Hope, Healing & Freedom Podcast: Episode 129
INTRO
Does the celebration of the coming new year have any significance to you or is it another been there done that event? Is the beginning of a new year just a day to gather with your friends and family and watch football and indulge in your favorite foods? In this week’s podcast I would like to challenge us that this new year’s day could be both a time of great significance for you personally as well as a wonderful chance to get together with friends and family and eat some great BBQ.
TRANSCRIPT
I’m Lee Whitman from Restoring the Foundations and I welcome you to this Hope Healing and Freedom Podcast. Today is New Years Eve. The beginning of a New Year is a time when we have a chance to look at the last year and evaluate what has gone on in the past, but it is also a great time to set goals and dreams and visions for things in the future. One of the hardest questions to ask is God, what do you have for me in this next year? Why is that a hard question? Because it will take some consecrated listening to hear the answer. In this podcast I want to talk about what we can learn about resting and listening.
The verse for today’s podcast is Philippians 3:13-14, “Brothers and sisters, I do not regard myself as having taken hold of it yet; but one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and reaching forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward calling of God in Christ Jesus.” The apostle Paul indicates here that the best way to move forward in your life with Christ is to forget what lies behind. I am going to talk through what I believe Paul is saying here by using a football analogy. (Sorry to those who don’t relate to football.) I played football in high school and all four years I was in college. Following every football game, we would sit down and watch the game film from the past game. We would examine each and every play to determine what went right so we could continue to do those things in the next game, and we would examine what went wrong so we obviously could eliminate those things in the future. The position I played on the team was quarterback. There is a saying that is taught to quarterbacks that a quarterback must have a very short memory. What that means is that as a quarterback you can’t live in the past. Even if what you just did was a very good play you can’t live on that good play once the next play starts. And if it was a bad play you are taught to not dwell on that negative play and allow the memory of the bad play to affect your future performance. In both instances you want to learn from the last play so it will help you become successful on future plays. Maybe it is because of my football imprinting but I hear Paul encouraging us in the same way in these verses. Examine what went right in the past year and also examine what did not go so right and use those experiences to press on toward the goal of the prize of the upward calling of God in Christ Jesus. Don’t live in the past. Press on to the goal.
The New Year presents us with the opportunity to examine our goals and dreams and visions for our life. I think many of us set what we call New Year Resolutions. For most of us those resolutions are things like losing weight or hitting the gym on a more regular basis. Some of us even set goals for really good things like reading through the bible in a year or becoming more disciplined in our prayer times. When you examine most of our resolutions for the new year, they are mostly about doing something. One thing that has become very evident to Cindi and I is that we as believers don’t take enough time to just be. We can get so busy doing the things that need to get done that we don’t spend time just being with Father God. Something that God is challenging us with is taking more time to rest. Rest as in doing nothing. I was challenged to look back at the last season and realize that I do not take time to just rest. Oh yea, we will take time to sit on the deck and read a book, or spend time listening to a wonderful podcast, but how often do we just do nothing. It is really difficult for me to put down my phone or a really good book that I am reading and just relax in God’s presence. When I am resting it almost feels like I am not accomplishing anything and of course the most important thing in life is accomplishing the next thing, right? Tongue in cheek! The lesson God might have for us in 2025 might be to learn how to set aside time to rest in the presence of God. For me it will be learning how to set aside that time just to sit in his presence without any agenda, just spending time resting and listening. Cindi and I take the first week of December each year to go on vacation. What we have discovered is that while we are lying on the beach without any agenda or schedule our creativity increases dramatically. Why? I think it is because while we are on vacation we allow ourselves to unplug from the drain of everyday life and give ourselves permission to just sit and think and rest.
This year while on vacation I re-read the book Experiencing Father’s Embrace by Jack Frost. I had read this wonderful book at least two other times over the last 15 years, yet this time when I read it, I was struck by the simplicity of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Jack Frosts says in this book is that the Christian life can be summed up in this: experience the love of Father God for yourself and then give it away to the next person you meet. We have taken the simple gospel of Jesus Christ and made it into many different religions and in so doing we have made it into something it was never meant to be. We divide from our brothers and sisters over secondary issues like speaking in tongues, or the gifts of the Spirit, or even on how we do baptism. We have complicated something that was meant to be simple and made it so complicated that many people want nothing to do with it. Look at the simplicity found in John 3:16, “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only Son, so that everyone who believes in Him will not perish but have eternal life.” It was so important for the children of Adam to experience God’s love for them that He sent His only Son to give His life so that they could experience Father God’s love. God sent Jesus out of love. He sent Jesus to bring us into a relationship with Him so that we could experience His love. And once we experience how incredible His love is for us, we will naturally want to give that love away to others. It goes on in John 3:17 to say, “For God did not send the Son into the world to judge the world, but so that the world might be saved through Him.” Judgement and guilt were never part of God’s plan for mankind, yet judgement and guilt have become part of most religion.
To quote from Experiencing Father’s Embrace, Jack Frost says this, “1 John 4:16 says “God is love and the one who remains in love remains in God, and God remains in him”. Notice that is does not say that God abides with the person who preaches eloquently or who attends church every week or who fasts 50 days every year. It does not say that God abides with the person who prays faithfully every day or knows the mysteries of God or who wins souls. It says that God abides with the person who is at home in the Fathers love.”
When Jesus was asked what was the greatest commandment, He responded in Mark 12:30-31, “And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength. The second is this: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. There is no commandment greater than these.” Jesus said the greatest commandment is to experience the love of God and give it away to the next person you meet. Ok I paraphrased a little, but the idea is the same, Love and be loved by God and then love others out of that love. Pretty simple isn’t it.
On this New Years Eve 2024, I want to encourage and challenge you to go back to the simplicity of the Gospel. What if Jack Frost is right and the entirety of the gospel can be summed up in his statement: Experience the Love of God and give that love away to the next person you meet. What effect would that have on your life? How would that affect your relationships? How would that affect your church? Please don’t hear me saying any of that in a judgmental way. I am trying to encourage myself and, in the process, encourage you to focus on experiencing the love of God in 2025 and see what a difference it will make. As Jesus said in Mark 12 “There is no commandment greater than these.”
Secondly, in order to experience His love on a regular basis I would like to encourage us to learn how to unplug from the world and learn to experience His love. How do we do that? I don’t know what that will mean for you but for me it means spending time just doing nothing in His presence. Really? Just doing nothing? Yep. and that is very hard for us to do. We have been taught that to experience the presence of God we need to read so many chapters in our bibles and spend so many minutes or hours in prayer. What if we started by setting aside 30 minutes a day and simply sat in a chair and did nothing. Just sit and listen to hear what Father God has to say to you. If He says something during that time that is incredible. But even if He does not say anything during that time you have rested in His presence for those 30 minutes. You win either way. We have looked to the verb form of the word love and tried to figure out what we need to be doing in order to experience love. But in 1 John 4:16 it says that God is love. That is a noun. It is a description of who God is and what God does.
In next week’s podcast I am going to share a journey Cindi and I are on that is taking me deeper into this topic of experiencing the love of God and giving it away to the next person you meet. I invite you to join us next week as you join us on this journey.
PRAYER
Father God as I write this podcast, I realize how grateful I am that you are love. Yes, it is something that you do, but even more than that it is who you are. I am asking that you would take each of us into a deeper experience of your love for us. It is going to take a revelation for us to know your love on an experiential level. I am asking for that revelation for each one of us this week. I pray for your blessing in 2025. I pray that each of us would grab a hold of the opportunities You give us each and every day in 2025 to Experience Your love and to give that love away to the next person we meet.
