When considering resolutions for 2007 I remembered a story:
In 1983 the upstart Edmonton Oilers met the three time Champion New York Islanders in the Stanley Cup Final. It was an interesting story because it was the first and last meeting of these two dynasties in the Stanley Cup Finals. Gretzky was the newly named captain of the Oilers and had set multiple records that season heading into the playoffs. Despite having won three years in a row, the Islanders were considered the underdogs by many. New York shut out the highest scoring Oilers twice in a four game sweep to win their fourth straight Stanley Cup. What happened?
“They taught us so much,” Wayne Gretzky said years later. “After the 1983 Finals, we had to walk by the Islanders’ locker room and we saw guys limping around and putting ice on themselves. We didn’t have a scratch. We learned a lot about what it took to win.”
“We could have played four more games, but they were spent. They left it all out on the ice”
One of my resolutions for 2007 is to in a new way, stop holding back when it comes to my service to God. I sometimes guard myself against serving too much because it will make me tired but when I have decided this I have forgotten who’s strength I should be using.
If anyone speaks, he should do it as one speaking the very words of God. If anyone serves, he should do it with the strength God provides, so that in all things God may be praised through Jesus Christ. To him be the glory and the power for ever and ever. Amen.
It is Him who provides the strength for the struggle, not me. I don’t need to worry about my strength running out, I only need to worry about God’s strength running out. What a foolish thing to worry about!
The Sovereign LORD is my strength;
he makes my feet like the feet of a deer,
he enables me to go on the heights.
God’s strength knows no bounds. It is endless. As I return to his service in 2007 I need to take a step in faith, sign the bottom of a blank sheet of paper and return it to God as my ‘ministry contract’. Trust Him fill in the details. God in His infinite wisdom, his infinite grace will call me to do exactly what I need to do. He knows how best to use me. I resolve to let him provide the strength I need and wait on Him to provide.
I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.
Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen.
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