A Leader’s Resolution

A new year has come to grow in the Lord, and a new year has come to help lead others to grow in the Lord—all with the same goal to become more spiritually mature this coming year than we were last year.

Spiritual leaders are player-coaches: intensely interested in their own spiritual growth, and also passionate about spiritual growth in others.

But it begins with us. Let us teach others and set the example by resolving to:

• • Remember that we are new creations in Christ; we are not the old person we used to be.
    Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. (2 Cor. 5:17)

• • Repent of past or residual sins that have infiltrated our lives as “normal.”
    “Remember therefore from where you have fallen; repent, and do the works you did at first … repent.” (Rev. 2:5, 6)

• • Reinvigorate our walk by grace through faith, as though each day is the day of our salvation.
    Therefore, as you received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in him… (Col. 2:6)

• • Refocus on what is most important in our ministries, to preach the gospel for salvation and for life.
    For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. (1 Cor. 2:2)

• • Reconfigure our desires to…
    know [Christ] and the power of his resurrection, and … share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death… (Phil 3:10)

• • Reorient our motivation that so easily goes astray.
    Not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect, but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. 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. (Phil. 3:12–14)

• • Re-ignite our passion.
    If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds [“affections” KJV] on things that are above, not on things that are on earth. (Col. 3:1–2)

• • Retire our pride.
    Far be it from me to boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world. (Gal. 6:14)

• • Raise the bar toward greater spiritual maturity.
    But grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. To him be the glory both now and to the day of eternity. Amen. (2 Peter 3:18)