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I am so glad to be back with all of you.  Bradford and I had a great holiday with our family in Alabama, but I missed you and I’m really glad to back with you.  This morning we’re going to talk about New Years Resolutions.  And I didn’t want to do this the first Sunday of January because at that point you were only a couple of days in and most of you were thinking that you could still accomplish your new years resolutions.  By now, you know better.  No, some of you are still holding strong. 

But, admittedly, New Years Resolutions are always tough to implement, aren’t they.  In fact, I was reading an article in the NY Times on Dec. 31 of this year about this.  Dr. Gonzales, who is a professor of psychology at the Univ. of Minnesota, stated, “In a season of change, in a year of change, most people who embark on a journey of self-renewal can expect anything but. Research shows that about 80 percent of people who make resolutions on Jan. 1 fall off the wagon by Valentine’s Day.”  Even changes that are absolutely necessary, like changing your eating after a heart-attack.  Dr. Edward D. Miller, the                       dean of the medical faculty at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, said more than 70 percent of coronary bypass patients revert to unhealthy habits within two years of their operation.

Despite these statistics, I am going to encourage all of us as a church to make 3 resolutions this year together.  Why?  B/c keeping them        perfectly isn’t the point—if you did, you would be Jesus.  See these 3 resolutions really are all about getting you closer to Jesus in 2009.  And I am convinced that if we pursue these resolutions—not keep perfectly—but just pursue them together, then look out San Diego:  Here is the first one:

1.  Resolve to view yourself the way God does

Sorta begs a question, doesn’t it.  And the question is this--How does God view you?  Well, our text gives you the answer in v17.  “If anyone is in Christ, He is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come.”  For those of you who have put your faith in Christ, then you’re a new creation.  The old you is gone.  Maybe even a better way to put it is the way that v14 does….that the old you is dead.  See v14 says that “one died for all, and therefore all died.”  This means that when you identify yourself with Jesus by putting your faith in Him, there is a death of that old you and there is a new you that is formed spiritually. 

See what happens is that when you put your trust in Christ, His               Spirit then enters your life.  He identifies himself with you and takes up residence within you, such that everytime God looks at you he sees you through the lens of His Son Jesus. 

It is somewhat like this.  I have these sunglasses that I really like that have rose colored lenses.  They make even the darkest days look rosy.  They just sorta cheer me up to put them on because the world is always rosy, no matter what the day really looks like.  In a similar way, when God looks at those of you who are in Christ, He always sees you through the lens of Christ.  There is never a minute  that he doesn’t see you in Christ.  Even when you go back to the slop—hit the bottle again—He still sees you in Christ.  Doesn’t mean that he won’t discipline you to help get you back out of the slop or that he is pleased to see you back in the slop, but the reality is that he still sees you through the lens of Christ.

Why does this matter?  We had a great conversation about this in              my community group this past Wednesday b/c we were talking about the difficulty of changing bad habits.  We talked about the spiritual reality of having an enemy who is violently opposed to the new you and how he constantly trying to distort the reality of you as a new creation.  “And you call yourself a Christian—yet you just got drunk again.”  “Your still wallowing in the same pit of depression and you think you’re a new creation.”  “Your temper flares up with your wife just like it used to—you must not really be a new creation in Christ.”  You minds well not even try to make any change in your life.

See the enemy keeps telling you what a failure you are, and God tells you what a success you are.  See v 11 says, “What we are is plain to God.” God knows exactly who we are—that is, in Christ, we’re new creations.  We’re his children and that is our fundamental identity.  It is plain to Him, but we have an enemy who doesn’t want us to live that way.  So our task is to keep putting on God’s perspective of us.  The Bible says this in a number of places b/c it is so critical…

Col. 3:7 You used to walk in these ways, in the life you once lived. Put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge in the image of its Creator. 11Here Christ is all, and is in all.  In the new self, as a new creation, Christ is all, and is in all.  This is why Paul says in 1 Cor. 2:2, “For I resolved to know nothing but Christ and him crucified.”  There’s Paul’s New Years resolution:  to know nothing but Christ.  My friends, this is the heart of your New Years Resolution:  put on Christ, the new you.  Over and over and over again. 

When I was reading this article in the NY Times, this woman gave me a perfect example of what it means to put on Christ, to resolve to know nothing but Christ.  Caroline Leavitt, a novelist in Hoboken, N.J. broke her New Year’s resolution to stop biting her nails for 5 straight years. “I went to a nail salon and had fake nails put on, I bit those,” she said. “I tried Lee press-on nails, I bit those off. I tried the stuff where you paint on nails, I bit those off. I even tried psychological stuff — ‘If I bite my nails, terrible stuff is going to happen to me, I’m not going to sell my novel.’ Nothing worked.”

In the end, Ms. Leavitt said, she overcame her habit after visiting a hypnotherapist. “The hypnosis didn’t work, either,” she added, “but something he said did: that I would always want to bite my nails, but the key was that I would want pretty nails more. He was right. I still want to chew my nails to the nubs, but I keep admiring my hands instead.”  That is really it.  You’re going to want to do things that you know aren’t good for you and the way to avoid it is to admire Christ and who you are in Christ.  Keep admiring Christ and who you are in Him, just like this woman kept admiring her hands.  That is the first step.

Now, before we move on, I told you that I would talk to those of you who don’t view yourselves as a new creation in Christ because you’re just not sure if all this is real or not, but you’re here checking it out.  Let me encourage you not to go down the road of saying this, “Well, I am glad that this is true for you and helps you as you think about becoming a better person, but that doesn’t mean it is true for me or anybody else.”  NT Wright addresses this in a great little book called Simply Christian when he writes, “Saying “It’s true for you” sounds fine and tolerant.  But it only works because it’s twisting the word “true” to mean, ‘not a true revelation of the way things are in the real world,’ but ‘something that is genuinely happening inside you.”  In fact, saying “It’s true for you’ in this sense is more or less equivalent to saying “It’s not true for you.”  Do you see what Wright is saying—you can’t reduce truth to a subjective feeling inside of you.  Either truth objectively reveals something that is true about the real world or it doesn’t.   See our text says in v15 “one died for all…”  Either Jesus died on a cross historically and that was sufficient for us so that we don’t have to die a spiritual death or it was not.  It can’t just be true for me, but not true for you.  So, if you’re in this place, I would encourage you to come to our upcoming Curious Discussion Forum and consider the evidence about the historical life and death and resurrection of Christ—b/c either it is true or false.  Either God reconciles you to himself through Christ as v18 says, or He doesn’t.  Either you’re a new creation in Christ, or you’re not.  It is either true for all of us or none of us.

2.  Resolve to view community the way God does

See you can’t go it alone.  Let me let the executive director of a firm that does consulting work with corporations on how to navigate change comment on this.  Listen to what he says…“It’s exceptionally hard to make life changes“and our efforts are usually doomed to failure when we try to do it on our own.”

See, my friends, the Bible says the same thing throughout.  In fact, it is a book that is meant to be read in community, and unless you do so, you won’t really get.  Let me read our text again to you and I want you to hear it crying out these words, “COMMUNITY.”  Listen to how many times it says WE. 

11Since, then, we know what it is to fear the Lord, we try to persuade men. What we are is plain to God, and I hope it is also plain to your conscience. 12We are not trying to commend ourselves to you again, but are giving you an opportunity to take pride in us, so that you can answer those who take pride in what is seen rather than in what is in the heart. 13If we are out of our mind, it is for the sake of God; if we are in our right mind, it is for you. 14For Christ's love compels us, because we are convinced that one died for all, and therefore all died. 15And he died for all, that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised again.  

16So from now on we regard no one from a worldly point of view. Though we once regarded Christ in this way, we do so no longer. 17Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come! 18All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation:

See the Bible is a community book.  It assumes that you’re going to be working Christ into your lives communally.  Here’s the reality--You don’t have a prayer of effecting change in your life alone.  And Sunday mornings are only the beginning of a community, but you don’t have real community with 150 of your best friends.  That is why we believe so strongly in  community groups.  Yes, it will be awkward at first, and yes, I know, you don’t have time.  But I’m convinced that there are few things more important for you than to have meaningful community in 2009.  And hopefully you’re community will help you with this 3^rd resolution that I want us to make as a church together….

3.  Resolve to view others the way God does

When you became a new creation in Christ, you circuits were rewired.  The one who remade you changed up the way that you view other people.  Listen to V16 “So from now on we regard no one from a worldly point of view.  What is a worldly point of view?  Well, all the verses preceding this were talking about not simply looking at the external appearance.  V12 says “12We are not trying to commend ourselves to you again, but are giving you an opportunity to take pride in us so that you can answer those who take pride in what is seen rather than in what is in the heart.”  Worldly perspective looks at what is seen—new creation perspective looks at what is unseen…matters of the heart.

And this will be a huge challenge for all of us in 2009 b/c our tendency is to view people from a worldly perspective.  Let me show you how prevalent this is.  When I was graduating from Law School at UVA, we had the privilege of having Francis Collins do our commencement address.  Francis Collins is a scientist who was the leader of the Human Genome Project. This project was an effort, an international effort, to map and sequence all of the letters of our own DNA code. At our graduation he said something that has stuck with me every since.  It was this:

Sadly, prejudice still abounds in our society. Though genetics is teaching us that there is no scientific basis for drawing sharp boundaries around ethnic or racial groups, we still focus on physical differences of skin color, facial features, and hair texture, as if they meant something biologically profound. They do not. At the DNA level, we are all 99.9% the same. All of us.

So, what Collins is saying, is that from a scientific perspective, we’re   99.9% the same. But .1% of our DNA structure is different and leads to varying skin color and facial features and physical differences we see.  So he was saying—isn’t it sad that we allow a .1% genetic difference to ravage our country.  See to focus on these external .1% differences is the worldly perspective, not the new creation perspective.

In the new creation perspective, God says in Gal. 3:28, “there is neither slave nor free, Jew nor Greek, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ.” That doesn’t mean that none of those .1% differences aren’t there, but it is just that in Christ you now have a unifying reality to your life that supersedes this .1%.

See, historically, when God’s people have done this, when they have really begun to say, “What does it mean to view others from a new creation perspective and not from a worldly perspective that focuses on .1% genetic difference, then really significant things have happened.

For example, a priest by the name of Desmond Tutu began to view all of humanity through the lens of Christ in South Africa and he began to lead others in doing this and he is one of the central figures credited with ending apartheid. 

A priest named Oscar Romero began to view peasants through the new creation perspective in San Salvador.  There was a civil war going on and there was effectively a genocide happening against a group of peasants, a group that from a worldly perspective didn’t matter.  Yet, he saw them through the lens of the new creation perspective.  The government didn’t like it and killed him, but this new creation perspective became radioactive after he was martyred and the war ultimately stopped.

In America, Martin Luther King called for people to view all of humanity, including African-Americans, from the new creation perspective, a perspective where people wouldn’t be judged by the color of their skin (worldly perspective), but by the content of their character (character is unseen, matters of the heart). 

In England, two men by the names of John Newton & William Wilberforce began to cast off the worldly perspective that slaves were somehow less than human and there was a film made recently about this entitled “Amazing Grace.”  I was actually quite impressed that they titled the film Amazing Grace because in doing so they captured well how this song and really what is behind this song impacted both Wilberforce & Newton.

First, let me tell you a bit about this song.  The words are plain enough to Amazing Grace—they talk about a grace big enough for a former captain of a slave ship, which John Newton was.  But what is interesting is the melody.  If you go to the Library of Congress, it says, “Words:  John Newton……..Melody: Unknown.”  But many musicologists—that is people who study music—believe that the melody of Amazing Grace is actually born out of Newton’s days as the captain of a slave ship.  See it was here that he would have been exposed over and over again to the pentatonic scale, which is what all negro spirituals were based on—that is, 5 black notes. The pentatonic scale became known as the slave scale in Early America because of this. And these five black notes would have been rising up from the bowels of Newton’s ship as the slaves groaned in their crossing.  The melody to Amazing Grace is that of the slave scale & This is why many label Amazing Grace as a white spiritual.  What is a white spiritual?  It is a white composer who composed his lyrics based on the pentatonic scale or the slave scale used in negro spirituals.

So the point of Amazing Grace was that a man who drove a slave ship was so overwhelmed by God’s Grace amazing grace that it was powerful enough to save a wretch like Him.  And the words and the melody are a constant reminder of grace & the new creation perspective it brings.  This same grace got ahold of John Newton and Wilberforce and changed the course of their lives, one becoming a preacher and the other a politician who gave his life to ending the slave trade.  Let’s watch …….

--Bring financial disaster (worldly perspective)

--God made men equal (finally new creation perspective)

--I once was blind, but now I see.  Newton and Wilberforce were blinded by the worldly perspective until grace got a hold of them and when it did, they began to view all of humanity with a new creation perspective.  They began to see through the unifying & dignifying lens of amazing grace, and as a result the slave trade was ended in England.  What if an entire church really got this and began to live out the convictions here in San Diego in 2009.  May it be so.