1984 Biblical Priorities for the New Year

In this part of the sermon: Pastor Martin opens by acknowledging New Year's Day as a natural, God-given occasion for reflection and evaluation, despite it being 'just another day' in some respects. He…

Martin uses the analogy of a gearbox with no neutral or reverse to illustrate the relentless, irreversible forward advance of time, emphasizing that no human technology can alter this reality.

However, New Year's Day is not like every other day, particularly in this one respect. It forces upon all of us who are conscious of the day that time is relentless, in its forward advance. New Year's Day underscores the fact that the gearbox of time has no neutral and no reverse. And of all the things that modern technology has been able to produce, even helping us to send men to the moon and send them orbiting about our earth and accomplishing all kinds of marvelous things, all of the king's horses and all of the king's men, all of the most sophisticated computers combined, cannot produce a ...

3:31 - 4:34 Read in full sermon

In this part of the sermon: Martin identifies the number one personal priority as singleness of devotion to Christ and the pursuit of holiness, citing various Scriptures. He challenges rationalizations for…

He uses the example of instinctively stepping back from a car or finding time to eat to illustrate the high priority people naturally place on preserving their physical lives.

And one of the priorities every one of us has is the preservation of our lives. That's why when we've stepped off the curb, when we shouldn't and we see a car coming, we instinctively step back. We place high priority upon the preservation of our lives. That's why no matter how busy we've been, no matter how pressured we've been, we have found time to eat enough to sustain ourselves.

11:29 - 11:53 Read in full sermon

In this part of the sermon: Martin uses a vivid deathbed scenario to challenge listeners to consider how their conscience would fare if they were to reflect on their personal, domestic, and church priorities…

Martin asks the congregation to imagine themselves on their deathbed with full consciousness, given four hours to reflect on their personal, domestic, church, and worldly priorities. This serves as a powerful thought experiment to prompt self-examination and underscore the urgency of living according to biblical priorities now.

As I wrestled with how to bring this home with some degree of clout to our hearts, I felt perhaps the best way was to ask you to try to do a little work with your imagination this morning. Imagine that God in his providence has let you live out your allotted time, whether it's going to be 20 years, 30, 40, 50, 70, 80, 90, whatever it is, and God has given to you the wonderful luxury of coming to what you know is your deathbed with your full consciousness. You've not become senile, you've not been out of touch with reality because of the deterioration of your natural powers or because of the ne...

34:38 - 35:48 Read in full sermon

The point: Resolve to enter the new year with no unresolved controversy with God or man.

He describes an Olympic 100-meter dash finalist wearing 20 pounds of lead weights on his ankles, calling him 'crazy.' This analogy illustrates how unresolved sin and a guilty conscience impede a Christian's progress in the spiritual race.

Now many of us are aware that 1984 is going to be the year of the Olympics. And we'll be hearing and seeing a lot about the Olympics. Now imagine the Olympics are in progress. And the time has come for the finals in the 100 meter dash.

44:08 - 44:29 Read in full sermon