A New New Year’s Resolution

January 1, 2006

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As is customary at the dawn of a New Year many people will be making resolutions today. These can be as frivolous or as serious as people want. People might make resolutions to stop smoking or exercise more or lose weight or spend more time with their family. Maybe it’ll be things like watching less TV or eating fewer chips or chocolate or drinking less soda pop. The problem with resolutions, as anyone who has made them can tell you, is that they are hard to keep.  By mid-January most New Year’s resolutions will have been forgotten with no real change having been executed in the lives of those who made them. The problem is that as the old U2 song New Year’s Day said it:  “Nothing changes on New Year’s Day”. Real change within people only comes about from within.

If there is a resolution worth making as Christians it is that we need to depend on God completely to fill all the areas of our lives that need his healing touch. Knowing that God loves and accepts us completely the question is why don’t we trust him completely? Too often we say: “God I know you are all I have but I don’t know you well enough to let you be all I need.”

A clue can be found in Romans 7:22-24: “For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members.  What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?”

God is telling a story in our lives – both individually and collectively. Are we willing to be whatever part God has for us? We don’t hear God’s story because there is something in us that wants God to tell the story we want to hear and not his story. In some ways we define sin weakly in our modern culture. It is often reduced to either bad things that we do we know displease God or as bad things that we feel. Hebrews 11:6 says: “… without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him.” – He rewards those who earnestly seek him. Jeremiah 29:13 says: “You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart.” The question we need to ask ourselves is: “What am I doing most earnestly if not seeking him?”

There are four metaphors in the Bible for the sin of not trusting God to meet our deepest needs. This morning I want to look briefly at these. There are times in each of our lives I think if we are honest with ourselves and God that we fall into the traps of one or more of these forms of sin. As we begin a new year let’s think about how in the days, weeks, and months ahead that we can seek him and in his pleasure he will reward us with himself.

The first metaphor is city building. City builders depend on their own resources to make their lives work. This metaphor occurs a number of times in the Bible. The first occurrence of city building begins after the first murder. After Cain killed his brother Abel, God pronounced judgment on him. Turn in your Bibles to Genesis chapter 4, verse 10. This is right after Cain has lured his brother out to the fields and has killed him.

The LORD said, “What have you done? Listen! Your brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground.  Now you are under a curse and driven from the ground, which opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand.  When you work the ground, it will no longer yield its crops for you.  You will be a restless wanderer on the earth.”  Cain said to the LORD, “My punishment is more than I can bear.  Today you are driving me from the land, and I will be hidden from your presence; I will be a restless wanderer on the earth, and whoever finds me will kill me.”  But the LORD said to him, “Not so; if anyone kills Cain, he will suffer vengeance seven times over.”  Then the LORD put a mark on Cain so that no one who found him would kill him.  So Cain went out from the LORD'S presence and lived in the land of Nod, east of Eden.  Cain lay with his wife, and she became pregnant and gave birth to Enoch. Cain was then building a city, and he named it after his son Enoch.

God’s judgment on Cain was swift, clear, and firm. The last element of the judgment and the one that Cain reacted to most strongly was the most severe. God told Cain that he would be “a restless wanderer on the earth”. He would never settle down and live in community again.  Because he had violated community, he was to be denied the joys of living in community. Cain’s immediate response was to complain. “My punishment is more than I can bear. Today you are driving me from the land, and I will be hidden from your presence; I will be a restless wanderer on the earth, and whoever finds me will kill me.” Cain was in essence saying that he could not anticipate what it would be like to live without a home isolated from his family and community. A few verses earlier in Genesis 4:7 God says to Cain “If you do what is right, will you not be accepted? But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must master it.” But Cain had given into sin and the consequence was immediate and devastating to him. So Cain did what people often do when confronted with a change in circumstance out of their immediate control – he rebelled. Rather than accepting the punishment for his crime and then asking God for mercy, he determined to create the community he knew he wanted using his available resources. In verse 17 we are told that when his wife gave birth to their first son, Cain was busy building a city. The fact that he names the city after his son perhaps suggests an attempt to institute a legacy to replace what God, according to Cain’s judgment, would not give him.  This is the metaphor of city builders – to draw from their own resources in a determined effort to obtain the rewards of life that God declines to provide. To build a city is to be protected from the forces outside.

The theme of city builders runs throughout the Bible. Here are a few other examples:

In Genesis 4:19-22: Lamech, the seventh generation from Adam in the line of Cain, married two women – so he was the first recorded polygamist. Lamech had three sons which together laid the foundations of the urban society – one was a farmer, one was a musician, and one was an industrialist.

As an aside let’s contrast the life of Lamech with that of Enoch. Enoch was the seventh generation from Adam in the line of Seth and in Hebrews 11:5 we read: “By faith Enoch was taken from this life, so that he did not experience death; he could not be found, because God had taken him away.  For before he was taken, he was commended as one who pleased God.” In Genesis 5:22 it says that Enoch “walked with God” – the phrase reminds us that there is a difference between walking with God and merely living. So in the seventh generation from Adam via two genealogies we have Lamech who was evil personified and Enoch who was commended as one who pleased God.

In Genesis 10:8 we read about Nimrod who it says was a mighty hunter before the LORD. The phrase “before the Lord” in Hebrew suggests the way a parent or teacher keeps an eye on a child who is likely to get into trouble. Nimrod built multiple cities including Babylon and Nineveh.

In Genesis 11 the account of the tower of Babel is told. The people of Shinar held a meeting and said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves and not be scattered over the face of the whole earth.” These folks were especially ambitious. So much so that they tried to compete with, rather than serve, God. Their city was never finished as God frustrated their plans by confusing their language.

In Haggai 1:3 the Israelites were taken to task for spending time and money on their own homes while the house of God sat unfinished. We read:

Then the word of the LORD came through the prophet Haggai: “Is it a time for you yourselves to be living in your paneled houses, while this house remains a ruin?”  Now this is what the LORD Almighty says: “Give careful thought to your ways.  You have planted much, but have harvested little.  You eat, but never have enough.  You drink, but never have your fill.  You put on clothes, but are not warm.  You earn wages, only to put them in a purse with holes in it.” The people had to hear that there were consequences to relying on their own resources rather than trusting God to provide for all of their needs.

In John 14:1-3 when Jesus comforted his disciples he told them this: “Do not let your hearts be troubled.  Trust in God; trust also in me.  In my Father’s house are many rooms; if it were not so, I would have told you. I am going there to prepare a place for you.  And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am.  You know the way to the place where I am going.” Jesus knew that his disciples had given up opportunities for personal advantage to follow him. He knew they weren’t sure what lay ahead for them. He comforted them by telling them he intended to build each of them a permanent place to live. He did not tell them to build their own houses here. This theme is picked up again in Hebrews 11:13-16 – “All these people were still living by faith when they died. They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance.  And they admitted that they were aliens and strangers on earth.  People who say such things show that they are looking for a country of their own.  If they had been thinking of the country they had left, they would have had opportunity to return.  Instead, they were longing for a better country—a heavenly one.  Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared a city for them.” The implication of this passage is hard to miss: God is disappointed in followers who build their own cities here. The emphasis in Scripture is always on what God does and not on what his people achieve.  In Deuteronomy 6:10 the Israelites were reminded to never forget what God had done for them. “When the LORD your God brings you into the land he swore to your fathers, to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, to give you—a land with large, flourishing cities you did not build, houses filled with all kinds of good things you did not provide, wells you did not dig, and vineyards and olive groves you did not plant—then when you eat and are satisfied, be careful that you do not forget the LORD, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery.”

The Bible ends with the vision of a city, the Holy City “coming down out of heaven from God” and the “dwelling of God is with men, and he will live with them.  They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God.  He will wipe every tear from their eyes.  There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.” God welcomes his family to enter it, live there forever and enjoy it.

To put all these accounts together, the core truth is that a passion for home runs deep. Ever since Adam and Eve were banished from Eden and Cain was sentenced to wander the earth, we have all felt the ache to want a home. Nothing seems more legitimate than wanting a home. But things are not as we think they should be. It’s hard living here: health problems, money worries, relational tensions, and emotional sufferings. And God doesn’t seem to be working to improve the situation. So we try to make things as good as possible. But as soon as we decide that it’s up to us to make things more comfortable we immediately begin to think: can we do it? Do we have the needed resources? When we commit ourselves to building our cities here, we are instantly consumed with doubts about our adequacy. Then we begin to live to erase our doubts. If we are successful, we feel proud and call it joy. If we fail, we learn to hate – ourselves for failing, others for not helping, and God for his indifference – and we feel justified in our hate. City builders are afraid of failure. They hate their own weaknesses. They become preoccupied with their own adequacy, or lack of it.

God often eventually deals with people who build cities by taking them to the desert. A desert is a place where our own system for managing life doesn’t work. It is a place where our talents are not enough to provide nourishment for our souls. The Spirit led Jesus into the wilderness but it was the devil who led Jesus to the city in order to tempt him into putting his trust in his own abilities rather than relying on God. The desert is God’s way of stripping our tendencies to be in control. Hosea 2:14-15 reads: “Therefore I am now going to allure her; I will lead her into the desert and speak tenderly to her.  There I will give her back her vineyards, and will make the Valley of Achor a door of hope. There she will sing as in the days of her youth, as in the day she came up out of Egypt.”

Desert experiences are the ones where the uncontrollable and unpredictable things happen. But as we just saw in Hosea it is there that God can speak tenderly to us and give us hope. Rather than asking if we are adequate to keep things together and reach our goals, we begin to ask the question our heart has been whispering all along: “I love my Lord. What can I give to his purposes?” That is a question that the Spirit delights to answer. He is the one who distributes gifts among God’s people to enable us to do our part in the body.  The question of a city builder changes from “am I adequate?” to “what can I give to advance God’s kingdom?”

The second metaphor the Bible uses to describe the sin of not trusting God is digging broken wells or cisterns. This metaphor is found in Jeremiah 2:9-13:

“Therefore I bring charges against you again,” declares the LORD. “And I will bring charges against your children’s children.  Cross over to the coasts of Kittim and look, send to Kedar and observe closely; see if there has ever been anything like this: Has a nation ever changed its gods? (Yet they are not gods at all.) But my people have exchanged their Glory for worthless idols. Be appalled at this, O heavens, and shudder with great horror,” declares the LORD.  “My people have committed two sins: They have forsaken me, the spring of living water, and have dug their own cisterns, broken cisterns that cannot hold water."

This passage is remarkable. God calls on the heavens to witness what his people are doing. Their sin it twofold – forsaking God who supplies living water and digging their own wells that cannot hold water. In John 4 in the account of the Samaritan woman at the well after Jesus asks her for a drink and she essentially reminds him that drinking from a cup handled by a Samaritan would make Jesus ceremonially unclean according to Jewish law, he tells her something reminiscent of the Jeremiah passage…

Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.”

“Sir,” the woman said, “you have nothing to draw with and the well is deep. Where can you get this living water? Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did also his sons and his flocks and herds?”

Jesus answered, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst.  Indeed, the water I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”

When Jesus says “if you knew the gift of God” the Greek word for gift emphasizes God’s grace through Jesus. Jesus gives us life and gives it freely. And the water he gives is living water the same as God’s description of himself in Jeremiah. This is not stagnant cistern water but fresh, flowing water, like from a spring or mountain stream, that revives and refreshes life.

For well diggers the central passion is to feel something – some kind of pleasurable experience. Their greatest fear is to feel emptiness. We want to fill that emptiness inside of us. But when we don’t drink from the Lord’s well we settle for lesser satisfaction. Digging wells promotes counterfeit joy. It is essentially saying “maybe I can arrange for these pleasures to produce joy inside of me.” But living for the singular purpose to avoid a certain painful feeling is still well digging. We demand a pleasurable feeling to eliminate the aches that life gives us sometimes. What well diggers won’t accept is that the eliminations of those aches won’t come until we reach heaven. As one writer put it: “until heaven, the joy of the Lord coexists with sadness – the richer the joy, the deeper the sadness, an experience that keeps us focused on Christ and what’s ahead.”

Sometimes though our hope wavers and sadness gets the upper hand. Then we begin to hate whatever emptiness we feel and fear that it will continue and worsen. Well diggers are motivated to feel good now, to generate an internal experience of well-being that has no sadness. As we begin demanding more satisfaction – whatever provides even a brief experience of ache-free happiness becomes irresistible. Then we assume responsibility to arrange for the pleasures we want. We dig our own wells. We don’t trust God to fill our aches.

It is not until we realize what our well digging does to other people that we begin to repent of it. The meaningful change in our lives comes with repentance and is moralistic in nature. This too is reflected in the account of Jesus and the Samaritan woman. Jesus asks her to fetch her husband and come back to him. She replies that she has no husband whereupon Jesus tells her that she has had five husbands and that the man she was currently living with was not her husband. Jewish law held that a woman might be divorced twice or at the most three times.  If the Samaritans had the same standard, the woman’s life had been exceedingly immoral. But then as the conversation continues and the disciples return to the scene, the woman returns to the village and because of her testimony we are told that many Samaritans became believers. As well diggers repent their question changes from “am I feeling what I want to feel” to “am I giving what I have to give to advance God’s kingdom”?

The third way we do not trust God completely is by lighting our own fires. The metaphor is found in Isaiah 50:10-11:

Who among you fears the LORD and obeys the word of his servant?  Let him who walks in the dark, who has no light, trust in the name of the LORD and rely on his God.  But now, all you who light fires and provide yourselves with flaming torches, go, walk in the light of your fires and of the torches you have set ablaze. This is what you shall receive from my hand: You will lie down in torment.

Fire lighters have a passion to explain every part of their lives. Fire lighters say “I will find a path I can walk by myself”. Isaiah’s words provide a clue if we are living according to our own strengths or in God’s. When we bump into something we can’t explain or if we find ourselves in a dark tunnel is our stronger impulse to trust God or to figure out by ourselves what to do? Isaiah says that if we walk by the light of torches that we have lit ourselves then we are not relying on God.

Oswald Chambers once said that “mature Christians have learned to walk in the light of God’s darkness”. Fire lighters insist on answers, a clear plan and do not ask the hardest questions. What Oswald Chambers meant was that if you are walking in the darkness then you are asking the tough questions – the ones for which there are no answers. We can even use the Bible to support our practices of fire lighting. If we prefer to see it more as a rule book or a collection of principles to follow when life gets rough rather than God’s revelation to his people then we are lighting fires. We somehow prefer instructions on what to do rather than an invitation to connect our hearts with God and then follow him wholeheartedly. God’s Spirit more often tells us “you can trust me” than “here’s exactly what to do”. Fire lighters hate uncertainty and irresolvable confusion. Their burning question is “am I right?” Are my plans the right ones? Fire lighting leads to a counterfeit of power. Rather than trusting God we find our confidence in a strategy we can follow.

The alternative to lighting fires is to be plunged in to the darkness of mystery. God breaks fire lighting by taking us into the deepest darkness to rely only on his light. The question of a fire lighter then becomes “do I know God well enough to relax about what might happen tomorrow?” Do we trust God? Isaiah says that fire lighters will end up lying down in torment. As Psalm 23 says: “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me.” God seemingly chooses to change us in the places of darkness in our lives, not in the places of bright light.

The fourth Biblical metaphor for not trusting God is wall whitewashing. When we are unsettled by the uncertainty of our lives, when we desire safety above all else we are tempted to whitewash walls. It comes as a response to the fear that God is unpredictable and that his unpredictability will spill over into our lives. We forget that “in all things God works for the good of those who love him”. Turn in your Bibles to Ezekiel 13.  We’ll look at verses 1-16 for this metaphor…

The word of the LORD came to me: “Son of man, prophesy against the prophets of Israel who are now prophesying. Say to those who prophesy out of their own imagination: ‘Hear the word of the LORD!  This is what the Sovereign LORD says: Woe to the foolish prophets who follow their own spirit and have seen nothing! Your prophets, O Israel, are like jackals among ruins.  You have not gone up to the   breaks in the wall to repair it for the house of Israel so that it will stand firm in the battle on the day of the LORD.  Their visions are false and their divinations a lie. They say, “The LORD declares,” when the LORD has not sent them; yet they expect their words to be fulfilled.  Have you not seen false visions and uttered lying divinations when you say, “The LORD declares,” though I have not spoken?  “‘Therefore this is what the Sovereign LORD says: Because of your false words and lying visions, I am against you, declares the Sovereign LORD. My hand will be against the prophets who see false visions and utter lying divinations. They will not belong to the council of my people or be listed in the records of the house of Israel, nor will they enter the land of Israel. Then you will know that I am the Sovereign LORD. “‘Because they lead my people astray, saying, “Peace,” when there is no peace, and because, when a flimsy wall is built, they cover it with whitewash, therefore tell those who cover it with whitewash that it is going to fall. Rain will come in torrents, and I will send hailstones hurtling down, and violent winds will burst forth.  When the wall collapses, will people not ask you, “Where is the whitewash you covered it with?” “‘Therefore this is what the Sovereign LORD says: In my wrath I will unleash a violent wind, and in my anger hailstones and torrents of rain will fall with destructive fury. I will tear down the wall you have covered with whitewash and will level it to the ground so that its foundation will be laid bare.  When it falls, you will be destroyed in it; and you will know that I am the LORD.  So I will spend my wrath against the wall and against those who covered it with whitewash. I will say to you, “The wall is gone and so are those who whitewashed it, those prophets of Israel who prophesied to Jerusalem and saw visions of peace for her when there was no peace, declares the Sovereign LORD.”’

The people of Israel must have been uncomfortable with God’s unpredictability too. In Isaiah 30 the people told the prophets – “Give us no more visions of what is right! Tell us pleasant things, prophesy illusions… and stop confronting us with the Holy One of Israel!” In passage we just read from Ezekiel 13 we see the consequences of the prophets’ compliance with the people’s wishes. The message was clear: building flimsy walls with whitewash was a pitiful substitute for trusting God with their security and protection.

In our day we may build a way of Christian life that may not last often because we distance ourselves from the harsh realities of life. Our lives are often lived with a camera in front of our faces to make the tragedy less real for us. I am sure that each of us here this morning could relate some incident of tragedy that has happened, if not to ourselves at least someone we are close to: family, friends, coworkers that has had profound effects on those affected by it. We need to admit that our understanding is not enough. Sometimes it takes disaster to weaken our whitewashed walls for God to break through to us and for us to simply know him better. There is nothing wrong with wanting safety and security in our lives but to demand it at the cost of knowing God and putting our trust in him is wall whitewashing.

Whitewashers hate any sense of disturbing reality. The question they ask is: “how can I protect myself from all the bad things that I fear?” They hate uncertainty more than they trust God. If they don’t see signs of God providing protection then they work at ways to provide it for themselves. For God to break through whitewashed walls sometimes does take a difficulty or tragedy they think can never happen to them. He allows difficulties like seasons of hailstones to come along and knock down our walls. Then we are confronted with a choice. Do we rebuild our wall or do we change the question to: “how can I face what is really there to make a difference for God?” If we are serious about getting to know him, he will take us up on it.

As we enter another year with its challenges and uncertainties can we make our resolution to trust God completely with all areas of our lives? It is something we cannot do in our own strength. Without God we do not have the resources to make it happen. If we feel inadequate, confused or unsafe we need to turn to God and accept his gift of living water. This morning can we like David say: “One thing I ask of the LORD, this is what I seek: that I may dwell in the house of the LORD all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the LORD and to seek him in his temple.”

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