Yogi Berra once famously proclaimed, after watching Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris hit back-to-back home runs: "It's deja vu all over again." New England Patriots fans everywhere this Monday morning are probably feeling exactly like that. Four years ago they lost in heartbreaking fashion to Eli Manning and the New York Giants, and some of the similarities were eerie - the improbable catch by a wide receiver (David Tyree in 2008, Brandon Manningham in 2012); the game sealing ball going through the hands of a normally sure-handed Patriots player (Asante Samuel in 2008, Wes Welker in 2012).
Yesterday at New Life we kicked off a new series that will run for five weeks that was themed around the idea of a big game. Our thought was that there are thousands of decisions that we will make throughout our lives that will have major impact on the person that we become. Those decisions will never play out on a stage with 170 million people watching, but that doesn't mean that our decisions are any less significant. In fact, they are more significant than any decision made in a football game, no matter how important that game seems at the time.
Of all those decisions, the one we talked about yesterday is the most significant. Very simply the most critical call any of us will ever make in our lives is whether or not we will respond to Jesus' call for us to come and follow him. We looked at a pretty well known passage from Romans 10, where Paul writes about the decision that God set in front of Israel in the first covenant, and in front of us in the second covenant.
It is essentially a decision between the choice to keep trying to save ourselves by works of our own righteousness, or to accept that we cannot save ourselves, cannot make ourselves "good enough" for God's standard and so accept his grace, mercy and offer of life extended to us. In the first covenant, God asked the nation of Israel to obey his laws wholeheartedly, not just as a ritual obligation, but they made a mess of that situation. In the second covenant, God sent Jesus into the world to be the sacrifice for sin once and for all, and to invite us to give our lives wholeheartedly to him in faith - confessing with our mouths that Jesus is Lord and believing with our hearts that God raised him from the dead.
This is a simple message, but it is by no means easy. It is simple to say that one must confess this with his mouth and believe this with his heart and he will find salvation. It is not easy, on a practical level, to confess that Jesus is Lord; not when so many forces around us would war against that confession, would tell us that Jesus was a good teacher and a moral man, but was not "Lord" in any sense of the word. To believe in your heart that God raised Christ from the dead is simple, but also not easy, because it requires that we suspend our disbelief, and accept the possibility that something happened with Jesus that had never happened before and has never been repeated since.
But if faith arises in our hearts to that end, then salvation comes to rescue us from ourselves. As I said yesterday, this is the biggest decision that you will ever make - whether or not you will in faith believe who Jesus is and in faith confess it. Because that is true, I will never rush anyone to make that decision when they're not ready, but I do know that when the opportunity presents itself, I should make clear the choice before us.
Next week we'll start looking at how we make decisions in different phases and stages of our lives, so I hope you and a friend will pull yourselves out of the Patriots-induced depression and join us next Sunday at 10:30!
Good word Keith! There was no place on Facebook to "Like" this so I'm doing that here!
Posted by: Ray Farnum | February 06, 2012 at 01:47 PM