“The One Thing”

Sunday, January 17, 2016

As a year begins, we inevitably make resolutions to make the new year better than the old one. Whether your resolutions have to do with money, health, family, or spirituality, I would like to offer a piece of advice which I believe will help you accomplish more: Just do one thing.

Choose one thing that you want to accomplish in each area of your life, and center all of your focus on that one thing. If your goal is to be more fit, then make sure all of your decisions contribute to that one thing. If your goal is to have more financial freedom to help other people, make sure all of your decisions contribute to that one thing. If your goal is to draw closer to the Lord, make sure all of your decisions contribute to that one thing.

This concept — the one thing — is modeled for us in the life of Paul. In a letter to the Philippians, he said, “…one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus” (Phil. 3:13-14). Every decision had to be filtered through the lens of drawing closer to the prize of God’s upward call in Christ. His devotion to God was not one segment of his life or one division of his time, it was the entirety of how his thoughts and actions. 

A professor at a Bible college assigned his class to graph the uses of their time on a pie chart. Assign the portion of each week that you devote to being a student, a parent, a neighbor, a civic leader, etc. “But,” he said, “Don’t put ‘Christian time’ on your graph. Because ‘Christian’ is what defines the whole graph.”

I hope that whatever your goals are for this year, that you can definitively say they fit into the singular idea of being a better Christian. And I hope that we can all take Paul’s view of the transition from an old year to the new one. “…one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus” (Phil. 3:13-14).

- Dan Lankford, minister

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