If you ate two donuts this morning, did you gain 100 pounds? Well, no. But if you ate two donuts every day for three years, do you think that would contribute to your gaining 100 pounds? I think it might. It is not really what we do once that matters; it is what we do consistently that adds up over time, whether that is good or bad. It is my kids, who have been practicing piano consistently, pretty much every day, for years now, and now we have a house that is filled with music, and I love that. They were the ones looking ahead at some of the piano players in our church, like Evie playing for the Christmas program recently, and in kids’ choir specials and things. You see someone ahead of you who is good at something, and you go, “I want to be able to do that.” Well, someone like Evie has been playing piano now for probably about ten years. You hear the beautiful offertory from my sister on piano and think, “I want to be able to do that,” and realize, well, Nicole has been playing piano in this church for, I do not know, probably over 35 years. So first there is a whole lot of consistent practice, and then there is the beautiful music.
Paying the Boring Tax
I think when we first start something new, it is just very, very exciting. It is fresh, it is new, you are bursting with dreams of the possibilities. You are thinking about the end, and you are dreaming of wherever you are going to be. If you are dreaming of being fit, or of being healthy, or of playing the piano, or of being a great public speaker, of making that thing, whatever you have dreams of, you soon realize, man, this gets hard, and it gets kind of boring, because there is this long stretch in there where you do not feel like you are making any progress. I heard someone call it the boring tax. There are a whole lot of little decisions and little actions that you have to take consistently before you feel the progress. You have got to pay the boring tax. There has not been one person in the history of the world who has gotten into shape with one visit to the gym. There is not one person in the world who has gotten in shape with only one day of exercise or one day of dieting. It takes a whole long time. I like British humor. It is often understated and subtle. They are not in it for the big splash. They just sarcastically poke fun at something and move on, and sometimes that is so hilarious to me. I do not know if it was a Brit who did this joke, but there is this trend of showing yourself in a before-and-after photo: “This was me, and this is me now, 10 years later.” There is the current picture, and alongside the current picture is the picture from 10 years ago, how it was and how it is going, that kind of thing. Well, there is something hilarious to me about someone who posts a picture of himself, and there are several versions of this out there, and then five minutes later posts a picture of himself with the caption, “Been on the keto diet for five minutes. Here is my progress so far.” And it is just the same thing. It is just the same picture. We laugh at that, but sometimes we expect the equivalent. I expect great changes in my life. I expect an incredible walk with God. I expect to turn the world upside down with my faith. Or I expect all my problems to go away once I get saved, or once I start reading my Bible, or “when I really get serious about the Lord, then God will come through for me.”
Between the Mountaintops
We see someone who has reached a level of what I would call excellence. They are at the top. They have reached this point of success. If it is a spiritual victory, then they are having spiritual victory; it seems like walking with God is second nature to them. If it is a musician, then the music they are making seems like it is not tedious to them. It is fun. The practice phase seems to be gone, and they are just making incredible music. If it is someone like an athlete, you look at them and go, “Man, they just make it look so easy.” Or the salesman who seems to make a sale every single time. Or it is that fitness influencer with all the toned muscles, and they seem to actually be enjoying the workout. It is like, “You are a weirdo. How can you do that?” But then you also say, “I want that.” They have reached a place of excellence where it just feels very natural. It seems like they are not even trying, and this is the phase when everyone gets noticed. You can see the progress. Everyone can see the progress. Sometimes, spiritually, we exalt those who are maybe Christians we know, or maybe it is the Bible characters. We exalt them as heroes. We want what they have, and we see these mountaintop experiences in the Scriptures. We read about Moses on Mount Sinai, and we read about Elijah on Mount Carmel, and Daniel in the lions’ den, and Joseph as the second-in-command of Egypt, and Peter preaching this incredible sermon at Pentecost and thousands getting saved, and we look at that and go, “I want that.” But wait a minute, how did they get there? Well, most of the time in the Scriptures we read about the high points, but there is a long time in between those high points. Moses spends 40 years in the wilderness. Elijah spends a lifetime walking with God. He spends three years with a widow woman in a poor little hut. Daniel has no idea that God is going to shut the mouths of the lions. He just goes to prayer like he always does. He still opened his windows and let everybody know, knowing very well that he would likely be killed for that. Joseph was thrown into a pit and thrown into a prison, yet he maintained his integrity before the Lord. It was years. He just stayed faithful, never knowing that God would use him. Peter had a time of denial, but it seems that after that he just purposed to never go back to that time of denying Christ. He was done with that, and Pentecost was just this incredible turnaround for him, but boy, it was a process. He was certainly not an overnight success. They say it takes 20 years to make an overnight success, and that is so very true, is it not? Most often it is a long process before the payout ever comes. This kind of goes the other way too. You can live a lifetime of indulgence and then wonder why there is a crash. See, it is not necessarily just one little decision that causes the ultimate destruction. It is often the series of small decisions that start to add up and compound before your life is so far away from where you intended it to be. The good news of the gospel is that no matter how far away you have gone from God, you are just one decision away from turning back. You can repent and turn to Jesus Christ. You can draw nigh to God, and He will draw nigh to you. There is an arrow that shows your life crashing after a series of small bad decisions, but you can turn that arrow around and get back on track and serve the Lord. So in all those cases I just mentioned in the Scripture, and that is just a short, short list of the Bible heroes, we get a glimpse of their lives, and it is like they had something that I want. It seems like they got a glimpse of God and never wanted to turn back, so their lives became not a series of bad decisions but a series of good decisions, a series of choices of walking with God, that led to those mountaintop experiences. That is what led to those highlights we read about. But man, like I said, there is a lot of lifetime in between the pages of Scripture. What did the Bible characters do in those times?
Steadfast, Unmovable
Now, I keep being reminded, all this past year, of this one passage. I keep coming back to this one verse that has been on my mind. Little things would remind me, and you might know the verse: “Therefore, my beloved brethren, be ye stedfast, unmoveable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, forasmuch as ye know that your labour is not in vain in the Lord.” That is 1 Corinthians 15:58 in the King James Version. The Scriptures tell us we have to be steadfast, unmovable. These two are synonyms, and the words just mean a seat, or a chair, or a base: just settled. There is something anchored about your life. You are not wavering with the winds. The same root word is used in Colossians 1:23: “If ye continue in the faith grounded and settled, and be not moved away from the hope of the gospel, which ye have heard, and which was preached to every creature which is under heaven; whereof I Paul am made a minister.” So it is choosing a course and sticking with it. I am afraid too many Christians try to skip over this step. It is like they are not willing to pay the boring tax. They want to hurry up and jump to the end: “Man, let’s get to the good part. Let’s get to the victory. Let’s get to the mountaintop experiences. Let’s just jump over this to the end and get on to the victory.” That is what many people want. But God is saying, “Whoa there, hold your horses there, buddy. Sit down. Get stable first. You are unsettled. Let’s get some things under control first.” “I am going to change the world.” Well, you cannot even make your bed. That is what Navy SEAL Admiral McRaven said in his famous speech: if you want to change the world, start by making your bed. He has a book, Make Your Bed, that gives the same message. So there is something to that consistency of steadfast, unmovable, that speaks to your character as much as anything else. God wants to do something in you before He does something with you. So as Christians, I think it does us good to learn to be steadfast and unmovable in our faith. Now, it feels like all that labour is wasted. It feels like all that labour is in vain: “I am exercising, and it feels like I am making zero progress. I am dieting, and it feels like I am making zero progress. I am working so hard, and it feels so slow. I am serving God, and I am not sure if I am making a difference.” That is what many people feel like. Hang on. The Scriptures say your labour is not in vain in the Lord. Who are you doing it for? Are you doing it for the Lord? Well, then, even if you do not see it clearly, God sees it like this: you are always abounding in the work of the Lord.
Always Abounding
I love that word abounding. We hosted a conference here several years ago called Always Abounding, and it means this overflowing, excessive amount, way over the mark, like the way some of the ladies in our church cook. I mean, if you go to their house, they cook way too much food. They give way too generously, and it is like they are offended until everyone is just stuffed full in their house, and it is like, “You are not leaving here unless you take leftovers,” and they are packing up some kind of container to send with me on the way out the door. It is always like, “Hey, come on, keep eating.” Well, that is abundance. That is abounding, and that is what God says about you. You want to be abounding in the work of the Lord, and I go, yeah, I want to be abounding. I want to always be abounding in the work of the Lord. I just find it absolutely fascinating that the abundance is not following the flash-in-the-pan type of person, the ones who are here for a short burst and then they are gone, on fire for God for a little while and then gone. No, the abounding in that verse follows the first two words: steadfast and unmovable. That has been one of those thoughts the Lord keeps putting back on my mind all year long, and it is like, God, give us abundance, but do not give us any shortcuts. I sometimes want to jump in and help my kids with something, and then I think, well, wait a minute, how was it that I learned how to do this thing? Well, I learned by failing a lot, and so I need them to fail to learn the process. In ping-pong, we have got our ping-pong table up right now, and I am slamming it repeatedly on the same spot over and over, and my son is getting better and better and better at returning it. I mean, it is kind of making me nervous. He has beaten me quite a bit now. But all those little things are what add up over time. You may not like it. You may say, “Well, it is hard.” Well, we have a family saying. I love saying it to my kids. It is a family saying that I repeat all the time, and they know my saying. It is just this: figure it out. You have got to figure it out. They know my saying, and they know they are going to be challenged to figure it out, because I believe that is good for them. So I am looking back at our church. I am looking back at this whole year. I am looking back on our 38 years of history here in the Temecula Valley and what God has done with us, and again, over the past year, I am looking at that and going, man, this is abundance. I am so thankful for what God has done in our church this past year, and in these past several decades, but that does not happen overnight. That is a result of a lot of God’s people banding together, doing that slow, steady work of living for the Lord, just plodding along, staying faithful. If you are coming to Calvary Baptist Church looking for some microwave Christianity, you are in the wrong place. My son was doing a project for school on the food of the Philippines, preparing for our missions trip coming up, and he made chicken adobo. He read the word simmer in the recipe. Simmer: well, yeah, that means it has got to sit and stew for a while. It has got to simmer for a while, and there is just no shortcut to the depth of flavor the chicken adobo had that day at lunch when we ate it. I was like, “I am glad you went through the process. I am glad you took the time and did not just rush that,” because it is a process. Well, the same is true with walking with God. Do not expect just a quick fix, or a Daniel or Joseph or Elijah experience. You cannot expect their experience without the Daniel or Joseph or Elijah kind of walking with God. “Therefore, my beloved brethren, be ye stedfast, unmoveable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, forasmuch as ye know that your labour is not in vain in the Lord.” God bless you in this coming year of 2025.
