(A sermon to be preached on the last Sunday of the year).

This week we’ll be looking back over the past, analysing the present, and setting goals for the future. For many of us the past year may have been a year we’d prefer to forget. For some, death has invaded their lives, and they’ve lost someone very precious… Then there is sickness, and for some of us there has been a new realisation of our mortality – the fragile hold we have on health and emotional sanity… There have been disappointments: some of them caused by ourselves (perhaps, let’s be honest, we’ve been plain lazy) some caused by those around us (such things as family crises, divorce, trouble at our job, and so on)…

But there were the high points: let us stop for a moment and recall them… Not a day has passed when somebody hasn’t shared with me something beautiful God has been doing in their lives…

But whatever our varied experiences, all of us here will have the same thing happen this week: another year will be subtracted from our life’s span. It was Pope Gregory 13 who fixed a date soon after the winter solstice to mark the beginning of a new year, and all it means is that the earth is about to commence another revolution around the sun. Time marches on… no it rushes on, and we are getting closer and closer to our greater destinies… And so it’s good to reflect, to take an inventory of our resources, to remember, and to set some goals. (By the way don’t set too many goals; and make sure they’re attainable!)

My text (perhaps the most commonly-chosen for this time of the year); ‘The one thing I do is to forget what is behind me and do my best to reach what is ahead…’ (Phil. 3:13)

Paul wrote those words from prison. He’d been arrested in Jerusalem, detained for two years in Caesarea, and was then sent to Rome to await trial before the emperor. And so after four years of his freedom being denied him, this amazing missionary says he’s still setting goals, pressing on to things that are ahead of him. The picture is that of an Olympic foot-race: in such a race you’re not concerned with past territory – in fact looking back can be disastrous – but you’re pressing on towards the finishing-line. The word Paul uses here is very vivid indeed: it describes a runner going flat out for the tape. Every muscle, every panting breath, is harnessed towards that goal. Films these days, like Chariots of Fire, depict such scenes in slow motion…

Now what are the things he wants to forget? As we read Paul’s letters three categories come to mind: he must forget his handicaps, he must move on from his failures, and he mustn’t ‘rest on his laurels’, his past successes and achievements.

(1) First, in his second letter to the Corinthians, he lists the handicaps and discouragements that befell him that would often have knocked lesser competitors out of the race altogether (see 2 Cor. 11:23-29). He also had a physical problem of some sort – a ‘thorn in the flesh’ – to keep him from becoming too proud (2 Cor. 12:7).

If Paul were writing today, I think he’d probably use another metaphor. He’d refer to the ‘No Parking’ signs everywhere in our shopping centres and say: ‘You’ll get fined if you park where you shouldn’t. And in life one of the greatest dangers is parking, resting, settling down. No one ever parks in life without paying a price. Life is a way, a road, not a parking-lot. Life is a school, not a cemetery. Life is for growth, for movement, for development, for struggle, for progress. So don’t park: keep moving. Keep driving.’

And don’t park by your handicaps. Many say to themselves ‘What’s the use – with my handicap?’ I think of blind people like Milton and Homer and Fanny Crosby and Louis Braille, who moved past their terrible handicap and became fulfilled human beings, not in spite of, but because of, their blindness. Others have been crippled – Byron, Dickens, Scott, Balzac, Wilberforce, Poe, Handel, Pasteur, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. At the age of 39, in the prime of life, polio struck Roosevelt down. He couldn’t walk, stand without support, and was, as one doctor put it, ‘a goner below the waist’. Look at this proud, wealthy, famous man who felt terribly humiliated being carried up and down stairs… and so hour after hour he’d crawl over his library floor like a child, and day after day he’d haul his dead weight up the stairs by the power of his hands and arms, step by step, slowly, determinedly, until he was covered with perspiration and trembling from exhaustion. But then he would try again – and again.

But after this illness, Roosevelt’s name became synonymous with help to the downtrodden, the weak, the helpless, and the fearful. Describing this transformation of character, this moving from surface to depth, from cleverness to compassion, from haughtiness to humility, John Gunther says that ‘polio was God’s greatest gift to Franklin Delano Roosevelt.’

Think of Beethoven – we are eternal debtors to his deafness. The last words of this composer of such majestic music: ‘I shall hear in heaven.’

If Charles Darwin was right when he said ‘We differ more in the degree to which we use our abilities than in the sum total of our abilities,’ then it is also true that persons differ more in the degree to which they use their disabilities than in the sum total of their disabilities.

Give one person the handicap of blindness, and they rot, and complain. Give another blindness and you have a Milton with a Paradise Lost – and Regained.

That isn’t to say that every handicapped person is a potential genius… but it is to say that in everyone of us there are untapped sources of power, unknown abilities, unused energies that are more than sufficient – with God’s help – to compensate for any handicap, any deficiency, any hardships, any opposition, if only we’ll refuse to park by our handicaps and move on beyond them. A term now used by some instead of ‘handicapped’ or ‘disabled’ is ‘differently abled’…

‘Adversity’, says Doctor Sangster in one of his sermons ‘is one of our greatest teachers. God polishes his jewels that way.’

(2) Paul also had to move on from his failures. Phil. 3:6 mentions the biggest of all – his persection of the church. (He comments about his misplaced zeal in Gal. 1:13 and 1 Cor.15:9 as well). What sad irony! Since his Damascus-road about-face, he’s building up what he once set out to destroy!

Who is there among us who has never failed? I’ve boo-booed, and so have you! And how tempting to rationalise our failures (‘if only I was a lucky as…’) and to park by them (‘what’s the use…?’).

Some have ‘tried the Christian life and it didn’t work’, and park by their spiritual failure. They’re now sitting in the hog-pen in the far country when they could be enjoying the hospitality of the Father’s house. A pastor visited a man after he’d been found guilty of commiting adultery. ‘There’s no use for me to try again,’ he said. ‘If I wasn’t Christian enough to live right when I had the chance, what’s the point of trying now?’

A famous psychoanalyst was asked by a reporter: ‘What do you try to do with your patients?’ ‘Our objective in analysis,’ he replied, ‘is to free the patient from the tyranny of the past.’

Life’s greatest tragedy is not to fall down, it’s to stay down. The greatest disaster in life is not to fail, it’s to park there, and say ‘What’s the use?’

Ethel Waters was born to a 12-1/2 year old negro girl who’d been raped at knife-point. She grew up in back-alley neighbourhoods, a tough little profane girl, who shop-lifted to feed herself when she was six. Married at 13 to an older man, she failed at that too. But she used to sing and dance before a mirror, and eventually overcame her past… You know the song which helped make her famous: ‘If his eye is on the sparrow I know he watches me!’

Enrico Caruso thoroughly messed up his first audition for the La Scala opera. ‘I have failed, maestro,’ he said to his teacher. ‘No, no, little one,’ the teacher consoled, ‘We make our climb more slow. Some day La Scala will come to us!’ Whole continents came to him…

‘Forgetting those things that are behind,’ says Paul. If you want to succeed you must be prepared to fail.

(3) Paul also had to move beyond his attainments, his successes. First he lists his inherited Jewish privileges, almost as if he’s counting them off on his fingers (3:5); then his Jewish attainments (3:5-6). But when he met Christ, all these things proved worse than useless. Earning merit with God through keeping laws he now regards as leading only to failure and despair. Salvation is something received, not earned.

Mind you, Paul’s not knocking ‘success’ as such. The Book of Proverbs was among his ‘inspired’ Scriptures. It’s simply that a wrongly-motivated success-orientatiion can lead to all kinds of evils, and ‘parking’ by our past successes can be more disastrous than wallowing in our failures. A competitive success-orientation that produces proud winners, and losers who feel they’re ‘nobodies’ has got to be wrong. But the problem is not with success or failure, as such, but with human pride. We can’t escape competitiion, comparisons with others, in a world of unequal talents. And everyone is accountable to God for the gap that exists between our ‘actual’ and our potential. Let’s not glory in mediocrity: the average and the good are the enemies of the best.

Our task is to grow – and to grow beyond past successes. As Kettering put it, bluntly: ‘The minute you get satisfied with what you’ve got the concrete has begun to set in your head.’ Was it George Bernard Shaw who talked about being dead at 30 and buried at 60? We’ve got to treat those two impostors – success and failure – the same, said Rudyard Kipling..

Read Paul’s ultimate goals (3:8-14). You don’t have to apologise for your handicaps, your failures, or your successes. BUT DON’T PARK THERE…!

Rowland Croucher