The "Little laws" of New Year's | Theocast

Hi, this is Justin, and today on Theocast, we are talking about the little L laws of new year season.

This is the time of year when we all make resolutions. We feel all kinds of pressure. There are a thousand different things that we need to be doing or abstaining from, and if we're honest, most of us fail in the things that we resolve to do, and it doesn't even take that long before we don't even live up to our own expectations for ourselves in the new year.

What do we do with all of this and what do we make of it from a reformed perspective, we talk about that in the regular episode and then the members episode, we talk about two kingdom theology and how that comes to bear on this conversation, and we also talk about the importance of maintaining proper distinctions between Bible and common sense.

We hope the conversations are helpful to you. Stay tuned. Welcome to Theocast, encouraging weary pilgrims to rest in Christ.

Conversations about the Christian life from a reformed perspective. Our hosts today are John Moffitt, pastor of Grace Reform Church in Springhill, Tennessee, Jimmy Buehler, pastor of Price Community Church in Willmar, Minnesota, and myself,

Justin Perdue, pastor of Covenant Baptist Church in Asheville, North Carolina. Brethren, we have met to podcast yet again in the year 2020.

Here we are in the early weeks of this new year. How are things going for the two of you? John, I guess maybe

I'm slightly more interested in what's going on with you than Jimmy, because you have the cultural update today. He does.

Yeah, I do. Yeah. No, it's, you know, beginning of the year, which means it's just 1 ,001 projects, as all of you probably are experiencing.

I have no idea what you're talking about. Yeah, I decided to make it 1 ,002 projects, so I'm finishing off my basement into three sections.

We're doing a playroom, my office, which I'm sitting in right now. If you're watching the video, I kind of make it a, it's a basement with brick walls, so I try to make it somewhat nice, and then a bathroom, so yeah.

I mean, it's church planning, Theocast, finishing off basements. It's all fun and games, so I go to bed giggling every night.

It's a blast. Doesn't everybody? Yeah, right.

No, but it's good. I'm excited. We just kicked off our new men's and women's Bible study. We're going to be doing

Chad Bird's book, Upside Down Spirituality. We just finished Sinclair Ferguson's book, which was

By Grace Alone, and we'll have that actually for you available. For those of you who want the study that I wrote for, that's a seven -chapter study, and we'll make that available on Theocast here soon, so stay tuned for that.

Yeah, just kind of back into it. That's the big event that's going on in my life right now, so I'm looking forward to kind of seeing how the basement will progress, and hopefully one day in the next few months,

I'll have an actual nice office to record in and not be looking at ducking and stuff like that, so.

Stuff like that. Really suffering for Jesus at the moment. Seriously. The three of us are knocking the rust off a little bit, getting our podcast groove back.

This is the first time all three of us have been behind the mics together in a few weeks' time now. So, we hope that we have a really good conversation today.

Jimmy, why don't you give the people just a little bit of a taste about what we're going to be chopping it up on today?

Well, and welcome, Jimmy Buehler, back to the mic. It's been since 2019 since we've seen him, so.

The people have been clamoring, and now they get what they want. That's right. That's what we like to tell ourselves.

So, gentlemen, as you well know, and as the listener who has perhaps perused our previous episodes well knows, one of the things we like to discuss here on Theocast is the distinction between law and gospel, and we don't need to get into that particularly right now because that is not really what we're going to talk about, but rather what we want to talk about is what we would call the little

L laws, and so let me back up and kind of explain what I mean by that. So, when we say law and gospel, specifically when we say law, what we are talking about, capital

L law, big L law, is God's moral law, or what we would see in the Ten Commandments as—or see in Scripture as the

Ten Commandments. And so, when we talk about distinguishing the law and the gospel, we're talking about distinguishing that from what

God has declared over us in Christ, freely by grace through faith. However, one of the things that we as people, because we are inherently bent toward a legal scheme, one of the things that we can do as people is we can jump on what we would call little

L laws, and this is language that we're borrowing from other brothers and sisters that we have seen, and by these little

L laws, we mean things that aren't necessarily required of us.

They may be helpful. They may serve a purpose for a season, but they're not necessarily required of us in Scripture, and we thought it's pertinent to discuss this because these are things that we see heavily in the new year, and so we create all of these little

L laws for ourselves in the new year, whether it be eating better, or exercising more, or doing this behavior more, or not doing this behavior as much, and not necessarily that these are bad things, and they can be good things, and they can serve a purpose, but I think what we want to discuss is perhaps maybe the pitfall or the dangers of living in that realm in ways that can perhaps become unhealthy, and so I don't know if one of you kind of wants to help flesh this out a little bit more and jump on what we mean by little

L laws. For the last few months, I've been super fascinated by social psychology and why people do what they do, why humans make decisions that they make, the pressures, the sickulosity, probably

David Zahl's book is what got me interested in looking at culture a little bit more, and as a pastor, it's helpful to understand why people in your particular country, so the

United States for me, why do they buy what they buy, and why do they look the way they look and talk the way they talk, and the pressures that they feel.

A good example of this would be, it's a conversation we were having before we got started. Jimmy brought this up to give him credit.

You ever been through the mommy blogger phase where you have these women who write about their parenting or about their housekeeping or about whatever it is, but they kind of present this expectation of successful moms and successful wives look like this, and they create this level of, unless you're doing it this way, unless you're educating your kids in this way, unless you're feeding your children in this way, unless you're exercising in this way, unless you're cleaning your home in this way, you are not a successful mom and you are giving your children and your husband less than what you should be giving them, and I would say that is right there, a pressure that is put upon us by the culture and has nothing to do with your spirituality, but it's easy to mesh those two together.

So I do CrossFit, true confession. Dun, dun, dun. Dun, dun, dun.

There it is. Yeah. Humble, humble brag. I, I, I rarely bring it up because I know that, man.

I will tell you this right now. I mean, if you meet Justin in person, you would never know he does CrossFit.

I mean, people kind of laugh when he says that. They're like, you do? That's right. Yeah. Uh, so at the, at the box, right.

And for those out there who are like, what in the world is he talking about? CrossFit gyms are referred to as boxes.

I didn't come up with it. I'm just using the language. But at the box right now, it's new year. And so there are a number of things going on.

And I would imagine that of all the people that go to the gym where I'd go, hardly any of them are

Christians, right? So these are just people doing these things because they think it's a good thing to do.

And there's, you know, dry January going on. Like people who generally consume quite a bit of alcohol are like, yep, not drinking for the month of January.

I'm going to lay off of it. There's nutrition challenges, right? Like whether it's paleo or keto or, you know, macros or whatever you want to do.

There's nutrition challenges. There's like a rowing challenge, like meters and calories. You can log on the rower over the course of the month of January.

I mean, it is just all over the place. And it is, it's hilarious because I like CrossFit, I like fitness and all, but the general perception, even around the

CrossFit gym amongst, I mean, I'm just going to say it like people that do not care about, about God, it is like self -justification and self -righteousness every place.

And it's like, well, you know, if you're, if you're serious about fitness and if you're serious about nutrition, and if you're like really want to take care of your body and all these kinds of things, or if you want to just get better at CrossFit, then you need to be doing all this stuff.

Like that's the implicit vibe that's just permeating the whole joint right now. And I go in and I just do my thing and work out and they laugh because like the pastor's the guy that's not doing dry

January or whatever. And I'm like, look, I'm really not interested in Nazarite vows. You know, it's just, it's just not where I'm at.

And so like, this is everywhere. I mean, John, you were talking about the, the, the mommy blogosphere. I'm talking about CrossFit.

We can talk about the church in a minute, but the point, the point is it's all over the place. Well, I, you know, unfortunately

I, I, I made the mistake. I told myself I'd never do this, but you know, I told somebody

I was doing keto and, uh, and so I was out to lunch with them and I happened to have chips and I'm like, oh boy, you know, that's too many carbs.

And if you're on keto. So he literally asked me, he goes, yeah, I was talking to my wife and I realized she's doing keto too.

And I told her, let's get you some chips and queso. And she's like, well, that's not keto. I said, well, John, John, John did it yesterday.

John, well, he's not following keto. He's not following the laws. He's a sinner.

So when it goes, apparently I'm an antinomian when it comes to the laws of keto, you absolutely are.

Yeah, that's right. So I, I, I think what we need to point out here is kind of perhaps the obvious that one, don't hear what we're not saying.

And what we're not saying is you are just a fantastic legal scheme of a person.

If you are trying to lose weight or become healthier, or perhaps become more disciplined in a specific area of your life, that is not at all what we were, we are saying, um, you know, even the apostle

Paul says, you know, physical training has value and it is of some value, you know, uh, that it is, it is good, you know, it is good to eat healthy foods, to exercise, to do these things.

However, I think because of our natural propensity towards living a legal lifestyle, and what

I mean by that is seeking to justify ourselves, our behaviors, our thoughts, our actions, our words, with how we live our life, our behavior, so on and so forth.

Because we are so prone to that, what we can do is we operate from this platform that if others are not living like I am, or they are not carrying out their life in ways that I am, we begin to look down our nose upon them and say, well, you know, they are not living as healthy as I am and, you know, don't you realize that your body is a temple and why don't you, why don't you take care of your body like, like me?

And it's like, well, I can't even begin to address that at this moment. Um, but I mean, let's just, let's just perhaps quit poking fun at, you know, eating, eating butter and candy, but more so look at kind of the, the ways that we as Christians kind of lay it on thick, particularly in January.

And so we're all on Twitter and fairly active on, on Twitter. And something that I noticed on Twitter was for like a solid three or four days after New Year's, it was like everybody was getting on Twitter, at least the people that, you know,

I saw on my timeline. And it was, oh, this is the

Bible reading plan that I'm choosing to do. And sure. And this is the Bible reading plan that I'm choosing to do.

And the interesting thing to me was, well, that's great. Um, well, one, why in the world do you need to tell the world that that is what you're doing?

Number two, it's, it's just like, that is a good thing. But, but guys, let me just throw this out to you.

How do we, I guess, from a reform perspective or a kind of status forward perspective is the language we like to use that, uh,

Christ has won our salvation once and for all based upon his perfect life, death and resurrection, not our own merits.

So, so how do we view these things without being so prone to the shame and the guilt and the self -judgmentalism that we put upon ourselves when we look and we're, we're, what is it?

It's almost February and perhaps we're already behind in our Bible reading. What, what do we, how do we view these things?

What would you guys say to that person that's perhaps struggling with that at this moment? I might want to make a couple of observations that are higher level,

I guess, maybe before answering that question, but I don't know if that's useful for us. I mean, John, do you want to answer that question directly first?

I'm happy to do it. Yeah, no, go ahead. I'll, I'll respond to whatever you say. Sure. So one anecdotal piece, and then a couple of observations.

I was having a conversation with some of the guys at, at my church recently, just because New Year and everything else.

And Jimmy, I saw some of the things, same things that you did on Twitter. And we were all talking about the reality of, you know, the

Bible reading plans and the, honestly, the yokes that people put on themselves this time of year, and it's, it's like, you know, there are all kinds of things that are good.

Like we've said, I mean, a Bible reading plan is good. It is certainly not bad. It's not necessary though.

You know? And so reading our Bibles is a good thing. Uh, but do we have to use a

Bible reading plan in order to do that? Absolutely not. It's a wisdom call. And so what a lot of people end up doing is they, they place themselves under a yoke or they, they set a goal that is just unattainable.

It's not realistic given their bandwidth and their limitations and everything else. And so you're basically walking into something that you're going to be behind on day 10, you're going to be despairing on day 24, and then by day 33, you'll have given up, you know, because it's, it's just so over your head, you know?

So one thing we discuss even with respect to the Bible reading piece is, you know, less can be more and let's think about this in digestible pieces and segments of time, and that's just a common sense kind of wisdom thing, you know,

Martin Luther, even about prayer. I mean, he said that prayer should be brief and frequent, you know, like that's a very liberating thought for so many people, like instead of resolving, to resolve to pray more is great, but you might not want to start with half an hour, you know, in the morning, you might want to just think, hey, well, maybe 60 seconds could be good and then move from there.

So those are just some common sense kind of pastoral things that we talk about in my context. I've got a couple of bigger observations that I want to make, but I'm gonna throw it over to you,

John, for a minute. Yeah, I would bounce off. Those probably are the two resolutions that most people go to that are spiritual.

It would either be giving more money, more time in prayer, more time in the word, or the third one would be memorization of scripture.

Scripture memorization, yeah. And to be clear, again, none of those things are bad. Yeah, wonderful.

Well, now I'm going to throw a wrench in there and say they can be, and most often they are. We're meaning in and of themselves, they're not inherently bad.

No, but just like a hammer in and of itself isn't bad, but it can be used to crush someone's hand or a gun in and of itself.

Yeah, so I'm going to probably say something that, you know, I'm going to say this,

I'm going to say it, I'm not trying to be a shock jock, and I definitely want you to hear me through. So if you're new to Theocast, let me finish my argumentation here.

There is a theory out there that the process of having a conversation with God, praying, or number two, the process of your eyes reading over the text does something spiritually for you.

And it's almost mystical, where as long as I may not be understanding what

I'm reading, or even worse, I'm misunderstanding what I'm reading, and then

I think it's actually benefiting me, I think is dangerous. Because what happens is people put so much hope, energy, and time, and dedication, and resolution into spending more time in prayer and more time in Bible reading, and when they're actually finished, they don't have a better understanding of truth, and they aren't having an increase in faith, which is what prayer should do, but they're having a better grasp on their self -righteousness.

And I would say their faith becomes weak because of their not seeing answer to prayer, so the struggle

I have with these little laws that the Bible actually doesn't set up, to use Jimmy's language, is that if not done correctly, you could actually cause more damage, and from my experience,

I mean, I'm walking through somebody right now that's having that circumstance. He's growing up in a large, massive

Baptist church, and he comes to Bible study for the first time, and his mind's being blown because he's like,

I've never read or understand the Bible that way before, as an example. I know you guys are probably ready to jump all over that, so go for it.

I think those are helpful thoughts, John, and Justin, I think I know the observation, the high -level observation you're going to make, and I want to make the same one, but I'm going to yield to you because I love you, and so I'm going to let you have it.

That's how to look smart, because even if he doesn't have that observation, now everybody's going to think he had it.

I like that. That's good. I think where the really large danger looms in this is that, particularly when it comes to our own spirituality, is that when we all of a sudden take the driver seat of defining what it means to be spiritual and what it means to not be spiritual, we do one of two things.

We either lay down these little L laws, and we accomplish them, and we think more highly of ourselves than we ought.

Case in point, and this is a hypothetical situation, would be in 2020,

I would like to read the Bible cover to cover, front to back, and so great, not a bad thing.

I mean, do it if that's really what you want to do, and we read it cover to cover, and then we get to the end of the year, and if our posture is, well,

I read the Bible cover to cover, and now I'm just that much more spiritual. Well, you just kind of gave yourself a law.

You set the bar, and then you jumped over it, so I'm not really sure what was accomplished there other than you read the word of God cover to cover, which okay, great, or the other thing, what can happen on the opposite side of that spectrum is this, is we say,

I am going to read the Bible cover to cover in the year 2020, and then before we know it, it's

July, and we're barely getting through the first five books, and so now all of a sudden, we're so behind.

We've got all these literal unchecked boxes on our bookmarks in our Bible, and all of a sudden, this heaping of self -shame and guilt and self -judgmentalism is brought upon because we begin to ask the questions.

Well, if I really love the Lord, would I not have followed through on this commitment? Would I not have done this more?

Would I not have prayed? Well, God's people pray, and I didn't pray as much as I wanted to pray, so what does that say of me?

Really, what these little L laws tend to do is they either rip out our assurance from underneath our feet, where it's not the

Spirit of God doing that. It's ourselves and our legal bent, or what it does is it props up the self -righteous man, the old man that lives within.

So, Justin, I'm going to pass the ball to you because I'm pretty sure I know what you're going to say, but I'm just really excited about it.

We're excited to announce that we have a new free e -book available at our website called Faith vs.

Faithfulness, a Primer on Rest, and we, the hosts, put this together to explain the difference between emphasizing one's faith in Christ versus emphasizing one's faithfulness to Christ, and how one leads to rest and how the other often to a lack of assurance, and you can get this at theocast .org

slash primer, and if you've been encouraged by what you've been hearing at Theocast, we'd ask you to help partner with us.

You can do that by joining our Total Access membership. That's our monthly membership that gives you access to all of our material that we've produced over the last four years, or simply by donating to our ministry, and you can do that by going to our website, theocast .org.

We hope that you enjoy the rest of the conversation. I think you're exactly right in what you just said, that these little laws and the way that we do this tends to produce either self -righteousness or despair.

I think you're exactly right about that. There are two big observations I want to make. I mean, the first one, this is just something that I've noticed, and it's prevalent.

When I look around at the resolutions that Christians make, hardly, if ever, do any of the resolutions made have anything to do with deeper participation in the corporate life of the church.

It's just an interesting thing. And it's all very personal stuff.

So it's really good. I mean, we want to be clear. It's really good to personally resolve to read the Bible. It's really good to personally resolve to pray and those kinds of things.

And something is off if our resolutions as believers do not include deeper participation in the corporate life of the church, because those are things that God has promised to bless in his word in a unique way.

When the church gathers, God shows up to minister to his people. And that is not true in the same way when we sit down privately to read or pray.

Not that those times aren't important or significant. Of course they can be. But the gathered church is a thing in the

New Testament. And so one of the things that we would want to exhort people to as pastors, I know, is, hey, resolutions are fine, but let's just make good ones and reasonable ones and wise ones.

And so if we're going to make them as Christians, they should include the church. Yeah, to add to that,

Justin, I would say as just a pure, simple illustration, I'm going to resolve to do such and such, which then

I'll spend less money, which then will give me more money to do whatever it is, give to the church or whatever charity it is.

But that's not a bad resolution. It's a great resolution. But just to,

I think, to even needle down even to more what you guys are saying, the church makes resolutions to mostly deal with sin issues in their lives.

So I struggle with such and such sin. Therefore, I'm going to resolve to do this and this so that I'll overcome and refrain from doing that sin, or I lack in this area of fruit of spirit.

So I'm going to do such and such to resolve, to make sure. And the answer to that, both of those, is that it's not more personal effort you need, but to embrace the means that God's already given you to establish either the overcoming of that sin or to establish that fruit in your life.

And this is going back to the illustration of prayer and Bible reading, is that if you aren't using prayer the way it's designed to be used, and if you aren't reading the

Bible the way it's supposed to be read, then you're actually causing damage. You're going to be digressing.

You're not going to be increasing because it's going to create either, one, a false sense of hope because you're putting it in the actions of what you're doing, or number two, you're going to come up with wrong doctrine, which is even more worse than a false sense of hope.

So, just to give you a great example of this, is that if you are struggling with sin, the church is designed to be there for one, to confront you, to comfort you, and then third, to support you as you progress through that and as you struggle against that sin.

So anyways, just to kind of pile on to what you guys were saying. Yeah, and if I may add to that, let me just say this, and I'll just spill my own guts by saying the worst sinner, the worst self -righteous person, the worst, most prone to heresy person that I know lives with inside Jimmy Buehler because left to myself trying to, quote unquote, resolve myself to be more spiritual,

I'll either fail and fall into this state of self -misery and doubt, or I'll, quote unquote, succeed and become this self -righteous jerk that begins to lay on these little

L laws on everybody else because what I begin to do is I begin to say, well, this worked for me.

You know, this is what I'm hitching my wagon to, and y 'all better get on with me because this is what it's like to be godly, or C, as John has said,

I begin reading scripture in such a way and at such a rate, but I'm misreading it.

I'm confusing things or I'm not reading it with the faithful men and brothers and sisters who have gone before me throughout history who have rightly divided the word of truth, and so I'm just going to my closet, reading it by myself, doing my own thing, disregarding what others have said about this, and then

I just begin to spill my guts here, there, and everywhere, and then it's just, well, I may or may not just be spitting out heresy, and so I just want to be so clear that what you're saying,

Justin, I believe is right on, is you said exactly what I thought you were going to say, which is great, that we shouldn't be divorcing our quote -unquote resolved lifestyle or our resolutions from the greater gathering of the church, which

I think is so important. Justin Perdue And the means of grace, right? I mean, that's the big thing, which

John already touched on, and you have too. I don't want to cut you off, man.

You good? Justin Perdue No. No, I'm good. You go. Justin Perdue Cool. So on Twitter, toward the end of the year,

I know I put up something to this effect, and I saw some other guys and gals putting up things to this effect.

As 2019 was drawing to a close, many were acknowledging all of the failure that happened in the calendar year of 2019 in the lives of Christians, and it's important that we do that, right?

So all those resolutions that we made for 2019, on many of those, if not all of them, we failed to meet the bar that we had set for ourselves, and so some people were a little bit punchy in the way they said it, you know, here are just condolences to everyone who has failed in all of their resolutions for 2019, and as we're rolling into 2020, more failure awaits, and as punchy and maybe absurd as that may sound to some people, it's actually healthy for us to talk in these terms, to remind ourselves that we will fail to meet the terms of all of our own resolutions, and so we're driven back.

Even the little L laws, right? So obviously the big L law in scripture, the first use of it is to drive us away and outside of ourselves to the

Savior, but even the little L laws that we sometimes shackle ourselves to, they also stand in judgment over us because we can't even meet that standard.

And so it's not bad that we realize this and we realize that, yeah, last year was full of failure, this year will be full of failure, and just like last year,

Christ will be enough for me this year, His righteousness and His merit in my place and all those things, and then here's the great part about that is that if we realize that and we own that in the church, then we can begin to make resolutions that can be helpful because we can make resolutions and do them in pursue them in freedom, not in this kind of bondage sort of way.

It's like, oh good, I can work at that and I can do that and I can choose to do that good thing that maybe isn't necessary, but it's good, and I can pursue it in freedom and in joy.

So do you guys, who's the most famous person in Christian history to be known for resolutions?

Jonathan Edwards, baby. Yeah, man. Have you guys ever read

Jonathan Edwards' resolutions? It's been a while. Well, there's one of them in there that says that he resolves to be the most spiritual person that he knows in the room at any time, which

I think is funny because in contrast to Jimmy, because Jimmy just said, I'm the most wicked person

I know at any time in the room, and of course, Jonathan Edwards wrote that when he was very young, but the ambition behind it, which is, is, it's the other thing you're going to notice in those resolutions is that you'll never find anything about Christ or the gospel in there, which is interesting.

So not to, I mean, my name is Jonathan Edwards, not to pick on him, but I am going to pick on him.

Yeah. And the thing is, not only did Jimmy say what he just did a minute ago, but if we read scripture, the apostle

Paul, obviously, at multiple points, talks about his own sin and how he's the chief of sinners, he's the foremost of sinners, how he doesn't trust in any of the righteousness or the godliness or whatever that is in his life.

He's looking to the righteousness that's been provided only through faith in Christ. And so I think whenever we start,

I know we talk about this stuff all the time, but whenever we start doing this measuring game, it's just bad. And it's bad, whether we're talking about our spirituality or even sometimes when we're talking about, you know, diet and, well,

I'm going to abstain from more stuff than you. You know, and so I'm more disciplined than you, and it's just no good.

Jimmy, jump in, man. Yeah. Well, what I was going to say, there's a member at our church who once wisely pointed out that at the end of a sermon, to not have a something to do has been so freeing for her because she said for the majority of her life, that has kind of been the cycle is that, you know, the end of the sermon was not

Christ, but rather what she could be doing for Christ.

And she had begun to see in the past couple of years that when sermons had ended like that, she would constantly come back the next

Sunday, either really high on her own horse that she had somehow accomplished that which the preacher called her to, or really low and dismal and almost wanting to reject the table, if you will, because she felt so unworthy and it can be so cumbersome.

And again, I know we mentioned this earlier, John mentioned it earlier, when we think about mamas, young mamas in particular, and I don't know how many of that demographic listen to our podcast, but I just want to say to the young moms out there, like we as men, we are married to young mamas and we recognize the difficulty that you face and the pressure that you face, that you cannot escape any platform of social media without feeling some sort of mom guilt, that you're going to see one of your friends or an acquaintance who is momming better than you, or they're really feeling the season of Advent, or they're really doing this really well and you're not doing it so well.

And so I think we would just want to say as your brothers in Christ that it's okay.

None of that matters. Please do not. It's not real either. Half of it.

Exactly. It's not real. It's kind of the cliche and teaching high school students,

I say this to them all the time, that social media is the great comparison of what

I feel on the inside to what I see on others' outsides. And all it does is it brings crushing shame and guilt to you.

So I think one of you wanted to jump in there. So I'll be glad. I'm going to jump in really quick and then kick it over to John.

Because of, like you said, Jimmy, I know you're married to a young mom. I am too. And I see what my wife does and what my wife battles.

And I see her struggle to try to find time to get a shower in the course of a day.

And that's when I can get very defensive, not only of my own wife, but of women in her position, when all of this nonsense in the evangelical world starts getting spewed this time of year about all the rigors and the disciplines and everything.

And if you take Christianity seriously, and if you're really passionate about Jesus, then you're going to be reading this and doing this and keeping up with this.

And that kind of thing crushes people, like our wives and like many of the women in our church.

And so as a pastor, I'm very protective of the young women in our church who have small children.

And I think it's appropriate that we would be. Anyway, I could say a lot of strong, strong, passionate things about that, but I'm not going to do that right now.

John, jump in. Save it for like 20 minutes. I don't know who this lady is, but my wife follows her on Instagram and she does, she purposely records everything that's wrong.

So, but she'll make fun of like makeup artists or clothing artists. She'll be out there in her sweatpants and sweatshirt that's way too big.

And clearly she hasn't combed her hair and she's like modeling it for you. And she's like, yeah, actually this is how

I just woke up. And nope. And it's, it makes my wife laugh because the parody of it is the, what you see on social media, that two to 10 seconds is all like perfectly captured.

And if you were to go through that person's phone feed, there was like 97 takes before they got the right one.

And in your mind, you're thinking, oh wow, look at that shot. And he's like, no, it took 97 shots. It took before they got that one.

And the 98th that they finally got it right. And we live in that world. Here's, here's what

I've discovered. When I started thinking about what I know of the gospel, what I know of depravity, and I, and I connected to social cues that's going on in our world right now.

When someone sins, when they fail, especially when it's one, a little law, new year's resolution, there is, as you guys have already mentioned, just despair that washes over us because we cannot believe we allowed that to happen to us.

I made this resolution. I put all the right places. And, and then you even hear language like,

I can't forgive myself for allowing this to happen. I can't forgive myself for doing this.

I'm so mad at myself. And I just want to tell you this. If you read scripture properly, you should never be shocked by your sin.

It should never shock you. As a matter of fact, according to first John, John tells us you should expect to sin.

Now I know that you've probably never heard a pastor tell you expect to sin, but let me put it to you this way.

I have a three -year -old and at dinner two nights ago, he knocked his cup of water into his plate and his whole plate was covered with water.

And you know what my wife and I's response was? Oh, well, let's get another plate. And of course he started crying and we said,

Hey buddy, it happens. You know, in our mind, we're going, he's three. That's what three -year -olds do.

I wasn't shocked. My wife wasn't shocked because I've had three other three -year -olds before. They've all done the same thing.

And with, when it comes to humanity, it's almost, we are trying to make sure at every, at every area, we, we are not going to allow ourselves to sin.

Now don't get me wrong. I'm not telling you it's okay to sin. All I'm telling you is what ends up happening is that when you are so overwhelmed by your sin, it actually prevents you from repenting and enjoying

God's love and being restored back to the Father because you must, this is part of the resolution problem.

We create a second new little law. And until I wallow long enough, I can't accept

God's forgiveness, right? I need to be angry. I need to be sad. I need to be upset.

And until I do those things, I'm not going to accept God's forgiveness. And I'm going to be just right next to Jimmy and argue with Jimmy that I'm actually a greater sinner than Jimmy is.

And so when I sin, I'm not shocked. I'm massively and fast as I can run back to the Father and say,

I did it again. And I really need you to forgive me and be restored. Yeah.

Well, and I would say this too, like when we become an expert in a law lifestyle or a law posture, we begin to lose sight of what repentance is and we replace repentance with penance.

And what I mean by that is when we begin to live in this legal scheme mindset, well,

I did X amount to get me to feel good and to feel right and to feel righteous, and then

I failed at that. And so I then need to do X amount in order to get myself to feel good and righteous again, and that's really not repentance, and that's really not

Christianity, because frankly, that kind of lifestyle, you don't need Christianity to do, you can go and be better by yourself.

I mean, I know plenty of believers, well, absolutely right. I know plenty of people who are not

Christians, who are far more disciplined, who are perhaps far more caring, far more emotionally intelligent toward other people than a lot of Christians that I know.

Far more likable, exactly, but they're not believers. But at the end of the day,

I look at them and I'm like, well, they're not living within the realms and the goodness of the gospel, they're still living within the realms of the legal scheme.

And so I think all what we're trying to say in the past half hour, 45 minutes that we've been discussing this, is what we're trying to push us to is exactly what you said,

Justin, that, hey, Christ was enough for you in 2019, and Christ is going to be enough for you in 2020.

And that isn't to say, don't fast, don't fight against sin, but rather fight status forward and fast status forward, that your righteousness is found and banked in Christ and Christ alone, and not these little laws.

And when you want to diet, whatever, if you're doing keto, and then all of a sudden you go bananas for cheesecake, it's like, hey, you went bananas for cheesecake and praise

God that he has given you taste buds to enjoy a delicious piece of cheesecake and walk forward in gratitude.

So that's, that's just all I want to say. Jimmy, I know you and I were talking, we were having some technical difficulties earlier and during that brief intermission, you and I were making the observation together about how most of the resolutions as well that people make are in the realm of depriving themselves of something.

Yeah. And inherently negative. Right. They're inherently negative. Like we're going to deprive ourselves of this. We're not going to eat that.

We're not going to drink that. We're not going to go there. We're not going to do that thing. And it's, it's interesting that that's how we are.

That also speaks to the, the, the legal mindset and the fact that we see so many things as prohibitions, you know, and that what we need to be doing is abstaining from stuff if we're going to really be living a disciplined life and monasticism.

Correct. Yeah. And it's, it's exactly right. Or even, even borderline asceticism, you know, it's almost like that's more discipline.

And maybe it would be good for us to resolve this year in 2020 to enjoy the grace of God more.

Now, again, people hear us say that and they immediately assume, well, what you're telling people is to go be licentious.

Give me a break. That's not what we're saying at all, but enjoy God's grace more. Enjoy your forgiveness.

You know, go after church on a Sunday rather than freaking out about what you need to go do in order to not disappoint

God. Why don't you go hang out with your friends from church and enjoy friendship and good food and good drink?

Do that more often in 2020. Enjoy all the good gifts that God has given.

That would be a great thing to resolve ourselves to. And it would cultivate, like you were mentioning earlier, Jimmy, a heart of gratitude, you know, toward the

Lord, which is an appropriate thing that we would walk humbly and with gratitude before Him. So yeah, just a couple of thoughts there.

No, I think that's good. Before we jump over to the members' podcast, which I have a couple of extra things

I want to throw in there for sure. Going back to explaining what Jimmy was saying about status forward,

I will tell you that my ambition for my church, and I can speak for these two guys because I know this to be true, is that our ambition for our churches is that our congregants feel so secure in their relationship to the

Father, and I would even say a more technical word, which we'll explain here in the next members' podcast, but in their union with Christ, they're so secure there, they have such a tight grasp on it, that from that position, they then live their life forward, which then helps them navigate the pressures of temptation, the pressures of sin, of a dying body, of failures and people hurting them, and the resolve

I think every Christian should make is I want to make sure that I am increasing in every way means possible of understanding and enjoying my union with Christ, and I will tell you right now, it isn't by resolving to read your

Bible in 365 days. Paul makes it very clear the way in which we grow up into the knowledge of the

Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, in which we grow up and love, is through the body of Jesus Christ, which

I would encourage you, if you're going to resolve to do anything this year, resolve to find a church that's going to feed you

Christ and that you can engulf yourself into. That would be a great resolution. Or move to a city that has a great church.

That's another great resolution, just to throw my two cents there. Yeah, and John, if I might just reiterate, to use the hammer correctly and to pound in that nail, if in 2020 you are resolved to read through Scripture and become a quote -unquote prayer warrior, to use evangelical cliche

Christianese, if you are resolved and you accomplish those things, and yet you are not part of a church or faithfully serving, man, all you've done is you've created a figment of your imagination of godliness that's not true godliness, because those things that you've become super disciplined in have not exerted themselves into love and good works toward God and neighbor.

You've just become really monastic and ascetic and good for you. I mean, frankly, scripturally,

I don't know if it would really back up what you're trying to accomplish. I had that same conversation with a young man today about that, about what our works and our obedience and all that is for.

And we tend to think in the evangelical church that our obedience and our good works ultimately, in one sense, are for us.

We'll talk about the glory of God, but it's all about me personally glorifying the Lord or me personally growing in my faith.

And yeah, like we say all the time, God doesn't need your good works, but your neighbor does. And our perspective is just so often skewed when it comes to that.

And a lot more than we could say, fellas, we're going to head over now to the members podcast. If you don't know what that is, you could make your way to theocast .org

and find out more information about our total access membership, where you can get access, as the name implies, to a lot of other content that we have for you.

One of which, one of those things, the premium content is the members podcast that comes out once a week.

Over there, we're going to let our hair down a little bit. We might use a few more big theological words and try to define those and we'll continue the conversation.