Resolutions: Study God’s Word

I’ve been convinced and convicted recently regarding my lack of discipline.  I don’t need (or want) to be legalistic, but honestly, my lack of discipline has not produced any good results.  Being more disciplined would produce better results – duh!  So how do I get to where I want to be from where I am as far as my productive habits (individual disciplines) go?  I think that a major part of what I was up against before was that I was trying to fit so many things into my schedule all at once, not in terms of having more things to do than hours in the day, but in terms of adding all of the new goals at once, like a traffic jam of to-do’s commuting into my schedule.  Having failed to fit everything in that way, I’ve backed off a bit.  I’m trying something different, adding just one thing at once, in order of priority.

Why in order of priority, instead of in order of ease or simplicity or fun?  Frankly, because if I admission into my schedule is based on how fun something is, I’ll only do the things that I want to do, and not the things I need to do.  If I add things based on how simple or easy they are to accomplish, I’ll only do the easy stuff, not the hard stuff.  Nothing worth doing comes easily, right?  So I am adding things in order of priority – and starting to sound like another annoying self help or motivational writer (seriously, they drive me up the wall).

So the way that I have decided to determine what disciplines get top priority is by who it serves, or who that discipline with bring me closer to.  So here’s the order that someone smarter than me came up with:  J.O.Y.; or Jesus, Others, You.  I believe that this idea is fitting with the Greatest Commandment: “… You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” (Matthew 22:38-39).  Loving God comes first, loving people comes second, and the command is finished with “as yourself” – a reminder to love and serve other people AT LEAST as much as you love and serve yourself.

Since loving God comes first, getting to know God is very important (might be kind of awkward to love someone I don’t know).  On top of that, as a Christian, no matter what I do, I am an ambassador of Jesus Christ, which means that I represent Him to the people around me.  In order to effectively represent Him, I need to know Him very well.  I’m going to keep this short and just simply say that the chief and primary way of getting to know God better is by reading the Bible.  Not everyone buys that, but I do, and here is not the time or place to defend why I believe that – or this won’t be a short post.

So my first resolution is to be a tireless student of God’s Word.  This is not a New Year’s Resolution, partly because it’s November.  I’ll have a few more resolutions by the time 1-1-2013 comes around, but I mean for this to last the rest of my life, not just for 2013.  I also mean for all of the resolutions I settle on to last beyond just 2013.  I know it’s a rabbit trail, but I hate New Year’s Resolutions because people don’t keep them.

Read the Bible for a Change, by Ray Lubeck

Wrapped up in that resolution to be a tireless student of God’s Word are (for me) four other long term commitments, three of which I’m borrowing from Ray Lubeck’s Read the Bible for a Change:

1. To read through the entire Bible at least once a year, but preferably twice.
2. To steward and hone the intellectual and spiritual gifts God has given me (especially the ones that enable me to study and better understand God’s Word).
3. To seek knowledge to enable better understanding of God’s Word.
4. To honestly examine my heart and attitude, and pray for God to create in me a clean heart so that His Word can be heard in my heart.

Here’s my thinking in those mini-resolutions:  they are quality assurance for the main resolution.  For most Christians, you don’t have to think very hard for personal experiences where people have misused the Bible and it caused harm to someone – perhaps even you personally.  This is one of many reasons critics of Christians say that we’re nothing but a bunch of self righteous hypocrites.

Anyway… Those are my thoughts on my first, and most important resolution.  One more time, even though I will probably have my little list of resolutions done and start incorporating them into my daily life by around the New Year, I don’t see these as New Year’s Resolutions for any other reason than their timing.  However I would still strongly encourage anyone reading this to give yourself an honest self examination of your own self discipline, and to consider what changes you might need to make.  If you are someone who is into New Year’s Resolutions, now is the time to start thinking about them.

Related articles

• A Confession… And a Resolution… (thinkrhema.wordpress.com)
• What is a Spiritual Discipline, Anyway? (buddyhowarddotme.wordpress.com)

A Confession… And a Resolution…

Rev. Jonathan Edwards, a leader of the Great Awakening, is still remembered for his extraordinary resolve. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I have a confession:  I am an undisciplined, arrogant hack.

And I have a resolution:  To become more disciplined (in what, specifically, is still developing).

God’s timing never ceases to terrify, amuse, and amaze me.  When you live (only because He graciously helps you to do so) a life that honors God, he seems to teach you things you never wanted to know about yourself – at the most relevant, and simultaneously inconvenient times.

September and October of this year were really busy for me – at least in terms of milestones – looking back on them I am convicted of my daily laziness.

Skylar and I were in the panicked process of finishing some home improvement projects (adding a master suite, moving into the master suite, turning our old bedroom into a nursery) and at the same time doing paperwork to refinance our house – which meant a lot of pressure on me to finish the projects.  Add to that, I started a new job in September.  I was hired to do a particular task in which I had no prior training, experience, or education – I had no idea what I was doing, and I spent a lot of time spinning my wheels.  Then in October, my role changed (thank God) to something totally different, but still something where I have no prior experience – parent mentoring.  My daughter Keaton (my first) was born on October 20th; and we closed on our refinance on the 26th.

So, a lot of “major” milestones happened or were wrapped up in the last two months, so I must have been busy, right?  Sadly, no.  I didn’t read my Bible, I didn’t invest time in my relationship with my wife, I didn’t work out, I didn’t eat well (yes, that takes more time than just stuffing my face), and I didn’t write anything worth posting (mostly just complaints and ungracious political rants).  I took every excuse that I could for a “guys night” with my brothers, I watched TV probably two to three hours a night, and I got hooked into another stupid Facebook game.  Despite all that laziness, I’ve had quite the self righteous attitude that I’ve got it together and I’m doing what needs done.

Don’t take me wrong here.  I believe that B.U.S.Y. stand for Burdened Under Satan’s Yoke.  There’s the whole rabbit trail of Good vs. Great that we could get into, also known as the tyranny of the urgent, but I’ll let this post be a discussion of examples, instead of ideas. Yes, those house projects were a good (and necessary) thing to put my time and energy into, as was figuring out my new job(s), and doing the refinance paperwork.  To some degree, “resting” is also a good thing, but I took it too far.  In a number of ways, I’ve come to think that the Great things are the often boring or difficult commitments we’ve made that require an enormous amount of our time before they produce results – but when the results come, they’re worth the wait.

Why the sudden conviction that I’ve been lazy and undisciplined?  One thing is the contrast between myself and a Great Christian of History whom I’ve been reading about: Jonathan Edwards (The Unwavering Resolve of Jonathan Edward by Steven J. Lawson).  The man’s incredible discipline continues to inspire Christians today, 254 years after his death.  Another is a Leadership Training video from Mark Driscoll (An Observation after Breakfast with Chuck Smith) which essentially says that it can take years of faithfulness (discipline) to produce fruit.  And the final straw is that even though I knew I was behind in my bible reading, that today, November 10th), I finally did the reading that was on my calendar for September 29th, and I’ve been doing two readings a day for the last week to catch up.  I don’t know why it only struck me today that I was that far behind, but it did.

So, with that conviction, I confess:  I am undisciplined and prone to laziness; and I resolve: to hone discipline.  As I mentioned above, the timing of this is amusing.  God has brought me to where I am in life, in His sovereign timing.  I’ll probably finish that Edwards book just before Christmas (I’m reading it as a part of a men’s group, not just for leisure), but of course the New Year will be right on the heels of Christmas.  With this conviction, and this timing, it seems fitting to start thinking now of of my New Year’s resolution(s), which I have never done because I thought them fruitless, apparently due to my lack of discipline.  Not only is the New Year coming quickly, but in January I go back to school, to begin working on my Master’s degree.  So this conviction of needing discipline falls uncomfortably close to adding another iron to the proverbial fire.

More to come.