work following a death.

I approach this topic very cautiously, for though there is something important to say here, there is a danger of trivializing it. I just spent several hours with a very good friend whose mother passed away a few weeks ago. Her passing was very difficult. The pain of my own mother’s death, almost a year and a half ago, is still very real, though not as fresh and strong as my friend’s grief is today. Death is not what God originally intended. It means something is wrong with the world. It is an enemy. In Christ’s resurrection, death was dealt a mortal blow; but it still kicks in its final throes. It is the last enemy yet to be defeated, at the end of the age.

Imagine being one of Christ’s followers in the day when He was taken to trial, to torture, and then to execution. He had told them often in advance that this had to happen. They did not understand; they fought the idea. Nothing, not even His frequent warnings, could prepare them for the loss, the injustice, the massive dashing of their hopes and dreams. Peter denied Him, others deserted Him. The women, more than the men, stayed with Him to the end; yet even for them, what a horrific end it seemed to be. This man had brought them unparalleled hope, healing, and love. He was the one who had words of eternal life. He had proved his supernatural power through repeated miracles. Then He was gone. I don’t know if any other death in history could have produced so much shock and grief.

We experience the grief of loved ones dying. We each face our own end. Further, we all experience loss and disappointment: being turned down by someone we love, being rejected by family members, losing jobs or opportunities, suffering injury or disease. These are lesser deaths.

Yet just as Christ’s death brought unparalleled pain, surely His rising brought His followers unparalleled joy! What could compare to Mary’s elation when she saw Him alive that Sunday morning, or the other disciples’ relief and happiness when He appeared among them? How often and with what unrestrainable smiles do you suppose they spoke of that among themselves, the rest of their lives? What could have been a happier moment than seeing Him alive? And what could have been a greater display of God’s power?

We pray for God to work in power, not always remembering that this is when we see Him most at work: when we most need Him. God does His best work following a death, even if it’s of a death of the lesser, figurative sort.

In 2001 my wife and I realized we ought to leave our positions at the headquarters of Campus Crusade for Christ. I was getting what I call “headquarters disease.” I was a Human Resources director, with national responsibilities, but I was getting disconnected from the field and from the reason I was doing what I was doing. When someone called me on the phone, it felt like an interruption, a bother to me. That was obviously wrong, and we decided the cure had to include leaving headquarters and going back to front-line ministry work.

We ended up in southeast Virginia–and it didn’t turn out to be what we had expected. We experienced some very deep disappointments, unfulfilled expectations, and very difficult conflict (this was with persons who are not now part of the ministry). I was certainly part of the problem; some real changes were needed in my own heart.

For a while it was, well, really awful. We had uprooted our family from one city, and now we were seriously wondering whether we were going to stay in this new one for long. We were living in an apartment we had rented as a base for living while we hunted for a home to buy. It would have been easy, in one sense, just to leave. It would have been terribly wrenching in another sense.

My wife was feeling it as badly as I was. One day she went for a drive down a street that we had visited more than once before, that we thought would be a particularly nice place to live. There were only a few houses on the cul-de-sac at the end of the street. None of them, unfortunately, were for sale. She prayed that day in a kind of desperation for answers and for hope “God, we don’t know if we’re supposed to be here. If you want us to stay, would you please, please, please open up a house on this cul-de-sac suitable for us to live in!”

Two days later I was with several co-workers driving north toward a conference in Gettysburg. We hadn’t even crossed the county line when my cell phone rang. My wife said, “The real estate agent has a house for us to look at.” I said, “Come on, you know I can’t look at any houses until after the conference!” She said, “It’s on the street we want, Tom.” I said, “Oh!” (Brilliant, no?) “I guess you’d better go look at it!”

She checked it out that same morning. It was listed for well below market price, and it fit our desired description almost exactly. The seller accepted our bid with a contingency clause, such that we could pull out of it if I disagreed when I came home. That house is where we’re living now. God was starting to do some of his best work, giving us hope and direction in the midst of what seemed like a deathly situation.

Relationships at work did not improve just then; in fact, for a while the situation continued to get worse. It became clear that I was not going to thrive in that position, and that we would have to make a change. We had no clue what that could mean. We had bought the house, we were not interested in moving (nor did we believe God wanted us to move), and yet there was no other position on the horizon for us locally. Around that time we also took a very severe financial loss, and my father-in-law died a very difficult death. Things were not getting easier.

And then another job with our organization opened up, virtually out of nowhere right near home. It was going to be what I would have considered to be my dream job, working with some of my favorite people in the organization. (And the office was walking distance from Starbucks!) It started out looking great, but even that dream died, too, when for reasons too complicated to explain, there just wasn’t a lot of work to do. The income was there, but the projects weren’t. Another dream seemed to have been spiked.

But God was doing some of his best work still. I was starting to recognize what I had learned from the rough relationships I had just been in–some extremely important personal leadership and character lessons. I can’t go into them here without sharing more openly than I should about the whole situation. Suffice it to say that I couldn’t be doing what I am now without having been through all of that. I am stronger than I was; and I am unreservedly grateful to God for it all.

Now let me back up a moment to another dream. I had always wanted to write–I just never had a clue how to get published. Now I was in a situation that afforded me time to think, study, and write–and now, too, there was blogging. That was the beginning of this whole adventure; and the dream has borne fruit in being published several times beyond the blog (see “Clips” above). I can’t imagine how this door would have opened without being in a situation that seemed like a dream that died.

And since then, the job projects and opportunities have opened up as well, just as I had thought and hoped they would two years earlier. (The story on that transition is as amazing as others I’ve told here, but to go into it all would make this long post really long.) I believe this new set of responsibilities and opportunities was in the plan all along–but that God also had a plan to fulfill a lifelong dream and vision (writing) along the way.

This has been bought the short version of a long story. I could tell much more about this and other things like it, and so could any follower of Christ. The Bible is full of such tales–Joseph, Moses, and many more. We all have dreams, hopes, plans, relationships; and some of those dreams, hopes, plans, and relationships die.

I look back over the past few years and I see both deaths and resurrections. The resurrections are where God’s hand is most clearly visible. They are where God has been most glorified. They wouldn’t have happened–couldn’t have happened–without the deaths. These experiences are miniatures of his final work yet to come, when both death and resurrection (for His followers) are not metaphorical but very real. Christ was first. He opened the door, so that any who are willing to follow may walk through after Him.

For a follower of Christ, no death, whether figurative or literal, is final. It’s God’s preparation for His best work.

Part of a Series: What Christ Does For Us

• Part 1: Our Roots In God’s Plan
• Part 2: Broken Roots
• Part 3: The Extent of Brokenness
• Part 4: Restorations
• Part 5: Who Christ Is
• Part 6: Among Us, Loving Us
• Part 7: Showing How to Live
• Part 8: Death and Resurrection
• Part 9: The Cross, Again
• Part 10: Resurrection, Again
• Part 11: Life in Christ

Related: How To Keep Your New Year’s Resolutions. This post elicited a short question, to which I’m writing a very long answer in the form of this series.

Here are 69 pages of evidences and reasoning on behalf of the historical truth of the resurrection. I just found out about it, so I haven’t had time to read it, but I’m sure it’s worth passing along:

1. A Cumulative Case for the Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth [PDF] — A draft of an article written by Lydia and Tim McGrew for the Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, edited by William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland.

[From the evangelical outpost: Thirty Three Things (v. 47)]

In a series on what Christ does for us, one post on Christ’s cross and resurrection is hardly enough. I must linger a while longer.

Ravi Zacharias once said (according to a friend of mine), “The only alternative to the cross is the trivialization of sin.” I’m sure he was speaking pastorally, to Bible believers, for if he had been speaking philosophically he could have suggested other alternatives. The cross–Christ’s death, in other words–is presented in the Bible as a drastic solution to a most serious problem. The problem is our sin: our rebellion from the God who created us in love; and the pain, alienation, and death that result. Christ’s death was the payment of the death penalty on our behalf, and a costly payment it was, being a torturous sacrifice made by God Himself.

So if the cross means nothing, then sin must mean nothing, says Zacharias. But let’s consider some other alternatives. If Christ’s death is not, as the Bible says, a drastic solution to a serious problem, then we have these choices:

1. There is no serious problem: sin is not what the Bible says it is.
2. There is a serious problem, but the death of Christ on our behalf is not the solution; there is another (at least one) way out of it.
3. There is a serious problem with no solution.

Option one cannot be entirely true. We don’t need the Bible to tell us we have a serious problem. We are at each other’s throats, in war, in office backstabbing, in greedy competition, in racism, in political maneuvering, and on and on. Every parent knows we do not need to train our children to do wrong; we need to teach them to do right. Moreover, there is pain, sickness, and death, which the Bible explains as the result of having turned our backs on God.

What we cannot see just by these observations is that the true source of these problems is in our rebellion against a true God. We cannot tell without God’s revelation that our conflict, self-centeredness, and pain and death are the result of this untrendy, meddlesome concept of sin. Perhaps it’s just a matter of competing for our place in the reproductive scheme of things. That’s what evolution implies: all of life is a fight for position. Some win, some lose. All die, but some leave more behind.

There is one observation from nature that counts against that view, I think: of all the organisms engaged in this struggle, only humans seem to care about it. Only we notice injustice. Only we have a vision of the good: love, joy, right relationships, giving, altruism. Only we foresee our own deaths, fear what comes after, and truly recognize and mourn the loss of others. This hints that there’s something different going on, something that doesn’t fit in the evolutionary scheme of things, something that may just have come from elsewhere. As the Bible says, we have the image of God impressed upon us; and by it we understand so much more than the animals do.

Option two accepts that we have a serious problem, something more than the obvious ones of death and discord, something spiritual; but suggests that there are many solutions. The alternative to Christ’s death might not be the trivialization of sin, but some other remedy that takes care of it another way: “there are many paths to God,” or if not to God, then at least to wholeness, or oneness with the cosmos, or some such thing.

We could spend a long time on this, which we will not do. Consider a few brief points in response. If there are many paths to God or to some sense of right living, then they ought to agree on the fundamentals. They don’t. The major religions and philosophies of the world disagree mightily as to the nature of ultimate reality, the truth of the human condition, what constitutes the ideal goal (heaven, Nirvana, whatever), and how one attains to it. If any one of these religions or philosophies is true, then the others are false; for contradictory beliefs cannot be true together at the same time and in the same relation.

If the cross of Christ is the solution for our problem, it is the only solution. If there is another answer, then the cross is irrelevant. But only Jesus’ death for us satisfies our need for being brought into right relationship with God, through the forgiveness of sins we could never rise above on our own; and only his resurrection satisfies the need for the defeat of pain and death.

Option three is more honest than option two. It recognizes our alienation from one another, it takes seriously our impending deaths. But it throws up its hands and says there’s nothing we can do about it. This was Bertrand Russell’s stand. It is a philosophy of despair, and Russell’s brave posturing cannot make it otherwise. It is nevertheless the only conceivable outcome of a materialist philosophy that considers all reality to be just the result of matter and energy interacting through natural law and chance. I do not suggest that Russell did not have try to rise above injustice, or that he gave up working to improve the human condition. I merely say that his philosophy provided no hope of ultimate success in that quixotic effort.

This series has not been about proving the Biblical view is the correct one, and I do not have space here to start down that path. I have been trying instead to make more clear what the Bible teaches by contrasting it with other views. These other options all float around our consciousness, for they are all to varying degrees prominent in our culture. Even Bible-believers can be affected by them: and thus, we can easily trivialize sin, as Ravi Zacharias said.

Make no mistake, the cross of Jesus Christ is a drastic solution to a serious problem, and the problem is our fundamental distance, because of rebellion, from the God who created and loves us. He loves us enough that He was willing (”for the joy set before him” Christ did this) to sacrifice Himself to solve our problem. There is no other solution for such a deep difficulty as we are in. It was, as was already said, a very costly solution. Do we trivialize our own faults? Do we recognize the sacrifice by which we are freed from them?

Thank God for the price He paid! Let us not regard it lightly, nor let us regard lightly our own sin, which led Him to pay it.

Part of a Series: What Christ Does For Us

• Part 1: Our Roots In God’s Plan
• Part 2: Broken Roots
• Part 3: The Extent of Brokenness
• Part 4: Restorations
• Part 5: Who Christ Is
• Part 6: Among Us, Loving Us
• Part 7: Showing How to Live
• Part 8: Death and Resurrection
• Part 9: The Cross, Again
• Part 10: The Resurrection, Again
• Part 11: Life in Christ

Related: How To Keep Your New Year’s Resolutions. This post elicited a short question, to which I’m writing a very long answer in the form of this series.

Jesus Christ lived on Earth and displayed a life of perfect love, trust, and worship. His example is incomparably great–and it’s unreachable. Part of the validation of the message of Christ is in its unique combination of reality and perfection in the character He displayed. The standard He set is strongly desirable–if being a person who lives for the sake of God and others, and in great joy is attractive to you–and yet it is impossible.

The Example Was Not Enough
This takes us back to the predicament we all started in, covered in the beginning of this series. God created us for relationship with Him, dependence on Him, and rich, full relationships with each other in an environment that didn’t constantly fight back. We haven’t lost the sense of how things ought to be, but we’ve certainly lost the experience of it. We’re told that “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” Sin is defined in the original context (and also in the original language) as a falling short, a failure to hit the mark.

In other words, if Jesus came just to teach and set an example, we might as well say, “A lot of good that did us! We can’t live up to that!”

But that’s not all he did. Again, going back to earlier in this series, recall that the penalty for rebelling against God was death. Jesus Christ lived to show us how to live, and then He died on the cross for us. We could speak of at least fifty reasons He suffered and died, as John Piper has done (skim the Table of Contents here), but most Christians put this one at the top of the list: he paid the death penalty on our behalf. Because He is God, and because He joined with us as a man Himself, he could do that on behalf of us all.

Rescue From Something That’s Bigger Than We Are
The story is told of a drowning man, whom two men went to help. The first threw him a book on how to swim. The second pulled him out of the water. This is the difference between teaching and rescue. The analogy, like all others, is imperfect; this one understates the real value of teaching. But it does remind us that there are situations where teaching is not what we really need, and one of them is when we’re dying and cannot help ourselves. Most of the passengers on the Titanic were in that situation: even the best and strongest of them needed rescue. The water was too cold, the shore too far.

We can too easily fool ourselves about our need. Once I was chatting with a seatmate on an airplane. He said it was his first flight in over 10 years, but he was okay with that; he seemed quite at home and comfortable. I sensed he was the type who would feel quite at home and comfortable anywhere. Somehow we got to talking about Jesus Christ. He said, “I don’t need that. I’m in control of my life.” I said, “Well, I don’t see you flying this aircraft.” He responded, “Well, I could!”

I don’t know where my remark to him about flying the aircraft came from, but I do know that he had a vastly overrated sense of himself. A friend of mine who flew F-116s and A-10s for the Air Force said even he wouldn’t try to fly a commercial aircraft–not unless the flight attendant came back and said, “The cabin crew have both just had heart attacks, so could somebody please land the plane for us?” Then, he said, he might volunteer, but never otherwise. Every aircraft is different: too different to permit even a fighter pilot to think, “I can fly one, I can fly them all!”

So I told my over-confident seatmate that day, “I understand you don’t feel a need for this right now, and in that case I wouldn’t expect you to respond to what I’m saying about Christ. But I predict someday you’re going to run into something bigger than yourself. I urge you to keep this in the back of your mind until then.” I offered, and he accepted, a written summary of the message of Christ, similar to this.

We’re all going to run into something bigger than ourselves. (Some of us are looking it down the throat today.) The one most certain example is death. That’s why we need rescue and not just good teaching. Jesus’ death for us accomplished a rescue: not that we will never physically die, but that it will not be the end of the story.

A New Life
It certainly wasn’t the end of the story for Jesus! On the third day, He rose from the dead. He appeared first to several women, then to others of His followers, and on one occasion to more than 500 people at once. (Evidences for this abound, here, for example; though in this series my primary purpose has been to explain more than to prove. ) He defeated death for us! The rescue He accomplished was not just to pull us out of the water and into the ICU on life support, but to give us everlasting life with a full experience of love, joy, worship, and yes, also very significant challenge.

We need His example, but beyond that, we need His life in us.

By the way, that life is not just for someday in heaven. What Christ does for us also includes giving us a whole new quality of life on Earth. That will be the subject next time in this series.

Part of a Series: What Christ Does For Us

• Part 1: Our Roots In God’s Plan
• Part 2: Broken Roots
• Part 3: The Extent of Brokenness
• Part 4: Restorations
• Part 5: Who Christ Is
• Part 6: Among Us, Loving Us
• Part 7: Showing How to Live
• Part 8: Death and Resurrection
• Part 9: The Cross, Again
• Part 10: The Resurrection, Again
• Part 11: Life in Christ

Related: How To Keep Your New Year’s Resolutions. This post elicited a short question, to which I’m writing a very long answer in the form of this series.

By outward appearances, Jesus Christ had a decidedly mixed beginning. He was born in a stable, but heralded by angels. His parents were obscure nobodies, but His birth aroused such fear in King Herod that the family had to escape to Egypt. Though Magi were bringing Him gifts including gold and fine spices, still when it came time for His circumcision, the offering His parents provided was but the one God had prescribed for the poorest people to bring. (The Magi, the ones traditionally thought of as Wise Men, arrived weeks to months later, and we have no indication the family became rich off them in any event.)

We know very little of Jesus’ youth, except that He was (Luke 2:41-52) obedient to Mary and Joseph (in spite of an apparent streak of independence), and He displayed astonishing wisdom for His age. Beyond that we know that He “grew in wisdom and in stature and in favor with God and man.” I have many questions I would like to ask someday about Jesus as a youth, and how others experienced life with Him.

Sometime around age 30 He was baptized by John in the Jordan River; and the Holy Spirit, symbolized by a dove, came upon Him in a new way. The Father inaugurated His ministry with the words, “This is My beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.”

And the contrasts continue. Immediately after, “He was led by the Spirit into the desert to be tempted by the devil. And after fasting forty days and forty nights, He was hungry.” Newly inaugurated leaders expect a “honeymoon period.” Jesus was tested instead. I used to be skeptical of the forty days of fasting, doubting anyone could survive it; now I know many people, including friends of mine, who have fasted on just water and juices for that length of time. And afterward, yes, they were hungry.

It was at that point that Satan pounded Jesus with temptation. He tempted Him with shortcuts to sustenance, with power, and with the fame accorded to one who makes himself a public spectacle. Most of all he tempted Him with an easy (but false) road to glory. Jesus rebuked him with words of Scripture; Satan left for a more opportune time. Jesus would not bow to anyone but God the Father; He would not have Himself worshiped under false pretenses; he would not take shortcuts to the will of God or to honor.

Thus He began. How, now, to summarize HIs few years of ministry? He must have been a palpably warm, inviting, friendly, trust-producing person: men and women dropped all and followed Him with just a word of invitation. He lived compassion. Lepers of the day (and the word could denote a variety of skin conditions) were outcasts, never to be touched, but He touched and healed many; and of course His healing ministry was not just for lepers. He showed grace to a repentant woman of adultery. (There are cryptic notes in that passage that make me think He found a way to get the right message across to the man, too.) There was another admittedly loose woman who found grace and a changed life through Jesus.

In fact, Jesus did astonishing things, for His day, to elevate the status of women. You can hear the surprise in the disciples’ questions during that last linked passage–they didn’t expect Him to be talking with Her. The honor given to the Virgin Mary preceded and foreshadowed what He Himself did. At the end, it was the women among His followers who had the awesome, historically unique privilege of first discovering and reporting that He had risen from the dead. The story of His life is framed by women. “Just so,” you might think, “that is, after all, nothing but what might be expected.” But not so in that day.

He demonstrated the peace that comes from knowing one’s God. This shines most clearly in the incident of a dark night, in stormy waters on a boat piloted by fisherman who in spite of their lifelong experience were terrified of death. Jesus, unperturbed, was asleep in the stern. When they woke Him He spoke a word to the weather, and all was calm.

Yes, He was a worker of miracles. And a man of great strength. “Gentle Jesus meek and mild” hardly begins to convey the way He stood up to the religious leaders of His day, men who had twisted God’s word into a means for personal prestige and pride. Read the Six woes Jesus pronounced on this group for their pride, and for leading many into error. He said among other things that they were no better than dead themselves: “You are like unmarked graves, and people walk over them without knowing.” They tried often to trap Him in error after that, but He just out-thought them. And he made it explicit that His teaching was for those who would receive it, not for those who had false purposes (here, for example).

Oh, this is just scratching the surface! Jesus showed us how to live: with compassion, under obedience to the Father, resisting temptation, eschewing shortcuts, welcoming the outcast, being friendly, experiencing the peace that comes through trust, displaying strength against injustice and untruth. At the end of it all, when He was brought to trial by the establishment He had so offended, they were unable to find any true charges to bring against Him. He bore this, too, knowing that He was fulfilling what He had come to do. He accepted the torture and death they gave Him, and on the cross said, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

We still don’t know what we’re doing, in many ways; but to follow Jesus, this most astonishingly great man of history, is surely a right place to start.

Still more to come.

Part of a Series: What Christ Does For Us

• Part 1: Our Roots In God’s Plan
• Part 2: Broken Roots
• Part 3: The Extent of Brokenness
• Part 4: Restorations
• Part 5: Who Christ Is
• Part 6: Among Us, Loving Us
• Part 7: Showing How to Live
• Part 8: Death and Resurrection
• Part 9: The Cross, Again
• Part 10: The Resurrection, Again
• Part 11: Life in Christ

Related: How To Keep Your New Year’s Resolutions. This post elicited a short question, to which I’m writing a very long answer in the form of this series.

Can you keep your New Year’s resolutions in 2008? Have you tried in past years? How did you do? Most of us give up long before January ends. It’s surprisingly difficult, isn’t it, to make a decision about our personal habits and stick with it. Can we actually improve ourselves?

The answer is no, we can’t. That may come as a surprise to some readers of a Thinking Christian blog, for you may think that Christianity is about improving ourselves: learning to do the right things, being more loving and kind, obeying the Ten Commandments, and so on. It’s not so, actually. People who have followed Christ for any length of time commonly say, “Living the Christian life isn’t hard, it’s impossible!”

We Can’t Do It Where It Counts
More specifically, it’s impossible to improve ourselves on the inside, where it counts. We may be able to set some goals and reach them. We may be able to adjust some behavior, or change some habits. But these changes are on the surface; they don’t get to the heart. And because they’re on the surface, often they are fragile. They break easily. We fail to keep up with our goals and standards.

That applies to New Year’s resolutions, certainly, and for that reason some Christian leaders recommend against making them. It even applies to the one standard that is unquestionably, consistently, a good one, the Law of God. It applies even to the best of us, like The New Testament leader and writer Paul, who said,

For I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate…. For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing…. For I delight in the law of God, in my inner being, but I see in my members [parts of my body, see more here] another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?

This is from the seventh chapter of his letter to the Romans (ESV). Even his perfect agreement with the law of God, and his intense desire to follow it, was not enough. It only showed what a failure he was.

This sounds terribly familiar to me–it’s a picture of my own experience at many times. How about you? Have you been made as painfully aware that you can’t live up to whatever standard you have thought was good and right? What then? Are we hopeless? Is there nothing we can do?

But It’s Possible In Christ
Paul goes on to say yes, there is hope! In the next chapter he writes,

For the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death. For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.

Romans is a closely reasoned and complex letter, and his point may not be immediately clear, especially since I’m not quoting the whole. I’ll pick out just three main points here that I think will help.

Freedom From the Cycle
First, we can have freedom from this terrible cycle of sin (our failures) and death (the inevitable result of the cycle). That’s great news! But we do not free ourselves. We are freed by what God has done. He sent his own Son “in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us.” It’s his doing.

Founded on Christ
Second, this freedom is founded on Jesus Christ. He “has set you free in Christ Jesus.” Paul writes elsewhere in Romans (and it’s found throughout the New Testament) that we start by placing our faith in Jesus Christ, trusting him to free us from our sin. There’s a great explanation of this here. Here’s the mistake many make: they think they must get their lives straight in order to begin to follow Jesus Christ. No, he accepts us as we are, and he will do the work to free us from our failures.

By the Power of the Holy Spirit
Third, to experience this freedom day by day, we “walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.” The Spirit here is not some vague ethereal religious sense, but the Holy Spirit, who is God Himself dwelling with those who have placed their faith in Christ. Again I’m going to rely on another resource to explain how we can experience this daily walk with the Holy Spirit.

What is life like when we follow the guidance of the Holy Spirit? Paul wrote about this in another letter, too. In Galatians 5 he emphasized freedom again. It’s not a matter of gritting our teeth and going by willpower, but of simple following:

So I say, live by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the sinful nature.

And the result is something that grows out of us naturally, like fruit. I don’t know what your New Year’s resolutions might be, but if you were to resolve to be more like this, and if it were really to happen, wouldn’t it be great? God says it’s not a matter of resolving but of walking in the Spirit:

The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.

We can experience success; we can know freedom from failure and guilt! But we cannot do it on our own resources. Jesus Christ is the foundation for anything we do that is right (pleasing to God). The Holy Spirit is God’s provision for our experiencing this. Let your New Year’s resolution be to explore and learn all that this relationship with God through the Holy Spirit can mean. Let the Word of God guide your other decisions. Any other resolutions will take care of themselves.

Related: This post brought forth a question (see the first comment) that started a whole series on what Christ does for us, beginning here.