A New Year's Resolution to Keep

So I read something recently that listed the five most popular resolutions made every year.

The fifth was to take up a new hobby. The fourth was to make more money.

The third most popular resolution was to improve relationships with others.

The second was to stop smoking. and the most popular New Year's resolution was

to lose weight, only to be found again.

A woman walked into her bathroom one morning, and as she did,

she saw her husband standing on the bathroom scales, this could be Nancy and

me, sucking in his stomach.

The woman thought to herself, he thinks that he will weigh less by sucking in his stomach.

So the woman rather sarcastically said to her husband, that's not going to help.

Her husband quickly replied, sure it is, this is the only way I can see the numbers.

Oftentimes at this time of year, after the overindulgence of the holidays,

we make resolutions to change our habits and our way of life.

A new year gives us the opportunity to start fresh and better ourselves,

but come the middle of January, maybe not even the middle.

We seem to forget our resolutions and go back to our old ways.

By the way, I wrote in my Christmas letter, our Christmas letter that we send

out to our family and friends.

When Nancy and I took a cruise last January, we came back after eating.

That's, I mean, food abundant on a cruise. We were gone a week.

We came back. Each of us had actually lost four pounds while on the cruise.

And so I told him in the letter, I said, only 19 more back-to-back,

week-long cruises, and I'll be back to my wedding wait.

It's easy to forget the commitments and resolutions we make at New Year's.

There is, however, our one resolution we cannot forget.

And that is the resolution we as a church can make to reach out to others and

share the gospel of God's grace about his son.

As a church, we make no bones about the fact that we desire to be a healthy

biblical community where each person is actively sharing the good news of Jesus

Christ with their unsaved family members, neighbors, and co-workers.

Now, we aren't dogmatic fundamentalists who are trying to force our religious

views down people's throats.

On the other hand, we merely desire that all people would come to follow Jesus

and that we might be the ones to lead them to Christ and to show them the way.

Notice I said, show them the way.

It is done in the way we live and done in the way we work, not in necessarily just what we say.

And the good news is that Jesus Christ can offer people freedom from guilt,

a hope for eternal life with God, and the power to deal with present circumstances.

And we desire to tell them that all of this is not gained through good works,

but it's a gift from God through Jesus Christ, as Scripture tells us.

So here's the New Year's resolution I want us to keep and encourage us to make

here at Richland Center Free Methodist Church for 2026.

And let's resolve to share Jesus Christ with all people everywhere.

That should be our mission. Our mission says to know God, to love God,

to love people, and to be his disciples.

And yet, this is what we should be doing, is to share the message of Jesus Christ

with all people everywhere.

I want to read to you from Matthew 28, verses 18 through 20.

Matthew 28:18–20

Not the normal, typical New Year's Eve message, not the normal,

typical post-Christmas message, but this is from Matthew 28, verses 18 through 20.

Matthew 28:18–20

And Liz referred to some of this when she talked that talk that Jesus came not

just as a baby, but he came for Calvary.

And then Jesus came to them and said, All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.

Therefore, go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name

of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey

everything I have commanded you.

And surely I am with you always to the very end of the age. Now,

one translation tells us that we should never climb ladders or fly into airplanes

because it says, lo, I am with you always.

Anyway, that's neither here nor there.

Jesus wants us to resolve to share our faith and to go into the world and teach people about him.

In order to fulfill this resolution, we need to develop some convincing ways

to persuade people in our lives of their need for Jesus.

When you enthusiastically tell people what you've discovered in Jesus Christ,

your friends may respond by saying that they think it's too good to be true,

and they may suspect that there's some sort of catch to it.

Let me share with you some of the characteristic traits, the character traits

that we can develop as Christians to share our faith tactfully with those around us.

Now, I don't know if you've seen periodically during the year,

there's some people that stand out by the county courthouse with signs talking

about repent or die or, you know, all these kind of things.

I'm not sure how many people they went to Jesus by carrying those signs.

But we can do so by tactfully sharing what God has done in us.

The first thing, if we are going to share Christ with others,

people must see in us a noticeable sincerity.

James 3, verse 17 says, But the wisdom that comes from heaven is first of all pure,

James 3:17

then peace-loving, considerate, submissive, full of mercy and good fruit, impartial and sincere.

More than anything else, what people need to see in Christians is that we are

sincere about our faith.

There is nothing that turns people off to the gospel more than phony Christians.

Those who profess to be Christians, but do not have the life and the lifestyle

to back up their profession.

It's all talk and no go.

Reader's Digest carried a story about a woman who traveled 50 miles to visit a friend.

When she went to the car to go home, she discovered that she had locked the

keys in her car. She didn't know what else to do, so she telephoned her husband long distance.

Yes, he was exasperated with her, but he said, just stay where you are and I'll

drive out there and bring my keys to you.

The woman went back to her car to wait and discovered that she had actually

left one of the back doors open.

She raced back into the house and telephoned her husband, but he had already left home.

What are you going to do when he when your husband arrives

her friend asked he's going to be so upset when you tell him that you had locked

yourself out and now he's going to be really mad when he finds out that he came

all the way out here for no reason the woman said i'm going to do what any red-blooded

american wife would do and so she went outside and locked the door and slammed it shut.

It's hard to try to cover up our imperfections.

We are used to putting on masks that make others think we are better than we are.

But we will attract the world by simply being open about who we are,

looking in the mirror, seeing the imperfections, and saying,

by the grace of God, I will become like Christ.

The way to influence your friends who don't know Christ is not to by expressing

a holier-than-thou attitude around them.

If we're going to influence our neighborhoods and our workplaces for Christ,

we need to be honest with ourselves and honest with others and openly admit

that without Jesus, we are no different than anybody else. We need to be sincere and authentic.

This church is a place of imperfect people.

No surprise, right? And if you're visiting here for the first time today or

have just begun attending, I want to tell you that we are a people of God who

do not desire to act as if we're better than anyone else around us.

We want to act like who we are, but we want to become like Jesus and to share that with others.

In fact, most of us will admit if it wasn't for Jesus Christ,

we would be in pretty sad shape and pretty big trouble.

But we do want those around us to see and experience that we are people who,

by the power of the Holy Spirit,

are seeking God's perfection of love through entire sanctification that helps

us to daily live like Christ so we can hold that mirror up to ourselves and

people will see Jesus in us.

Second thing, another thing we need to recognize that we must offer to others

is our vision that we are becoming a healthy biblical community.

In addition to seeing sincerity in our faith, people around us are searching

for a safe place to belong.

There is a sense when we talk about people coming to church,

there are three things we want to look at is belong, believe, behave.

People want to come and belong to us, with us as part of our community,

and then that we learn as we do how to behave, or excuse me, how to believe.

We come to know Christ and believe in him, and that transforms us into a behavior that's like Christ.

To provide people with that, we must become a healthy biblical community with

an emphasis on all three words, healthy, biblical, and community.

Acts chapter 2 tells about the first church and how it grew rapidly and won

Acts 2 · chapter mention

so many people to Christ.

And do you know what Acts chapter 2 verse 46 says about the first church?

Acts 2:46

Don't worry, I'm going to tell you. They broke bread in their homes and ate

together with glad and sincere hearts.

We need to remember that the only way to influence our non-believing friends

and family for Christ is to invite them to be a part of our life.

We cannot influence people for Christ if we aren't up close and personal with them.

We need to invite people to be a part of our lives and us a part of theirs.

Invite them into your homes and share your home life with them.

Take them out to eat. When it gets warmer, have them over for a cookout.

Take part in the community and school activities.

Bring your non-believing friends to church with you.

Third, in order to fulfill our resolution to share faith with others,

we must also have a passionate conviction.

Someone once said that one man with conviction is worth more than 99 people with opinions.

Dictionary.com defines a conviction as a strong belief.

I would say that conviction is a strong belief that stirs up a deep emotion

which elicits a powerful response of action. Does that sound familiar?

Thoughts produce feelings.

Feelings produce actions. Actions have consequences.

Positive and biblical thoughts and beliefs produce positive emotions,

which invoke biblical responses of actions, having holy and evangelistic consequences.

Know the will of God through the scriptures and prayer.

Think in the will of God, and you will be stirred to a passion for your lost

friends, causing you to do what is right to help them find Jesus.

In Acts chapter 17, we read that the apostle Paul entered the city of Athens, and it says,

Acts 17 · chapter mention

While Paul was waiting for Timothy and Silas to join him, he was greatly distressed

to see that the city was full of idols.

Athens was a city that had some 30,000 statues made in honor of their many hundreds of gods.

Paul probably took a tour of Athens to see what the city was like,

and there at the Areopolis were statues to many of the gods.

And as he walked around, it sickened him to see all the pagan worship going on.

He was distressed. In fact, the word translated as distressed means a violent emotion.

When was the last time...

You've been sickened with a violent emotion by the thought that your friends

and family are headed for a Christless eternity. Think about that.

When was the last time you've been sickened by a violent emotion,

by the thought that your friends and family are headed for a Christless eternity?

That emotion elicited a powerful action in Paul, but not to destroy the idols and statues.

Instead, he took action by using what they knew to point to the one true God.

This is what he said, or that says in Scripture, Then Paul stood up in the meeting

of the Areopagus and said, People of Athens, I see that in every way you are very religious.

For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship,

I even found an altar with this inscription to an unknown God.

So you are ignorant of the very thing you worship.

And this is what I'm going to proclaim to you. The God who made the world and

everything in it, it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not.

Live in temples made by human hands, and he is not served by human hands as if he needed anything.

Rather, he himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else.

From one man, he made all the nations that they should inhabit the whole earth,

and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their plans.

God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him.

What he said is, this unknown God, this guy, this God that you don't know, I know him.

And here he is. He's the creator of the universe. He's the one who's loved us.

In the past, God has overlooked our ignorance, but he has drawn us to himself

through the person of Jesus Christ.

Then it goes on to say that when the crowd had heard Paul, many sneered.

But so too many believed. I wonder, you know, there might be a time when we

are sharing this message, we are living this life of Christ,

we are trying to be examples of Jesus, we are looking,

having people look in the mirror of our face and hoping that they see Jesus,

and there will be ones that will be turned away by it, but there will be others

that will be drawn like a moth to the flame, wanting to know what it is.

If we live that life of Christ with passionate conviction,

Well, I understand that the purchasing department in a major grocery store has

a sign that reads like this,

salesman, before you try to sell your product to us, be so convinced of its

superiority that when you're finished, people will be more anxious to buy than you are to sell.

If you don't believe what you're saying, if you don't believe in what God has

given you, then people will know that you're a fake.

How can we sing victory in Jesus with true conviction if we live a life of misery and defeat?

And so too, what do you expect others to hear in your witness for Christ when

you sing songs like, joyful, joyful, we adore thee, while you're sitting there

in your pew with a sourpuss face in misery.

Your belief in Jesus Christ must be passionate in order for it to be contagious,

but it also has to be real.

It has to be something that comes from deep in your soul.

It has to bubble out from you. In fact, there was an old song that used to be

sung in the church. I don't know if you ever sang it here.

It goes like this. It's bubbling, it's bubbling, it's bubbling in my soul.

They're singing and laughing since Jesus made me whole.

Folks don't understand it, but I can't keep it quiet.

It's bubbling day and night.

Is the Spirit of God bubbling up in your soul? Are you being an example of him

to others in the way you live and the way you bubble and exist?

Are you being a contagious Christian passing on the disease of knowing Jesus?

Maybe that's not the right word, disease.

Maybe it's the good ease.

Jesus Christ has got to be a consuming fire in your life that produces a passion

in your soul that just bubbles out of every pore of your body.

In Jeremiah chapter 20, verse 9, the prophet Jeremiah described the words of

Jeremiah 20:9

God as a fire in his heart.

He said, his word is in my heart, a fire shut up in my bones.

I am weary of holding it in. Indeed, I cannot.

You know, it almost sounds like something John Wesley would say,

but Jeremiah said it a long time before John Wesley would.

But it's a fire that consumes us, and it's built up in our bones and in our body.

The salvation, the love of knowing Christ, the honor of knowing Christ,

the honor of being transformed into his image should be like a fire that consumes

us and spreads to others.

That's the kind of conviction we need to motivate us to share Christ.

Jesus is in our hearts as a consuming fire, and if we continue to stoke it through

a close relationship with Jesus, it's a fire that will not die.

That's how Christians should be about Jesus.

Enthusiasm often goes a long way in convincing others about Jesus.

And then in order to fulfill our resolution to share Jesus Christ with others,

we need to have a spiritual reliance.

If we're going to share Jesus, we must not do it by human effort alone.

We need spiritual assistance to help us with leading people to Christ.

In fact, We don't need it with spiritual assistance.

We need it with spiritual direction and reliance. That's why each of us must

value prayer if we desire to speak out to our friends about our faith.

I want you to write this next thing down.

Before we speak to God about people, excuse me, people about God,

we need to speak to God about people. So write that down.

Maybe you could put that on your mirror when you look at it in the morning and

get yourself ready to show Jesus to people.

Before we speak to people about God, we need to speak to God about people.

God needs to work on their hearts before anything we say will have effect.

It's called prevenient grace. It's that grace that goes before anything that we can do.

It's that grace that God's drawing people to himself, even before anybody says anything.

Jesus said in John chapter 15, verse 26, that it's the Holy Spirit that testifies

John 15:26

to the world about Jesus.

Paul wrote in the book of Ephesians that we wrestle not against flesh and blood,

but against the powers of darkness.

He was referring to the powers of the evil one in this world.

In June of 2001, U2 singer Bono, who had recently become a follower of Jesus

Christ, had a private meeting with President Bush and other Christian government

leaders on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C.

At this meeting, he said this, I believe that the kingdom of heaven is taken by force.

God doesn't mind if we bang on the door of heaven sometimes,

asking him to listen to what we have to say and to deliver for his kingdom.

Bono was not talking about fighting a war with protests and boycotts or even guns and ammo.

He was talking about fighting a war on our knees. When was the last time?

You stayed on your knees until God broke through.

You know, Bono's right. God wants us to bang on the doors of heaven and pray

that the kingdom of heaven will expand on earth.

In fact, Bono says we need to bang on the door of heaven about our friends and

family until God has to listen and act.

In John 4, verse 14, Jesus says, you may ask for anything in my name and I will do it.

John 4:14

What more could be in the name of Christ, in the will of God,

than if we ask for souls to be one to the kingdom.

I think that's in keeping with the will of God, don't you?

In the prayer, we pray, thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is

in heaven. How much do we really believe that.

Jesus said, if you ask and keep asking, it will be done for you.

So let's start asking. And let's make this as our resolution this year.

Let's resolve as a church, as the Richland Center Free Methodist Church,

to share Jesus Christ with all people everywhere.

Will you be with me on that? Let's stand and pray.

Heavenly Father, as we close this service, This last service in 2025,

we are looking for a new day, not that this one was bad, but we're looking for

a new day in which we can share the message of Christ.

Help us to be those people that share Jesus with all people everywhere.

Especially even the ones close to us in our neighborhoods, in our families,

in our workplaces, in our schools.

Father, may we be the people of God that look like Jesus and share him with everyone.