Good morning everyone and happy new year to you all as we begin 2024. It was about this time last year when I stood up here that I said that one of my new year's resolutions was to run a marathon.
Last year that is. And my second resolution was to do it in a personal best time. Given that it was my first ever marathon, it was if I achieved the first one I would achieve the second one automatically, which I did in July last year.
Having run that marathon, by the end of July, in fact, before I'd even finished the marathon, I resolved never to run another one again.
However, I do want to encourage you today to run. That's my goal today, is to encourage you to take up running if you have not yet taken up running and to particularly run in 2024.
Not a marathon, I wouldn't necessarily encourage us all to do that at all, but in fact to run the race of faith in Jesus Christ.
So if you're someone who takes notes, I've really got four points. If you've got the translator version in front of you right now, you'll see three points there.
That's because I gave it to John yesterday and I woke up early this morning in order to add a fourth point.
So my four points is to run. Secondly, to run with Jonathan Edwards. Thirdly, to plan your run. And fourthly, lastly, how to run.
That's the four points for the direction we're going to take this morning.
So first of all, run. New Testament letter to the Hebrews. Ash has mentioned it, just read out a section of it just then.
It was written to a bunch of Christians who were losing sight of what it meant to be disciples and to follow Jesus.
The most famous section of this letter is chapter 11, verse 1, through to chapter 12, verse 3.
It's the section about the great examples of faith from the past.
Chapter 12 refers to it as the great cloud of witnesses who were there, if you like, as in the stadium, watching us compete in the race of faith.
The writer is hoping to inspire the Hebrews, the recipients of this letter, with examples of those who had gone before them as faithful disciples of Jesus.
And chapter 12, verse 1, is the main application of the section.
So open your Bibles, it'd be great if you followed along with me here.
It's the main application.
The word can mean race.
It can also mean a struggle.
It can mean a fight.
It can mean a contest.
As difficult as a marathon is to run, I think those of us who have lived long enough realise that life is fundamentally harder than just running a marathon.
It's a contest.
It's a struggle.
It's a fight.
And the life of faith is, in fact, a fight.
In fact, this whole section in chapter 12, if you continue to read on, talks about enduring.
It talks about shedding blood.
It's all within the imagery of the Olympics.
It's all within the imagery of fighting, struggling.
Endure is what Hebrews 12 is telling us to do.
Fight the good fight.
Be disciplined.
Train hard.
Run the race set before you.
Of course, we know that that operates in a physical sphere as well for us, not just in the spiritual sphere.
Doctors will tell you that you are not going to live a good life, a healthy life, or even a long life, unless you are willing to exert yourself and sweat.
But our bodies get to a point where they will not be able to perform normal daily exertions, unless there are times of extraordinary exertions called exercise.
So what a command to a church here that was getting old, was settling into the world, losing its wartime mentality, starting to drift through life without focus, without vigilance, without energy.
Their hands were growing weak.
Their knees were feeble, according to verse 12 of chapter 12.
It was just easier to meander in the crowd of life than to run the race of faith.
Or to treasure Jesus and pursue their joy.
And so against this mentality, having spent chapters after chapters of elevating the majesty and the splendor of Jesus Christ,
he then calls the church to endure, to persevere, to run, to fight, to be alert, to be strengthened.
Don't drift.
Don't neglect.
Don't be sluggish.
Don't stroll.
Don't meander.
Don't wander aimlessly.
Run as in a race with a finish line, with everything in life hanging on that finish line.
Fight the fight of faith on the basis of Christ's spectacular death and resurrection.
Now, we need help here.
We need help in the modern world because we are convinced in the modern world that the chief aim of life is our happiness and our comfort.
On the most part, we are busy, incredibly busy, with secondary to-do lists and neglecting the importance of working hard to grow in treasuring Jesus.
Growing in God's faith and growing in God's faith and the gospel joy.
And the gospel joy that comes as a result of that.
So I want to do something here this morning, which I've done before in the past.
I want to turn to someone who, if Hebrews 11 was taken right through into the 18th century, this man would be included in this list of those who have run the race as part of the cloud of witnesses.
And I want to encourage us to run with Jonathan Edwards.
Jonathan Edwards was born on the 5th of October, 1703.
He died March 22, 1758.
He was a preacher, a theologian, a philosopher, a missionary to First Nations people in America.
And he was the first president of Princeton University.
Edwards is considered now by both secular and Christian historians alike to be the greatest Protestant thinker America has ever produced.
He was a small-town pastor for 23 years in a church of about 600 people, because back in those days, everyone went to church.
He was a missionary to First Nation peoples for seven years.
First president of Princeton for a few months before he died.
He reared 11 faithful children, giving credit to his wife on that one as well.
And the more you understand his life, you give even more credit to his wife on that one as well.
He reared 11 faithful children.
He worked without the help of electricity, without emails, word processors, computers, or even sufficient paper to write on.
He lived only till he was 54, which I'm turning in a few months myself.
Yet this man, in such a short life, led one of the greatest spiritual awakenings of modern times.
He wrote theological books that administered to people for more than 250 years.
And did more for the modern missionary movement, the global advancement of Christianity, than any single person of his generation.
A remarkable individual.
Now, as a teenager, Edwards wrote down, a teenager mind you, right?
This is before social media and gaming.
And he wrote down 70 resolutions to govern his life.
And to help cultivate growth as a disciple of Jesus.
70 resolutions.
He went on to reread this list at least once a week to keep his mind focused and renewed.
These resolutions sustained his vision for God and drove him to persevere and grow as a disciple of Jesus.
I've printed out maybe 10, 15 copies of those resolutions.
They're not hard to access online.
You can grab them online and you'll see the remarkable focus of this man.
And my prayer for us this morning is that we will see something here that will give us a new sense of zeal and commitment to the most important things of life.
And there are four broad exhortations, if you like, from the life of Edwards that I want to focus on this morning.
I'm not going to go through all 70 resolutions.
You'll be grateful to know that.
The first thing I want to say is Edwards exhorts us to radical single-mindedness in our occupation of spiritual things.
Two of his resolutions that he made in 1723.
He was almost 20 when he wrote these.
Resolution number 44.
Resolved.
That no other end but religion.
Now when he uses the word religion, what he means by that is the Christian faith.
Resolved.
No other end but religion shall have any influence at all in any of my actions.
And that no action shall be in the least circumstance any otherwise than the religious end will carry it.
Number 61.
Resolved.
That I will not give way to that listlessness which I find unbends and relaxes my mind from being fully and fixedly set on religion, whatever excuse I may have for it.
I think that's the application of the Apostle Paul's principle in 2 Timothy 2 verses 4 to 6.
No one serving as a soldier gets involved in civilian affairs.
He wants to please his commanding officer.
Similarly, if anyone competes as an athlete, he does not receive the victor's crown unless he competes according to the rules.
The hardworking farmer shall be the first to receive share of the crops.
What happens for many of us in the busyness and the difficulty of life is we start to give way to amusements and diversions and hobbies just to survive emotionally.
They don't just become helpful things.
They become our way to survive emotionally.
The evenings and the days off are filled up with harmless, enjoyable diversions and what happens is before too much longer the whole focus shifts.
The radical urgency of the kingdom priorities fade.
The wartime mentality shifts to a peacetime mentality.
The lifestyle starts to get cushy.
The all-consuming singleness of vision of life evaporates.
I want to ask you, in all seriousness, how many Christians do you know, how many Christians do you spend time with, who are laboring, and I use that word intentionally, laboring to know God.
Who are striving earnestly to study of the scriptures and prayer to enlarge their vision of God.
So the first exhortation from Edwards is to be radically single-minded in our occupation of spiritual things.
Secondly, Edwards exhorts us to labor earnestly to know the scriptures in particular, to know the Bible in particular.
Don't get your vision of God secondhand.
This is Edwards' example himself.
An early biographer of Edwards said that he came to his pastorate, his church in Northampton.
He says he had studied theology, not chiefly in systems or commentaries, but from the Bible.
Edwards once said in a sermon,
Be assiduous.
That is, I had to look that up.
Showing great care and perseverance.
Be assiduous in reading the holy scriptures.
This is the fountain whence all knowledge and divinity must be derived.
Therefore, let not this treasure lie by you neglected.
He was an amazing example in his own diligence in studying the Bible himself.
One example.
I think you can see this Bible from memory in a museum in Germany, if I'm correct.
He grabbed a Bible.
He took the binding off the Bible, separated every page of the Bible,
put a blank sheet in between each page and bound the whole thing back up again
and drew a line down the middle of every blank page.
And the blank page, the two columns were just filled with notes, page after page after page,
notes of the scriptures as he studied them.
And then when they were filled, he turned it sideways
and wrote over the top of his notes the other direction.
I think there is reason to believe that Edwards really did follow on his 28th resolution.
Resolved.
To study the scriptures so steadily, constantly and frequently
as that I may find and painfully perceive myself to grow in the knowledge of the same.
I find this resolution to be a rebuke.
How many of us have a plan of growing in the grasp of the whole terrain of scriptures?
I don't mean the terrain of just the Bible verses to prop up my theological preferences.
I mean the whole terrain of scripture.
How many of us have a plan of growing in that way?
Do we labor over the scriptures in such a way that we can plainly see
that today we understand something that we did not understand yesterday?
Some of us work at reading books on the Christian life with a view of growing,
but have no plan and no sustained effort to move steadily and constantly forward
in our understanding of the Bible.
Study the Bible so steadily and constantly and frequently
that you can clearly perceive yourself to grow in them.
Resolution 11 is one of the reasons why he made such amazing progress
in his theological understanding.
It says,
Resolved.
When I think of any theorem in divinity to be solved,
immediately do what I can towards solving it,
if circumstances do not hinder.
What he's saying there is his resolution was not to be a passive reader.
He read with a view to solving problems.
Most of us in the modern world are cursed with a bent towards passive reading.
We read, if we do, in the same way that we watch TV.
We don't ask questions as we read.
We don't ask,
Why does that sentence follow that sentence?
How does this paragraph relate to the one that was there three pages earlier?
We don't ferret out the order of thought or ponder the meaning of terms.
And if we see a problem,
I think we habitually just leave them to the experts.
Thirdly, Edwards exhorts us to redeem the time
and to do what our hand finds to do with all of our might.
His sixth resolution was pretty simple and powerful.
Resolved to live with all my might while I do live.
Resolution five was pretty similar.
Resolved never to lose one moment of time,
but to improve it in the most profitable way I possibly can.
He was a great believer in doing what you could in the time that you have,
rather than putting things off to a more convenient time.
He was clearly a person who was disciplined in mind and body and spirit.
He would spend up to 13 hours a day in his study.
He rose early,
even for non-electricity and alarm days.
In fact,
he was probably entirely serious.
I read it as a joke,
but he was probably entirely serious
when he wrote in his diary in 1728,
I think Christ has recommended rising early in the morning
by his rising from the grave very early on the Sunday.
I commend for your consideration
whether such care to maximize time and effectiveness
in devotion to the pursuit of God and his word
is what the preacher meant
when he says in Ecclesiastes 9 verse 10,
whatever your hand finds to do,
do it with all your might,
for in the grave where you are going,
there is neither working nor planning
nor knowledge nor wisdom.
Fourthly,
the theological,
the biblical labor of Edwards
exhorts us to study
for the sake of hearts of worship
and for practical obedience.
What you see in Jonathan Edwards
is the sweet marriage of reason and affection,
of thought and feeling,
of head and heart,
of study and worship
that took place in the life of Edwards
that I think is rare today.
So the final exhortation from Edwards
is to recover what the old-time Puritans
used to call logic on fire
or fire with joy and obedience.
Edwards did not pursue a passion for God
because it was an icing on the cake of his faith.
He wanted to be smarter than everyone else
in terms of the Bible.
For him,
faith was grounded in a sense of God
which was more than what reason alone could deliver.
In other words,
it is to no avail whatsoever
merely to believe that God is holy
and that God is merciful.
For that belief to be of any saving value at all,
we must have true delight in it
of what it is in and of itself.
We must delight in that truth
for it to have saving power.
Otherwise,
the knowledge of God
is no different than what Satan has.
Satan knows that he's merciful.
Satan knows that he's all-powerful.
But Satan does not delight
in that knowledge of God.
Does that mean that all of his study
was in vain?
Not at all.
He said,
the more you have
of a rational knowledge
of divine things,
the more opportunity there will be
when the Spirit
shall be breathed into your heart
to see the excellency of these things
and to taste the sweetness of them.
So the goal for Edwards
was not just growing
in knowing God,
but growing in delighting in God,
in savoring God,
in relishing in Him.
for all of his intellectual might
and frankly,
he was a very,
he had a very powerful mind.
But Edwards,
for all of that,
Edwards was the furthest thing
from a cool,
detached,
neutral,
disinterested academic.
Disinterested academic.
We often fall on one side or the other
for the donkey on this.
We're either the academics
who are coolly detached
or we're people so-called
filled with the Spirit,
alive in Jesus
but don't know the Scriptures.
Edwards rebukes both.
He was as intent
on cultivating
his passion for God
as he was cultivating
his knowledge of God.
He said,
or he wrote,
seek not to grow in knowledge
chiefly for the sake of applause
and to enable you
to dispute with others
but seek it for the benefit
of your souls
in order to practice
according to what knowledge
you have.
This will be the way
to know more.
Edwards is remarkable in this.
He said,
the moment
in your study
of the Scriptures,
the moment
you don't put something
into practice
from your study
is the moment
you stop growing
in knowledge.
Knowledge is to be put
into practice
and the moment
you don't put into practice
is the moment
you stop growing
in knowledge.
The greatest thing
I think
that we can learn
from Edwards,
I think,
is that God
is glorified
not most
by being known
nor by being
dutifully obeyed.
He is glorified
most
by being
enjoyed.
If you've been around
St. Paul's
a while,
you will
potentially
put together
my love
for Edwards.
in our vision
statement,
treasuring
Jesus
together
for the joy
of all people.
The joy,
treasuring Jesus
and joy
go together.
Edwards wrote this,
God is glorified
not only
by his glory
being seen
but by
being rejoiced
in.
when those
who see it
delight in it
God is
more glorified
than if
they only
see it.
In other words,
the disciplined
life,
the goal
of a disciplined
life
is the joyful
worship of God
and the
undisciplined
life
robs us
of delighting
God,
our greatest
joy.
So that
brings me
to my
third point
that is
and I'll
briefly run
through this
stuff,
plan your
run.
The essence
of the
challenge
for us
as we
step into
a new
year
is to
plan your
run
with
Jesus.
News
of a
terminal
illness,
attending
a funeral,
they are
often times
when we
focus on
what really
matters in
life.
The sharp
realities of
life come
to bear
on us in
that moment.
And I
think the
beginning of
a new
year may
be a
distant
but a
relatively
close
third as
well.
We must
labour to
ensure that
the most
important things
stay the
most important
things in
life.
So be
inspired by
in
Edwards.
Get
some
plan in
place to
grow in
the
important.
Don't
coast,
don't
meander,
redeem the
time.
That's the
challenge from
Hebrews and
Edwards.
For the
past year,
we have been
constantly saying
here at
St. Paul's
encouraging you
to take
your next
step.
We have
the good
news of
the gospel.
It's written
out there on
the board
straight behind
me here.
We have
the good
news of
the gospel
and on
the other
board we
have what
the gospel
gives us.
Embrace the
good news of
Jesus Christ
and you end
up with a
life of
satisfaction and
meaning and
hope and in
other words,
joy.
They are the
consequences of
trusting in
Jesus.
So how do
we pursue,
pursue,
pursue the
gospel in
our life in
order that
those consequences
might grow
more and more
and more in
our hearts
and our
minds.
We're going
to be talking
more about
that in our
vision series
in a few
weeks.
But to get
Hebrews and
to put Edwards
together, I
just want to
say one
thing about
planning your
joy.
Pursue
godly habits
in life.
Pursue
spiritual
disciplines,
spiritual
practice,
diligently
pursue them,
train in
those things,
sweat in
those things.
we're going
to emphasize
seven things
as we move
forward.
Weekly
worship,
daily
devotions,
Christian
community,
use of
our talents,
the service
of others,
generous
giving,
witness of
the gospel,
and rest.
Rest.
something that
we do not
know how to
do in our
modern world.
Now I'm not
expecting any
of us to
be the next
Edwards,
the next
Jonathan
Edwards,
or to take
on all of
his disciplines.
He was a
remarkable man
who I think
we should
just frankly
admire.
But I do
want you to
take your
next step.
I do want
to exhort
you to a
discipline
life.
Because life
and faith
is a race
and therefore
all of us
have at least
one next
step to
take.
At least
one next
step to
take.
Lastly,
how to
run.
As a,
someone who's
done a bit
of running
over the
years,
more recently,
and
trained for
a marathon,
marathon,
I had to
Google
how to
run a
marathon.
How to
actually run
a marathon
and get
advice from
a bunch of
people,
how to
train for
a marathon,
all that
sort of
thing.
So how do
you run
the race
of faith?
life?
life.
So this is my
last point,
but let me
just say,
very significant
point.
How to run
the race of
life and
faith.
This is the
crucial
dynamic.
It is,
if you like,
the petrol in
your engine.
Reading for the
beginning of
Edwards'
resolutions,
and it sets
the tone for
the entire
70 of the
resolutions,
Edwards wrote
this right at
the beginning,
being sensible
that I am
unable to do
anything without
God's help,
I do humbly
entreat him by
his grace to
enable me to
keep these
resolutions so
far as they
are agreeable to
his will for
Christ's sake.
Hebrews 10
puts Edwards'
introduction in
these, sorry,
Hebrews 11 puts
it in these
words.
Fix your eyes
on Jesus,
the pioneer
and the
perfecter of
your faith.
You might say
the pioneer
and the
perfecter of
your race.
Jesus is
not simply
the pattern
of life and
faith, he
is the
completer of
it as well.
He is the
only one who
has perfectly
lived it and
he did it for
us.
So I'm not
just exhorting
you to a
life of
discipline.
I'm exhorting
you to a
life of
discipline that's
focused on
Jesus who
has run the
race before
you and
completed your
race for
you.
There is a
great gulf
between the
understanding that
God accepts us
because of our
efforts and the
understanding that
God accepts us
because of what
Jesus has done
for us.
religion operates
on the principle
that I obey
and therefore I
am acceptable to
God.
The operating
of the Christian
faith, the
operating principle
of the Christian
faith is I'm
accepted by God
through what
Jesus Christ has
already achieved
for me and
therefore I
obey.
Therefore I
pursue.
Therefore I run
the race.
Two people
living by those
two very
different principles
may in fact
look the
same.
They may
even be sitting
beside you in
church now.
They both
pray.
They both
give generously.
They're both
loyal and
faithful to
family and
the church and
they're good
citizens but
they live it
out with
radically
different
motives.
Religion
tries to
live out
divine
standards out
of fear.
If we
don't live a
disciplined
life then we
fear we'll miss
out on God's
blessing now in
this life and
in the next
life to come
every time
something bad
happens in
life.
And you
go,
hang on a
bit,
what?
Oh,
I haven't
been reading
my Bible,
I should
have gone
to church
and give
a little
bit more
money.
That's a
life of
fear.
Gospel
motivation is
gratitude for
the blessing
we have
already received
because of
Jesus.
That's why
the writer
to the
Hebrews
spends 10
chapters
exhorting the
Hebrews about
the supremacy
and the
magnificence of
Jesus Christ
before he
says run.
Run.
Gospel
motivation is
gratitude for
the blessing
we have
already received
in Jesus
Christ.
While the
religious person
is forced
into obedience,
the Christian
rushes into
it in a
desire to
please and
to resemble
the one who
endured the
cross for
them, for
their joy
and for
his.
And so my
exhortation for
you this
morning,
today,
beginning of
2024, is
rush,
rush into
obedience
with joy.
Look to
Jesus and
the gospel,
plan your
run with
him and
take your
next step
of faith
in 2024.