I Resolve...

Unfortunately many of our resolutions become tasks to accomplish and we carry them out in our own strength. And when we make spiritual resolutions they too become accomplishments and goals to attain. We try to get more done, take what we can and put things to our use.

The Christian life has much more to do with receiving rather than taking. You see, ours is faith of subtraction rather than addition. This is expressed wonderfully by John the Baptist who says of Jesus, that he must increase, and I decrease. It is modeled powerfully by Jesus, who not thinking that equality with God was something to hold on to, emptied himself and became a servant in great humility.

I think most Christians today are involved in a spirituality of addition. It is very American, and it is the only way many of us have ever known. We see reality, experiences, events, other people, and things—in fact, everything—as objects for our personal consumption; tasks to accomplish, goals to achieve.

Even religion, Scripture, sacraments, worship services, and good deeds become ways to advance ourselves—not necessarily ways to love God or neighbor, not the means by which we attend to the relationship. Our successes, anything deemed “spiritual”, is a check mark, a credit, on our private worthiness list.

This isn’t the Gospel. Which is why spiritual resolutions, not unlike our New Year’s resolutions become burdens and chores, rather than sources of freedom and life.

Why? Because we tend to approach them with the mindset that God will help me, because I am helping myself.

The Gospel – the good news that God is reconciling the world to himself in and through Jesus Christ – asks us to trust –not to help. God is doing the work.

We pay attention to those things that He is doing and come along side, participate, but the movement is always from God, towards us – we trust that when our resolutions fail, & our good works falter, & our motives and attitudes come up short – which they will. God is with us, making a way for all things to be made well, made new, made right.

And He is here in spite of our best efforts. If I resolve to do anything in 2012 this might be it – resolve to trust God. And resolve to trust Him again and again when I am tempted to trust myself.