Today is January 1st, and as I sit here in my office I am thinking, like a lot of you, about resolutions.  What is 2010 going to hold, and how am I going to live differently?  What needs to change, what needs to go, what needs to come?  A lot of us will have resolutions to get thinner, grow healthier, eat better, save more, and even give more.  Those are good, and I have some of those myself.

I thought I’d do a little non-scientific bible search on the word “resolve”.  Here’s where it shows up (at least, in the NIV):

Alarmed, Jehoshaphat resolved to inquire of the LORD, and he proclaimed a fast for all Judah.  2 Chronicles 20:3

Though you probe my heart and examine me at night, though you test me, you will find nothing; I have resolved that my mouth will not sin.  Psalm 17:3

But Daniel resolved not to defile himself with the royal food and wine, and he asked the chief official for permission not to defile himself this way.  Daniel 1:8

For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.  1 Corinthians 2:2

How do your resolutions for 2010 stack up to these?  They are challenging, aren’t they?  They make me think that my resolutions need to have more to do with God than me.  More to do with seeing His kingdom come than my own.  More to do with what He cares about, not me.  And more to do with His plan for humanity, not my weak plans for myself.

May God be honored by my resolve this year.  May He give you and me strength to pursue Him, and may He give us the life-transformation that only He can bring.

Remember when newspapers thought they were only in the print newspaper business?  They delivered the paper (at my house growing up in Raleigh, we got one in the morning, the Raleigh Observer, AND one in the afternoon, the Raleigh Times), and we read it.  This, and the local and national news at 6pm and 6:30, was how we got information.  This was how we got the news.  But then the internet happened.  And the smart newspapers realized that they weren’t in the “newspaper business”.  They were in the “communication business”.  The not-so-smart ones – the big dinosaurs that didn’t get it – fell by the wayside, getting surpassed by everyone that took advantage of different ways of getting their message out, primarily via the internet.  Some of those big ones have yet to fall.

Pastors are in the communication business too.  For so long we have thought that what we do is prepare for a Sunday morning message, deliver the sermon for 30 minutes or so, and that’s that.  On to next week.  But the thing is, times have changed.  Yes, Sunday morning will always be a primary time to communicate.  But we are not just “Sunday morning preachers”.  Pastors are “communicators”.  What does that mean?  And how do you wrap your arms around that new reality?  It used to be that people gathered in the church weekly to hear the message.  Now people travel, have soccer games, or other commitments during that Sunday morning hour (and these are just the people who may be already affiliated with your church – not the rest who are disconnected from a spiritual community altogether).  If we only focus on the Sunday morning thing, my fear is that we have lost touch and become like the newspaper dinosaurs – increasingly irrelevant.

I’ve been a bad blogger myself lately, so I certainly don’t have lots of answers here.  But it starts with asking the right questions, right?  Like – how does the reality that I am a “communicator of the gospel of Jesus Christ” – not just a Sunday morning pastor – impact my message?  How does it impact the technology I use?  How does it impact where/when/how we communicate?

Maybe we have focused too much on the Sunday morning experience, and not nearly enough on using the rest of the resources we now have to communicate the message well.  Maybe we have tied the timeless message of Christ down too often to a specific place (my church) and a specific time (11AM).

It’s way past time that we explore ways to communicate with people in their language – in ways that people receive communication now, not 10, or 100 years ago.  I’m not saying get rid of Sunday services – there is much value there.

I am saying, though, that we’re missing the boat if we don’t see ourselves as more than just Sunday morning preachers.  And missing people who desperately need the hope that is Christ in their lives.

I love stories.  If you’re human, chances are you do too.  If you are a church-going person, do this – next time you are listening to your pastor, think about what happens when he/she begins to tell a story.  Pay attention to yourself; watch what other people around you do – if you listen hard enough, you will realize that the room got suddenly…quieter.  Not as many people rustling pages, opening candy wrappers, or looking at their watches.  Know why?  Because intuitively, people love to hear (and tell) stories.  In my opinion they are especially captivating if they are personal.

Don’t ever forget that God is a God of story.  He is not a list of propositional truths that systematic theology gives us; He is not a bullet-pointed page of do’s and don’ts; He has written and is writing the most captivating Story…right now!  We’re all to be story-tellers.  Telling His Story, and how our stories intersect.

Next week I am attending a conference called, simply, Story.  It’s for communicators of all kinds, in Chicago for a couple of days.  Pastors, teachers, writers, filmmakers, etc.  It centers on what’s been called the Greatest Story Ever Told – the story of God, the story of His Son Jesus, and the story of us.   If you are a pastor, like me, there are TONS of conferences out there.  More than ever before.  But as soon as I saw this one, I knew that I had to go.

Glad my wife is letting me do something like this during this season of our lives!  I’ll be sure to let you know what I learn.

What I’m especially looking forward to at Story (in no particular order):

Main sessions with Donald Miller, Ed Young, and Chris Seay

Workshop with Michael Hyatt, CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishers

Hanging out with my buddy Bob Gordon!

Checking out the classic Paramount Theatre, where this thing is taking place

Lesson Learned #3:  Pain is a necessary element of change.

If you want to change, you are going to have to endure some pain.  If God wants to change you, you can be sure that your transformation will, at times, be painful.  Look at this passage with me today:

“I am the true vine, and my Father is the gardener.  He cuts off every branch in me that bears no fruit, while every branch that does bear fruit he prunes so that it will be even more fruitful.”  - John 15: 1-2

There is some pain in life you can anticipate.  Exercise falls into this category.  I recently was at the local YMCA triatholon.  Uh…serving cups of water…not running, swimming, or biking (yet!).  It’s a pretty humbling experience to watch all of these very in-shape dudes running by you, grabbing cups of water, sometimes getting you soaking wet as they run by.  It was interesting – on about half of their faces I saw focus, determination, and resilience (these were the first ones to come through).  On the other half – pain.  Sheer pain.  One lady who was participating came by, shaking her head, and said what a lot of the others were surely thinking – “What was I thinking????”

No pain no gain, right?  We know that about exercise.  Clearly these athletes, especially the ones who were doing well, had put themselves through intense training, which inevitably involved pain, to get where they wanted to go.  To give themselves the best chance to win.

That’s what I’d call “intentional pain”.  Pain we put ourselves through on purpose.  I recently have been doing this push-up program, called “100 Pushups”.  The goal is to get to a point where you can do 100 pushups in a row without stopping.  And I can tell you from first-hand experience, if you want to get stronger, pain will be involved.  Your muscles need to break down and regenerate in order to get stronger.  It is the way our bodies work.

There is another type of pain we go through in life.  If the above is “intentional pain”, I’d call this “unintentional pain”.  This is the junk, the stuff we go through, just because.  Because we were in the wrong place at the wrong time, because of the randomness of life, because bad things happen to good people, because what was sitting passively in our DNA suddenly got the switch flipped on…the list goes on.  (By the way, looking for a good reason for your pain?  Often there is not one.)  All of us at one point or another suffer through pain that we didn’t ask for and surely don’t want.

So the question is not “will I experience pain in my life?”  The question is “how will I view and deal with the pain that I am going to experience?”

The light-bulb-over-the-head realization for me over the last two years is that God wants to use our pain to change us. He will do it, if I will allow myself to be released to Him.  This doesn’t mean He gave me the pain.  But one of the miracles of God is that He wants to take evil things in our lives and bring good out of them.  This is the essence of the Gospel.  God took something meant for death (the cross) and turned it into the instrument He would use to offer life to all people.  Pain doesn’t have to have the last word.

Pain is a necessary element of change.

I need to prune the bushes and shrubs in my yard so badly right now.  They are out of control.  When they grow without being pruned, it is a pretty bad result.  Everything’s overgrown and we start to get stared down by our neighbors who drive by.  Pruning involves cutting branches and stems until they look uniform.  The cool thing about pruning is that it actually allows the shrub to grow more beautifully and more effectively.  Pruning is necessary for the growth of the plant.

I’m starting to view any difficulties I experience as part of God’s pruning work in my life.

This is hard.  I want to be angry about my pain.  I want to blame God for my pain.  I want to lash out.  I want to retreat inside myself and stew.  God, however, wants me to be open.  He wants me to be at His feet.  He wants me to ask Him to work and open up my life to that possibility.  He wants to use my pain to change me.

I believe He wants to use whatever difficulty you are going through to change you right now.

To prune you, to trim you back, to make you more useful for His purposes.  This will hurt – it always hurts to be cut back.

Do you trust Him to do this?  Do you trust Him to prune you and shape you and mold you?

I’d say He has a pretty good track record with taking awful things and making them into things that glorify Him.  He WILL use what you are going through right now to shape you and mold you, if you submit to His pruning shears in your life.

So I decided to change the title of this series of posts to “On the Anvil”.  Frankly, “Lessons Learned” was a little on the boring side of life, and this hit me today as pretty accurate and a bit more descriptive.  An anvil, according to the dictionary, is “a heavy block of iron or steel with a smooth, flat top on which metals are shaped by hammering”.  If that doesn’t work for you, picture the big metal block that falls on the bad guys in old Bugs Bunny cartoons.  These are used for shaping formless metal into useful objects (so I guess you can call me a TOOL now), by way of a hammer.  A nice metaphor for what happens when we go through tough stuff.  Being on an anvil can be a painful experience – no one likes being beat on.  But I think it is a great picture of how God shapes us through difficulties.  He is the skilled blacksmith, using all the tools at his disposal, with the goal to make us into people useful to serve in his Kingdom.

We all have had “on the anvil” experiences.  For us, the last two years have been that.  We know that God is using the tough stuff to shape, mold, and sharpen us into tools to be used for Him.  The first thing we’ve been learning I talked about here.  Here’s the 2nd thing I’ve learned while on the anvil:

Lesson #2:  No one but yourself can decide what God is telling you, where He is calling you to, or what tough decision you need to make now.

Friends are amazing.  We have some great ones.  They have served us in so many ways in the middle of Susan’s cancer and as we have walked through tough decisions with our church.  They can offer advice, and they have – in fact we have often received very wise counsel from our friends. But they can’t make decisions for you.

Our doctors are incredible.  They are smart, caring, thoughtful and diligent.  They can dispense advice and give us their recommendations on treatment.  But they can’t make decisions for us.  It’s still up to us to decide based on all the facts we know.  (Sometimes you know 90% of the facts, other times you only know 5%, and we still have to decide – know what I mean?)

This goes for everyone else in your life too.  Spouse, brother, sister, parents, your boss, your pastor.  I’m sure if you’re like us you are surrounded by terrific, smart people who are often more than happy to share their stories, opinions, and advice with you.  But they can’t make decisions for you.

I say all of that because there are times, especially when we are “on the anvil”, that we are faced with difficult decisions.  And when I’m honest there are times when I’d rather someone else make the decision for me.  ”Should I go this way or that?  Should we do this treatment or the other?  Should we let this staff person go or not?”  We are called on in the Scriptures to seek the wise counsel of others.  But when the stress gets to me I can find myself seeking not just the counsel, but the decisions of others.  Or I end up making a reactive, defensive choice.

The thing is that no one can make the decision for me but me.  Two problems with this:  1) I don’t very often know what is best.  And 2) while my friends, doctors, pastor, etc MAY offer great advice, they don’t often know what is best either.  See the dilemma?

There is One who does know, though.  He knows the answers to the questions, He knows what is three miles down the road when I can only see thirty feet, He knows what I need.

Better than I do.

The thing Susan and I have learned (and are still learning) is to lean into Him.  He is the One with the wisdom.  He is the One with the answers.  And the good news is, He wants to talk.  He wants to whisper in your ear.  It may not be the answer to your specific question.  I’ve found that lots of times He wants to say something other than what I want to hear.

If you’re not careful, you can get really frustrated by that.  If you want to follow God, though, you’ll have to grow more content each day with what He does want to tell you.  Pretty soon you’ll find yourself wanting more of what He has to say, not just the answer you want.

When you and I are listening to God first and foremost, we can have a peace about the choices we have to make during tough seasons.  And then here’s what happens:

6Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. 7And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.

Philippians 4:6-7