A Year of Discovery

January 20, 2011

The following is an edited excerpt from the sermon of January 02/11, entitled “Discovery” Listen to the full sermon here.

As each New Year begins, we often set ourselves up to fail. We tend to “over reach” with New Year’s resolutions that we’re never likely to reach or keep, leaving us with a sense of failure because we’ve not lived up to some imagined promise.

But what if, instead, we set ourselves up to succeed in the New Year? What would it look like? Well, it wouldn’t be about performance, it would be about discovery. It wouldn’t be about effort and striving, it would be about watching and finding.

And what is available to be discovered and found the presence of God in your everyday world. And what makes any year a success is coming to the end of it knowing that you truly can say you spent it with God and you discovered more of who He is and what He can be for you than you ever knew before. You get to the end of the year and you are able to say I know God better than I did when the year began… and I saw my life in Him for all it can be. Now, wouldn’t that make for a successful year?

So I want to encourage you to ask God to give you a word for the year. To seek him in prayer and simply ask him to impress upon your heart a word around which His presence can gather, like iron filings gather around a magnet. The word God gives you becomes a word around which you discover and recognize God’s presence and activity in your life. You begin to see His hand everywhere it seems. It’s like when you buy a blue car and suddenly you see blue cars everywhere, God begins to be seen in and around the word He’s impressed upon your heart.

Over the years I’ve moved away from self defeating new year’s resolutions and instead, I’ve asked God for a word each year and in that word I have discovered more about Him each year. Words like faithfulness, trust, guidance, astonishment…last year my word was quietness, which I took to mean I wasn’t supposed to strive and strain or push for results but let God move as I stepped back. And God gave me a great year of discovering more about His presence and provision.

So I want to encourage you to scrap your new year’s resolutions that are all about the pressure of performance and simply ask God for a word for this next year. And in that word, trust you’ll find the joy of freshly discovering Him. What might your word be?

And for us as a church, together, I’d like to offer a word for the year for all of us to share in: and it’s this word “Discovery.” What discoveries can we make of God and with God this year? What remarkable things will we see because we were looking to discover His hand at work through us and in us, rather than pressing and pushing to make our life together as a church just work? What will we discover about Kingdom life as we live into it? What discoveries about God will you and I make together this year?