Press On

An elderly man moved into a Florida retirement community and immediately started making new friends. One of this new friends was a woman who, like him, had lost her spouse many years ago. Their friendship continued to grow until one evening he decided to propose to her.

The next morning, he woke remembering that he had proposed to her, but he couldn’t remember how she had responded. He went to see her and said, “I am really embarrassed. Last night I asked you to marry me, but I can’t remember if you said yes or no.”

“Thank goodness,” she replied, “I remembered saying yes, but I couldn’t remember who proposed to me.”

Each year about 62% of Americans make New Year’s resolutions. Only 8% of them will successfully keep their resolutions. Some people give up on their resolutions, but most of us simply forget about them within the first few weeks until we realize that we are doing the thing we said we wouldn’t do or that we failed to do the thing we said we would.

Back in high school I was supposed to write a paper about my New Year’s resolutions. I had never made any resolutions, and, because I was a rebel, I wasn’t about to start just because my teacher wanted me to. So, I wrote three pages explaining why I did not want to make any resolutions. My paper explained that since I was required to make one that my resolution was that I would never make any New Year’s resolutions. I then explained how this was one resolution that I failed to keep the moment I made it because I had in fact made a New Year’s resolution, therefore breaking my resolve not to make one. I’m not sure why, but my teachers always looked stressed.

Have you ever made a New Year’s resolution? Were you one of the 8% of people that were successful in keeping your resolution? The number one resolution each year is to lose weight. More exercise equipment and gym memberships are purchased during the first week of January than at any other time throughout the year. Many homes have an expensive exercise machine that is never used except to hold their laundry. Many people own a gym membership that never gets used. Why? Because they forgot their resolution. Because a resolution holds little value unless it includes a commitment.

Brothers, I do not consider that I have made it my own. But one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. (Philippians 3:13-14, ESV)

The Apostle Paul and Timothy wrote this letter to the church in Philippi to instruct them how they should live as followers of Christ and to encourage them to succeed. Paul knew that having the knowledge and putting the knowledge into action were two completely different things.

I can have vast amounts of knowledge about how eating the right foods and exercising daily will allow me to live a healthier lifestyle, but until I actually commit to live a healthier lifestyle all of that knowledge is useless. Commitment requires 3 things that we see here in this scripture passage.

Choose to Change

The first thing I want you to understand is that nobody should ever make you feel bad about your physical appearance: the length of your nose, the size of your ears, freckles, your cup size, or jockstrap size are never things that you need to change unless it is due to a medical issue. Don’t ever let anyone make you feel that you need to change your physical appearance just to please them. Including yourself. Got it?

With that said, change is something that must take place if we are to improve ourselves. No person is perfect the way they are, regardless of what your mom, your BFF, or your buds tell you. We all have room for improvement. Usually people focus on external improvements, such as weight loss or muscle gain, when we should probably start with internal improvements.

Some of these improvements require that we recognize something important: we have been lied to. That’s right. Snookered, bamboozled, tricked, conned. Your teacher said everyone is a winner, but there is only one winner in any contest. The American Dream says you can be whatever you want if you just work hard enough, but no amount of hard work will make you the next American Idol if you don’t have the talent for it. Your mom said you could grow up to be president one day, but only 44 men have ever been elected president out of some 600 million citizens that have lived during that time. The odds are rarely in your favor. Coaches taught you that all you must do is show up to get an award, but nobody gets rewarded for just showing up to work. The best employees get the rewards; those that just show up get minimum wage at best.

And the greatest liar of them all is the devil. The amazing thing is that we don’t recognize his lies sooner. He tells people that they can do everything on their own. That they are perfectly fine the way they are. In essence he’s saying, You don’t need Jesus. You’re fine. You don’t need forgiveness. You don’t need to be better. Just coast along and you’ll be happy.” But at the same time he’s telling people that they are ugly, too fat, too thin, a geek, an idiot, a loser, friendless, unlikeable, a nobody.

It’s easy for the devil to fuel the narcissism or self-pity. We live in a culture that basis our worth on social media: on how many friends we have on Facebook, how many hearts or likes we get on Instagram, how many upvotes we get on Reddit, how many thumbs up on YouTube, how many retweets, etc. If someone unfriends you on Facebook it is a-gallon-of-ice-cream-and-a-spoon time.

The devil can really do a number on our self-esteem if we let him. How can we not see through his lies? How is it that we continue to believe his lies? Probably because we are so used to being lied to that we have trouble seeing the truth or that we don’t want to hear the truth.

The truth is that, while we are all specially and uniquely made by God, none of us are perfect the way we currently are. We all need to continually be striving to be better. That requires change. If we can’t see a need to change, then we will never make a commitment to change.

Set Some Goals

One of my dad’s favorite phrases to tell me over and over and over was “The failure to plan is a plan to fail.” To be successful in most things, you must make some goals. The first rule to setting goals is that you make sure it is possible to achieve the goal, but not too easy. If you set the goal beyond your ability to reach, you’ll get discouraged and give up. Trying to lose 50 pounds in a month is generally not possible or healthy. On the other hand, setting a goal to walk 20 steps per day is way too easy unless you are recovering from a serious injury. Extremely easy goals can also make you quit trying.

Setting goals should take into account where you are now and where you want to be. If where you want to be is a great distance from where you are now, then set multiple goals to get there. How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. How do you climb to the top of the Washington Monument? Well, they no longer let you do that, but if you could, you would do it one step at a time.

When we take a trip to visit my parents in Mississippi or Wendy’s in Missouri, we don’t plan to drive there in one day. Why? Because it is 16-17 hours of driving. With the required stops for fuel, bathrooms, and food it takes us more like 20 hours. Before kids we could have driven that far in one day, but not anymore. So, we must plan to stop for fuel and food and bathrooms as well as to spend the night somewhere and break our trip up into 2 days of driving.

If you want to lose 50 pounds, don’t try to do it in one month or even one year. Set that as a long-term goal and set mini-goals in between. Maybe try to lose a pound a week and see how it goes. There will be setbacks, such as vacations, Thanksgiving, and other times when you will overeat and under exercise. If your eyes were focused only on the 50 pounds you might be tempted to quit. If you are focused on that 1 pound a week, you can just skip your vacation week and start again next week.

What about spiritual goals? We should all have goals to improve our spiritual life: to read the Bible more often, to pray more often, to grow in our understanding of the Bible more, to tithe, to do things more like Jesus. If we start with a goal that is too far out of reach we will never make it. If you are not tithing anything right now because you don’t even make enough to pay your own bills, then simply saying that you plan to start tithing 10% of your income probably won’t be very successful. You will need to make some additional mini-goals in order to reach your goal. Deciding to read the Bible in a year won’t happen unless you set daily and weekly goals.

Make goals that are achievable so you don’t get discouraged. If you are constantly reaching your goals, make them more challenging. Goals create change. Goals move us toward growth. Goals enable us to verify change. Goals give us reliable evidence of the work and effort that we have put into improving ourselves. They are milestones of where we have been and a map to where we are going.

Stay Focused

After you make your goals, you must stay focused on them and continue to press, or move, toward them. As I mentioned, you will have days or times of failure. Don’t get discouraged by these little setbacks. Keep in mind the thing you have resolved to do and keep moving toward the next goal in your plan.

We all need motivation to keep us moving. The best motivation is to keep your eyes on the prize that awaits you. As followers of Jesus our prize is to become more like Jesus and to live for all of eternity with Him in heaven. When we get discouraged with life, we need to look at what is waiting for us at the finish line. Forget where you were and look to where you want to be.