James Meehan - Choose Who You'll Become in 2025
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I think one of the most important lessons that a young person like you can learn is that the choices you make today determine the person you become tomorrow. The choices you make right now determine the life that you will live in the future because our lives are the results of the decisions that we make. And very rarely is it one big decision. And very rarely does it happen all at once. More often, it is thousands and thousands of tiny decisions that we make day after day and year after year that get us where we end up. For example, Juan Soto is a professional baseball player who just got offered the largest contract in sports history for, get this $765 million.
Now, he did not just wake up that morning and decide he wanted to be the most sought after player in the MLB. His journey started long before anyone knew his name. From a very young age, he was mentored and encouraged by his dad to love the game of baseball and become great. And from the time he was a little kid until now, baseball has been his passion. He committed himself to the sport and becoming the best that he could. So that day after day, tiny decision after tiny decision, all of them stacking up to make him the all-star he is now. The choices that he made at a young age made him into the player he is now. And the same idea is true of you. You are who you are because of the choices that you have made in the past.
And, for some of you, those choices have been really good and you’re grateful for where you are. Like you’ve got great friendships, you’re doing well in school, you’re growing in your faith. But for others of you, the choices have been a lot less helpful. And now you are sadly suffering the consequences. The good news is that the choices you made in the past, they’re in the past. Today is a new day. This year is a new year. So together let’s choose to move forward so that we can all become the people we were made to be, the people that deep down we all really want to be. So to do that, we are going to read a passage of scripture found in a letter that the Apostle Paul wrote to his apprentice Timothy.
Now, for those of you who don’t know, the Apostle Paul is a big deal. He is known as one of the greatest evangelists and church planters in history. And many of the letters that he wrote to early Christians can actually be found in the New Testament of our Bibles. But what’s even more wild is that before he became that person, he was someone who actually thought Christianity was a false religion that needed to be stamped out, and he did his best to put an end to it. He literally hunted down Christians, throwing them in prison or even helping get them executed. And for much of his life, the choices that he was making were leading him down a horrible path until Jesus appeared to him in a vision and offered him a change of direction. And it was there that the Apostle Paul made a different choice. Instead of trying to end Christianity, he devoted his life to serving Jesus and spreading his faith to every corner of the Roman Empire. Do you see it?
The choices that we make today determine the person we become tomorrow. And the good news of the gospel is that it is never too late to make a different choice and devote your life to Jesus. Before I met Jesus, I was chasing lots of things that didn’t really matter. I was really committed to being the best Mixed Martial Arts fighter I could be, which is like cool and stuff, but by itself that is not a worthy goal for our lives. I was really committed to being in romantic relationships, whether they were healthy or not, and that wasn’t good for me or the people that I was in a relationship with. I was really committed to making money so that I could meet my needs, which again, not by itself a bad thing, but it is so much less than what any of us were created for.
And then Jesus showed me a better way. He stepped into my life and offered me a choice. And it is because of His grace, it is because of my choice to respond to Him in faith that now I can tell you I am more confident than you can imagine, that Jesus is better than anything and that following Him changes everything. The choice I made 10 years ago to start following Jesus has changed my life in ways that I never could have imagined. And there are some of you that maybe today will be the day that you choose just like I did, just like the Apostle Paul did to trust in Jesus.
Now, where was I? Yes, we were talking about Paul and Timothy. So Paul, he’s the dude who went from killing Christians to planting churches. He started a church in this place called Ephesus, and he put a young leader named Timothy in charge. And as is often the case, Timothy very quickly ran into some very big challenges. So Paul wrote a letter to him because back then FaceTime did not exist, and he was instructing him on how to lead his church in a way that was faithful to God and helpful to the people under his care. Now we’re gonna look today specifically at a passage of this letter found near the end of chapter four. Here’s what the Apostle Paul writes. In verse seven he says, «Do not waste time arguing over godless ideas and old wives' tales».
Pause there for a second. If Paul were writing today, he would probably say something like, do not waste time arguing on social media or obsessing over conspiracy theories. Because even if you’re right, what value is that adding to your life or to the lives of others? And perhaps more importantly, what kind of person is that making you into? Let me be the first to say that in all of my years, I have never met a person who became more of who they wanted to be by bashing people on Reddit. The choices we make today determine the person we become tomorrow. So the Apostle Paul goes on to say, «Instead, train yourself to be godly».
Train yourself to be godly. If you’re taking notes, I want you to write this down that we become godly by training ourselves to do what we can and trusting God to do what we can’t. We become godly by training ourselves to do what we can and trusting God to do what we cannot. Becoming godly doesn’t happen just because we want it really bad, right? It doesn’t happen just because we try really hard. We actually need to train and we need to trust God to do for us what we cannot do for ourselves. The way we get good at anything is through training. It is through practice. Whether it is your sport, your instrument, math, friendship, or your favorite video game, you get better when you train. When it comes to becoming godly, though, it’s not something we can do on our own. We need God’s help. That’s why we do what we can and we trust him to do what we cannot.
Paul continues in verse eight to tell us that, «Physical training is good, but training for godliness is much better promising benefits in this life and in the life to come. This is a trustworthy saying and everyone should accept it». This time of year, almost everyone and their grandma is setting goals, intentions, resolutions, or whatever they decide to call it that involves their physical health. Things like losing weight, getting stronger, eating better, et cetera. All of those are good things. But training to become godly is much better because not only does it benefit you in the here and now because it does, but it promises rewards in the life to come. And I agree because the more godly you become, the better your life will be.
Now let me be clear. Better does not mean easier. Training is difficult. Training isn’t always fun, but it prepares us for the challenges ahead, and it makes us more equipped to tackle them. Faithfully following Jesus, training for godliness will not make your life easier, but it’ll make your life better because it will make you better at life. In verse 10, the Apostle Paul says, «This is why we work hard and we continue to struggle. For our hope is in the living God who is the savior of all people, and particularly of all believers».
So what does this look like for you as a switch student in 2025? How do you take the truth of this message and apply it to your life? How do you start to become godly? I want you to write this down if you’re taking notes. You train to become godly by building godly habits. You train to become godly by building godly habits because the choices that we make today determine the people we become tomorrow. And the best way to consistently make choices that make you more of who you want to be and less of who you don’t want to be is by building godly habits. Now, habits are just those routines, those practices, those things that we do on a consistent basis that have become so much a part of what we do, that we often do them without even thinking about it.
Now, building a new habit or breaking an old one is not easy. It takes a lot of hard work. But once that habit is in place, it does a whole lot of work for you, which is why if you’re trying to build a new habit, one of the best things you can do is to actually work on replacing a bad habit with a better habit. So when we get to our groups, the question that we’re gonna discuss is this one. What bad habit are you going to replace with a better habit? What bad habit are you going to replace with a better habit? And what I did is I gave you a sample sentence with a couple of blanks that you can fill in to help you make your answer specific, practical, and actionable. It looks like this. When I, blank, instead of, blank, I will, blank.
So, maybe for you, it’s when I get home from school instead of immediately jumping on «Fortnite», I will ask my mom what I can do to help her around the house. When I wake up in the morning, instead of opening social media, I will read one chapter of my Bible. When I get in bed at night, instead of scrolling on my phone, I will pray for God to bless 10 people. Now, for me, I would fill in that sentence this way. When I get bored, instead of opening up entertainment on my phone, I will read.
Now super simple. When I get bored, which happens decently regularly, instead of opening up entertainment, and that could be YouTube, it could be the internet, it could be some form of social media, I will read, whether a book that I’m enjoying or the Bible, because I know that entertainment can be good in the right time and place. But if I allow myself to put all of my boredom towards entertainment, then I’m missing out on opportunities to learn and grow and become more of who God has created me to be. And so one of the ways that I’m doing this is by actually removing every entertainment app from my phone so that I don’t really have a lot of fun choices when I get bored. I can like open my Notes app and read notes I’ve written before, I can open up my Bible, which is a really good thing that I want to do.
I can like scroll through old text message conversations or text people, but I’m just not really a texter person. And so by removing those things that might be stealing my attention, I’m making it easier for me to do what I want to do so that I can become who I want to be. Somebody who doesn’t just scroll endlessly on social media, but is actually feeding my mind and feeding my soul with good things that have been written by wise people and by the very spirit of God. So what is it going to be for you? When you, blank, what will you, blank, instead of, blank?
Now, before we close out, I wanna read to you that verse one last time, verse 10. The Apostle Paul tells us this. He says, «This is why we work hard and we continue to struggle. For our hope is in the living God who is the savior of all people, and particularly of all believers». You see, we work hard and we continue to struggle, not for superficial reasons or for a temporary reward. We do it because our hope is in the living God. We do it because our hope is in Jesus, the Savior of the world, and we do it knowing that his Holy Spirit is alive inside of us, giving us the power to do what we cannot do on our own. And this isn’t something we do just to benefit ourselves. We do it so we can honor God with our very best and so that we can become the kind of people who make a difference in the lives of others who need it. We become godly by training ourselves to do what we can and trusting God to do what we cannot.
So Heavenly Father, we come before you right now, so grateful for all the ways that you have shown your love to us. We ask that today you would help us to build godly habits so that we can become the people that you have created us to be, so that we can become the kind of people who love you with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, and love others, the same way that you have loved us through your son Jesus. I pray for every single student listening to this message that you would give them the wisdom, the courage, and the discipline to do what it is you’ve asked them to do. We pray all this in Jesus' name. Amen and amen.