How to Make 2002 the Greatest Year of Your Life

Tom Shrader challenges the worldly definition of ambition — defined by endless accumulation, self-obsession, and dissatisfaction — and replaces it with a five-part framework for a genuinely fruitful year. Drawing from 2 Timothy, 1 Corinthians, Philippians, and Romans, he calls believers to improve human relationships, break free from enslaving habits, cultivate godly passion, expand their perspective through Scripture and learning, and rely on the Holy Spirit's power to accomplish what they cannot do alone. The sermon closes with an invitation to trust that God never calls His people to anything without supplying the strength to follow through.

“As long as I'm enslaved to him, as long as he owns me and everything about me, all my possessions are his — as long as that's in place, now I can live the life he designed me to live and there will be joy.”

— Tom Shrader

Series: Year in Review

Recorded: 2002 at East Valley Bible Church

Duration: 42 min

Themes: ambition, new year, habits, relationships, holy spirit, personal growth, purpose, godly passion, feeling stuck, starting over, struggling with bad habits, young adult, new believer, someone discouraged, seeking purpose, person in a rut

Scripture: 2 Timothy 1:1-5, 1 Corinthians 7:23, Philippians 1:9-10, Romans 9:3, Acts 20, Ephesians 3:14-16

Theological Themes: sanctification, becoming holy, spiritual disciplines, holy spirit empowerment, scripture, biblical living, transformation, fruit of the spirit

Full Transcript

Looking Back Before Moving Forward

This message is really the second part of a two-part series. Last week, we looked in the rear-view mirror and asked the question: what kind of year was 2001? We asked you to evaluate that year. At the end of that evaluation, we recognized there are basically two kinds of people. First, those who had a great year — and to you we say, good going, hang in there, congratulations. Go to Dairy Queen, do the two-for-one on the Blizzards, knock yourself out, and have a blast. However, past performance is not a guarantee of future results, so because you had a good 2001 does not mean you will have a good 2002.

There is also a group of you who had either a neutral or a poor year. We want you to confess it, acknowledge it, and get over it. If you had a bad year, this is really important: it is no one's fault but yours. It is not my fault, not the Taliban's fault, not God's fault, not your spouse's fault — it is your fault. I am not saying circumstances do not change. Circumstances go up and down. What I am saying is that if you are grounded in this faith, there is a constancy to your life even in the midst of that. Things may be moving all around you, but you remain steady — maybe even growing, because we grow best in those trials.

A Fresh Approach to the New Year

This week we come at things with what we have called a fresh approach to a new year, subtitled "How to Make 2002 the Greatest Year of Your Life." To do this, we are going to ask you to strive to develop in your life a characteristic that is rarely thought of in the context of the Christian faith. We are going to ask you, in 2002, to be ambitious.

Now, oftentimes when you hear that word, it carries a negative connotation. There was a gentleman by the name of Srully Blotnick — and I presume that is not a pen name; I cannot imagine anybody saying "call me Srully Blotnick," so I am going to guess that is actually his name. He wrote a book called *Ambitious Men: Their Drives, Dreams, and Delusions*. It was a New York Times bestseller, and its purpose was to examine ambition — to understand what ambition actually is and what effect it has on people.

Here is what Blotnick says near the beginning of that book: "There is one thing that has changed, and that is that people look on ambition more favorably now than at any time in the last 25 years. In fact, men and women see themselves as somewhat defective if they cannot comfortably claim to be ambitious." What Blotnick is saying is that across the board, there is within the nation a sense that ambition is good. That brings us to the obvious question: what exactly is ambition?

The World's Five-Part Definition of Ambition

Rather than define ambition himself, Blotnick put together a series of short vignettes, videotaped them, showed them to many different groups of people, and asked those groups to identify what they saw in the vignettes that demonstrated ambition. Through that process, five dominant themes emerged that together form the common definition of ambition.

The first theme was a desire for more. A person was considered ambitious only if they had a desire for more — and the groups were very specific about what "more" meant: more money, fame, prestige, and power. Simply saying you wanted a happier life was not considered sufficient evidence of ambition.

The second theme was an emphasis on quantity, and it is a logical extension of the first. In judging whether someone was ambitious, the public did not care about quality — only about how much. Ambition, in audience reaction, was a quantitatively oriented word. It was irrelevant to them whether the person was having a good time or a bad time. All they focused on was how much someone was accumulating. If you were not out there trying to get more and more and more, and if you gave even the slightest indication that you might be enjoying yourself, they graded you down on ambition.

The third theme was a shortage of time. The people watching were not inclined to give you forever to accomplish your goals. What Blotnick found was that you had to have the big four — money, fame, prestige, and power — today, or no later than nine o'clock tomorrow morning. There is an urgency to it, a sense that everything is moving fast. A lot of people you know live exactly that way.

The fourth theme was an absence of satisfaction. The quest had to be open-ended. Someone who said, "Once I make a million dollars, I will never work again — I will just lie on a hammock and smile," was considered more goal-oriented than ambitious. For the word "ambitious" to truly apply, they felt the person had to be willing to strive virtually until the day they died. So people see ambition as good, and if you are really ambitious, you strive right up until the end. The picture that comes to my mind is the salesperson who is still cold-calling on his deathbed — still knocking on the door, still saying, "It's just me, I may not be able to help you, but somebody from the office can." And at the funeral they would say, "He was an ambitious man. Right up to the very end, he was ambitious."

The fifth theme was an obsession with self. The person had to seem somewhat ruthless. To the extent that someone showed concern for other people's feelings, the groups downgraded their assessed level of ambition.

The World's Definition of Ambition

Unless he gave the appearance of being out for himself, many were reluctant to use the word. This is what the world says is a positive set of personality traits for you to have. Tomorrow, sitting in your car on the freeway going nowhere, look to your left, look to your right, look in the rearview mirror, look out in front — you are not going to see anybody in there smiling. Here is why: to them, this is real life. A desire for more, an emphasis on quantity, a shortage of time, an absence of satisfaction, an obsession with yourself. This is no way to live, yet this is what the world says is really living.

This is why you watch people who have more stuff than you ever thought you would need — more stuff than you ever thought anybody would need — and they are still miserable. Maybe that is you. I remember one time a guy asked, "Will you help us move?" Just in case you are thinking about moving and calling me, I do not do this anymore. I am an old man. I now have people that move, and that is a good thing. He said, "Will you help us move?" and I said yes.

When we were all done, we were sitting around having a Diet Coke and a pizza, and the wife said, "This is so good. This is so exciting. This is everything we ever dreamed of. We could live here forever." Eighteen months later, they were moving — and not downsizing. They were moving on up. It was supposed to be everything she ever needed. I will tell you why it was not: there was something missing.

A lot of men, to justify their obsession with work and their own greed and materialism, will say to their wife, "Honey, I just do this for you. This is for you and the kids. I am doing it for you." That is not true. They are doing it for themselves. It is all about them. When you live this way, you are going to be miserable — always wanting more, never enough, no sense of satisfaction.

A Different Kind of Ambition

So when we say to you, "Be ambitious," we obviously are not talking about striving for those things. Here is how we would say it: be content in material things, but cultivate a quiet, godly discontent in spiritual things. There is a point — not apathy, not complacency — where you say, "That is enough of the temporal. Now I am going to look to the eternal." There is always a discontent in spiritual things, because you are not made to be content spiritually here. There is always a hunger, always a desire for more, and it will never be satisfied until that moment you step into heaven, because that is what you were created for.

Here is an odd thing. As you tend to let go of the temporal and focus on the eternal, one of two things — or both — tend to happen. Either your desire for the temporal starts to fade away, or God, in a surprising sort of way, gives you all the temporal things you need. It is a remarkable thing. So when we tell you to be ambitious, we are not talking about the world's normal approach to ambition.

Five Things: A Fresh Approach to Ambition

Let me give you a fresh approach to ambition — five things for this year.

**Number one: an improvement in human relationships.**

The Apostle Paul writes this in 2 Timothy: *"Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, to Timothy, my dear son."* For twenty years since I became a Christian, I have had a sense that Paul needs a public relations makeover. He is always portrayed as a dogmatic, doctrinal, dry figure — cut and slice, no humanity, no emotion. I want you to read this freshly, with the eyes of someone embracing it for the first time.

Timothy is not Paul's biological son. He is his spiritual son. There is a relationship, a kinship there. I found a letter the other day that Larry had written me, and he addressed it, "To my beloved son, from your proud father." That is exactly what we are talking about here.

Then Paul offers a wish. He says, "Here is what I wish for you, Timothy: grace and mercy and peace." What a great thing to wish for someone. Years ago I was sitting in my office and one of the women in the office was getting married. We were doing the thing where you have to sign the card, and it was making its way around — I could see it coming — and I was dreading it. You have to write something, and you try to find something meaningful to say, and I was thinking, what can I possibly write? Just signing my name does not work.

So I picked up the card to see what everyone else had written, hoping I could either borrow an idea or write bigger so mine would be seen first. The person ahead of me had written, "I wish you all the world has to offer." And I thought — suffering, pestilence, hardship, the plague, smallpox — wish all of those things and more to you. That is all the world has to offer.

Then I thought of this verse. Here is what Paul wishes: grace and mercy and peace. That is what he wants Timothy to have more than anything else — grace, which is unmerited favor; mercy, meaning God is not going to give you justice but what you do not deserve; and peace. That is what the world is truly searching for, that sense of satisfaction. It comes from God, from Jesus Christ.

You Need Real Friends

"Serve as my forefathers did with a clear conscience, as I constantly remember you in my prayers, recalling your tears, longing to see you, that I may be filled with joy." Paul is thinking back to a time that Luke records in Acts chapter 20, when Paul said goodbye to the elders at Ephesus. There were great tears there as Paul said farewell to these men. He evidently knows something else about Timothy as well, saying, "I am reminded of your sincere faith, which first lived in your grandmother and then in your mother and now is in you." We don't have the specifics, but the question that leaps off that page is: where are the men? Where is grandpa and where is dad? We don't know, but they are not there.

The point is that Paul knows this man, and he knows him well. You are going to have a great year if you can improve your relationships, because you desperately need other people around you. You need friends. Here is a basic rule of thumb: men, your best friends need to be other men, and women, your best friends need to be other women.

It may be possible, though doubtful, that a man and a woman could have a relationship that was not muddled up with other male-female dynamics. You hear a woman say there is a guy in the office and he is her best friend. But when he looks into her eyes and says, "I want to tell you something I can't really share with anybody — if I told the guys, they'd laugh at me. I'm just so comfortable with you and you're such a great listener. I just can't be honest with everybody the way I can be with you" — do not buy it. That is not sensitivity. That is a web being spun. There are no sensitive guys. They do not make them that way, and if there were, you would not want them.

The Friend Exercise

A high-profile business man came to Tom one day and said, "Will you be my friend? I need a friend." The answer was no — not out of unkindness, but because real friendship takes time, and all the friend dance cards were already full. The man agreed he needed to find some friends, and the suggestion was this: go home, make a list of everything you are looking for in a friend, and bring it back next week.

He came back the following week with his list — all the things you would expect someone to write down. Then came the key question: do those things describe you? He said he was looking for a friend. The response was simple: so is everybody else. If those are the qualities you think matter in a friend, then that is exactly what other people are looking for too. If you are those things, you will attract people.

Negativism Destroys Relationships

One thing nobody is looking for in a friend is criticism. Some people are committed to the principle that every silver lining has a cloud, and they consider it their job to find it and share it with everyone else. That is why they have no friends — they are a load to be around. They are argumentative. They say, "I can't help it, I just tell things the way they are." And that is precisely why they are alone. You have no right to be telling people the way things are when you carry that kind of spirit.

Howie Hendricks, a longtime teacher at Dallas Seminary and a master of his craft, was in town doing a devotional for PGA Tour players. During his talk he said this: "No marriage in the world can withstand a constant barrage of negativism." That principle can be expanded, because he is right — no human relationship can withstand a constant barrage of negativism. If you go to lunch tomorrow and spend the whole time ripping everything and everyone, it will not help you. It will not do anything for you. Nobody is attracted to that.

Some people are so bitter and so sour that they do not realize others can see it clearly. It is visible. Bitterness and sourness are not private feelings that stay hidden — they are on display, and they push people away.

How Paul Maintained Friendships

Paul had friends, and he did four things to maintain those relationships. The first is right there in the text: he prayed for them. "I constantly pray for you. I pray for you day and night." The second thing he did was write to them. There is something powerful about a written letter, something even more powerful than email.

The problem with email is that it is person to person but not face to face. Because of that distance, people will type things in an email they would never write in their own hand, and they will write things they would never say face to face. There is accountability and weight to handwriting that email simply does not carry.

Improving Human Relationships

There is a collection of letters that Ronald Reagan wrote to Nancy, and here is one of them. He wrote: "To my first lady, I love you so much — so much more than I did 365 days ago, and so much less than I will 365 days from now." I said, whoa, get some paper here. Write this down. I tried it myself. I wrote it out and gave it to Susan. She said, "I don't get it." I said, "What do you mean?" She read it back to me: "I love you so much more than I did 365 days ago, and so much less than I will 365 days from now — signed Ronnie." I had copied it a little too closely. I meant Tommy. That's what I meant.

There is something about writing. But writing was only the third thing Paul did. He also prayed and he visited — the face-to-face part. We are studying 1 Corinthians, and Paul says, "I long to see you again." You have to go out. You have to show up in person.

The last thing Paul did carries a somewhat negative connotation today, but it is really positive: he networked. He said, I have Timothy, and I am sending him to see you. There is no one in the world quite like Timothy. You are going to have a magnificent year if you improve your human relationships.

Increasing Your Freedom

The next thing that will make this a great year is increasing your freedom. Paul writes: "You were bought at a price, so don't become a slave to men." You have been freed — and yet you can turn right around and enslave yourself to men again. There are many ways we do this. We can be enslaved to Bank of America, enslaved to work, enslaved to alcohol or drugs. Some people are enslaved to gossip and simply cannot finish a conversation without it. Others are enslaved to golf or exercise. Many men — not just in this church but among the people we deal with regularly — are constantly caught up in internet pornography.

Here is the problem with being enslaved to anything: when that thing owns me, there will always be an absence of joy in my life. And do not misunderstand — you are designed to be a slave. Paul himself said, "I, Paul, am a slave to the Lord Jesus Christ." As long as Jesus owns me, as long as He owns everything about me and all my possessions are His, I can live the life He designed me to live, and there will be joy.

When I know that Jesus is my Master and I am His servant, living obediently at His charge, joy flows from that. But if something other than Christ owns me, my life will always be missing something. If He is my Master, then I understand that He first loved me, and so there is love in my life. If I love Him, I want to obey Him. If I want to obey Him, I will come to know Him. And that starts everything.

You want to grow spiritually — fall in love with Him. As you love Him, you want to obey Him. As you want to obey Him, you get to know Him. As you know Him, you love Him more. As you love Him more, you obey Him more. And on and on it goes — you are going to have a great year. Break the chains of whatever binds you.

Perhaps you are a slave to what other people think. Perhaps it is pride, or on the flip side, insecurity — whatever it is, you are held hostage to the opinions of others. You will have a great year if you improve your relationships and increase your freedom.

Intensifying Your Passion

The third thing that will make this a great year is intensifying your passion. I want you to be a passionate people. Howard Schultz, who was for a long time the chairman and CEO of Starbucks, wrote a business book that is genuinely interesting and full of human insight. This passage comes from after he had traveled to Seattle, where he had heard about Starbucks when it was still just a small coffee house. He got on the plane and flew back home, and here is what he writes:

"On the five-hour plane trip back to New York the next day, I couldn't stop thinking about Starbucks. It was like a shining jewel. I took one sip of the watery airline coffee and pushed it away. I reached into my briefcase, pulled out a bag of Sumatra beans, opened them, and sniffed them. I leaned back and my mind started to wander. I believe in destiny. At that moment, flying 35,000 feet above the earth, I could feel the tug of Starbucks. There was something magic about it — a passion, an authenticity I'd never experienced. Maybe I could help it grow. What could I bring to Starbucks that could make it even better than it was? The opportunity seemed as wide open as the land I was flying over. By the time I landed at Kennedy Airport, I knew in my heart that this was it. I jumped into a taxi and went home to Sherry."

And then the last sentence of the chapter: "That was the way I met Starbucks, and neither of us have been the same since."

He is talking about coffee. This man is in love with coffee. But the title of his book says it all: *Pouring Your Heart Into It*. Don't you desire that? Something you can pour your heart into. Something that gives you a reason to get up in the morning. Something that lights your fire.

There is a word I do not particularly like, though I use it periodically and I know it has a place in its proper sense. That word is *balance*. I do not like it because for many people it has become a code word for apathetic or average.

Passion That Sets You on Fire

Balanced people don't accomplish great things. If I said "the Apostle Paul" to you and we did a word association, I could give you a billion words and I cannot imagine you landing on "balance." In fact, Paul fights against that. Here's what he said: "This one thing I do." Now, we know he does other things, but he is saying this one thing supersedes everything else. Here are the things in my life, here are the priorities — when I triage my life, here is the way they shake out. I put my emphasis on this, then this, then this, and I may not have any time for these other things. That is the way to live: with something that brings out in your life a passion.

We live in a country whose coinage reads "In God We Trust." We have a national anthem. We have a national symbol, the eagle. What we need is a national color — a color that captures the heart and spirit of Americans today, a color that radiates and says, when you look at it, "That's America." Here is what I suggest that color would be: beige. Just like these walls — kind of bland. That is what we are about.

A recent poll found that 47% of high school students said they could not imagine anything worth dying for — not family, not friends, not country, not faith. If there is nothing worth dying for, then there is nothing worth living for. And all of a sudden, life becomes whatever. Someone much more astute than I am looked at our culture and said, "We have become so addicted to mediocrity that we don't even sin with vigor anymore."

Here is what Paul says in Romans 9, verse 3: "For I could wish that I myself were cursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my brothers, those of my own race, the people of Israel." Paul is saying he would give up his faith — not that it is actually possible, but he is expressing that he so loves, so cares, and is so passionate about his nation that he would surrender the salvation he treasures most for their sake. That is passion. Is there passion in your life?

Passion is contagious. John Wesley, years ago, was preaching, and common people were coming out to hear him. It was driving the church establishment nuts. They kept asking, "How do these men come out and stand in the rain outside the mines to listen to you, but they will not come to church and listen to us?" Wesley's answer was this: "Light yourself on fire, because everybody loves to watch somebody burn." That is true.

Passion Is for Everyone

Let me offer some encouragement, because maybe this is not naturally who you are. Maybe you are not an animated person. You can be quiet and soft-spoken and still be passionate. In fact, if you are quiet and soft-spoken, the last thing you ought to do is perform excitement you do not feel — there is nothing worse than someone saying "I really care about this passionately" in a flat, unconvincing tone. Be you.

If the Word is in you, and it saturates your body and your mind, and you are in love with the Creator God of the universe, and He has changed your life and you know it, you will become passionate. I have had at least fifteen people tell me that *A Beautiful Mind* is a good movie. Every one of them said I should go see it, that I would like it, that even if I did not like it, it would be interesting. None of those people are on staff with the company that produced the film. None of them have any affiliation with it. They simply saw a movie, liked it, and the most natural thing in the world was to tell someone else. They were excited about it.

If that is true about a movie, how much more true should it be about a personal relationship with the Creator God of the universe — the One who changed your destination from hell to heaven, who took a life that was dead and meaningless and gave it purpose? There should be something contagious about the way you live. I ought to be able to see it all over you.

When people walk onto this campus and they encounter those of us who are here on a regular basis, there ought to be something — when their foot hits the blacktop — that makes them say, "There is something different here. I cannot put my finger on it, I cannot name it exactly, but there is something different." And what it is, is the Spirit of God living in the people of God. That makes you passionate. It makes you passionate about your work.

Expand Your Perspective

Here is the next thing: you will have a great year if you expand your perspective. Paul writes this in Philippians 1: "This is my prayer, that your love may abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight, to be able to discern what is best, what is righteous, and may be pure and blameless." He is talking about knowledge of the Lord. You have to spend time in that Word.

I was talking with a man a month or so ago over breakfast. He had just finished, along with a group of scholars, a word-for-word translation — I believe it was the English Standard Bible. He described working at Cambridge, starting every morning at 7:30 and going until 5:30 or 6:00 at night, immersed in the Word. And yet, after three or four days, he found himself empty. What had happened was that the work had become a purely academic exercise, and his private time of simply opening the Bible and reading it had faded away. Consequently, he was drying up. You have to be in this Word.

Now, let me suggest something else. Expanding your perspective also means expanding your knowledge in this changing world you are in.

Expanding Your Perspective

There are tapes out there somewhere — I don't know where they are, I don't remember when I said it — where I predicted that the computer was a fad and would never last. Now, I don't know that I'm wrong yet. The tide seems to be moving against me, but I'm not certain it still couldn't whip back. I said I'm never going to have one of those, I don't need one of those. And now our computer at home just went down, and it took me about 30 seconds to call over here and say, "Somebody order me a computer — I'll pay for it myself — and get it into my house. How am I going to function?" You can't just shut out the world around you.

That happens especially with older people. The problem with "older" is defining it — I would say older would be anything above 52, and I'll be 53 next year, so older. I watch this: I'm with older people and I hear, "Everything's happening so fast, I just can't really keep up, I'm kind of obsolete, nobody wants us, we don't know how to do anything." Jay Leno tells a great story about his dad and mom's TV breaking. He bought them a new TV, went to visit his dad, and they're sitting there watching it. He said, "Hey Dad, isn't something on channel three?" His dad got up, walked over, turned the dial, and came back. After this happened three or four times, Leno said, "When they shipped this, didn't they give you a remote?" His dad said, "Oh yeah, we got one of those, but I don't know how to use it." Leno said he knew his dad was afraid that if he pushed something, it would blow up.

Listen, that is no way to live. There was a young man walking across this campus a while ago, about 13 years old, beaming from ear to ear — he looked like he had just won the lottery. I said, "What's going on?" He said, "I just got an email from my grandpa." I'm telling you, this generation is dying to hear from you. You have something to bring.

In our premarital class, every time we ask which session was the best — and we do eight or nine of them — you know what they say? The best session is when Alan and Betty Page come in. Alan and Betty have been married 53 or 54 years; they're a fascinating couple. He saw her at church, shipped out, never talked to her, wrote her a letter saying he thought she should marry him, and they got married — they never had a single date. That's a pretty neat story. We don't recommend that, by the way; that's not the part we ask you to emulate. But here is this couple, 54 years in, he's a colonel who was gone a lot — how do you make this work? They have so much to offer, and my observation has been that young people want to listen. All you have to do is tell it.

Tyler was over last night, and we were talking about different things. He was talking about his grandfather, talking about when his grandfather was a young man, and he said, "Man, I just love to listen to him." That's all around you — you just need to make the effort to expand your perspective.

All Change Is Not Progress

Now, I know what stops a lot of you. A lot of what's changing in the world isn't good — I understand that. Years ago, they interviewed John Wooden, the Wizard of Westwood, and among the things they asked him about were the new uniforms — those short pants they used to wear, now replaced by the long, sloppy ones. I encourage all of you to watch ESPN Classics and find an NBA game from about 30 years ago. There's no music, a guy would fall and he'd say, "Oh, I did that," rather than yell and swear and hit somebody. It was a phenomenal thing they had going back then. They asked the Wizard about the shorts, and he said, "Well, it's certainly changed." Then he said this — I wrote it down: *All progress is change, but not all change is progress.*

I know there's a lot of stuff changing in ways I don't want to see it change. But if you withdraw because of that, you'll make yourself irrelevant. You aren't irrelevant — you just decide to be irrelevant. You have to be willing to step out. The other day, Milton Friedman said he had just read a book that would change the world. Milton Friedman is a 90-year-old economist, and he is S-M-A-R-T. I've got almost no idea what he usually talks about, but I also know there is only one book that is truly going to change the world, and that is the Scripture. Still, I thought, I wonder what this book is.

It turned out to be a book by a Peruvian economist. I made a note, went to the bookstore, and found it — it's called *The Mystery of Capital*. I read about 10 pages and had no clue what the man was saying. But I thought, you know what, I'm going to buy this and work through it. After about 150 to 200 pages, I started to understand what he was saying, and it's a really phenomenal thing — something I had never even thought about before. Isn't that something? You are going to have a great year if you expand your perspective.

Strengthened by the Spirit

Now, here's the problem. If you look at this list, you can be overwhelmed. You're going to have a great year if you improve relations, increase freedom, intensify your passion, and expand your perspective. There ought to be something in you right now saying, "I can't do all of that. It's impossible for me to do that." That's exactly right — because what you need is to be strengthened by the Holy Spirit.

Here is what Paul wrote: *"For this reason I kneel before the Father, from whom His whole family in heaven and on earth derives its name, and I pray that out of His glorious riches He may strengthen you with power."* That is what you and I need in this life — power. It was just a year ago that we watched the transfer of power. Bill Clinton and that administration yielded to George W. Bush, and in he came with everything that comes with it.

More Power Than You Think

The most powerful man in the world has the strongest military at his beck and call. He makes the call, and it happens. And yet I say this, not for effect — it is absolutely true: you have more power than George W. Bush, because you have the Holy Spirit living in you. As God works through your life, you have the power to see people's hearts change. You cannot call out the military and shoot down an airplane, but you can call upon the creator God of the universe and ask Him to send His angels and His Spirit to invade the lives of people around you — first and foremost, you. Now, that is real power.

The Trade Worth Making

I remember when I became a Christian. I had not been a Christian very long when I thought, "Uh-oh, I'm hearing a lot here about giving up — give up this, give up that." I was thinking, I don't know about that. What is God going to take away from me? Here is a brief list of what He took away: guilt, remorse, depression, anxiety, loneliness, and fear.

Here was the trade I made. I gave all of that away, and here is what I got: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, and self-control. The ability to understand this world as it was meant to be understood, and at the end of this life, I go to heaven. I may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer, but that seemed like a pretty good trade to me. That is a pretty good exchange right there.

That is not the reason I make that exchange, though. I make that exchange because I am a sinner, and I understand my sin, and I understand that this is the only solution for it.

You Have the Power

I think a lot of you opt out with "I can't do it" too quickly. It might be that you cannot come up with a plan. It might be that you do not have the resources or the strength. But here is something you do have: you have the power to do it. You know Someone who can get it done. It is the Spirit of God.

You are going to have an extraordinary year if you will take the time to improve relationships, to increase your freedom, to intensify your passion, to expand your perspective, and to be strengthened through the Holy Spirit. I really encourage you to use this tool and to come back to it again and again. The notes, at this point or very soon, are on the website. Take this inventory, because next year, the first two Sundays in January, we are going through this exact exercise — word for word, illustration for illustration — all over again.

Purpose Even in the Hard Times

Even in this life, if difficult times come this year and hard times arrive and you have down times, what I am saying to you is this: in the middle of those down times, you have purpose and meaning, and there is an excitement and anticipation of what God is going to do. That is the life we live.

I had someone say to me the other day, "You look like you live a very exciting life." I said, "You know what? I live a very exciting life." Because I never know exactly what God is going to do. And He does not ask me to do anything that He is not going to give me the strength and the power to do — and that is the same with you.

Next Week

Next Sunday, I had planned to get back into 1 Corinthians 14, but I am going to take one more week. I have something I want to talk to you about, and I am going to ask you to make certain that you are here. If you know others from the church, make certain that they are here as well. We are just going to have a fireside chat — a heart-to-heart talk about some things that I see, some things that I sense, and some warnings that I want us to heed and listen to. We will talk about that next week, and then the following week we will be into 1 Corinthians 14.

Father, help us live this life that brings honor and glory to You. We ask it in Jesus' name, amen. Have a great week. We will see you next week.