What are Your Plans for 2012

What are Your Plans for 2012?

Steve Patton

We are three weeks into the new year and most new year’s resolutions probably are falling by the wayside.  The best of intentions too often remain no more than intentions.  How do we overcome that?  Part of the solution is to keep our goals on our minds constantly.  A plan for the year needs to be put down on paper (or computer screen), then placed where we will see it constantly.  Then “out of sight, out of mind” is not a problem.  After that it’s just staying motivated that is necessary (a minor detail).

Spiritual goals are like that, too.  We commit to read through the Bible and then misplace our Bible reading chart.  We commit to attending Sunday evening services and then the playoffs start.  And the old habits creep back in.  We lose motivation and forget about our resolution.  We will end the year no stronger spiritually than when we began. 

But God wants us to grow, to improve, to mature.  Part of being in the family of God is taking the responsibility to help others grow along with myself.  We work as a family, as a team.  Everyone commits to growth and maturity.  We want to go to heaven together and help each other to get there.

One of the reasons we set a theme for the year as a congregation is to accomplish these goals.  We want to keep spiritual goals before us regularly and we want to encourage each other to accomplish these goals.  Today the elders are setting goals and plans for 2012 before the University family.  The success of these plans will depend upon all of us committing to these goals and keeping them before us.  Our theme – An Eternal People – is designed to help us all develop a daily perspective that not only remembers heaven as our goal, but that makes daily plans to be there.  What a joy it will be if each one of us works to help each other get to heaven.  Listen to the plans for 2012 today and commit to personal growth.  Also, commit to helping the congregation grow.  Let 2012 be a year in which the University church becomes a powerful spiritual influence upon one another and with all those around us.  Let us truly commit to being the People of God – an Eternal People setting goals for eternity.

Donald Trump on Marriage

Steve Patton 

Donald Trump, several years after his second divorce, had this to say:

“If you have to work at a marriage, it’s not going to work. It has to be sort of a natural thing. But my ex-wife would say, ‘You have to work at this, you have to do this, you have to do that’. And I’m saying to myself, ‘Man, I work all day long, well into the evening. I don’t want to come home and work at a marriage. A marriage has to be very easy.”

I suspect Mr. Trump’s ideas about marriage are pretty common today considering present day attitudes toward marriage and divorce.  According to the Pew Research Center, little more than one half of all families are headed by a married couple. In 1960, it was nearly three-fourths. The decline is attributed to changes in public attitudes over the past half century that have led to increases in divorce, co-habitation, and age-at-marriage.

Anyone who thinks a happy marriage is easy has never been married.  Having made a lifelong commitment at your wedding what follows are years of work of making a relationship work - during good times and bad.  When the scriptures instruct us to love our wives it is not talking about just having a fuzzy warm feeling for them.  It is referring to always seeking your mate’s good.  That is what the word “love” means in those passages.  It is a constant, selfless effort to serve your mate and seek what is best for them.  And I am sorry Mr. Trump, but that takes work. 

If you want a happy marriage you have to put forth effort – lots of it.  No partnership of any kind works without effort.  “Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself for her…”  (Ephesians 5:25).  That is a pretty high standard Paul is setting.  Let’s all work at our marriages and honor God with our homes.

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Saturday January 28 2012