I hate New Year Resolutions.  I tried something ambitious last year thinking that blogging about it would keep me accountable to it, but I failed miserably in record time.  This year I am refraining from making a resolution because I know that I will only be setting myself up for failure.  That being said, I do plan to work on one thing through the coming year and beyond.  I’m going to work on where I put my focus.  I think most people fail at resolutions before they even start because of where their focus is.

As I’ve been reading The Naked Gospel by Andrew Farley, there has been a pull on my heart to see God’s grace in every moment.  I struggle with sin like anyone else, and as a Christian I know that I am redeemed and all of my sin was taken from me at the cross of Christ.  When you look at sin as willful disobedience towards God, it would make sense that a Christian would want to avoid sin at all cost.  The problem is that Christians sin too.  Dave Buehring pulls sin apart in his study A Discipleship Journey.  The root of sin is unbelief.  Unbelief starts with a seed of deception that we cannot rely on God’s promises.  Unbelief leads to pride when we say that we can make it on our own and find satisfaction ourselves.  This pride leads to willful disobedience, and if left unchecked can become habitual sin.  To sum this up in Buehring’s words, “Unbelief in the mind moves to pride in the heart and bears the fruit of disobedience in the will.”  So if we believe in God and His promises to us, why do we still sin?

I think the answer to that is where our focus is.  When we think about sin, the automatic thought process is to think about the rules we are breaking when we sin, or ‘the law’.  As Andrew Farley puts it, “…the law breeds only two things: defeat f you’re honest and hypocrisy if you’re not.”  When we focus on the rules that we are trying to obey to avoid sin, failure is inevitable.  When we focus on our relationship with our Father God, and the grace extended to us through Christ Jesus, we tend to draw closer to Him and further from sin.  That’s not to say that we should just ignore the law, but we should focus on our relationship with Christ.  As my friend Pastor Scott Stevens would say, “True accountability comes from our relationship with Christ.”

So my goal is to draw closer to God through my relationship with Christ.  I am not setting up dieting rules, an impossible reading regiment, or committing to quit a specific sin in my life.  I am just trying to put my focus on Christ through ever moment of every day.