New Year’s Eve – 2006 Beginning Again – Jacob's Well – Greg Meyer
Introduction of 2 minute video clip from Groundhog Day (1993) in which Bill Murray, a weatherman sent to Punxsutawny, PA to cover the emergence of the groundhog on Feb. 2, is stuck repeating that day over and over. His maladjusted way of dealing with the endless new starts at the same old thing get him nowhere.
Bill Murray got caught in an endless loop in the movie, Groundhog Day. His trap gets resolved at the end, but what about yours? You don’t have a screen writer making sure everything turns out all right. It is New Year’s Eve, and there is nothing you can do about last year now. And there is nothing you can do to keep a new year from starting in approximately 13 hours. You can decide what your year to come will be about, however…
Perhaps you’ve made some resolutions already. A couple years ago I investigated New Year’s Resolutions and found them pretty predictable. A lot to do with spending more time with family – I liked the one “To stop emailing my wife.” A lot about dieting – Someone named Rhonda had posted her New Year’s resolutions from over the last several years… In 2002 it was to lose 15 lbs and get down to 130. In 2003, lose 30 lbs and get down to 130. In 2004, lose 45 lbs… you get the idea.
Self improvement isn’t a bad thing. Who doesn’t want to be better? God would like you – and me – to be better people. But it isn’t the purpose of your life to take your X number of years on earth and see how good you can become. If it were, then perfecting yourself would be the main goal and there would be some real pressure to make these resolutions work. Unfortunately this is what many of us believe and many have given up on God completely because they think this is what we expect them to believe.
But God clearly says that our purpose is to be loved by God and to love God back. Now that’s a different ballgame, and while it has all kinds of implications for the sort of lives we are to lead it doesn’t give us an ultimatum. We aren’t all on The Apprentice with God playing Donald Trump.
As you begin again with a new year, it is good to take a few lessons from Jonah.
And the first is this; God has a PLAN for your life.
Beginning again isn’t just a matter of “oh well, what should I do this year.” No, God cares and has ideas. All paths don’t lead to Rome. There are good ways to use your life and good ways to waste your life.
God had a plan for Jonah; God wanted to send Jonah to Nineveh. God has a plan for everyone. Ephesians 1 [1].11 says this,
All things are done according to God's plan and decision…
Now we need to explain what that means. When we talk about God’s plans we don’t mean that before you were born God had already decided who you should marry, what job you should take and where you would live. No, God is interested in the bigger picture of your life. That verse from Ephesians goes on to say,
All things are done according to God's plan and decision…
and God chose us to be his own people in union with Christ because of his own purpose, based on what he had decided from the very beginning.
That may be a little hard to digest al at once, but what it means is that God’s plan from the beginning is to bring us close through Christ. Not to micromanage our lives.
Folks, God is more interested in your character than your career. God is more interested in the direction of your life than the details of it. Get it? ... Good.
Now that doesn’t mean, like with Jonah, that at certain junctures of your life God won’t have some pretty specific ideas about which way to turn. I think of raising my own children. I may feel pretty certain that I want them to clear their dishes to the kitchen after a meal. I may be uncompromising that homework be done before TV is watched, but when it comes to where they decide to go to college, I’m pretty open. It should be a good match for them. Likewise what career area they settle in. And as for who they will to marry… I know better than to have much of an opinion about that.
God guides, God doesn’t drag us along by a leash. And we can find example after example in the Bible of people who did their best work after getting significantly off course. Which brings us to the next characteristic of God’s way of giving us second chances. And that is…
God is PERSISTENT. If the old saying is true that you aren’t a failure until you quit trying, then it is easy to see why God is not a failure. God never quits trying. In this fabulous story – that kept women and men, boys and girls in rapt attention for generations around crackling fires at night – people heard about Jonah’s God. The God who created heaven and earth, who used a storm, a game of chance and a whale, not to punish Jonah for his disobedience, but to creatively help Jonah obey. This was their God. It is ours too. The God who has chosen you will neither settle for less than what you can be, nor give up on helping you be it.
Around the time of Jonah another prophet, Isaiah, passed on these words from God,
…my word that goes out from my mouth:
It will not return to me empty,
but will accomplish what I desire
and achieve the purpose for which I sent it.
Isaiah 55 [2].11 NIV
That’s persistence! You see, people tend to try to do too little and to do it too fast. God would like to do amazing things and use your entire life accomplishing it. Just look at God’s record. Take creation for example. I know that the first chapter of the Bible tells about how it was done in six days, but that is story language conveying spiritual truth, not history or science. Remember the difference between the vehicle and the cargo? Which one are we supposed to fix our eyes on? The cargo, right. The truth is that creation is still happening. Stars are still being born. People are still being born. Lives are being changed. Species are still evolving. In fact that number six was symbolic for the Jews. It is one short of seven, the number meaning forever. So creation will last right up to the end of time. The Bible attests to that over and over again. Why? Because God is in no hurry to do small things, but is patiently persistent at making sure all things “achieve the purpose for which God sent them.
Boy, I probably got myself in trouble a couple of times today with some of you. Questioning the whale, the way some people understand God planning our lives, and now how many days there are in creation… I’ll have to hold a midweek class to explain all this…. Oh well, if I’m not making you think, I’m not doing my job.
So… God is persistent… You see, getting off track is getting off track, but God specializes on getting us back on track. You cannot get out of God’s reach or interest. God doesn’t give up, God just gets more creative. Since we began Jacob's Well many people have come to me and said they’ve been going to church their whole life and always thought it was just fine, but discovered a whole new level of meaning to their faith here. That doesn’t mean the other churches aren’t as good as we are, it just means that this place is another expression of God’s creativity to break into some of the dark places Jesus’ light hasn’t been able to shine. God is persistent.
The third characteristic of God we learn from Jonah’s saga of second chances is that God is COMPASSIONATE. God understands how hard it is to become what God would like us to be. That’s what Jesus was all about. God became one of us and lived our life and found out you get crucified for it. So God is ready to forgive, ready to help you up when you fall, eager to help you start again even when it seems like all we want to do is head off in the wrong direction.
Part of Jonah’s story that I didn’t tell yet and that isn’t as well known is what happened after he got to Nineveh. Everyone, even the king, changed their ways. A little hard to believe actually. And this sent Jonah into a major depression. Why? Because this made him a liar. He said their city would be overthrown in 40 days, but because they repented, it wasn’t. Here’s what Jonah said about that,
O Lord! Is not this what I said while I was still in my own country?
That is why I fled to Tarshish at the beginning;
for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger,
and abounding in steadfast love, and ready to relent from punishing.
Jonah 4 [3].2
“I knew you’d make me look bad, God!” A strange thing to be upset about it, seems to me. What Jonah doesn’t see is that he was the recipient of that compassion too. Indeed we all are. God is indeed “gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, ready to forgive and not punish.”
You’ve got some things to change in your life today. God has a list for you too. But remember that’s not God’s agenda. God’s agenda is to love you and to watch that love transform you.
And this isn’t only true for you, it is true for us as a community of believers. We are now a little over three months old. Wow! Still in diapers. And they need a change! Anything that God doesn’t make new pretty often begins to stink. I’m not saying we are off track or headed downhill, we’re not, but just like the water in this well, if it is cut off from its source it becomes stagnant and no longer gives life.
So we are counting on God keeping us on course of some of the things that are core to who we are. Hopefully whales won’t be necessary. Up to this point we’ve focused on Sunday morning. Our worship and the H2O program. We believe that this is the place to start – centering on worship and building a community. But God is calling us to more now and the needs are becoming apparent. Here is what we see God calling us to in 2007.
- Starting a second worship gathering time. Probably not on Sunday morning and
- Launching a second site, probably somewhere east of here in Minneapolis so that we can be touching the lives of 100’s more in a year than we are today.
- Becoming financially independent so that money won’t be a limiting factor to the ministry we are called to.
- We will be working on developing small home-based groups where people can get to know each other and have a chance to drill down on what we are learning on Sundays. Something that doesn’t happen when 2 or 3 hundred of us get together.
- Right now H2O is one group from age 3 to 10. We know that needs to specialize and expand.
- Many of you are teens; it seems you like what is going on, and many of you are adding enormous value to Jacob's Well through your talents. But I bet you would like to get together just as teens sometimes. That means the beginning of a youth ministry.
- We will be discovering our calling in the neighborhood. Ways to give ourselves away and make a difference in our neighborhood and in the world.
- Recovery from addictions is something 60-70% of families are directly dealing with. It is something that many of you have talked to me about. Developing a ministry for this is part of telling the truth and meeting people where they are.
- We need to have special ways to grow in faith, get to know each other and just have fun. Developing some outdoor retreat ministries backpacking, sea kayaking, canoeing, sailing, mountain biking are all part of our near future.
Why all this stuff? Not to be busy… believe me, keeping Sundays going is enough to wear me out, I’d love to keep it at that. But because God wants to touch all corners of our life, and a faith that balances worship, learning, community, serving and sharing is what makes us a healthy church. And I took a pledge when I accepted this call to Jacob's Well, and many others did with me, to do whatever it takes to bring people in, to raise them up and send them out with God’s love. And that’s what I’ll do. I hope you will join me.
Would you close your eyes and pray with me…
Lord, you are the God of second chances. Thanks for loving us the way you do so that there can be such hope for us. We are all stuck. Our lives are full of dead ends. There are some here right now with tears in their eyes and hearts about to break because of the pain they are living with. It is too much for anyone to carry alone. Teach them to see you. Let them feel the hope and peace that you promise.
God, we also need to learn that agreeing that you are good, that you have the best in mind for us, means little. We must trust you with our lives, take up your will and make it our own. Take away what holds us back, let your Spirit run through us so that we can give our lives to you. Speak to individually today. Prompt each one of us to reach out for you as our heart tells us to. As you will, Lord, may it be so… Amen.