Resolution: Don’t Be A Walking Corpse

What is your New Year resolution? If you are like me you are starting to formulate a New Year resolution plan now. If you are like me, that resolution will be a distant memory by January 7th.

This past week I looked through an old journal I once kept and I stopped to read an entry dated December 28, 2001. This entry represented my last New Year celebration before I began a serious and Socratic method study of God, the Bible and Jesus (which began in April of 2002). I was fascinated to read what I was thinking, what were my dreams at this time and what were my aspirations and resolutions for the coming new year.

They were all selfish and worldly to the extreme and I can’t recognize the man who wrote those words. I was a dead man walking.

Dead man walking. That phrase describes how life feels apart from God – shunning His purpose, slogging forward, feet stuck in the mud. I know all about it. For 33 years of my life, before I gave my life to Christ, I was a dead man walking. Heck, even after having given my life to Christ I feel this way when complacency begins to set in.

When we’re outside of God’s plan for our lives, we resemble a pile of lifeless bones (Ezekiel 37:1-14). Like Adam at creation, like every newborn person in Christ, we need that first full breath of life from the Holy Spirit. Without it our heart and mind remain stagnant and lifeless. We resemble a fresh corpse, skin wrapped around bones and nothingness. Unless God’s Spirit animates us we remain dead. Walking dead.

We constantly need God. It really is that simple.

Sure, our clanging and rattling bones make noise as we go about our lives. However, they can only create an empty soulless sound. Our busyness and activity provide no assurance that we’re moving forward for God’s Kingdom. That was me in that journal entry from 2001. Making nose, rattling bones, busy, active and seemingly just fine. But I really wasn’t – I was dead and I didn’t even know it.

The question is, are we preparing for life now or for life later? That’s really the question with New Year’s resolutions isn’t it? Life now or life later?

Focusing on the here and now is like carefully combing our hair before heading into a hurricane. Yet, we invest hours in the new diet, making our bodies look better, managing our money, making our cars cleaner, adding on to our homes, vacationing etc. Our time would be far better spent working our relationship with God – serving Him, working for his purposes, displaying His glory.

If we don’t, we’re no better than a bag of dry bones. God sees us as so much more. He sees our eternal possibilities. He bought us with great sacrifice (1 Corinthians 6:19-20). We honor Him when we live as the priceless beings we are, filled with the breath, the very Spirit, of God.

This New Year’s Eve let’s all resolve to relentlessly and recklessly pursue God. Let’s resolve to fix our eyes and our hearts on Jesus. Let’s resolve to find new ways to serve Him, to labor for His purpose, to shine His light into this dark world and to display His glory.

Besides, if you are like me, there is no way that diet lasts past January 7th.

 

Michael Homula, Executive Director of ICU Mobile

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