December 31

God’s work in you is a process, not an event.  It progresses not in three or four huge events, but in ten thousand little moments of change. 

Well, it's that season once again. It's the fodder for blogs, email articles, news clips and far too many Instagram posts and reels. It is the time for the annual ritual of dramatic New Year's resolutions fueled by the hope of immediate and significant personal life change.

But the reality is that few smokers have actually quit because of a single moment of resolve. Few obese people have become slim and healthy because of one dramatic moment of commitment. Few people who were deeply in debt have changed their financial lifestyles because they resolved to do so as the old year gave way to the new. And few marriages have been changed by means of one dramatic resolution.

Is change important? Yes, it is important for all of us in some way. Is commitment essential? Of course! In various ways, all our lives are shaped by the commitments we make. But growth in grace—which has the gospel of Jesus Christ at its heart— simply doesn't rest its hope on big, dramatic moments of change.

The fact of the matter is that the transforming work of grace is more of a mundane process than a series of a few dramatic events. Personal heart and life change is always a process. And where does that process take place? It takes place where you and I live every day. And where do we live? Well, we all have the same address.

Our lives don't lurch from big moment to big moment. No, we all live in the utterly mundane.
 

Most of us won't be written up in history books. Most of us will make only three or four momentous decisions in our lives, and several decades after we die, the people we leave behind will struggle to remember the things we did. You and I live in little moments, and if God doesn't rule our little moments and doesn't work to re-create us in the middle of them, then there is no hope for us.

The little moments of life are profoundly important precisely because they are the little moments that we live in and that form us. This is where I think "Big Drama Christianity" gets us into trouble. It can cause us to devalue the significance of the little moments of life and the "small-change" grace that meets us there. And because we devalue the little moments in which we live, we tend not to notice the sin that gets exposed there. We fail to seek the grace that is offered to us. You see, the character of a life is not set in two or three dramatic moments, but in ten thousand little moments.

The character that is formed in those little moments shapes how we respond to the big moments of life. And what makes all of this character change possible? Relent-less, transforming, little-moment grace. So we wake up each day committed to live in the small moments of our daily lives with open eyes and humble, expectant hearts.

For further study and encouragement: John 1:16 
 

Devotions from: Paul David Tripp’s New Morning Mercies by Crossway Books