Resolved.

Grace and peace, friends.

As I was leaving the church parking lot after last Sunday’s message, someone yelled at me from across the parking lot, “Hey pastor. Tell God to stop stepping on my toes!” Don’t you just love conviction? Honestly, I think the word “conviction” gets a bad wrap. So many times I have heard that word used in the context of guilt and shame. Yet, when I sense a conviction in my heart, I don’t see it in a negative context. Quite the opposite. I sense an urging and desire of the Holy Spirit calling me to a life of more. And that’s what this series, The Other 167 Hours is really all about. 

I was reading recently about the North American revivalist preacher, Jonathan Edwards. He preached with a fire that could have only been fueled by the power of the Holy Spirit found at work within his life. In fact, on many instances when he would preach, he was afraid his mannerisms and inflections might interfere with the power of God’s Word so he would just read his sermons, often mechanically, without expression. Yet, as the Spirit spoke, it was noted that the listeners were so convicted of sin that they screamed for God’s mercy and tightly gripped their pews for fear of falling immediately into hell. Now how is that for a church service? 🙂 The point here is this: Edwards desired a life filled with the Holy Spirit and asked God to live within and love outside of that Holy Spirit power. 

While reading about his life, I loved finding a list of “resolutions” that Edwards created early in his ministry that would set the pace for how he would live for God in the midst of his “everyday ordinary life,” as Paul referenced in Romans 12:1-2. 

Here are some of those resolutions:

• Resolved, to live with all my might while I do live. 
• Resolved, never to do anything but duty; and then according to Ephesians 6:6-8, do it willingly and cheerfully as unto the Lord, and not to Man.
• Resolved, never to lose one moment of time, to improve it in the most profitable way I possibly can. 
• Resolved, never to do anything which I should despise or think negatively of within another. 
• Resolved, never to do anything out of revenge. 
• Resolved, never to do anything which I should be afraid to do even if it were the last hour of my life. 
• Resolved, to improve every opportunity, when I am in the best and happiest frame of mind, to cast and venture my soul on the Lord Jesus Christ, to trust and confide in him, and consecrate myself wholly to him; from that this I may have assurance of my safety, knowing that I confide in my Redeemer. 

Incredible. 

Perhaps today is not just another day full of the mundane and routine. The Holy Spirit is waiting and ready to take the ordinary and bring the extraordinary through our resolving to live in and love out of His power.

Join me? 

See you Sunday!