What is your Advent resolution?

For to us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government will be on his shoulders. And he will be called Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. Of the increase of his government and peace there will be no end.

Isaiah 9:6-7

Advent is upon us. The start of the church year. A time of reflection. A season to anticipate the coming of the saviour into the world – the return of Christ who will bring all things to completion.

Or at least it ought to be, but as the world heads into Advent what is going through our minds? For some it will be fear based on the actions of ISIL/ISIS in Europe recently. For others it is the frenetic activity required to prepare at work for the Christmas break. For others its the organisation of Christmas itself, perhaps coping with the ever increasing excitement of children around them. For some it will be sadness at the memory of loved ones no longer around to celebrate Christmas with them. So many pressures and thoughts competing for our attention!

Yet in the passage in Isaiah we find some words that we could meditate on to help us to recenter and to find hope in Christ. There are amazing promises in the short paragraph. For example, to us, yes us, a child is born, a son is given. To us? Who are we for such a gift? What love the Father has for us, what grace. And not just for us because of the increase of his government and peace there will be no end. Whatever is going on around us the truth is that Christ’s peace is extending across humanity and across his creation.

Jesus taught his disciples to pray “your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” It wasn’t some bit of wishful thinking, some acknowledgement that God should be allowed to get on with what he was doing. It was a prayer that committed the one praying it to be the hands and feet that saw that kingdom come, to see God’s will being done. To make that happen Jesus left us with the counsellor, the Holy Spirit, who empowers and enlightens us, who enables us to be the answer to the prayer that we pray.

So Advent is a time when we can meditate on the wonderful truths of Jesus and all that God has done for us. As the church year starts we can make our “new year” resolutions, resolutions to be the answer to the prayer that we pray daily to see God’s kingdom come and his will be done, to be people of peace filled with God’s Spirit bringing light and life to those we encounter, introducing them to the God who gave everything for us and for them.

The best of intentions

Sow for yourselves righteousness, reap the fruit of unfailing love, and break up your unploughed ground, for it is time to seek the Lord
Hosea 10:12

One month into the new year and our resolutions and best intentions are probably already beginning to fall by the wayside as the pressures of day-to-day life take their toll on us. My own resolution to exercise instead of taking a lunch break every day failed in the first week of the year, although I have managed since then to get back on track!

Through Hosea God was speaking to a people whose hearts were not for the things of God, urging them back to him. As I was preparing for a recent evening sermon on 1 Corinthians 13, that famous passage about love, I was struck by a commentator who said that our emotions reveal our values and beliefs. As I pondered this I started to wonder what my emotions said of what I value and believe. What is my emotional response to people and situations – is it always a response of love that reflects their intrinsic worth in God’s eyes? Or do I find myself irritated or angry by something they have said or done? As I thought about it I realised that in some instances my responses were good, but with a moment of honesty I realised that I also had some poor responses. I wonder what you realise about yourself as you notice your emotional response to people and situations?

To put this in Hosea terms, when we find ourselves not responding in love it is an indicator of hard unploughed ground in our hearts. We cannot reap the fruit of unfailing love because there is hard unploughed ground. Yet the call is to break up the hard unploughed ground and to sow for ourselves righteousness, reaping the fruit of unfailing love.

Whatever your pledges were as you entered 2015, one thing God is asking of each of us is to break up the hard unploughed ground in our hearts – the selfishness, individualism, envy and so on. Ploughing is hard work and takes time, but God’s call is clear. Then we need to ask God to sow his love afresh in our hearts as we chose to put aside the things that harden our hearts so that he can grow his love in us. As we do this we will reap the fruit of unfailing love as our emotional response to people and situations changes, reflecting God’s love into the lives of others, bringing light into their lives, and introducing them to the God who loves them so very much.

Let us pledge to make 2015 the year when our hearts are ploughed and entirely yielded to God and his purposes so that we can reap the fruit of unfailing love as we seek him.

Let’s be real here …

Have you ever noticed programmes like 60 minute makeover, where part of a house is utterly transformed in 60 minutes – old stuff stripped off and new stuff put up – so a living room, dining room and bedroom would be repainted and papered, furniture, curtains, fireplaces and lamps etc replaced, all in just 60 minutes. Or the 5/2 diet where you can eat what you like for five days a week, so long as you don’t overdo it, and by fasting two days a week you will lose a stone in a month. Or perhaps the new exercise regime where you do  four bursts of 30 seconds high intensity exercise with four minute rests between three times a week and just six weeks of that has the same health benefits as 20 weeks of a normal exercise regime. The allure of rapid results with little effort is very appealing.

We can approach our Christian lives like that. Today there are an amazing number of quick-fix Christian books offering easy steps to an enriched Christian life. We are encouraged to add to these conferences that promise amazing changes in your life, listening to top speakers at events, and evenings of worship led by  big name worship leaders.

The only problem, and its a big problem, is that is not what Christianity is about. We don’t go to church to get a spiritual 60 minute makeover from the worship leader and the preacher, we don’t offer a stipend to a leader to sit back and watch him or her do all the ministry of the church, we don’t try to live our spiritual lives with four bursts of 30 seconds of high intensity spiritual exercise with a few minutes rest between, three times a week – or at least we shouldn’t.

Romans 8:29 tells us we are being conformed to the likeness of his Son. That process isn’t something that can happen by quick fixes. Being conformed to the likeness of his Son involves growing fruit in our lives. I’m no gardener, but I know enough to understand that if you want good fruit then you need to tend and care for the plant, as well as the ground that it is in. You need to prune and shape it, aerate the soil, fertilise it, and keep it moist. Developing fruit needs protected from pests, and  harsh weather – and you can’t plant a  tree and expect to eat fruit the next day; some trees need a few years to mature before the fruit starts to come, and then more years before they produce full harvests.

Growing fruit means cultivating love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control in our lives. That can only come about by spending time with God and co-operating with his work of grace, developing new attitudes and crucifying some old ones. It means leaving everything behind and following him wherever he will lead us, it means developing spiritual discipline in our lives. It isn’t quick, but it will make us real as Christians, and as Pope Benedict said in his final tweet “May you always experience the joy that comes from putting Christ at the centre of your lives.”