We are in the third week of a series of messages about momentum for life. Every one of us has the responsibility of continuing the momentum of the dream God has given us. I was thinking the other day, "What is a Christian?" Many times in our country and in our world, if you ask people, “What is a Christian?,” they come up with a trite answer about someone who believes certain truths about God. But a Christian is a person who has made a commitment, not an intention, to a lifelong journey of faith. Christians are people who spend all of their lives following Jesus. Christians are going where Jesus is going, they are doing what Jesus is doing and they are being who Jesus is being.

The call of God on our lives is a call of holiness. I want you to get out your note sheets and Bibles, because in these eight weeks we are creating lifelong habits that will build momentum for change and will help you in the “stuck” areas of your life. Write down "a call to holiness.” What does the word holiness sound like? Wholeness. I used to hear the word holiness and think it was one of those cloudy, pie-in-the-sky concepts of God that meant goodness. No. It means to be whole in every area of your life. God is a holy God, which means he demonstrates total excellence and wholeness in his character. This is a journey in wholeness, this Christian life. It's not a belief system.

Open your Bibles. We're in Psalm 122. There are fifteen Psalms that are called the Psalms of Ascent - from Psalm 120 to 134. They were written to be sung once a year when God’s people made the journey up the mountain to Jerusalem, which was a several day endeavor. It wasn't like getting in the car and saying, "Let's go to church tonight." Their journey was up a steep incline, and they made this journey at least once a year to make an excellent, honorable offering to God. The New Testament talks about striving toward the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. By being a people who are called to holiness, or the demonstration of excellence in every area of our life, we never reach a plateau or plain. Where did the idea ever come from, "When I am grown up . . . when I arrive . . . when I'm mature...then I can take it easy?" Jesus said you will never see or experience the Kingdom of God unless you become like a child. A child realizes that they are not there yet. They have not arrived. They are ever in this process of discipline and maturation. A child is always in school.

Psalm 122:1-2
1. I rejoiced with those who said to me, "Let us go to the house of the LORD ."
2.Our feet are standing in your gates, O Jerusalem

Look at Psalm 122 with me. It is the song of a person who has made the commitment to go where God is calling them to go, to make an honorable offering of excellence. Notice it says, "I rejoiced with those who said to me, 'Let us go up to the house of the Lord. Our feet are standing in your gates, O Jerusalem.'" It is a total change of attitude. It's not like, "Someday I'm going to..." This is the psalm of a person who is on their way to where God is calling. As I said last week, every one of us has some areas of life in which we do better than others. When I look at some of your careers, I see the reflection of excellence. Yet I can look at another area of your life, maybe your marriage, and it represents less than excellence. Or you're a student in school, and your grades and your study habits do not reflect the honorable excellence of God's character. The best motivation I know to getting unstuck in an area of your life is God. It's acknowledging it’s not about you in each area of your life. You say, "Well, I don't have the time. It's not convenient." Hey, it's not about you. The best motivation I know for getting unstuck in any area of your life is God.

The first way you get unstuck is to deal with rationalization. We dealt with this last week. Rationalization happens when you look at any area of your life and you make yourself the exception. I call it dealing with your big 'but.' How many times have you said, "Yes, but I just don't have the time." "I would love to exercise, but I'm too busy." Or "I would like to get involved in that Bible study at church, but I work." Before you are ever able to go anywhere, you have to repent of rationalization. The first Psalm of Ascent, Psalm 120, is a psalm of repentance.

Psalm 120:1-7
1. I call on the LORD in my distress, and he answers me.
2. Save me, O LORD , from lying lips and from deceitful tongues.
3. What will he do to you, and what more besides, O deceitful tongue?
4. He will punish you with a warrior's sharp arrows, with burning coals of the broom tree.
5. Woe to me that I dwell in Meshech, that I live among the tents of Kedar!
6. Too long have I lived among those who hate peace.
7. I am a man of peace; but when I speak, they are for war.

The second area you have to deal with in your life to get off “stuck” is procrastination. Procrastination is when you don't know where or how to get started in a particular area of your life. You know you need to, you just don't know how so you don’t do anything. Many of you know I'm a dog lover. I have a giant schnauzer named Luka. He weighs about 125 pounds. He is a great dog; he is the most loving dog. You've heard me say before, and I know this upsets you, but dogs are not all that bright. What I love about Luka is that he wants to be anywhere we are. So if we go down into the basement to run on the treadmill, he's down in the basement. If we go all the way upstairs to shower, he's up there lying down next to us. But he has this little problem. He has this "head thing" going on with getting started going up the stairs. He's six years old; he should have this down by now. So when he starts out at the bottom of the stairs, he does what I call his procrastination shuffle. Once he gets started he has the momentum. It can take him a whole minute to get started, but once he gets going, he's got it. So the key here, and this is what we're going to focus on this week, is to identify your area of procrastination. Failure comes in direct proportion to the level of your procrastination.

Proverbs 6:9
9. How long will you lie there, you sluggard? When will you get up from your sleep?

Turn to Proverbs 6:9. This is pretty strong language, but it's not to condemn you, but to move you. "How long will you lie there, you sluggard? When will you get up from your sleep?" Here's procrastination: every time you feel like you need to do something, you go to bed until it goes away. Have you ever been there? You might eat. "A little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest--and poverty will come on you like a bandit and scarcity like an armed man." What I want you to see here is that procrastination equals poverty. Now again, in some areas of your life, you have wealth. You might be doing great guns in one area of your life and you see the prosperity of acting by faith. The Bible says faith without work is useless. But in another area, where there is procrastination, you see poverty. That's why many of you right now are aching in one particular area of your life while you might be winning in others. Holiness is about whole life living.

We can see how procrastination attaches itself to our spirit. How many of you ever went into a test unprepared. "Oh, Lord Jesus . . ." Do you remember? It literally has physical consequences on your body. Your palms begin to sweat. You begin to make all kinds of deals with God. When you're not prepared, it feeds feelings of inadequacy and creates self-doubt. Here's what happens: procrastination attaches itself to your psyche and repeats these patterns subconsciously in your sleep. Years after I was out of school, I would have dreams of going to exams. I would dream that I was taking an exam, but I had forgotten all quarter I was in the class so I never showed up except for the exam. Have any of you ever had a similar kind of dream? I would think, "Okay, now I'm not going to graduate." Then I would wake up and think, "You're fifty-three, you graduated. You have a doctorate." I think I was in two plays in all my life. I had dreams, years later, of being at the night of the play and never memorizing my lines. Have you had similar kind of dreams? Notice what happens in your life subconsciously. The Bible says, "As a person thinks within themselves (that's your subconscious), so you become." Procrastination is planting seeds of failure, because subconsciously you're dreaming about panic, failure and defeat. Procrastination is putting off before you go to sleep tonight what God has put in your spirit to do today.

Proverbs 23:7 (King James Version)
7. For as he thinketh in his heart, so is he: Eat and drink, saith he to thee; but his heart is not with thee.

There are three characteristics to procrastination we need to deal with. See if you recognize them within yourself. The first is defaulting, which is when you make a commitment to do something, but you don’t follow through. Instead, you choose to avoid it by doing non-essential activities or by turning to ways you have sought comfort from in the past. For example, you make a commitment on Wednesday, "Honey, don't worry about it. I'll do it this weekend." The weekend comes and you find yourself working on other non-urgent tasks. You default to non-urgent tasks. Anything worth doing is hard…which means it often causes us to sweat. The consequence of sin is the aversion to sweat…so because the task is hard and we have this little aversion to sweat, we default to non-urgent tasks, or we turn to comfort activities. Sound familiar, anyone? When you only have two shirts left in the closet, you go face a whole pile of ironing that's been stacking up for a month-and-a-half. You've been wearing those two shirts a few more days than you should, but you see this pile of ironing and you don't know where to start. So you go get Ben & Jerry's. That's defaulting. Right now, I have just started writing another book. The action step I've taken to get the book started is to commit to preaching this sermon series for the next eight weeks. The book is called "Momentum for Life". My choice was to create an activity in my life to keep me from defaulting, but I still want to default. Here's what I'll do: On Tuesdays, I do nothing but stay home in my office all day and work on writing the book. I get in my office and get my computer open. "I think I'll check my email." Do you see what defaulting is? You start checking your email and you can still be on your email two hours later. Then you say, "It’s too late to start now. I'll do it next Tuesday." So, it never gets done.

When we are tempted to resort to default behavior, we have to check the "I'm too busy" excuse. Here's one I hear around the church a lot: "I'm too busy to do my daily devotion with God." It’s not about you! If you're too busy to do your daily devotion with God, you've got the wrong priorities going. All of life is a journey of ascent, striving for the upward call of Jesus Christ. It's where our sweat meets the blood of Jesus Christ. Sweat and blood come together. If you're too busy, then you've got the wrong priorities in making an honorable, excellent offering to God. "I'm too busy to exercise." Your body is the temple of God and if you're too busy, then you're life is about you. It's not about the journey of ascent of making an honorable, excellent offering to God.

Do any of you ever default? Recognize it, or you're going to be doing that procrastination shuffle with Luka. Recognize the area in which you tend to default. For me, the Lord told me to write this book last March when I was in Philadelphia. At that time, I called my agent in Nashville, but when did I get started? Two weeks ago - when I recognized that I was defaulting in my life.

Here's the second area: you're overwhelmed. You've got so much to do; you don't know where to get started. As we look at these Psalms of Ascent, I want you to go back to the picture of the temple of God up on the mountain. "When we were going to Jerusalem I was glad when they said unto me, 'Let’s go to the house of God.'" For this is the only place a Jewish person could make an excellent, honorable offering to God. Every good Jewish person was supposed to go there at least once a year. But no matter how good their intentions were, many didn't make it. They started thinking, "Okay we're going to make this trip. We're going to be gone ten days. We've got six kids." Think about packing all of the kids' clothes and stuff! "Then we've got to have the toys to keep them occupied in the donkey cart. What are we going to eat? Where are we going to stay? It's easier to stay at home." Some of you have done that in your lives in the church. How many times have you gotten up and your intention is to go up to the house of God, but "Wait, we have to get the kids going. They're crying; one of them doesn't feel good. We've got to get breakfast; Johnny's got Cheerios in his hair. They don't have clean clothes to wear and then we have to get to church and deal with the parking and the crowds and where are we going to sit?! Isn't it just easier to stay at home?'" Nothing worthwhile is easy. What does it mean to work out your salvation with fear and trembling? It's where your sweat meets Jesus' blood. You've got to make a commitment to do the first thing, the top priority. Commitment is different than good intentions. Commitment is to do the first thing.

Four and a half years ago I made the commitment to get fit. When I talk about fitness, just think about fitness as a metaphor for every area of your life. When I made the commitment to get fit, I was overwhelmed. I was forty-nine years old and didn't know what to do. I thought back to high school gym class. All I could remember was something like jumping jacks. Okay, I'm sweating now. That must have been good. Then there was something that Carl Kunkle, who was our Phys. Ed. teacher, called side straddle hops. Has anyone heard that term before? I forget what those were. I think it was jumping jacks going sideways or something. And so here I am, "Okay, what do I do? I don't like to run . . . I don't like . . . I don't like . . ." So I thought, "Well, push ups. I can do a push up. Last time I tried, when I was sixteen, I could do a push up." So you just get frustrated. You quit because you don't know what to do. If you're going to advance in any area of your life, you need to hook up with a life coach who's ahead of you. Here's an important point: all leadership begins with self-leadership. You can't go any farther than you are. So unless you hook up with a person who's ahead of you in the area in which you're struggling, you're always going to fail. The first week, I hooked up with a personal trainer. My trainer said to get down and do a push up. Here's what she did at first - she put a towel around my waist and helped me. Now, it's not a problem. Now I'm fifty-three and I'm better than I was when I was forty-nine, but I started with a towel and help from someone who was ahead of me. I can't talk about this with you unless I'm leading myself. All leadership starts with self-leadership. It's about demonstrating the excellence and glory of God in you. Once you get started you have to keep momentum going. The first time I ran around the campus with my trainer, I was out there in the grass gasping for breath. We had run about two minutes and I said, "I've got to stop." My trainer said to me, "We can't stop, because once you stop, you won't get started again." She was running next to me. I think she was like a twenty-seven-year-old young person at the time. She said, "Slow down, so you're doing a little better than walking. Then, when you get your breath again, take off."

Here is the key when you're overwhelmed: you have to find a life coach. That's why it's critical to have each other. "I rejoice when they say to me, 'Let’s go to the house of the Lord.'" We need each other to get here. It's why we have classes about everything from finances to fitness to help you make an honorable, excellent offering to God with your life. Some of you right now are doing the Transformation Journal every day, and I really want to applaud you for your effort. But you say, "This is frustrating. I just don't know what I'm getting out of it." Every Wednesday night you have a coach in Mike Bowie who is here to help you with the Transformation Journal. Let me encourage you to keep doing that.

Psalm 122:33. Jerusalem is built like a city that is closely compacted together.

Here's the third characteristic of procrastination: disorganization. God is a God of order. Remember Psalm 122 is the song of a person who has made the commitment to go where God is calling them to go. This person has not made an intention or a declaration, but has made the commitment. The metaphor of this Psalm is architecture. The third verse says, "Jerusalem is built like a city that is closely compacted together." It means that it works. It's well designed. It’s tight. All the rocks are together in harmony. For your life to be all together, you need a blueprint. You need a life map. Cluttered spaces create cluttered minds which create cluttered spirits which create cluttered eternities. Have you ever noticed when you allow a little clutter in your house it grows? It's like cancer.

Last year, Carolyn's mom moved to a senior residence complex. So we moved a lot of the furniture she couldn't use into our garage. Since we built this house in 1993, we have been able to get two cars into the garage space. We kept it organized, but now all of a sudden, about half of the garage has all her mom's stuff stacked in it. You know how it is; you have all this emotional attachment to stuff. So this was all the stuff Carolyn couldn't throw away. Now once you allow a little clutter in . . . Jonathan moved home from college last year. So he said "Oooh! Here's a new place to stack junk. I no longer have to carry it all the way down to the storage room in the basement and find orderly places to stack it. We're now allowed to dump it in the garage." Then disorganization creates chaos. You don't know where to begin. It creates cluttered thinking and tension in relationships. I've got a motorcycle coming at the end of February; did any of you know that? It's not going to sit outside when you spell it H-A-R-L-E-Y. It's coming all the way into the garage, and I wasn't going to clean up all the junk by myself. On Saturday, he was leaving to do ministry at Princeton. So last Friday I said, "Jonathan, you and I are going to straighten up the garage." He looked at me and said, "Well, Dad, where are we going to put all that stuff?" You've got to start with a plan. I bought jumbo garbage bags. We went out to the garage last Friday with the jumbo garbage bags. I said, "The best place to begin is by throwing everything away that you're never going to use again." He had about fifty bats out there. Most of them were broken, but every one of them had some kind of memory, even though I think it's good firewood. Do you know when you start cleaning stuff up and Carolyn will say, "That was his kindergarten picture to Mommy." Start with a plan - garbage bags.

What we are going to do the next five weeks is make a life map to holiness. Holiness means wholeness. We're going to introduce five daily activities that will give you momentum to reach God's excellent purpose for your life. Here they are; some of you will remember these. I use the acronym DRIVE. We're going to begin to practice these. Next week we're going to begin with devotion to God. I begin every morning spending an hour in the word through the Transformation Journal, and in prayer and journaling. That begins to give you momentum for every area of your life. R is readiness for lifelong learning. If you quit growing when you're thirty, forty, fifty, sixty or seventy, you're dead. I love it that people like Benjamin Franklin invented bifocals at age seventy-eight. It is continually allowing God to be the potter and you the clay for him to shape and mold. I is investing in key relationships. As I have made resolutions, this is the year for my marriage. You all know I've got a decent marriage, but sometimes we put it on cruise control and I just think my marriage has been a little bit on cruise control. Don't tell Carolyn I think that. Well, she'll like it when she knows that this is the year where that's the priority in my life. V is visioning - that is the ability to see through eyes of faith. We're going to spend a whole week on that. E is eating and exercise. I love the way Dwight L. Moody said it. He was an evangelist - the Billy Graham of the 1800s – who used to fill baseball stadiums when he spoke. He said, "We pray like it is all up to God and we work like it is all up to us." Isn't that a great quote? Let me say this, opportunity is not going to come and drag your behind off the couch. You have to put yourself out there. You have to start the climb of faith.

Amen. God bless.