One Day at a Time
Romans 8:1-11; Matthew 13:1-9[1]
Last week we talked about the Twelve-Step
slogan, “Let Go and let God.” Another familiar slogan from the Twelve-Step
movement is “One Day at a Time.” It’s one of the tools that people who are
trying to live in a healthy way use to deal with “bad” days. Because the truth
is whether you’ve been practicing “recovery” for decades or for days, everybody
has “bad” days. The idea behind the slogan “One Day at a Time” is that, even on
the worst of your “bad” days, you can handle whatever comes your way for one
day. To be sure, there are days when it all seems too much to handle. But
usually, that’s because we’re viewing our problems from the perspective that
they’ll never change. It’ll always be this way. When you think you’re going to
have to deal with your problems for the
rest of your life, it can become overwhelming. But when you frame it as
something you just have to handle today, it usually gets more manageable.
There’s another point to the slogan “One Day
at a Time.” It’s related to the fact that we’ll never perfectly fulfill our
goals in this lifetime. But if we keep our focus on doing the best we can
today, we may wind up pleasantly surprised with how well we do. And after a
while of doing our best “One Day at a Time,” we usually realize we’ve made a
whole lot more progress than we could have imagined when we first started out.
I think those of us who take living the Christian life seriously have a similar
experience. There are wonderful times when we know the joy and peace and
freedom we have from God through Jesus Christ. And then there are other days when
the way we practice the Christian life can best be summed up by the phrase,
“three steps forward, two steps back”!
I think we see some of this reflected in our
lesson from Paul’s letter to the Romans for today. There, Paul emphasizes that
the Holy Spirit poured out on us is the one who makes it possible for us to
experience this new life of joy and peace and freedom right now. And when you
pay close attention to what Paul says, it sounds very much like he is promising
that we already have the fullness of salvation, right now. That’s because
everything necessary for us to experience the fullness of joy and peace and
freedom in this life has already been done for us by God in Jesus Christ. And
it’s also because of what God is doing in our lives through the Spirit right
now, to this very day. Paul puts it this way: because the Spirit of the one
“who raised Jesus from the dead” lives in us, that means God is also working to
give us a new life like the one Jesus has now in the presence of God (Rom
8:10-11, NIRV).
That’s quite a promise. We can have a life like
the one Jesus has in the presence of God right now because of what God is doing
in our lives through the Spirit. And I would absolutely affirm that’s a true
statement: we can have a life like the one Jesus has in the presence of God
right now because of what God is doing in our lives through the Spirit! But the
other side of the truth is the fact that we never experience the fullness
of the life of the risen Lord Christ in this life. We do experience joy and
peace and freedom as a gift from God in Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit.
Theologically speaking, we already have everything we need to know this new
life now. But practically speaking, our experience (and the teachings of
Scripture) remind us that we will not know that new life fully until we are
standing face to face with him. In the meantime, we live our Christian lives in
the tension between the promise of new life now and the full experience of it
when we stand face-to-face with Jesus.[2]
I would say that our Gospel lesson for today
also addresses this question, but from a different perspective. The parable is
a familiar one. A farmer goes out to plant seeds in a field. In those days,
planting seeds was much less precise and involved perhaps even more risk (if
that’s possible!). Farmers would just scatter seeds, hoping some of them would
take root and grow and bear fruit. Of course, Jesus wasn’t really talking about
agriculture in this parable. Among other things, he was trying to warn those
who want to follow him that not all the seeds they planted would bear fruit.
Faithfulness doesn’t always guarantee results. Sometimes we find ourselves
sowing and not reaping.
But there’s a deeper issue here, one that goes
beyond the typical observation that the seeds need the right “kind” of soil in
which to bear fruit. That kind of thinking leads many Christians to wonder
which kind of “soil” they belong to and even to doubt whether they’ve “done
enough” to bear fruit in their lives. Or it leads to a too easy assumption that
because we’re in church we’re automatically in the “good soil” category. But
something that the famous Swiss Reformed Theologian Karl Barth pointed out is
that in this parable, the farmer isn’t planting four fields. The farmer is
planting seeds in one field.[3] Therefore, he suggests that we must reckon with the truth that we all—including
those who are within the Christian community and those who are not—are among
“those who hear” the “Word” of the gospel. That means there is always a mixture
of “ignoring” the “Word” that fails to put it into action on the one hand, and
on the other hand responding to the “Word” with “understanding” that leads to
fruitful Christian living.[4] And that mixture of “ignoring” and “responding” to the “Word” is in all of us.[5] We all respond to the gospel in all these ways outlined in the parable in
differing measures.
That brings us back to where we started. We
all have good days and bad days when it comes to the Christian life. There are
times when our experience of can best be summarized as “three steps forward,
two steps back.” That brings us back to “One Day at a Time.” I think the slogan
applies to our Christian living as much as it does to the recovery movement. We
do our best “One Day at a Time” to respond faithfully to the promises of God’s
word and the demands that go along with them. We do our best “One Day at a
Time” to live fruitful lives as followers of Jesus Christ. That doesn’t mean
that we have to wonder every day whether we’re doing it “good enough.” But it
also means that a faithful response to Jesus Christ can never be something that
we do once and then we sit back and think we’ve done all we have to do.
We live our Christian lives “One day at a
time.” Sometimes we respond to the Word of the Lord like the hard path: it just
“bounces off.” Sometimes we respond like the rocky soil: initially, we’re
enthusiastic, but the Word never really takes root. Sometimes we respond like
the thorny ground: we respond to the Gospel but the other things in our lives
that distract us choke it out. Sometimes we respond to the Word of the Lord in
a way that bears fruit in our lives and in the lives of those around us. This
is true for all of us. That doesn’t mean that we get discouraged because we
don’t always get it right. We live our Christian lives in hope: the hope that
the light that shines in this world through the love of God in Jesus Christ
will always be more powerful than the darkness in this world that we all
participate in and at times may even contribute to![6] Despite any apparent success or failure, we keep on following Jesus “One Day at
a Time,” not because we put our confidence in ourselves, but because we trust
in God to fulfill his promises to us. And somehow, someway, God always turns
our imperfect faith into fruit that benefits not only the Christian community
but also all those with whom we share God’s love.
[1] © 2026 Alan Brehm. A sermon delivered by Rev. Alan Brehm PhD for Hickman
Presbyterian Church, Hickman, NE.
[2] Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, 105, calls the hope of new life that
Paul holds out in Romans as the “impossible possibility of our redemption.”
Later in Romans 8:23 Paul talks about “groaning” for the full experience of new
life.
[3] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, 3.1:189.
[4] Barth summarizes this dilemma well when he says that we all alike “both those
who know and those who do not know” (ibid., 192).
[5] Cf ibid., 188-93, where Barth interprets the
parable of the sower through the perspective that it describes the “antithesis”
in which we all live out the Christian life: “the light of life shines in the
darkness.” That is always true whenever the light of the gospel shines: it shines
in darkness. And we are still a part of that darkness, even though we have embraced the light.
[6] Cf. Henri Nouwen, The Wounded Healer,
76, where he says that this hope is the true motivation for Christian
leadership. I would say it is also the true motivation for Christian living in
general. It is the hope that enables us to “keep pointing to new life even in
the face of corruption and death” and that what God has done for us through
Jesus Christ, especially in raising him from the dead, is a definitive
affirmation that there is “light on the other side of darkness.” I would say it
also points us to the hope that this “light” in the world will always and
inevitably overcome the “darkness.”
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