And if you are not Jewish or not living in a major part of the Asian world, happy New Year to you! Everybody else has their New Year at a different time, but this is when we choose to recognize a new start. Now we can be coldly philosophical and simply say it's just another day in a rotation around the Sun, but we choose and we like to look at it as a fresh start. And in this it's a good thing to stop and say look at ourselves and where are we going.
If you are like me, I've been inundated over the last few days on social media with all the things I should be focusing on. I should be concerned about my weight or my health or the condition of my health because of my weight. I should be concerned about self-care. I should be concerned about what is my financial dreams, what is all these things and you look at them and they kind of make your head spin.
But you know, thankfully the Word of God tells us what is the plan for 2023. And that is what we're going to look at, Lord willing this morning, but before we do that, let's pray. Father, we thank You for the privilege of a new day. For we know we believe and we affirm that You give us each day, that the breath that we draw in and the breath that we put out, we do that because You have chosen to allow us to.
Lord, we recognize this morning that You are the Lord, the Creator of heaven and earth, that You reign in the heavens and You have no equal. As we start what we expect to be a new year, Lord, we recognize that You have already made the plans for this year and they will not be thwarted. And we stand in that. Lord, this morning as we meditate on Your Word, we pray that You would be speaking to us.
Lord, I ask that it would be all of You and none of me, that You would glorify Yourself here. We ask this in Jesus' name. Amen. So it's pretty simple.
If you're the kind of person who likes to make lists about what are going to be my New Year's resolutions, I'm going to cut it really simple for you. And it goes like this. First off, if you don't know where you stand with the Lord Jesus Christ, you have one item on your list starting right now. And that is you need to come to the saving knowledge of Jesus Christ, because nothing else in the universe matters.
If you don't know that Jesus Christ died to pay for your sins and that you need to accept what He accomplished on the cross for you. So that's where it starts. If you are still debating that, if you're still wondering about that question, are you in your mind? Understand that nothing else matters.
Not a single course in school, not a single job opportunity. Nothing matters as much as that, because all eternity hinges on that. And though we talk of 2023 and maybe 2024, maybe you're one of these people who's already looking at your five-year plan that's going to go to 2028. You people make me tired.
The fact is, we don't know how the day is going to end. A few weeks before Christmas, I had was at school and one of my teachers came into the office with a look that I could tell something major had happened. And she looked at me and she said, they just called me. My dad just died.
And then she said, I was going to go visit him yesterday and I didn't have time. And he's dead. Now, that dear brother went home to be with the Lord because he put his trust in Christ. But the fact is, he didn't and she didn't expect on Sunday that on Monday he was no longer going to be here.
None of us know what the next moment holds. So your first resolution is, do you know Jesus Christ? Have you put your trust in what He's accomplished for you on the cross? If you have, awesome.
Then you've got one other resolution that grows out of that. And God gave it to us. If you have a Bible with you and look at a few passages, so you can flip through it. A little practice keeps the blood moving or you have an electronic device.
You can look it up there, but no looking at other things, no drifting into other apps. Once when I taught school, we were just starting to get into using electronic devices. And in my classroom, and it wasn't a deep classroom, I had mirrors on the back wall. And it was wonderfully strategic because students would sit there with their devices like, what are you doing with your device?
Oh, Mr. Michaels, I'm just doing what you're doing. But I could see in the reflection of the mirror behind them what they were doing. So.
So those of you who are young, keep track of your parents because they're the ones to tend to drift. Deuteronomy chapter six, God had called His people and He's speaking to them and He's giving them what should be their focus. And in Deuteronomy chapter six, starting at verse one, these are the commands, decrees and laws. The Lord, your God, directed me to teach you to observe in the land that you are crossing the Jordan to possess.
So that you, your children and their children after them may fear the Lord, your God, as long as you live. By keeping all his decrees and commands that I give you. And so that you may enjoy long life, hero Israel, and be careful to obey so that it may go well with you and that you may increase greatly in a land flowing with milk and honey. Just as the Lord, the God of your father has promised you, hero Israel, the Lord, our God, the Lord is one.
Love the Lord, your God, with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strengths. These commandments that I give you today are to be upon your hearts. Impress them on your children, talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads, write them on the door frames of your houses and on your gates.
Brothers and sisters in Christ, here is the resolution for 2023. If you know Jesus Christ, if you have a relationship with Him, this is your resolution. Love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your strength. Turn over to Mark 12.
Our Lord reiterates this in Mark 12. When a man comes and asks him a question, and many people have been asking Jesus questions, trying to trip him up, trying to show a flaw in his theology, trying to make him look contrary to the truth. And then after he had managed to answer every question with truth and accuracy, one of the teachers comes up to him and asks this, starting to read in Mark 12, verse 28. One of the teachers of the law came and heard them debating, noticing that Jesus had given them a good answer.
He asked him, of all the commandments, which is the most important? The most important one answered Jesus is this, hero Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength. You may notice that there's a difference there between what is said in Deuteronomy, which Jesus is quoting, and what Jesus says.
In Deuteronomy it says, love the Lord your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength. When Jesus states it, he says, love the Lord your God, with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength. Jesus isn't adding to the word of God. Jesus is just helping to explain it, because in Old Testament times, they only thought of people as having sort of the seat of passion, your heart, your feelings, your soul, and then of course your strength, what you do.
But by the time Jesus is teaching here, Greek thinking it also began to talk about the mind, the seat of reason where we think and make decisions. So Jesus is simply expressing it to include the whole person. So no one could say, oh, with my feelings, I love God, with my actions, I serve God, with my soul, I am close to God, but my mind is somewhere else. And Jesus is saying, no, and your mind too.
And it's important to notice here that it is an exclusive love. Hero Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one, love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, with all your strength. The love relationship we are to have with God does not have a prenuptial agreement. You're familiar with the concept where two people say, we love each other, we're going to get married, but just to protect myself, I have written a legal document in which I will say the following things will remain mine.
And should anything go astray, please sign. You know your marriage is already in the downward spiral when people pull out papers like that. But we can do that in our relationship with God. God, I love you with 87% of my heart, 3%.
I keep for the world, junior hockey tournament. I love you with 72% of my mind. 28% of it is involved in other social media things. What I love you with 42% of my strength, but I need 58% of it in order to make this life work for me the way I want it to.
And God is saying, this is what I want from you. I want all your heart. I want all your soul. I want all your mind.
I want all your strength. That's what I want. And we look at that and sometimes we can struggle with it if we're honest, yet humanly speaking, we'll do that. If I were to do a quick consumer poll among the married folks in the room, how many of you, when you were pledging your love to your person in your life, did you say, I promise to love you with at least 50% of my attention?
Any of you and still got married? Yeah, not happening. In those moments we are, I will give everything to you. I have just emptied my bank account to buy this piece of jewelry because the diamond manufacturers of South Africa told me I should spend at least two months of my salary on this.
We do those things. We make those claims. Why? Because there's something in us that tells us that that's what love is this huge massive thing.
And God says, this is what I want from you. 2023, love me. Now the beauty of that is, is that love is a reciprocal love because we're told in 1 John, chapter 4, verse 19, how do we love God? Because he first loved us.
So we actually are simply receiving an abundance of love from God, purchased through the blood of Christ, how much does he love us? He loved us enough to die for us, to take us while we were yet enemies with him. And that's the thing. There's sometimes I forget that and I had to be reminded by the Lord that in the beginning of our relationship it wasn't, I kind of liked God.
God loved me. No, God loved me. And I was rebellious and indifferent. And so we poured out his love for me on the cross.
And then his spirit drew me to himself. And then I became transformed by his love. So that love we have to give to God, he is already given to us. And you know what?
It's not so hard to love someone who loves you, is it? Let's be honest. Again, I think of people, I love seeing young couples when they make those commitments to love each other. Especially when the young lady gets a ring, you don't have to wait to see the ring because you can see her face.
She glows. And she wants everybody to know that she's just made this commitment that the person in her life has just come to her and said, I love you and I want to live my life with you. I want to build a life with you. Will you marry me?
They glow. And the guys, we strut. So I asked her to marry me. She said, yes.
Marrying above my pay grade. Yep. And we feel like we can do anything, right? Why?
Because someone loves us. When we know we are loved, we love in return. God pours his love into our life so that then we give that back to him. But we have to be careful because there are those forces around us that want to compete for our affection.
We're also told in 1 John not to love the world or the things of the world because they are competing for our affection. They are trying to draw us away from God because the world system that we live in knows that as we are drawn away from God and we aren't experiencing and enjoying and reciprocating the love of God that our lives become less and less and less. And we become empty because no love satisfies like the love of God. So we begin to be blunt to cheat on God with other things, but they don't fulfill us and they make us feel less and less.
And then it's like, well, I was going to sit down. I can't really pray right now because I know I've been where I shouldn't be in my mind, in my heart, in my soul, in my strength. Oh, God is calling us back to him. So what does it look like to love God?
Does that mean that on a regular basis we pick out a God? I love you, Humma? God, I love you. I've got a really corny poem in here.
What does it look like? Well, Jesus told us what it looks like in John 1415. He said, if you love me, keep my commandments. If you love me, keep my commandments.
Why? Because loving God is demonstrated in obedience because the obedience God calls us to is for our best. Our brother shared this morning around the Lord's table talking about defenses, the boundaries that God gives us. That he says, this is how you will live.
You will not live like this. Oh, here. Why? Because this is my best for you.
Outside of this, it's only going to harm you. Where the world says, oh, no, no, God obviously doesn't love you. He's a controlling, dominating lover. Or he's an all-knowing one.
So he knows what's best for me. And he says, obey my commandments. This is not legalistic. This is not, oh, you must follow this rule.
You must do this. It means walking in step with the Spirit of God. Recognizing that my first love is to God. And then God enables me to love others.
And that's a hard one too. And I know we often struggle with this in relationships. I say to you, young ladies, if a man ever tells you that he loves you more than anything else, he may be sincere, but he's wrong. Because if he loves you more than God, or if he's put you in the place of God in his affections, then he will never be the man that God is calling him to be for you.
Because God says, love me 100% of your heart. And then through, my love for you, you'll be able to love your wife in an amazing way. That will be unselfish. It won't turn into something that's consumer-driven.
Now, what does this look like in daily life? Because we could all say, I love God with all my heart, soul, mind, and strength. That's easy to say, actually. It reminds me of the example Jesus gave us when the man was lowered through the ceiling.
Remember the friends who brought the man who was lame. They wanted to bring him to Jesus. But the house was packed. They went on the roof and did a renovation and dropped the guy through the roof.
I always wonder if they fixed the roof afterwards. But anyway, dropped him through the roof and suddenly he's there and Jesus looks at this man. And he's like, oh, this is so cool. Here's this man.
He's physically crippled. We're going to see Jesus do a miracle. And Jesus looks at the man and says, your sins are forgiven. And of course, immediately those people who know what the law says.
What you doing? Only God can forgive sins. Periticular, pariticular. And Jesus asks him, so tell me, which is easier?
To say, your sins are forgiven or get up, take up your bed and walk. Well, of course, I could say to my sister, your sins are forgiven. Well, you guys can't tell what has happened on a supernatural plane. She's going to find out when she goes to glory because she put her trust in what I said and not in the face of Christ.
She's going to be really annoyed with me because a human being doesn't have the power to forgive sins. But so they're all thinking, oh, yeah, anybody can say that. And Jesus says, so to show that the Son of Man has power on earth to forgive sins, I'll show you the part that you can see. Get up, take up your bed and walk.
And the man gets up and he walks away. And everybody's like, oh, okay, now I have to think about that. That just made my head hurt. So Jesus shows us how we show the evidence of the love of God being reciprocated in our life.
And he says this also in Mark 12, verse 31, the second is this, love your neighbor as yourself. There is no command greater than these. Well said teacher, the man replied, you were right in saying that God is one and that there is no other but him to love him with all your heart and with all your understanding, with all your strength and to love your neighbor as yourself is more important than all burnt offerings and sacrifices. When Jesus saw that he'd answered wisely, he said to him, you are not far from the kingdom of God.
Because you see, the demonstration of what is happening super naturally in my heart and in my life, the demonstration of my relationship with Christ is demonstrated this way. In how the love of God is demonstrated through my life to those around me. So in 2023, brothers and sisters in Christ were called to love God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength. And that will be witnessed by how we love one another.
First, within the household of faith, how we love one another. How we care for one another, how we speak the truth and love for one another, how we rebuke one another, how we correct one another, how we encourage one another in Christ. That will be demonstrated the evidence of the love of God at work in us. And then how it flows out into our broader communities.
How the love of God is made manifest in our community. So when I can forgive someone who no one would think I can forgive because of the love that God has put in my life and the love that I give back to him, I am now able to love and therefore forgive that makes a difference. Brothers and sisters, we live in a dark world. We within the armed forces are wrestling with, of course, one of our issues is the words coming back from a number of our veterans who when seeking mental health support were directed toward medically assisted suicide.
We received some information that since Canada made medically assisted suicide legal, it was the same time as the state of California made the same thing legal. Since that time up to the latest statistics, which I think go back to 2020, so from 2015 to 2020, 2021 about 700 people in the state of California, which is 40 million people bigger than Canada, about 600, 700 people have requested and received medically assisted suicide. In Canada, the number is over 10,000. We are killing ourselves off.
When people come with no hope and someone says, here, I can give you something, we can take your life. And someone says, okay, that sounds like my best option. The love of Christ needs to start shining abroad from our hearts. Because we live in a dark world.
We live in a world where people are going out in our desperate to find anything to fill voids. They need the love of Christ to shine forth in our hearts. So we need to, as we love God, as James tells us in one 27, the true religion is this, that we care for those who are in need and we keep ourselves unspotted from the world. When I'm loving God, I'm not looking at what else I can love, except what he loves.
See what God loves, I am going to love and God loves people. One of the amazing truths of the gospel is God desires that none should perish but that everyone should come to repentance. Which means that no matter what person you see and how much you may not connect with them, maybe you're even frustrated or disgusted with them, God's desire is that that person would come to the saving knowledge of Christ and be redeemed. That is amazing.
That this is what God desires. He desires us to love people. And I love the fact that God loves people so much he will meet every person exactly where they are, but he loves them so much he'll never leave them there. His desire will always be to transform and redeem.
And it's amazing to see how he does it. One of the things I got to experience this fall thanks to one of my children was I got to get back into Russian literature. And if you've never read Russian literature, it's an experience, especially Russian literature written in the late 1800s into the 1900s just before the Russian Revolution. And we were reading a couple of stories, one story by Tolstoy and one story by Dostoyevsky.
Both individuals who came to the saving faith in Christ. One over a journey of time, the other through the crisis of ending up in a Siberian Gulag. And there ain't no prison like a Siberian Gulag prison where all this man had who had pretty much convinced himself he was an atheist, was a Gulag and a piece of the gospels. And while he read through the gospels, he came to the saving knowledge of Christ.
That was Fido or Dostoyevsky. Tolstoy writes this story and in this story you see all that's wrong with the world. At that time in Russia as it's heading toward the revolution, you see the corruption in government, you see the hopelessness of the lower classes, you see the corruption even within the state church of the time, you see classes and you see all these things. And we meet this individual, this character who basically reaches the point where life has no value.
And so he becomes a murderer. Why? What does it matter? And so he brutally kills people if there's something he needs or something he wants or whatever.
And he seems to be the pitcher of how low Russia had fallen. But then one night as he plans to rob and murder a family, he encounters a woman who's the disciple of Jesus Christ. And in their brief conversation before he takes her life, her concern for the state of his soul was greater than her fear for her own life. And it so impacts this man that eventually he goes and confesses his crimes and he goes to prison, he wants to be destroyed in prison.
He's because he's so consumed by his guilt, so convicted by it, but at the same time there's something about the testimony of this woman. And while he's in prison, the dramatic thing where he's wrestling with evil spirits that wanted to just take his own life, and then he meets a man who opens up the gospel to him, who cares enough to tell him about it. And he hears the gospel and he understands the forgiveness of Jesus Christ and he puts his trust in Christ and in the message of the gospel. And it so transforms him that he begins to transform the prison.
And for the rest of the story, he starts meeting each of the characters we met in the first half of the story that were so corrupted, that were so frustrated and each of them as he shares his testimony in the gospel of Jesus Christ with them, they begin to be transformed, including all the people who made him suffer through his life. Because as the love of God shines abroad in his heart, he becomes an instrument of grace. And you come to the end of the story and Tolstoy leaves us with the sense that political revolution is not going to change Russia. Following a state's stagnant religion is not going to change Russia.
It said changing classes isn't going to change Russia, but the gospel of Jesus Christ and the love of God can change anyone. One other story a friend shared with me just this week. Her friend had the privilege of going to China in the early 1980s when China reopened its borders after the Cultural Revolution, and invited in a small number of Westerners to teach English because the leader of the Communist Party determined that in order for the People's Republic of China to be able to really succeed and grow, it was important that they learned English. It seemed like a wise thing.
It worked well for them. So in this one northeastern Chinese city of about 1.5 million people, three ladies, three Christian ladies were brought in to teach English at a university. And they arrived there and they said the first thing they realized is that they were a necessary evil. The government didn't want them there, but they wanted the English.
So most of the students didn't necessarily want them there, but they wanted the English. So they were moved into this apartment block and they said it was a Soviet-style Cracker Box apartment blocks with students in them. They were moved into one block that had nobody living in it but them because they didn't want any casual mingling between foreigners and the Chinese graduate students. So these three ladies lived in this apartment building by themselves, just them, and the Guard.
Said the Guard, Lao Dang, was a Red Army Guard. He had served under Mao. He still wore his old uniform with pride, and it was his job to meet the needs of the three Westerners. And to make sure that they were doing nothing that could corrupt the students.
So he said it was his job to change light bulbs, make sure that any electrical or heating problems were solved, to supply toilet paper, and to regularly inspect of their room to make sure they had no Chinese Bibles or any contraband. They said he delighted in the second job. He was very reticent to vote the first. Said on many occasions he would claim that they were wastefully using the electricity and that's why the bulb burnt out, which could mean a week of being in the dark because there was only one light bulb in the little apartment each of them was in.
Toilet paper, he determined that Westerners were great wasters because of their capitalistic style and often denied them toilet paper for a week at a time, which made things uncomfortable. But he let them know at every turn that he opposed them. Well, about three months into their stay, they received a message from the leaders of the university and the local party officials. It was their opportunity to come to a meeting where they could express any complaints they had, which was part of Chinese Communist policy.
They were called meetings of which to exhort or correct. So the three ladies are going, we have a complaint and his name is Lao Dang. So he said they sat down in a group of three of them and they wrote a list, 60 items, issues they had with Lao Dang. Said the night before the meeting, one of the ladies, Kerry woke up in the middle of the night and she was struck by this thought.
She said, how is bringing these complaints ever going to win the heart of Lao Dang? And she said, as she laid in bed, she began to think about this man, a product of the Communist Party and about his heart. Before God said, a few hours later, they went into the room and all the party officials from the region and the university leadership were sitting at this long table. They were sitting at a table.
Lao Dang was sitting over by the wall and said, the oldest of the group had the list. And she said, Kerry was sitting there and said, she was just felt over and over. It's like, you are not to bring this list. But she said there was, she was sitting here, then there was the other lady and then the lady with the list and said, there was no way I could get to her.
I said, Lord, if this is what you want, you're going to have to change things. And they said, the party official got up and told them how much they appreciated them teaching English. She went on and on. And then the party official pointed at Kerry and said, now, if you have anything to say, you are to stand up and say it.
And said, she stood up and said, the first thing she did is she thanked the university for allowing them to be there and thanked the Communist Party for allowing them to be there to teach students and such. And said, and then we want to thank you for the blessing of giving us Lao Dang. For Lao Dang, he's always concerned with our welfare. He always makes sure that we are aware and follow the policies he is there.
And she said, for the next few minutes, she said, well, the lady sitting next to her was kicking her ankle ferociously. She talked honestly about anything good about Lao Dang. And said, Lao Dang stood up and just beamed because in post-communist revolution, China, the greatest gift you could give a person is to praise them before the party. And the party members stood up and they clapped for Lao Dang.
And the three ladies stood up and clapped for Lao Dang. So they left. So the next morning Kerry opened her door and there were six rolls of toilet paper sitting outside her door and outside the door of the others. And he said, he began to soften.
A month later, it was Christmas. Of course, Christmas could not be celebrated. Said they managed to get the three ladies the day off on December 25th, but the rest of the university ran as normal because there was no Christmas. But at six o'clock in the morning, Kerry had a on her door and she's thinking, oh, the other ladies are eager to see what gift I've managed to cobble together for them.
She opened the door and it was Lao Dang. And Lao Dang said, you must come with me. Kerry quickly grabbed a robe wrapped herself up and said it was freezing cold because the heat was only allowed to be on for four hours each day. And it was winter and northeastern China.
And he took her down into the little foyer downstairs and they came around the corner and there was a banana tree. Three feet tall wrapped in cut paper chains with little paper ornaments with a large star of the people's republic of China stuck on the top. And Lao Dang looked at her and said, Merry Christmas. And she looked at him and said, how did you know about a Christmas tree?
And he said, when I was very small, my parents died in a plague and my brother and I, no one would care for us. But there were two mission ladies here in the community. And despite everything that would be against it, they took us in. They were our missionary mamas.
And they said, they told us the stories of Jesus. And they told us all the stories of the Bible and who Jesus was. And they celebrated Christmas with us. But then when the Japanese invaded, they were taken off to a camp.
And my brother and I had to fend for ourselves. And then when the Japanese were defeated, they were sent out of the country and they weren't allowed to take us with them. And so we were left with nothing. And nobody was helping us.
And then the Communists came. And they told me that if I joined Mao's army that my brother would be looked after, but only the Communists would care for us. And so I left God behind. And I served in the party.
And Kerry said, but God still loves you. And he says, you don't know what I've done. I said, I served in the Cultural Revolution. I said, for the next three years, little conversations, each year the banana tree got bigger in the foyer.
One year they even got lights. They couldn't plug them in, but they had lights. Kerry was sent out of the country. A number of years later she was able to return.
She went to the university and was told that Lao Dang no longer worked there because of illness. She managed to find where he lived and he was dying of advanced kidney cancer. Said she came into his apartment and sat beside him. And they chatted for a few moments and said, Lao Dang, do you know if you're ready to die?
Because it was obvious, it was imminent. And he looked at her and said, yes, I put my trust in Jesus. Because of what my missionary mamas taught me and because of what you showed me. And shortly thereafter he went on to be with the Lord.
Love God with all your heart, your soul, your mind and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself. And God will put us in places where the love of God will shine abroad in our hearts and people will be changed. First and foremost, we will be. Let's pray.
Father, as we look into 2023, Lord remind us how much you love us. Overwhelm us with a realization that you love us with an everlasting love. Lord, then move us to love you in return. Not to partially love you like an acquaintance or love you just as a friend, but to love you as the one who is the lover of our souls.
Lord, I pray that you would blind our eyes from the temptations of the world around us. That would seek to present itself as more attractive than you. And then Lord, I pray that love that you lavish on us, that it would spread from us to others. Lord, that we would love our neighbors, that we would love our acquaintances, our extended family, our brothers and sisters in Christ, that we would love the people of this city.
For Lord, without you, there is no hope. So Lord, do this work. For your glory in Jesus Christ, amen.