New Year’s resolutions are a great idea. The start of a new year is the perfect time to make important changes in your life, changes that will help you to become the person you want to be. A healthier diet. Regular exercise. Reading the Bible every day. All of these are important things that will shape your character for good.

At the heart of almost every resolution is the issue of self-discipline, and the heart of self-discipline is the ability to say “No” to the wrong things so that you can say “Yes” to the right things. I need to learn to say “No” to the things that steal my time, my health, and my character so that I can become the man God wants me to be. And I think most of us want to become the person God wants us to be.

We want to instill practices in our lives that make us better people. We want to form good habits and participate in daily spiritual disciplines. We want to eat better and work out more. Hence, New Year’s resolutions.

The Problem

But I’ve discovered, after trying this every year for about 20 years, that turning on a dime is nearly impossible. Most of us are like battleships. We need a lot of time and energy to change course. Of all the resolutions I’ve made over the years, I was only ever able to keep one of them. (I read through the whole Bible in 2011, so I’ve pretty much punched my ticket to heaven.) That’s about a 2% success rate. Yikes!

Most of the people I know are close to that number with the resolutions they’ve been able to keep. While some people are significantly better at keeping resolutions, most of us feel lucky to have stuck to one or two in our entire lives. All of this failure makes me want to stop trying. Maybe you’ve reached that point. I know I have. I’m ready to try something new.

Resolutions don’t work because we’re not used to living lives of self-discipline. It’s a me problem. I enjoy certain things in life, and have come to believe that I am entitled to them.

Whether it’s eating out or sleeping in, the pleasures of life are no longer something I enjoy occasionally, but rather pleasures to which I feel entitled every day, every meal. The problem isn’t that I’m not saying yes to the right things; it’s that I’m saying yes to the tiny pleasures of life all the time. Saying “Yes!” to these tiny pleasures, these entitlements, too often leaves no room to say “Yes!” to the things that create character in your soul.

I drink Coke at almost every meal.

I get on Facebook and Twitter dozens of times each day, at work and home, stealing time from my vocation and my family.

I read sports blogs instead of good books.

I watch Netflix instead of exercising.

This list could go on and on. While these things are not bad in and of themselves, and they can be part of a healthy and balanced life, what I’ve discovered is that the development of my character is won or lost in a thousand tiny decisions each day. Trying to cut out sugar, Coke, or Facebook all at once on January 1 just doesn’t work for most people. It has never worked for me. So I want to try something new, and I’d like to invite you to participate with me.

The Solution

I’m calling 2014 the Year of No. It’s not the Year of No Netflix, or the Year of No Fast Food, or the Year of No Shopping. I’m not quitting anything cold turkey. 2014 is just the Year of No – the year of saying “No!” to something to which you feel entitled each day. It’s the year of celebrating small victories of self-discipline and self-denial. Radical, immediate life change is very rare. More often than not, life change is a long, slow process of saying “No!” to your entitlements which then opens up space for you to say “Yes!” to the practices and disciplines that allow for character development.

In Mark 8:34-35, Jesus said:

Then he called the crowd to him along with his disciples and said: “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me and for the gospel will save it.

I’m convinced that following Jesus is not a decision I make once, but is a long series of decisions made everyday. It’s not a prayer I pray once, but a persistent prayer of “No!” against the entitlements and temptations of my heart. You have to learn to say “No” before you can say “Yes.” You have to lose your life before you can save it.

I need to learn to say “No,” but I know that I can’t learn it all at once. I’ve tried that. But maybe I can learn to say “No” one decision at a time. I don’t need to cut Twitter out of my life, but I do need to learn to say “No” when I’m tempted to scan through it eight times at work or while my kids are awake. That’s what this is about: cutting back what is out of a balance rather than cutting it out of my life completely. I know myself too well to think that I can do the latter at this point, but I remain optimistic about being able to do the former.

The Plan

So here’s my plan.

Identify some of the things to which you feel entitled, and write them down. It could be anything. Eating out. Watching TV. Sleeping in. Drinking alcohol. Buying clothes. Facebook. Comments sections on news websites. (Okay, that one you should cut out completely!) Wherever you find yourself indulging, that’s where your entitlement lives. Identify your entitlements, write them down, and keep them somewhere you’ll see them everyday. Clarity is the first step toward victory, and writing is important for remembering.

Say “No!” to one of your entitlements every day. Have a glass of water at lunch instead of Coke. Stay off of Facebook or Twitter while at work. Put your phone away when you get home and interact with your roommates, spouse, or kids. It’s not about saying “No” to something forever; it’s about saying “No” to an entitlement right now so that you can say “Yes” to something better and more important. This is how you win the battle for self-discipline: denying one little entitlement at a time.

Share your experiences – the victories and the failures – using the hashtag #yearofno. At the risk of being both cheesy and self-congratulatory, I think it’s important to share this stuff with each other because self-discipline isn’t something I can do by myself. I’ve tried that already, dozens of times, and failed every time. We need each other for celebration and accountability. So when you say “No!” to that second dessert, or cigarette, or Netflix binge, share it on Facebook or Twitter with the hashtag #yearofno so we can all celebrate with you. (Of course, if your entitlement is social media, find an appropriate time to share it. Hint: Not when your kids are asking for your attention!)

This is not a resolution. This is not about quitting something cold turkey. This is about strengthening your will through tiny exercises of self-discipline. It’s about denying yourself in small ways every day so that you can become the person God wants you to be. It’s about denying yourself so that you can find true life.

If this is something that you would like to do, you don’t have to sign up for anything or even tell me. You can just start saying “No!” to your entitlements and use the hashtag on Twitter or Facebook. Then, if you see someone else doing it, you can offer them encouragement and support. Feel free to share this post so that other folks can know what you’re doing and participate, too.

This message is from the series A People of His Very Own at Grace Church. The text is Luke 9:57-62.

It’s amazing where your mind goes in the midst of suffering. When bad things happen, most of us will look for someone to blame. It’s my fault. It’s your fault. It’s God’s fault. We shake our fists at the sky and cry out, like Job, “I’m innocent! This shouldn’t be happening to me!” Or when everyone turns against us, we complain like Jeremiah, “I know that you’re righteous, God, but your justice leaves a lot to be desired!” Why is this happening to me? I’m one of the good guys! I’m on your side! Like David, we lament our own condition and look with envy upon the “wicked,” for whom nothing ever seems to go wrong.

My wife and I have certainly run the gamut when it comes to this kind of thinking. For a while, I thought that Zeke’s disease was God’s punishment for my sin. In my more self-righteous moments I would scream at him, “Why are you doing this to me?! What have I done to deserve this?!” We also went through a period where we thought that his disease was a result of spiritual attack. At this point, we’ve accepted that his disease is simply the result of living in a world that is broken.

I’ve discovered just how important it is to maintain a healthy perspective of my suffering and trials while in the midst of them. If my mind is not right, my emotions quickly follow. Believing “holy lies” like God is in control, God causes all things, or God will never give you more than you can handle is mentally, emotionally, and spiritually destructive. When suffering strikes, it’s easy to believe these lies because we are desperate to believe that someone (God, for instance) is controlling or sending all the chaos, evil, and pain. It may be comforting, but it’s not true because God is not the author of evil. I can’t stress this point enough. God is not the author of evil.

In order to find a healthy perspective in the midst of overwhelming hardship, I’ve had to understand that there are four primary reasons for suffering: discipleship, discipline, disengagement, and disaster. The four disses. (See what I did there?) While I typically hate alliteration, this scheme seemed to work pretty well, so against my better judgment I’m sticking with it!

Discipleship

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The New Testament promises suffering. The verses are too numerous to recount here, but the authors of the New Testament seemed to assume that suffering and discipleship go hand-in-hand. The question for us is how to discern which suffering is intended for discipleship.

I believe that all suffering, appropriately understood and faithfully persevered through, will make us more like Jesus. In that sense, all suffering creates the opportunity for discipleship. But there is a certain kind of suffering that is specifically intended as an act of discipleship. This is the suffering that comes from persecution on account of our faith in Jesus.

This is the paradigm of suffering found in the early church. Sure, people suffered then like we do today (in disease, loss of loved ones, etc.), but the defining trial of their faith was the persecution they would have experienced on account of following Jesus. This type of suffering would force them to choose between Jesus and the world, and stories abound of the faithfulness of the early Christians who chose Jesus despite all kinds of torture. The Church is built upon the blood of the early martyrs. Persecution is pretty straightforward, and the appropriate response is obvious, so I won’t spend any more time on this.

Discipline

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There is another kind of suffering that can enter a believer’s life, but this is not to prove the genuineness of his faith. Rather, it refines him by way of discipline. Hebrews 12:6 reminds us that God disciplines those he loves, and the verse that follows exhorts us to “endure hardship as discipline.”

But there is a more punitive form of suffering that can happen in a believer’s life, and that is when we suffer for committing sin. Discipline of this kind could look like the loss of a position of leadership in the church, or even expulsion from the congregation itself. This sort of suffering is the direct result of our sin, and it’s redemptive purpose is to lead us to repentance, which can then result in restoration.

Unless we are blinded by our own self-righteousness or sense of victimization, we will know when we are being disciplined by God because we will have lost our place in the faith community. In 1 Corinthians 5, Paul commands the church to “expel the immoral brother.” In Matthew 18, Jesus tells the disciples to treat an unrepentant member of the church as though they did not belong to the church. The point of this is restoration, but that must be preceded by repentance. If you are under God’s discipline, pray that you would have the humility to see past your self-righteousness or sense of victimization so that you can repent of your sin.

While all suffering can function to make us more like Jesus (discipleship), not all suffering is the result of punitive discipline. This is important to grasp, because as I said above, in the midst of a difficult trial we often search for someone to blame, and that often means blaming ourselves. Like Job’s so-called friends, we convince ourselves that our sin has brought about this suffering. But this is not true. If you have not lost your place in the faith community, then your suffering is not a result of God’s punitive discipline.

Zeke’s disease is not God’s punishment for my or Breena’s sin. The punishment for our sin has already been paid. 9/11 was not God’s punishment on America for the sin of the people. The punishment for their sin has already been paid. God does not discipline us by killing others or inflicting our loved ones with diseases. Zeke is not dying for my sins; Jesus already did that. To call this form of suffering “discipline” or “punishment for sin” is to say that the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross was insufficient to pay for the sins of humanity.

Disengagement

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Suffering may also befall us when we stubbornly pursue our own path and God has finally had enough, sighing sadly, “Fine then. Have it your way.” It is divine disengagement. Romans 1 tells of how God gives people over to the desires of their hearts, thereby removing any divine protection they might otherwise enjoy. This is what happens when we demand life on our terms, refusing to accept any of God’s attempts at discipline or calls for repentance.

Think of all the suffering in this world caused by our collective stubborn refusal to, for example, rein in our sexual desires. The physical damage caused by STDs can be devastating. The emotional (and sometimes physical) trauma of abortion is criminally underreported in our media. Divorce caused by adultery has devastated millions of adults and their children.

Sadly, this type of suffering is largely avoidable. Adultery is not inevitable; it is a choice. The same is true of drug abuse and other types of addiction. You could even look at the recent economic troubles in the US as suffering because of divine disengagement. We stubbornly pursued what our greedy hearts desired, and the bubble burst with catastrophic results for many.

Disaster

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This last kind of suffering is probably the most common, and doesn’t really have an explanation. Horrible things just happen in this world. Tsunamis. Wars. Cancer. Batten disease. This is just the crap of life, and any attempt to make God responsible (whether through a faithful appeal to God’s sovereignty or a skeptical appeal to God’s weakness/wickedness) rings hollow. We may not like it, but more often than not, there’s no one that we can hold accountable for the suffering of our lives. Disaster happens.

When disaster strikes, our first instinct is to ask, “Who is at fault?” But we need to train ourselves to ask two different questions first: “How is God redeeming (or going to redeem) this?”, and “How am I going to respond to this?”

God loves to work in the midst of disaster, redeeming it in ways that we could have never imagined. This redemption, however, is often contingent on the softness of our own hearts and our willingness to come alongside his redemptive work in the midst of our suffering. Knowing that God is present in your suffering, working to redeem it, will help you to keep a soft heart and a humble attitude toward him. Rather than sinking into playing the blame game, train your eyes to see God at work and throw yourself into that.

Our little Zekey is probably going to die at a very young age, but I’m not going to blame God for this. He didn’t create Batten disease. But he is redeeming it, and in ways that I could have never imagined. I have resolved to be a vehicle for God’s redemption of Zeke’s disease. Not only is that what’s best for me and God’s kingdom, it’s what’s best for Zeke. Imagine what his life would be like if his father was relentlessly bitter of this lot in life. Bitterness undermines God’s incredible work of redeeming disaster. I will never see the work of God in my life or in Zeke’s if I live angrily and embittered; but the stories of God’s faithfulness belong to those who persevere through suffering and come alongside God’s redemptive activity.

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My hope is that having these categories for suffering will help you to keep a healthy perspective in the midst of your own trials and hardships. I’d like to add one final thought: Suffering is not something to be avoided, but rather an overwhelming opportunity to get close to God. 

David Platt’s book, Follow Me, is a Reformed, missional catechesis with the goal of moving consumer “Christians” into full discipleship. The problem Platt sets out to address is the masses of “unconverted believers” that attend, worship, and serve in church every Sunday. His diagnosis is stark: “Multitudes of men and women at this moment think that they are saved from their sins when they are not.” (7) American Churches are full of people who claim to be Christians, believe that they are Christians, and may even be told by their pastors that they are Christians, but they are not, in fact, Christians at all. “Only those who are obedient to the words of Christ will enter the Kingdom of Christ. If our lives do not reflect the fruit of following Jesus, then we are foolish to think that we are actually followers of Jesus in the first place.” (16) Put simply, “People who claim to be Christians while their lives look no different from the rest of the world are clearly not Christians.” (18)

Platt puts his finger squarely on the biggest problem facing the American Church today–Consumer Christianity. Not only is there little distinction, morally, between the lives of self-identified Christians and self-identified nonChristians, there is also little difference between the way churchgoers approach Church and the way they approach grocery shopping. Consumerism, not discipleship, has become the world-defining belief of American Christianity. For Platt, this is most evident in the self-centeredness with which many Christians understand salvation.

David Platt begins his catechesis with a study of total depravity, particularly in the light of conversion to Christ. Many Christians will talk about their salvation moment like this: “I invited Jesus into my heart…,” or, “I found Jesus at….” This, Platt argues, is backwards at best. We do not invite or find Jesus; rather, he argues, Jesus invites and finds us. “The reality of the gospel is that we do not become God’s children ultimately because of initiative in us, and he does not provide salvation primarily because of an invitation from us. Instead, before we were ever born, God was working to adopt us.” (29) God initiates and enacts salvation because, left to our own devices, we would never choose God. We are totally depraved, i.e., sinful through and through with no desire for God in our hearts. We are, as Ephesians says, “dead in [our] transgressions and sins.” As Platt aptly puts it: “Inviting Jesus to come into your heart is impossible when you’re dead in sin.” (34)

From his discussion of depravity and salvation, Platt moves to the distinction of Christianity among the world’s religions. Christianity’s distinction, he argues, lies in it’s adherence, not to a list of rules, but to a person–Jesus Christ. “We are not called to simply believe certain points or observe certain practices, but ultimately to cling to the person of Christ as life itself.” (54) Because Christianity is a relationship with the Creator God, it is fundamentally transformative, or as Platt puts it, “supernaturally regenerative” as opposed to “superficially religious.”

Superficial religion involves a counterfeit “Christian” life that consists of nothing more than truths to believe and things to do, and it misses the essence of what it means to follow Jesus. Supernatural regeneration, on the other hand, involves an authentic Christian life that has been awakened by the Spirit, truth, love, passion, power, and purpose of Jesus. (66)

If I were to sum up the core of Platt’s book, I would say it like this: Follow Jesus into his mission to save lost souls. As we saw in his best-seller Radical, David Platt’s heart is directed toward taking the Gospel to all nations. The antidote to Consumer Christianity is Missional Discipleship, i.e., participating in the fulfillment of the Great Commission. This, in my opinion, is where the book excels because it is the way in which it most clearly reflects the calling of its author. David Platt has an apostolic heart, and the Church would do well to heed his call to move from lazy, superficial religion to missional, supernatural regeneration by proclaiming the Gospel to the ends of the earth.

My Criticism

If you love and adore David Platt and are thoroughly Reformed in your theology with no possibility of ever changing your mind, I encourage you to stop reading this post now, for I would like to address the content of the second chapter, which I have already touched on briefly. In this chapter, Platt makes a thorough, if accessible, presentation of the doctrine of total depravity. He cites many Scriptures, and uses several illustrations, the most moving of which is the story of the adoption of his son. In short, he makes a compelling case that:

• God is solely responsible for the initiation of salvation.
• Human beings are completely sinful, so much so that we are characterized as being “dead” in our sins.
• God hates, even abhors, sinners.

In principle, I agree with the first statement. God is solely responsible for the initiation of salvation, though I would say that happened on the cross and in the empty tomb of Jesus. Only God could do that! From there, God has charged his followers with the proclamation of this news, this Gospel, to everybody else on the face of the earth. In other words, God has placed the message of salvation into human hands. While God did everything to make salvation possible, he has commissioned us to make that salvation available.

Furthermore, Jesus tells parables in the Gospels that seem to give another side to the story. For example, in Matthew 13:44, Jesus says this, “The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field. When a man found it, he hid it again, and then in his joy went and sold all he had and bought that field.” The active agent in this story is not God or his kingdom, but the human being who found salvation, then gave up everything he had to gain it.

This leads me to the second point of disagreement, which is about the idea of being “dead” in our sins. Here is what Platt says:

Our problem is not simply that we have made some bad decisions. Our problem is not just that we’ve messed up. Our problem is that we are–at the very core of our being–rebels against God, and we are utterly unable to turn to him. This is what the Bible means when it says we are dead in sin. When Paul wrote to the Ephesian Christians and said, “You were dead in your transgressions and sins, in which you used to live,” he meant that they were completely dead. Not partially dead. Not almost dead. Not halfway dead. Not kind of dead. Completely dead. (34)

It’s important to point out that they were not, in fact, completely dead, for if they were, it would have been too late for them, and they would not have been alive to hear the proclamation of the Gospel or respond to it in faith. I’m not trying to be a smart aleck, I just want to point out that Paul’s use of “dead” is metaphorical, not literal. Nor was Paul saying that the Ephesians were “spiritually dead.” Paul would not have separated the spiritual life from the physical life, saying that one could be dead while the other was alive; this was an invention of the Gnostics.

The view of humanity painted here by Platt, and elsewhere by other Reformed writers, is simply inaccurate. It assumes that the truest thing about humans is Genesis 3. Platt sums up this view well with this statement: “As we have already seen all the way back in Genesis, our sin is not something that exists outside of us. Sin is ingrained into the core of our being. We don’t just sin; we exist as sinners.” (42-3) The trouble with this statement is that Platt doesn’t go back far enough into Genesis. Before there was a Genesis 3, there was a Genesis 1 and 2, in which humanity is called, by God, good. To be sure, Genesis 3 is all-too-true now–we are sinful creatures–but there will come a day when that will not be true no longer. Genesis 3 is temporary. Genesis 1 and 2 are eternal. The creative act of God is more powerful and more enduring than the destructive acts of Satan and human beings.

In order to understand humanity, we must seek to grasp the tension of the present situation–not simply that Genesis 1, 2, and 3 are all true right now, but also that the Gospels, and particularly the Gospel, are also true right now. We were made by God in the image of God. We were not created sinful. That came through our choice to worship ourselves and disobey God. So we became broken. Then God did the impossible–without becoming sinful, he, too, became broken so that we might be put back together again. Why did he do this? Because he loves us.

Which brings me to my final, and most vehement point of disagreement with Platt: God does not hate sinners. Everything about Jesus should drive this thought away from our hearts and minds. If Jesus is the perfect image of the invisible God, if Jesus is the logos of God, if Jesus does only what he sees his Father doing, then there should be no doubt in our minds, even if we only consider the cross, that God does not hate us, but that he loves so lavishly that he would withhold nothing from us! If you need biblical proof that God does not hate sinners, this is it: Jesus!

When I started reading The Good and Beautiful God, I had hoped to blog my way through every chapter. It seemed a reasonable expectation, given that I was only supposed to read a chapter per week. However, though my reading has stayed on pace, the busyness of life has prevented me from blogging about the book, or much else for that matter. I last wrote about chapter two of the book, and today I’m going to skip ahead to chapter 6.

This is the chapter that deals with God’s holiness. When we say that God is holy, what we mean is that he is pure, unstained by sin, and completely other than (meaning above and beyond) anything else in creation, including humanity. One of the most important consequences of God’s holiness is his hatred of sin. Yes, God hates sin. (No, I don’t believe that God hates sinners, but that’s another discussion for another day.) But when we think about God in relation to sin (and, therefore, in relation to us), Smith says that we tend to believe one of two false narratives: 1) We believe that God is in a furious rage at us because of our sin; or 2) We believe that God doesn’t really care about our sin, and is pretty much cool with whatever.

Neither of these stories tell the truth about God, which is that wrath is God’s right(eous) action. So then, what is wrath? The image that comes to my mind is much like that first false narrative–of someone in a furious and destructive rage, completely overwhelmed by their emotions and totally out of control. But God never lacks for self-control, and his wrath, like his love, is not contingent upon his emotions. Just as God’s agape love is his self-willed act to lay down his life, surrender his rights, and forgive sins, so his wrath is his willful act to consistently oppose sin and evil. “God is not indecisive when it comes to evil. God is fiercely and forcefully opposed to the things that destroy his precious people.” (121)

The key insight that I gleaned from this chapter is that wrath is not an attribute of God, but rather a temporary action. God is wrathful as long as sin exists and wreaks havoc on humanity; but when sin is swallowed up in victory, then God will never be wrathful again.

God’s wrath (remember, not his rage, but his just and pure opposition to all sin and evil) was poured out upon Jesus at the cross. God’s final and perfect judgment of sin and evil occurred in the crucified body of his son. The wrath that we should have received did not rain down upon us because Jesus stood over us. The only shelter from the wrath of God is in the son of God.

So, then, since God has directed all of his wrath against sin and evil toward Jesus, does that mean that Jesus is sin and evil? Yes, but only for a brief time (“God made him who knew no sin to be sin for us”), because God then vindicated Jesus (ruling that he was in the right all along) by raising him from the dead. In the end God’s wrath is only a servant, even a symbol, of his love.

Smith concludes the chapter by writing, “God’s first and last word is always grace.” (127) Amen. Even in the wrath of God we see the extent of his grace, because his son stepped in to receive God’s opposition to sin and evil, to fully satisfy it in his death, to be declared innocent and true in his resurrection, and then to become king over all in his ascension and present reign.