Anybody broken their New Year’s Resolution yet?

I’m not a resolution maker, but I get why people do it. New Year, New You, New start. I feel like most people’s New Year’s resolutions are all positives – things they want to do to improve their life.  I don’t think most people say, “Hey you know for this New Year, I think I’ll set myself up for a heart attack by eating worse than I ate last year.”

No, most resolutions are more along the lines of “In the new year I’m going to lose 10 pounds”.  And then you do!  But unfortunately, you gain 20 pounds.  And that’s the problem in this world.  It seems that for every problem we solve, another issue, another problem, another worry comes along.  So we’re all looking for a better way, a better life – The Good Life.   It seems it’s always just over the horizon, just out of reach.

On January 5^th we begin a new series, The Good Life, a simple life in Christ. Over the next several weeks we’ll be looking at what’s known as the Sermon on the Mount. We’ll start by looking at the Beatitudes in Mathew Chapter 5.   What we’ll see is that The Good Life is not so much what you do or don’t have as it is a better understanding of what the Good Life really is.

You may not be familiar with the Beatitudes, but perhaps you’ve heard parts of it.  “Blessed are the poor for they shall inherit the earth” is something that you may have heard before that is…mostly from the Beatitudes.  Lots of people look at the Beatitudes as something be done, or in the other extreme, see them as something that can’t be done.   The good news is that as one commentator notes, “It’s important we see them as BE -attitudes, not DO-attitudes”.   That’s really good news!  In a world of trying to find the good life in the next diet, the next self-improvement craze, in a world of DOING, Jesus gave us a way of BEING.