1-9-13
Who here plays video games?
I’ve always played mostly sports games.
Does this sound familiar to you at all?
You’re playing NCAA Football and you pick your favorite team, the
Hawkeyes (of course) and you are playing some poor team like Minnesota. You know you are going to win easy so you are
going to just run up the stats. You
throw the ball deep…it’s intercepted.
Okay, no big deal because you have plenty of time left. You get the ball back, run it up the middle
and BOOM, you fumble and the other team recovers. Now you are starting to get a little angry
because the game is cheating you. Your
down 2 TD’s now and you need to get some points fast so you go deep again and
the intercept it again and return it for a TD.
Now you’re mad because the game is “cheating you.” What usually happens next? You hit the reset button.
Every year about this time a lot of people hit the reset
button on some part of their life. They
call it a New Year’s Resolution. Do any of you have a resolution you are working
on? The most common resolution usually involves working out and losing
weight. Think about the words from the
song. “I’m afraid,” “I feel alive and it
hurts,” and “I’m never going back” all sound like the sayings of someone
starting a work out plan. Scared they
aren’t going to be able to do it, knowing that it’s going to hurt after the
workout, and planning to get in shape and make a “lifestyle” change. I’ve just renamed their song The Resolution
song. I’m sure they are thrilled.
One resolution I am working on this year is a commitment to
reading the Bible every day. It’s a
similar plan to what I had last year. I
did a better job of it last year than I did the year before, but I can still
get better. That is what I think of when
I hear the song “Never Going Back to OK.”
Do you think resolutions are a good thing? I think resolutions can be a great thing if
we treat them like we are hitting a reset button. Too often we get hung up on what we have done
in the past. We dwell on the mistakes
that we have made. We refuse to forgive
ourselves. We focus on the times we have
failed in the past, possibly with last year’s resolution. We can’t treat it like we are just re-trying
something that we already failed at. We
have to hit the reset button and completely start over.
Did you know that the idea of a reset button comes from the
Bible? When we get into the book of
Genesis we start with the first family, Adam and Eve. Adam & Eve had kids, grandkids,
great-grandkids, etc, etc, etc. When we
get to Genesis 6 we learn that the Earth wasn’t a very great place
anymore. Of all the people living only
one family is still worshipping God, the family of Noah. God saw how corrupt the Earth had become and
he was prepared to hit the reset button.
So he gave Noah a job to build an ark.
God gave Noah very specific details of how to build the ark, including
the enormous size that was needed. Do
you remember how big the ark needed to be?
(450’ long, 75’ wide, and 45’ tall)No cranes or forklifts, just Noah and
his sons, and the help of the animals if you have seen Evan Almighty. If we were unsure of Noah’s faithfulness
before, it would have been very clear after seeing the ark.
After the ark was built God told him to get in with his
family and bring 2 of every animal, a male and female. Then God hit the reset button and flooded the
Earth. For 40 days and 40 nights the
flood water came and stuck around for 150 days.
God wiped out all of the bad things and started over. That is exactly what we talked about with the
resolutions. God could have just left
things as they were. Things weren’t
perfect but God had still filled the world with living things. That had to feel
somewhat impressive. God didn’t want to
settle for a world that was just ok though.
He also could have just turned off all living things in the world. He could have decided that the whole game of
life wasn’t going how He wanted it and hit the “power button” and turn off the
lights. God went the resolution route
and decided to give man another shot to live life the right way. You may want to argue that we are failing
again, but that is where the challenge returns to us. We have to live a life that strives for
perfection in our relationship with God.
We can’t settle for just ok. We
need to make the resolution to grow in our faith and the Never go back to
ok.
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