Every New Year, American’s like you and me pause and reflect on the last year and make plans for the coming year. Done right, it is a good practice that can serve to draw us nearer to the Lord. Done wrong, it is a meaningless ritual that proves its irrelevance before the end of January and is totally forgotten by the beginning of the spring.
The concept of “New Year’s Resolutions” is as American as turkey at Thanksgiving. It’s what we do. Today, we even have websites that provide us with a place to publish our resolutions and invite those we choose to view them and hold us accountable to keeping them. Yet, there is so much failure.
George Will provides a great secular commentary on this failure in his column in the Washington Post: Given Up Your New Year’s Resolutions? It’s the American Way. There are several points in his column that merit our consideration. But the last paragraph is most worthy of our attention:
Willpower…is like a muscle that can be strengthened but is susceptible to exhaustion. Did you tell lots of people—did you blog about—your New Year’s resolutions? Akst knows why you didn’t: “self-control fatigue,” which is as American as microwave apple pie.
The root of the problem is that we place our New Year’s resolutions on the foundation of self-control. We aim to control our appetites so that we lose weight. We aim to exercise our bodies so that we maintain good health. We aim to devote ourselves more intentionally at work so that we can keep our job. We even devote ourselves to reading through the Bible in a year or memorizing Scripture so that we know the Bible better.
In and of themselves, none of these devotions are bad. We all need to pursue goals such as these. But the reality is that the majority of our New Year’s resolutions are addressing sins in our lives and the only way to rightly address sin in our lives is to confess and repent. Here’s what I’m talking about:
- A resolution to lose weight must begin by confessing the sin of gluttony (Proverbs 23:20-21) and acknowledging to God that we have misdirected worship away from him and toward ourselves (Philippians 3:19).
- A resolution to devote ourselves more fully at work must be predicated by a confession of slothfulness (Matthew 25:26) and acknowledging that we must work as unto the Lord (Colossians 3:23).
- A new resolution to read the Bible through in a year and to memorize Scripture must be borne out of a heart of confession for not treasuring Scripture as depicted by the Psalmist (Psalm 119:9-11).
The Lord calls us to repent of our sin, not to merely make a resolution. Many of our New Year’s resolutions fail because they are addressing sins that we have not confessed to the Lord. Confession and repentance are everything. This is true for at least two reasons:
- We need to understand that all of our sins are sins against God (Psalm 51:4). To refrain from confessing our sins to God and trying to deal with them by merely “turning over a new leaf” in a new year is to dishonor God. It is an act of self-idolatry because our objective is to do right, on our own, and for our own sake. In such a situation, God is neither the means nor the end of our resolution—we are!
- Raw and rugged willpower will not suffice! We are fallen and finite and we will experience “self-control fatigue.” We are desperate for God to enable us to live holy lives that honor Him in all that we do. We can never begin to do so without His gracious enabling—and He will not enable what is, in truth, unconfessed sin.
We must not merely make meaningless New Year’s resolutions that are an affront to our righteous and holy God. Rather, we must be about New Year’s repentance so that we have a chance at living a life of worship of the One True God in the potential-filled New Year that He has granted us.
The Apostle Paul was inspired to declare to those whom he encountered “that they should repent and turn to God, performing deeds in keeping with their repentance” (Acts 26:20). We, too, should make this our New Year’s practice. We must worship the Lord by repenting of our sinful ways and living according to our repentance. Only then will we be grounded in a resolution worth keeping. Only then will we have any hope of honoring our commitments–which have been made unto the Lord.
