Yesterday I posted a quote about resolutions…today I want to share my New Year Goals!  Ok, there isn’t much of a difference, but that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

First, physically, 2010 is the year of thin!  In 2007 I ran a full marathon and a half marathon and was in the best shape of my life.  I was also tired after the half marathon in December so I took a couple of weeks off from training and those two weeks turned into 2 years.  I am tired of toting this extra weight along and I plan to lose it.  Here’s how.

First, I’m going to start walking and lead up to three to five miles a day four days a week with the long term goal of running a half marathon in the Fall.  Second, I am going to cut out all drinks except for water.  Third, I will eat a breakfast bar for breakfast, a salad with grilled chicken or fish for lunch, and I will eat what I want for supper as long as 1) it is before 7:00, 2) the portions are not too big, and 3) it is not fried.  That’s it–exercise and cutting out big portions, fried food, and diet drinks, and eating past 7:00 at night. 

Spiritually, I will do what I do every year in terms of reading the Bible through.  I will continue to memorize scripture with a focus on the portions that the church is going to be asked to memorize.  I will continue to read, but I will be making two things a priority–family worship and personal prayer.

We do family worship, but it is way too sporadic.  I pray, but it is also way to sporadic.  Those are the two areas that need the most work and I want to make sure I spend adequate time on each. 

What about you?  Will you join me in the 2010 the year of thin?  Will you spend time growing spiritually in your personal life and in the life of your family?  I’d love to hear what you are planning to do next year!

I found the following on Justin Taylor’s blog…

D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Spiritual Depression, p. 35:

Would you like to be rid of this spiritual depression?

The first thing you have to do is to say farewell now once and forever to your past.

Realize that it has been covered and blotted out in Christ.

Never look back at your sins again.

Say: ‘It is finished, it is covered by the Blood of Christ’.

That is your first step.

Take that and finish with yourself and all this talk about goodness, and look to the Lord Jesus Christ.

It is only then that true happiness and joy are possible for you.

What you need is not to make resolutions to live a better life, to start fasting and sweating and praying.

No! You just begin to say:

I rest my faith on Him alone
Who died for my transgressions to atone.

Kevin DeYoung posted the following on his blog…enjoy.

In a New York Times article, Karen Crouse wrote about Tiger Woods.  She said,

“Woods’s parenting role model was his father, Earl, who was committed to rearing him after having two sons and a daughter in a failed first marriage. Earl, a retired Army officer, attributed the divorce to military obligations that took him away from the family. Asked how he would manage to be there for his children when golf takes him away from home so much, Woods told me, ‘It’s going to be a lot more difficult, there’s no doubt.’

Maybe it is impossible. Perhaps Woods was destined to be like his father, only not in the way he had hoped. Over lunch on the veranda at the Masters one year, Earl Woods said, ‘I’ve told Tiger that marriage is unnecessary in a mobile society like ours.’”

Paul tells us that fathers are to bring up their children “in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.”  Dads, your children know what team you pull for and they know the hobbies that you love, but do they hear about Jesus from you?

As we approach the New Year I want to challenge you to spend time making Ephesians 6:4 true in your life.  The words ‘bring them up” speak of nourishing them—the idea is to feed them as you would nourish and cherish your own body.  (5:29) The word “discipline” speaks of doing everything necessary to bring them up and the word “instruction” is verbal—it means to place before the mind.

The idea is that you are to do everything you can as you are going about your daily life to bring your children up in the Lord.  There will be times that they will walk away from what you teach them, but if they do make sure it is in spite of what you teach, rather than because of what you teach!

I love to read Randy Alcorn’s books and his blog.  He wrote the following words,

I feel a spirit of adventure not just for the passing joys of Christmas, but for an eternal Christmas, a great story where—as C. S. Lewis put it at the end of the Chronicles of Narnia—every chapter will be better than the one before.

The prayer of my heart this Christmas is that people would understand that Jesus is the person they were made by and made for—that they would understand that He loved them enough to go to the cross for them and pay the price for their sins so that they could live forever with Him on the New Earth, the eternal Heaven.

There’s a true story of a Christ-loving man who lay dying. His son asked, “Dad, how do you feel?”

His father replied: “Son, I feel like a little boy on Christmas Eve.”

Christmas is coming. We live our lives between the first Christmas and the second . We look back to that first Christmas and the life of Jesus on the earth for some 33 years—but we look forward to the Christmas in which the resurrected Christ will return and we, his resurrected people, will live with him forever on the New Earth. And right when we think “It doesn’t get any better than this”….it will!

Great day playing with the new Wii with the family.  We can play golf, bowl, tennis, baseball and never leave the house.  I love it!!

Today is the day we set aside to celebrate the Incarnation.  Our family will be busy unwrapping in a matter of minutes what it took months to buy.  I can tell you Christmas at our house is wide open!!

As we celebrate today remember this–our God became a man.  Man never becomes God, but God took on human flesh and lived among us.  He lived as one of us, He died for us, and He rose again so that we could know Him. 

Spurgeon had a great perspective on this–so let me share his quote and say Merry Christmas.

“Our faith is a person; the gospel that we have to preach is a person; and go wherever we may, we have something solid and tangible to preach, for our gospel is a person. If you had asked the twelve Apostles in their day, ‘What do you believe in?’ they would not have stopped to go round about with a long sermon, but they would have pointed to their Master and they would have said, ‘We believe him.’ ‘But what are your doctrines?’ ‘There they stand incarnate.’ ‘But what is your practice?’ ‘There stands our practice. He is our example.’ ‘What then do you believe?’ Hear the glorious answer of the Apostle Paul, ‘We preach Christ crucified.’ Our creed, our body of divinity, our whole theology is summed up in the person of Christ Jesus.”

John 1:10 tells us, “He was in the world, and the world was made through him…”  Genesis describes the process John states as fact.  The writer takes us through each day of God’s creation with the climax of the Genesis account being the creation of man. 

The climax of John’s account was the fact that the God who created all that we see and know as our universe became a man.  Wesley said, “Our God contracted to a span, incomprehensibly made man.”  Yesterday I shared a picture of a star 40 light years away from us.  Today I want to share a picture of our own milky way galaxy.

I’ll never forget eating dinner on a dry river bed in Tanzania and looking up to see the Milky Way.  The stars seemed close enough to touch.  I remember thinking the same thing I thought when I saw this picture–Jesus made that!  That little baby born in Bethlehem was the same One who said “Let there be…” and this happened.  That’s our Jesus!

John 1:3 says, “All things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made.”  When you think of the baby in the manger–remember that the baby in the manger is God in the flesh and those little hands wrapping around Mary’s finger are the very hands that made everything.

From time to time NASA will post pictures taken from outer space.  I love the following picture of a planet orbiting a star 4o light years away from us.  The baby in the manger spoke that into being!  That’s our Jesus!!

If this child who now lies before the eyes of your faith, wrapped in swaddling clothes in Bethlehem’s manger, is born to you, my hearer, then you are born again! For this child is not born to you unless you are born to this child. All who have an interest in Christ are, in the fullness of time, by grace converted, quickened, and renewed. All the redeemed are not yet converted, but they will be. Before the hour of death arrives their nature shall be changed, their sins shall be washed away, they shall pass from death unto life. If any man tells me that Christ is his Redeemer, although he has never experienced regeneration, that man utters what he does not know; his religion is vain, and his hope is a delusion. Only men who are born again can claim the babe in Bethlehem as being theirs.

“But” saith one, “how am I to know whether I am born again or not?” Answer this question also by another: Has there been a change effected by divine grace within you? Are your loves the very opposite of what they were? Do you now hate the vain things you once admired, and do you seek after that precious pearl which you at one time despised? Is your heart thoroughly renewed in its object? Can you say that the bent of your desire is changed? that your face is Zionward, and your feet set upon the path of grace? that whereas your heart once longed for deep draughts of sin, it now longs to be holy? and whereas you once loved the pleasures of the world, they have now become as draff and dross to you, for you only love the pleasures of heavenly things, and are longing to enjoy more of them on earth, that you may be prepared to enjoy a fullness of them hereafter?

Are you renewed within? For mark, my hearer, the new birth does not consist in washing the outside of the cup and platter, but in cleansing the inner man. It is all in vain to put up the stone upon the sepulcher, wash it extremely white, and garnish it with the flowers of the season; the sepulcher itself must be cleansed. The dead man’s bones that lie in that charnel-house of the human heart must be cleansed away. Nay, they must be made to live. The heart must no longer be a tomb of death, but a temple of life. Is it so with you, my hearer? For recollect, you may be very different in the outward, but if you are not changed in the inward, this child is not born to you.