Back and Forth

I’ve always loved the week between Christmas and New Year’s for many reasons–Bowl games between anonymous football teams, time off from school, and some great sales for those with patience among us. (I am not usually patient enough to take advantage of the sales).

But at a deeper level, this week seems to be a bit quieter than many others, often affording a little time to reflect on the year behind and the year ahead. We will be reading from one of my favorite texts in the Book of Acts. There, we will see how Paul looks back and goes forth during one of his great journeys. As we read, we will find that remembering is much more than merely reciting the facts of the past and vision is much more than simply coming up with an idea for the future.

My prayer is that with our families we will be able to enter into this week after Christmas looking back and forth with wisdom and insight from the Lord!

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Grace Fellowship Church

Jon Stallsmith

December 28, 2014

Back and Forth

Acts 20:17-35

If you have your Bible, go ahead and open it to the book of Acts, chapter 20. If you don’t have a Bible, you can slip up your hand, and we will put a Bible in your hand, and you can follow along with us. Also, if you need a sheet for notes, you can get one of those if you’re going to jot down any of the incredible insights that will be coming at you in the next 30 or 35 minutes from the Scripture.

Or also if you are new or you have a prayer request, the bottom of that sheet is detachable, and you can communicate with us that way. Drop it in the offering plate as it goes by after the sermon. This morning, we’re doing something a little bit different. You know our tendency here at Grace is to preach through big chunks of Scripture, verse by verse expositionally. It’s part of who we are. But we find ourselves at a little bit of a bridge week.

We’ve wrapped up our study of the Prophets through the fall. We’re about to begin with the gospel of John next Sunday. So I was really praying and asking the Lord, “What should we read together this morning?” This passage from Acts 20 is really one of my favorite passages, and I think it will reach us in a timely fashion.

But before we get into reading it, here’s a question just to chew on, just to think about, maybe to reflect on a little bit…How good is your memory? What was the question? Exactly. Yeah, how good is your memory? My memory is good on some things, and it’s bad on others. I am really good at forgetting where I put these. Do you guys ever do that with your keys? They just tend to sneak into forgotten places, and it only happens that you forget where your keys are when you’re in a big hurry. We forget stuff sometimes.

Do you ever do this? Do you ever take a thing and you put it in a special place? You’re like, “I want to remember where this is so I’m going to put it in this special place,” and then you forget what the special place is. I did that the other day with my briefcase here at the church. I was sure it was stolen. We were looking for an hour, and the special place where I had left my briefcase was actually underneath the stage. I thought, “I will certainly not forget it underneath the stage,” and I had forgotten it underneath the stage.

Or kids. Some of you kids, have you ever like lost a toy or something you really wanted to be playing with and you have no idea where it is? What do you do when that happens? “Mom!” Because somehow (this is like a grace of God) our mothers have a supernatural ability to keep track of everything in the house. At least my mom did.

My parents are here this morning. It’s really sweet. My brother and his wife. Yeah, give my parents a hand. They are sweet people, and they raised a couple of really good sons. There are only two boys in the family, just in case you thought that there were like three and one of them was… Never mind. But yeah, I felt like my mom would always know. “Mom, where’s my baseball glove?” It’s like, “Oh, it’s on the shelf.” She knows.

But when it comes to memory, we often tend to think that a good memory is the kind of memory that can retain the information, right? Our school system is often based on this idea. If you can sit down at the test and remember the capital of every state in the United States then you get a 100 on the test, and this is a good score. You can retain and regurgitate the information. Or maybe in the business world if you can remember the profit and loss balances of the last six months just off the top of your head, people would say, “Oh, you have a really good memory.”

Or even games. Have you guys ever played that memory game? Some people call it Concentration. You put out all the cards and try to find matches. You flip one card and it’s a purple grape, and then you flip another card and it’s a red raspberry. You’re playing against a 7‑year-old, and they flip purple grape and purple grape, then red raspberry and red raspberry, then yellow banana and yellow banana, and then orange and orange. They’ve won, and you just think, “You have a marvelously uncluttered mind…and a great memory.”

So often, when we think about the question…Do you have a good memory?…we think about our skill at retaining information, right? But what if in the kingdom of God having a good memory means something more than that? What if it’s more than just being able to recite the facts? Or maybe when we’re thinking about our own lives, what if it’s more than simply being able to regurgitate the events of our lives? What if having a good memory is talking about some quality we bring to our reflection on the past? Some way of seeing the past in a godly way.

What if that’s what a good memory is all about? Then there’s a second question. Not just do you have a good memory, but…Do you have a good imagination? How does your imagination function? Maybe a good way to chew on that question a little bit would be if you had a blank sheet of paper and I asked you to draw a picture of 2015, what would you imagine would happen in 2015? What would 2015 be like? Just imagine forward.

Think about the coming year. Dream a little bit. If you had to draw a picture of 2015, what would you draw? I know I’ve probably lost many of you to doodles now for the rest of the sermon, but that’s okay. If you’re drawing pictures of 2015, that’s a useful exercise. What people would you put in that 2015? What would be the dominant events? What sort of things would you be thinking about?

See, because God gives us both a memory and an imagination so we can function and live really well in the present. We find ourselves between these two places, the past and the future, right now, and so much of what has happened in the past, our memory, shapes us here, and also where we’re headed, our future, shapes us right here.

I’ve found that this time of year, in between Christmas and New Year’s, for many of us, myself included, tends to be a little bit of a slower season. David was just sharing about that. Sometimes it can feel like our work schedules have been dialed back a little bit, and often we have the opportunity to be together with family. Kids are out of school. We get to share a few more meals perhaps than we normally would.

So this time of year… There’s nothing inherently sacred about the new year. It’s not like January 1 is some magical date, but because it is a holiday and because we do think about the new year, it’s often a great little time, a little window, to reflect back on our memories from the previous year, and maybe even the previous years, and also to look forward or think about, “How are we going to go forth into the coming year?” It’s just a great time because you just have a little window to reflect back and to go forth.

So that’s what our sermon is called this morning, Back and Forth. We’re going to be looking at Acts 20 where Paul is engaged in a very similar exercise, because Paul here in Acts 20, to set the context, is wrapping up his third missionary journey. You guys remember Paul the apostle. He started off as a Pharisee, a very devout Jew. He hated the followers of Jesus. He was there at the stoning of Stephen, one of the first Christian martyrs. He applauded the action.

He was on his way to Damascus to find some other believers, some followers of Jesus, to persecute them, and along the road (you know the story; it’s very familiar to many of us) Jesus appeared and said, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?” Saul is blinded when he arrives in Damascus. He is healed. He comes to faith, trusts Jesus.

His whole life is radically transformed, and he goes forward then as one of these great apostles, one of these sent ones. He plants all these churches. He takes these missionary journeys through the ancient world in the Roman Empire and to Greece and modern-day Turkey, parts of modern-day Syria, and eventually winds up all the way in Rome.

Here in Acts 20, here’s this Saul. Paul actually is his Greek name. Paul, as most of us know him, is winding up his third missionary journey, and he’s headed back to Jerusalem. On this journey he has been most of his time in Ephesus. That’s where the great church of Ephesus had been planted. He spent almost three years in Ephesus. He built really deep relationships there in Ephesus. Then he carried on, did some other trips.

Now he’s on his way back, and on his way back, because he’s traveling most likely by sea, he is at this town Miletus, and he asked the Ephesian elders, the leaders of the church from Ephesus, to come down and meet him. He has this conversation with them, and in this conversation, because he’s in transition, he’s in this lull between this third missionary journey and whatever is coming next, he reflects back on his past a bit.

Remember, Paul has a pretty interesting past. He has done some things he really shouldn’t have done. So how does he reflect on all of that? He has experienced some hard stuff. How does he reflect on that? What’s it look like to have a good memory of the past? Then he also is going to be sharing about what’s happening moving forward. So let me read you this text and then we will talk about it a little bit. So Acts 20:17, and we’re going to go down through verse 24.

“Now from Miletus he sent to Ephesus and called the elders of the church to come to him. And when they came to him, he said to them: ‘You yourselves know how I lived among you the whole time from the first day that I set foot in Asia…'” Ephesus was in Asia. That’s what they called that area, Asia, at the time.

“‘…serving the Lord with all humility and with tears and with trials that happened to me through the plots of the Jews; how I did not shrink from declaring to you anything that was profitable, and teaching you in public and from house to house, testifying both to Jews and to Greeks of repentance toward God and of faith in our Lord Jesus Christ. And now, behold, I am going to Jerusalem, constrained by the Spirit…'” Some translations have the word bound by the Spirit there for constrained.

“‘…not knowing what will happen to me there, except that the Holy Spirit testifies to me in every city that imprisonment and afflictions await me. But I do not account my life of any value nor as precious to myself, if only I may finish my course and the ministry that I received from the Lord Jesus, to testify to the gospel of the grace of God.'” (Acts 20:17-24) Then he goes on to give a number of instructions to the Ephesian elders about how they should be leading the church in the time to come after he departs from them.

Paul has a sense that this is probably the last time he’s going to talk to these guys because of where God is calling him next, but this little reflection on his time in Ephesus as he looks back and then also as he looks forward into what the Holy Spirit is calling him to do can be very helpful for us as we find ourselves in the same sort of place. How do we reflect on what’s back there and how do we go forth into what God’s calling us to do?

The first thing I find really interesting is how and what Paul remembers from his time with the Ephesians. He uses this word in verse 18. He says, “You yourselves know,” talking to the Ephesian elders. That word know is not, in the original language, a word that means you have a fact in your head, like, “Oh, I read that in Encyclopedia Britannica.” It’s more the idea that they experienced it. “You yourselves were there. You saw it. This is a memory for you.”

What Paul is doing is inviting these Ephesian elders into an exercise of remembering. He’s saying, “You yourselves know how I lived among you the whole time I was there in Ephesus. Come, remember with me.” Now, how does he remember? What does he remember? The things he mentions are very interesting.

He starts off with the hard memories. He says, “I was serving the Lord with all humility.” Humility. That means the low times. Humble. Not the mountaintop experiences. He remembers back and mentions the humble times. Then he talks about with tears. Those are the painful times. He remembers the situations that caused him tears, sadness of heart.

Then of course, the last one he mentions is trials, the times he was tempted, he was attacked, the times in Ephesus he faced opposition and hardship. He talks about the things that happened through the plots of the Jews, other Jews who had been like Paul was and didn’t like the followers of Jesus, didn’t want this Jesus movement to spread, and created all sorts of schemes about Paul. We know from his journeys that many times he would either be beaten, often kicked out of towns, sometimes he ended up in jail because of these plots against him.

So this is the first thing he remembers, the hard memories, the low times, the tearful times, the trying times. The second thing he brings up is actually more happy memories. He talks about when he was testifying to the Jews and to the Greeks. He was teaching in public and from house to house.

It’s interesting. If you study Paul in his time in Ephesus, Paul understood the importance of having both the big community to gather but also the house-to-house setting. That same thing remains true for us. It’s amazing to be a part of this big body at Grace, and there are things we are able to do as a gathered body with the combined resources of the community, like start the Lantern Project down in Clarkston. If we were just a little house church, it’d be very difficult to do that.

But at the same time, each one of us has that need to be a part of a house-to-house community of people who know our names and we know their names and we know their kids’ names and we’re friends and we connect. That’s so much about what the Grace Groups seasons are about. People get connected to those smaller communities of people through the catalog or through serving at KidzLife or serving at LUG, so many ways.

So here’s Paul, and he’s inviting the elders back not just to remember the hard times but also to remember the happy times. “Remember, I was among you testifying, and God was doing all this great stuff.” That’s basically what Paul is saying. Our question for our lives is…Do we remember our lives similarly? How do we reflect on our lives? When we look to the past, do we have this balance where we’re able to see both the hard stuff and the happy stuff?

Even the way Paul communicates it, it seems to have a certain order to it, like he’s been able to process his past enough that he knows there are thing that were tearful, thing that were trying. “There were humble times, low times, but there were also really happy times. There were times we were gathered in homes, gathered together worshiping. God was doing great stuff.” It seems like he has this well-ordered perspective of the past.

Now maybe to illustrate this a little bit we could use some of these bricks. One of the advantages of having fewer kids downstairs in the kids’ ministry is that I don’t feel guilty stealing the bricks from them because you’re up here. Imagine that each of these bricks represents an event from the past, sort of a memory, something that happens to us or a decision we’ve made, some sort of event or memory like that.

We think about, “How do we process the past? How do we remember?” A lot of times we get moving so quickly that the events in our lives sort of just pass us by. So we’re just running right along. Something happens. We’re like, “Cool.” Something else happens, “Cool.” Something else happens, “Cool.” We just run through life and our memories are scattered behind us, and we get here and we’re kind of, “Oh, what happened? I don’t know. I don’t really remember much since 1997.”

Some of us try to remember, but we don’t do a whole lot to keep them in order, and so our memories sort of just are in our past but they’re stuck in this well-packed box. This sort of is how we remember. It’s just a scatter of memories with not much order to it at all. Some of us when we remember, we have a tendency to emphasize or focus on maybe one kind of memory.

Maybe we have a bent to remember only the really hard stuff that has happened to us and we overlook the good stuff. So if this is all of our memories we have a tendency only to collect the memories of a certain color, like this. All the red bricks, all the hard things that have happened. We walk through life carrying these and neglecting the rest.

We’ve hung out with people like this who only hold onto and remember the hard stuff. That’s tough. I mean, people have lots of difficult things that happen in their lives and carry red bricks around. No question. But if these are the only ones we pick up then we’re missing out on the grace of God. One of Paul’s points in emphasizing the humble times, the trying times, the testing times, the tearful times is that in those times is when God’s grace was really apparent.

Some of us don’t like to think about this stuff, the bad stuff, so we just throw it over there and we only carry with us the good memories. There are some family cultures like this as well, where there’s been some really hard stuff that has happened back there but, “Hey, we don’t want to talk about it because we’re all happy.” We’ve got these.

What’s so brilliant about the way Paul remembers is that he has the ability with the help of God to gather all those memories, the hard times and the good times, and bring them into some sense of order and, in fact, gain some lessons from these memories.

Miroslav Volf, who’s a theologian and author, pastor, a very sharp guy, in his book called The End of Memory… It’s a really brilliant book, and it’s all about remembering. How should we remember or reflect on really hard things that happen to us? So his experience in the former Yugoslav Republic in 1984… He was a soldier. He was interrogated a number of times. He refused to fight and shoot against his enemies, so they went after him in a number of different ways.

His book was prompted by that experience, and so he wrote this book. If you have some hard memories in your past and you’re trying to sort out, “How do I remember those?” and invite the grace of God into them but it’s very painful, it’s a fairly intellectual read, but it’s really brilliant. The End of Memory. Miroslav Volf.

In that he talks about how in many ways remembering is kind of like rebuilding. It’s putting together the past in some sort of order, and if we’re going to remember well, especially the hard times, then it’s really important that we work with God to figure out how to integrate those memories, especially the challenging memories, into the big story God is doing in our lives.

Not only that, but he also says in that process it’s crucial that we find our identity from God. As we’re putting together the pieces of the past, remembering well, we have to find our identity from God, because sometimes something really bad can happen to us and that becomes our identity. You think about sometimes people who survived the Holocaust, right? It’s a terrible situation. Absolutely brutal. The whole thing is such a traumatic experience, traumatic memory that that’s their identity. “I’m a Holocaust survivor,” or, “I was a victim.” That’s their whole identity.

Volf says not only do we have to integrate this, figure out with God how this fits into the bigger picture of what God’s doing, we also need to understand that in the kingdom of God our identity doesn’t come from this. This is a part of our lives, but our identity comes from God. In the kingdom of God we are children of the King. If we carry around this, we’re not leaving space for God to define our identity.

So many of us as we’re ordering our memories and remembering well, having a good memory, it means letting go of some of these things that have become our identity and to trust God, listen to God, pray with God, to hear what he calls us. So for Volf, we integrate our lives. Then the other piece he says is so important is we recognize that there are new possibilities with God.

This is just the way our minds work. Sometimes we have a tendency to look at what happened in the past and assume that’s how it’s always going to be, especially if we’ve had several repeated bad experiences. As we look forward, the only thing we can see is just the tunnel shaped by the previous memories.

Volf says we don’t just need to learn how to integrate these memories into the whole, see the whole picture, hear our identity from God, we also need to understand that God is entirely capable of coming in and doing something totally fresh and different than what we’ve experienced in the past, and that all together this comes into a sense of wholeness, a sense of a well-constructed, well-ordered memory.

Volf’s big point (and I love this) is that when it comes to our memories we have a choice. See, the facts are the facts. This red brick, whatever it is, happened. We need to be truthful about that. Whatever the memory is, it happened, but we have a choice about how we remember it and how we allow God to tell us what this means and where this fits into the integrated picture.

Like, for example, let’s say you’ve had a challenging marriage, and this brick is the day you got married. You can look at this and you have a choice about how to reflect on the day you got married. You can look at this day and say, “That was the biggest mistake of my life,” or you can look at this day and you can say, “That was the day the Lord brought me into a challenging situation through which I’ve seen his grace and I need more of his grace.” See, this is a very different way. We have a choice about the way we view our memories.

We need God’s help to view them the way he sees them. Sometimes with these memories, especially the ones that pop up over and over again, the really hard ones, it’s just so good to bring this memory to God and say, “Lord, how do you see this? How do you see this thing? Lord, show me what’s going on? Where does this brick fit here? What were you doing? Where does this brick fit in with my identity? Where does this fit with the future and what you’re wanting to do?”

See, for Paul, as he’s reflecting on his life, he’s looking backward. He has a very whole, good, healed memory. “There are times of trial, times of tears, times of humility, but there are happy times too, and God is sustaining me through all of it.” This is the way Paul remembers. I wonder, what are the choices we’re making when we’re looking at our memories? To what extent are we inviting God to help us understand where those things fit, hearing his identity for us?

But then, not just looking backward, Paul also looks forward. As Paul looks forward, it’s so clear that his way of seeing toward the future is dependent on the leadership and the guidance of the Holy Spirit. One of the promises Jesus makes to his followers is that he will give us his Holy Spirit and his Holy Spirit will lead us into truth. The Lord will lead us. So we look forward and we say, “All right, God, where are you calling us?”

How does Paul work this out? Paul says, “I’m going to Jerusalem. As I look forward, my calling is Jerusalem.” Then he says with such conviction, “I am constrained by the Holy Spirit to get to Jerusalem.” Wouldn’t it be great to have that clarity in life? “Hey, I am constrained to get to Arby’s for lunch by the Holy Spirit.” That’s a silly example. I mean, Jerusalem is a lot more significant than Arby’s in most cases, but think about Paul looking forward. How does he come to this point of such clarity and conviction?

It’s a fascinating story. The last nine chapters of the book of Acts are really devoted to this part of Paul’s calling, this movement toward Jerusalem and then eventually from Jerusalem to Rome. If you trace Paul’s interaction with the Holy Spirit, it’s really, really interesting. It begins all the way back in Acts 19:21. While he’s at Ephesus during at riot, he decides. It says he resolved in the Spirit. There are two pieces there. It seems like Paul resolved, so it’s part of his own will, but he’s in the Spirit, so it’s the Holy Spirit’s will. It’s like the two things are coming together.

Maybe you’ve had this in your life where there’s an overlap of your own will with the will of the Holy Spirit. In fact, when Paul here in Acts 20, in our little passage we’ve just read, says, “I’m constrained by the Holy Spirit,” or bound by the Holy Spirit, what he’s describing is this binding together of the Holy Spirit’s direction with his own heart’s direction. He’s not waging war against the Spirit and he’s not ignoring the Spirit. He’s saying, “No, we’re bound together in this thing. We’re going in this direction.”

Of course, he travels to Jerusalem. In the rest of Acts 20 and 21 you see some of this journey. Along the way, some interesting things happen. He lands in Tyre, a city near Jerusalem on the coast. The believers come out and meet him and they say, “Hey we’ve been told by the Holy Spirit don’t go to Jerusalem.” Paul says, “No, I’m going to go to Jerusalem. I’m bound by the Holy Spirit.”

Then Agabus, this prophet, shows us, and he says, “Paul, give me your belt.” Agabus takes the belt, ties up his hands, ties up his own ankles, and he says, “This is what’s going to happen to you if you go to Jerusalem. You’re going to be bound.” So there are these warnings from the community, and yet Paul is so clear, firmly convicted from the Holy Spirit, “This is what I’m called to do,” that he moves forward anyway.

He even says it in his own passage. “In every city, the Holy Spirit tells me that imprisonment and afflictions await me.” Then he says, “But I’m not doing this on account of my own life or value or something that’s precious to myself. I just want to do what God calls me to do.” So when Paul looks forward, his dominant, controlling factor is the will of God.

That’s what he wants. Like, “Moving forward, Lord, I want to do your will. I want to be bound to the will of the Holy Spirit and I will listen to the community. When Agabus the prophet shows up, I will listen, but ultimately success in the kingdom of God is finding the will of God and doing it.” That’s how Paul looks forward. It’s important to remember because sometimes we can become in our lives consumed with weighing out the options, measuring the pros and the cons, and if the pros are enough and the cons are little enough then we’re going to make the decision.

There’s wisdom in thinking about the pros and the cons and what’s moving forward, but ultimately (and this is what we see from Paul so clearly) it’s the Holy Spirit’s will. For Paul, he says, “Okay, listen. I even know that that road is going to be a hard road, and yet the Holy Spirit is calling me, so I will do it. I’m going to obey.”

I was thinking about some of those times in our lives, Amy and me, thinking through, moving forward, visions, dreams, and all the rest. Many of you know Amy just finished her nursing school program, her masters, but that was a dream she had from the time she was a little girl. So when we got married… You weren’t here the first hour. It wasn’t nearly as emotional. Honey, you weren’t sitting right there. Now you’re sitting there, and it’s tender in my heart. Whew. I’m wearing my Christmas shirt. I can do this! All right.

We got married, and I knew that this was a big part of Amy’s heart, to be a nurse, and for several reasons it just hadn’t worked out for her to get to nursing school yet, and yet it was one of those things. It was a dream in her heart. It almost felt like she was constrained, she was bound by the Holy Spirit to move in this direction. It just wouldn’t go away. It was just so persistent and seemed to be so clearly from God. We prayed about it. Invited the Lord into it. It felt like this is the way we’re going to go.

It was going to be challenging. We knew that, but we just felt like it needs to be we’ll take each step. The Holy Spirit is calling us in that direction, calling Amy in that direction, so we’ll just take the first step. So she had to renew her anatomy and physiology classes. That went well. Then there was the next step. She needed to take the GRE. She did really well on that. Okay, now the next step. Apply to the school. That’s great. Now take the interview. Great. Now she has gotten in and accepted. That’s fantastic. Now she starts class.

She just kept moving forward and forward, and it felt so clearly that this is something the Holy Spirit has drawn us and drawn her into. Almost like she’s constrained. It wasn’t like moving and walking into a pathway of imprisonment, although second semester pharmacology did feel like that, but it was certainly a road that was challenging, intimidating, sometimes overwhelming, and yet it felt so clear.

This is where the Holy Spirit is calling her, and so we could trust that and keep moving even though along the way it felt like there was hardship and challenge. The Lord sustained her so beautifully through that whole time. I wonder what those things are in your life for the coming year. To what is the will of the Holy Spirit binding your will? Where are you going? Where are you constrained to go with God? What’s he calling you to do?

This is where these two pieces, looking back and looking forward, are so important, because if you look at this passage carefully, here’s Paul reflecting first on hardship, trials, challenges, suffering, good stuff, reflecting back on that, and then he’s looking forward, saying, “I’m going to Jerusalem.”

If you pay close attention to the text, back here he sees the trials and he sees that he’s testifying. Right? It’s a good memory of testifying to Jesus and the good news. Then when he looks forward, once again there are going to be trials, but he’s going to be testifying to the good news. What’s happening? Paul understands that what God has been working out in his past is the foundation upon which God is going to build what’s coming, which is why it’s so important we remember well.

If our memories are just a big, messy pile, it’s hard to build on that, but when we’re walking with God and he helps us to understand how our lives have fit together, when he calls us to move forward, we can look and say, “Okay, that’s going to be hard. Maybe there’s even imprisonment down that road, but I can see where you’ve been building, so let’s go. These foundations, these things you’ve been putting in place, now that I understand them, yeah, we’re going to do more things like that.”

It’s very, very, very interesting. I was actually reading a psychologist named Daniel Schacter. He is a Harvard psychologist guy, and he does all of his research on memory and how memory works. It’s almost like God hardwired our brains to connect these two things, backward and forward, looking back, moving forward, because Schacter, in his research, has found that the same part of the brain we use to remember is the same part of the brain we use to imagine forward.

So just think of it this way. It’s like that part of your brain is sort of like a DVD player, and so we take our memories from the past and we put it into that part of our brain as a DVD player and kind of envision it, but then also whatever we feel or dream or think about might be coming, we put it into the same DVD player and envision it.

There’s this connection about the way our brains work between the past and the future, which is again why it’s so important to have a clear view of the past because if this is all muddled up when we start imagining the future it’s impossible to separate it from the muddle of the past. God built these things together.

I think about my life this year and reflecting on this year a little bit and the transition I made after being the mission pastor here at Grace and then moving in to be the campus pastor here at Grace and preaching every week and the challenges of that and the excitement, the adventures. Sometimes people ask me, “How do you like preaching at Grace?” and I say, “It’s kind of too soon to tell. I haven’t run out of sermons yet.” It’s good source material. The Bible’s a lively book.

But I knew looking forward when we started having those conversations in a lot of ways that the responsibility of leadership would be heavy. On that road, even though it would be exciting, I’d been around Grace long enough to know that it’s also very challenging. So I was looking at it with some trepidation, some concern, going, “I don’t know if this is where God wants us to go. I don’t know that I’m necessarily… Am I feeling that constraint of the Spirit, the binding and the leadership of the Spirit to go that way?”

But then as we prayed about it (Amy and me and friends and the elders and Buddy) and processed it and all these conversations, what began to happen for me is I began looking at what has God been doing. I said, “Oh, there are some amazing pieces here. In fact, that kind of looks like the foundation that would serve really well if I took this route moving forward in leadership.”

So much of my own conviction and confidence in obeying the will of God to step into this role came from understanding what God has been doing here. Does that make sense? So often in our lives this is how God is at work integrating the big story, leading us forward. So how do we do this? How do we reflect well on what’s back there and go forth with confidence into what God’s calling us to do?

There are some different ways, different strategies. You can think about the last year. Maybe you have a journal. Jot down a few key events. Maybe it’s just a meal you share with your family and you have everybody go around. “Okay, what happened last year?” Maybe you just take a few of these items, these memories, and put them together a little bit. Maybe you pray about them, read the Scripture, going forward thinking about some goals.

Brian Krawczyk and his wife Sadie lead our Grace Monroe Campus, and they have four little kids. I love what they did last year. Brian got everybody in the family around the table and they had some food. It was just around this time of year, right before New Year’s, and he got a big white sticky board out like this, and he drew a quadrant on there and had four different categories.

There were things they were thankful for, things that were hard but good from the last year, things that were not happy things from the last year, and then there were things they wish they had done but hadn’t. I was asking Brian, and he said, “We did use the emoticons on here, the smiley faces.”

But they went around and everybody in the family had to share one item from each part of the quadrant. What are you thankful for? What was a really good thing that happened this year? What was a hard thing but it ended up good? That’s where you can begin processing in your family, inviting God into the process to help figure out where these things fit. What were the really hard things? “God, what were you doing then?” What do we wish we did but we didn’t and maybe God’s doing it this year?

So this whole exercise helped shape their year in terms of looking back and remembering. I don’t know what it looks like for us and for our families, but maybe an exercise along these lines would be really useful in recognizing the foundation God has put together this year or the pieces he’s added to this foundation this year.

Then Brian took the next sheet. He just had a sheet of hopes, and everybody once again went around, just shared all their hopes. This year, Brian is going to pull out the sheet of hopes, start with that, and say, “Okay, what happened this year?” and do the grid again and say, “What are our hopes for the coming year.” This is a rhythm now in Brian’s family that’s beginning to take shape so he’s constantly living wisely with his wife and with his kids between what God has been doing and forward into what God’s calling them to do.

I don’t know what that looks like for us, but I know it’s important. For Paul, it was essential. His conviction and clarity about his calling and identity in life I think were firmly rooted in the understanding of how God had been at work in Christ in grace in his past and how God was going to be at work building on all of that stuff.

So what I want to do is just pray for a moment, and I want to ask the Lord to speak to us through his Holy Spirit maybe about one thing, one memory he may want to speak to in our past from maybe the past year or more, and I want to ask the Lord just to speak about one thing maybe looking forward.

The way the Holy Spirit often works is a feeling like his ideas are arising within your ideas. Like Paul said he resolved in the Spirit there in Acts 19. There’s this joining together. So we’re just going to take a moment here to be quiet before God and invite his Holy Spirit to bring to mind just one thing from the past, one memory, one brick that maybe he wants to place or help us understand, and then looking forward one thing that maybe he’s calling us into by his Spirit.