When it comes to New Year’s goals, I’m very aware that many despise the practice. The resistance is reasonable.

Some reject resolutions as a marketing scheme created to counter the post-Christmas purchasing lull. Others feel that new commitments are pointless because they’re so often abandoned by February. Still others resist the negativity of starting a new year focusing on who they’re not. As understandable as these objections are, though, I can’t fathom entering a new year and viewing it as just another day. You could say I’m haunted by the moment.

Every year, when I write “January 1,” it dawns on me again that I’ve been gifted with another year on this earth. I’ve made yet another trip around the sun. It may seem as though life goes round in a circle: another January, another year, another chance — but then the haunting moment comes: “January 1 . . . 2023.” That moment never fails to take my breath away. After we watch the ball drop and the clock pass midnight, we wake up where we have never been before — the land of a new year — and when this year is over, we will never be here again. All of history — past, present, and future — resides not on a circle, but on a line.

The line that began with the creation of the heavens and the earth is headed somewhere — to the culminating point in which the dwelling place of God is with man, and all those who have trusted in Jesus experience the joy of God making all things new (Revelation 21:1–5). Knowing where history is headed and that God is at work along the way, I can’t imagine beginning my one and only shot at 2023 without pursuing some big goals for the year ahead.

If these words inspire you to do the same, I’ve discovered a well-marked yet seldom-traveled pathway to setting wise goals.

Bigness of Small Decisions

Hikers know that sometimes the path to a destination seems to take you in the opposite direction. A journey to the mountaintop can start downhill. In these moments, it requires faith to trust the trail. Similarly, the journey to something big will be attained by consistently embracing that which is small. Small decisions lead to great destinations.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise to those who are familiar with Jesus’s way of life and teaching. Not only does he consistently tell us to embrace paradox, but he also explicitly teaches that the way of the kingdom begins small. The kingdom is like a grain of mustard seed, “the smallest of all seeds,” that grows and becomes a tree (Matthew 13:31–32).

“Jesus explicitly teaches that the way of the kingdom begins small.”

And not only does the kingdom of God start small, but progress is often hidden from our sight, like “leaven that a woman took and hid in three measures of flour, till it was all leavened” (Matthew 13:33). If the pathway to greatness starts small and progress often remains hidden, it’s no surprise that so few consistently embrace it.

Our flesh keeps us on the couch, waiting for opportunities that appear to promise instant and immense impact. Those who constantly dream of the big victory often overlook the small decisions required to get there. This type of home-run mentality seems to be exactly where Satan wants us to be. It’s no secret that he tempted Jesus with comfort and glory (fake as it may have been) that was instant and immense (Matthew 4:1–11). I’m convinced Satan is still running the same playbook, and we may be easy targets.

We can test how susceptible we’ve been to his scheme by what we do (and don’t) remember about David, the shepherd boy who eventually becomes king of Israel.

Fighting Giants or Making Lunch?

Regardless of your religious upbringing, most people can name David’s big victory. He defeated the Philistine giant, Goliath. Far fewer, however, can recall what brought David to the battlefield that day. David didn’t wake up in the morning, put on some hype music, and look into the mirror proclaiming, “The world will remember you after today.” No, it was actually a small, humble decision that led him to that great destination.

While all the “men of Israel” went to fight the Philistines, David was considered too young and remained at home tending the sheep. David’s father came with a request: “Will you take lunch to your brothers at the battlefield?” If there ever were a pathway to greatness that started small, it was this one. Specifically, David was asked to bring grain and bread to his brothers, and ten cheeses to King Saul (1 Samuel 17:17–18). David was a tomato away from being a pizza-delivery boy. Humor aside, you can imagine the potential tension in his heart.

On the one hand, he may have been crushed that his greatest contribution to the war was cheese, not combat. On the other hand, I suspect he still carried himself with honor, remembering the moment when God led the prophet Samuel to anoint him as the future king of Israel (1 Samuel 16:11–13). The promise was certain, but the pathway remained unclear.

“Small decisions lead to great destinations.”

Imagine if David had responded to his father, “Dad, really? Lunch? Cheeses? No thanks, I’m holding out for something big today.” By embracing this small, seemingly insignificant act of service, David was unknowingly set on a path to greatness. Small decisions lead to great destinations.

My Three Small Decisions

As you prepare for the new year, I would encourage you to consider the small decisions you might make and keep. Personally, I am committed to starting the year with three small decisions in mind.

The first is to start each day with devotion. The key moment will be when I first wake each morning. My goal is to turn my attention toward God in prayer and the word before turning to my phone. My second decision is to deliberately and consistently look for small acts of kindness that could serve those around me. Lastly, I am committed to taking it one day at a time. After proclaiming that we should praise the name of the Lord forevermore, David starts surprisingly small: “From the rising of the sun to its setting, the name of the Lord is to be praised” (Psalm 113:2–3).

One devotion, one kindness, and one day at a time. I’m starting with those three small decisions this year. What will yours be?

Small Steps to Destruction

One reason I am so convinced of the power of small decisions is because the opposite is true as well: small decisions lead to great destruction. Just as we underestimate the impact of our small decisions toward Christ, we also tend to overlook the small, seemingly insignificant decisions that lead us away from him. We daydream of the big victories, and have nightmares about committing big evils, and ignore all the small wayward decisions that lead us there. Once again, our memory of King David (or better yet, our lack of it) doesn’t serve us well.

David’s big evil is just as iconic as his big victory. He slept with Bathsheba, a married woman, and then, to cover up what he’d done, had her husband given a sure-death assignment on the battlefield (2 Samuel 11:14–15). As with the Goliath victory, we would benefit from remembering how David ended up entwined in such great evil.

As you could probably guess, David didn’t set out to have an affair and commit murder. Like the pathway to greatness, the road to destruction also began with a small decision. For David, it began here: “In the spring of the year, the time when kings go out to battle, David sent Joab, and his servants with him, and all Israel” (2 Samuel 11:1). David had a job to do, yet chose to send someone else. However inconspicuous it may appear at first glance, it was the first step among many that set him on a path to destruction. Small decisions lead to great destruction.

New Year, Small Decisions

I imagine that the dark side of small decisions lands heavy, as it should. We ought to regularly pause and consider the unwanted consequences of our daily choices. In doing so, we are following the way of the wise, who “see danger ahead and hide themselves” (Proverbs 27:12). While this isn’t a pleasant process, there’s a silver lining around the cloud of our choices. If small decisions can take us to great destruction, then it is also through them that we can avoid many evils.

Perhaps this is why Joseph sends his brothers home from Egypt with the seemingly small request to “not quarrel along the way” (Genesis 45:24). Joseph could have rightly charged them not to plot to kill or sell each other into slavery, but he didn’t. It’s conceivable that Joseph knew that the flaming hatred they once had toward him grew from the kindling of quarrelling. Friends, small decisions can prevent great destruction.

Whether they lead us to great destinations or great destruction, small decisions will shape the direction of our lives. Tomorrow night, we will hear those familiar words, “Happy New Year!” It will feel like we’ve been here many times before, but we haven’t. History has now made its way to the year 2023, and we are part of the story. I invite you to join me in pursuing something great this year, one small decision at a time.

Audio Transcript

We’re back, and we’re back into an online controversy — a “brew-haha,” as it was called. Pastor John, on September 30 you tweeted about coffee. You posted Hebrews 12:28, which says, “Let us offer to God acceptable worship, with reverence and awe.” And in light of this reverent, awe-filled vision for our worship, you posed this open question: “Can we reassess whether Sunday coffee-sipping in the sanctuary fits?”

As I mentioned last time, the tweet was loved and hated and spread all over the Internet to the point that, after a couple weeks, it had 1,000 retweets, 1,500 comments, 3,000 likes, 2.7 million views, and feature articles online from Fox News here in the States and the Daily Mail in the UK. None of which you saw, which we talked about last time, on Monday.

Now, there’s a lot behind that tweet, a whole worldview really. So, we are building out the context behind it, and you are talking about how to build and shape a church with this “reverential vibe” in everything that happens on Sunday morning. Last time, you signaled that you wanted to get into the nitty-gritty of helping church leaders move their church away from casual worship toward something better and more fitting to what Hebrews, and all of the Bible, calls for. So, get practical, and pick up the discussion for us at this point.

I argued last time that sipping coffee in the holiest hour of congregational worship does not fit with the reverence and awe that Hebrews 12:28 calls for. “Let us offer to God acceptable worship, with reverence and awe,” Hebrews says.

But I argued that sipping coffee is not the heart of the matter. The heart of the matter is that people and leaders don’t have a heart that resonates with what I mean by “reverence and awe” and the holiness, the sacredness of that hour of congregational worship on Sunday morning (usually). Those realities are not prominent in their mind and heart, those reverent realities. They know those words: reverence, awe. They know the words, but the words don’t have compelling existential content, with the kind of serious joy that makes people eager for reverence and awe. They’re just words.

And I argued that you don’t solve that problem by creating external rules. You solve it by awakening internal, heartfelt reverence. So, things that are unfitting don’t get outlawed; they just fall away. I think that’s the way I tried to do it. I don’t think I ever laid down rules for 33 years of preaching.

What I’d like to do here now is to point a way, a possible way forward for pastors to lead the church gradually — say, over five to ten years. You’ve got to be patient to move from the atmosphere of a casual, chipper, coffee-sipping, entertainment-oriented gathering to a more seriously joyful, reverent, deeply satisfying encounter with God. So, maybe in this episode, Tony, we could talk just for a few minutes about the kind of preaching that would lead in that direction.

Developing a Godward Mindset

But before I say that, the pastor’s mindset overall should be that it’s fitting for one hour a week, or an hour and a half, that the people of God meet him with a kind of radical Godward focus that has weightiness to it and seriousness to it, and that this weightiness and seriousness of God-centeredness become the most satisfying experience in our people’s lives. That’s the mindset we’ve got to have: “I want to do this in a way so that they love this, they want this, they come for this. This is not tolerated — it’s desired.” That’s the mindset.

We will never out-entertain the world. I just need to settle that. We’ll never out-entertain the world, nor should we try, because we have something infinitely better, something our souls were made for.

And most of our people don’t know this. They don’t know what’s better than the fun they have in watching videos and other kinds of entertainment. They just don’t know. They’ve never tasted the real thing. Something profoundly stabilizing, strengthening, refining, and satisfying at the depths of our being is what people long for, and they don’t know what they’re longing for until they’re shown it over time.

So, here are five appeals to pastors with regard to preaching.

1. Build Bible-people.

Rivet the people’s attention on the Bible, the very words of the Bible. Deal in great realities, and show them those realities from the text. Build trust in the Bible. Build trust in yourself as a Bible man, so that people say, “We can trust him because he’s a Bible man.”

Some people will leave the church because of this orientation; it’s too frightening and threatening to submit to the Bible like this. Others are hungry for this, and they’re going to come. Over time, seek to bring into being a people whose mindset is self-consciously and happily under the Bible’s authority. Seek to create a people who measure everything by the Bible. Every thought, every emotion, every word, every action, put through the sieve of Bible teaching — and what the Bible really teaches about everything.

The way you handle the Bible and the glories you see in it will bring about this kind of congregation. They’re not their own. They belong to Christ, and his word is their life and their law. That’s what needs to come into being through your Bible-saturated preaching.

2. Make God the dominant reality.

Make the glory of God and all that he is for us in Jesus the main reality people sense over the years, as they hear you preach week in and week out: “God is the main reality here. God is big. God is weighty. God is precious. God is satisfying. God is near. Don’t mess with God. God loves us.” I mean, it’s just a massive, weighty vision of God. Make the greatness and beauty and worth of God the dominant reality.

Be amazed, pastor, be amazed at God continually — that God simply is, that he just is, without beginning. This blows the mind of every four-year-old, right? “Who made God, Daddy?” the child asks. “Nobody made God,” responds the father. “Woah.” Eyes get big. “He just always was there.” God is absolute reality. All else, from galaxies to subatomic particles, is secondary. Everything we see is secondary.

God is the primary reality. Help your people to see this and feel this, that God relates to everything in their lives, all the time, as the main thing. He is the main thing in their lives. He’s the supreme treasure, the main value, the brightest hope, the one they are all willing to live for and die for.

3. Tremble at God’s wrath.

Make sure that the ugliness of the disease of sin in us and in the world and the fury of the wrath of God against that disease are felt by your people. God’s grace, precious grace, will never be amazing — not the way it should be — if our people do not tremble at the majesty of God’s transcendent purity and holy wrath against sin. If they do not feel the fitness of the outpouring of the cup, of the fury of his wrath against sin, they will never be amazed that they’re saved.

This is one of the main contributors to the happiness of serious reverence. It’s paradoxical, I know, that you would have a high, holy, trembling view of God’s wrath be the main contributor to the happiness of the seriousness of reverence. But it is so.

The 1,500-degree fire of the building from which we have just been snatched by the firemen can still be seen. We see it. We feel it. We see the smoke. We hear the crackle. And the trembling of our unspeakably happy thankfulness is anything but casual.

4. Exalt Christ and his work.

Exalt Christ in his majesty and lowliness, in his suffering and resurrection, and in the unimaginable riches of what he purchased for us. Romans 8:32, “He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things?” Every single good that God’s elect receive, from now to eternity, is owing to the blood of Jesus Christ. Knowing that I don’t deserve this and what it cost him makes me tremble in my ecstasy.

5. Wonder over the new birth.

Finally, teach your people the miracle of their own conversion. Nobody knows from experience the glory of the miracle of new birth. We only know the wonder of the new birth from Scripture.

“Even when we were dead in our trespasses, [God] made us alive together with Christ . . . and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus” (Ephesians 2:5–6) — nobody knows this. Nobody knows this stupendous reality from experience. We know it because God tells us it is so.

We have to teach our people that they are supernatural beings. Most people come into the sanctuary feeling very natural, right? We have to help them feel another way: “You’re a miracle. You’re a walking resurrection from the dead. You’re not merely natural anymore. This is not a moment of gathering natural people. Our faith, which is our life, is a miracle. God created it. It is trust. Our saving faith is trust in a supremely treasured Savior and Lord.”

May I venture to say that preaching like this will, over time, create in your people an eagerness to encounter God in his word in a way that will make coffee-sipping seem out of place?

http://rss.desiringgod.org/link/10732/15249525/how-is-the-armor-of-god-ordered