A Different Kind of New Year’s Resolution

A New Year is always a time for reflection. Even though nothing literally “resets” on January 1, there is this sense of a clean slate, like someone has shaken the etch-a-sketch and given us a chance to create something fresh and new.

In this spirit of optimism and renewal, let me give you a different kind of challenge this year. Most resolutions fail. In fact, statistics say only 3% of us will make a New Year’s promise and actually keep it. But you knew this already.

Gym memberships will expand for a few months, and then the expansion will revert back to our waistlines.

Those read through the bible checklists will survive to mid-February (or about the book of Leviticus).

I will be screaming at NFL referees by mid 2nd quarter Wildcard Weekend, lasting only around 20 minutes into my promise to be a better-behaved fan in the New Year.

It’s inevitable.

And while I’m certainly not speaking against the merits of self-discipline, I am acknowledging my proven inability to “fix myself.” I’m acknowledging my inability to fix my family, to fix the people I work with, to fix and control the underlying insecurities, selfish desires, and sinful instincts that drive so much of my behavior and the behavior the people around me. I will never “resolve” my way back to perfection, no matter what great image I try to paint with my social media profiles.

So as we head into a new year, let me give you the only resolution I know that can fix the things that are wrong with you and me. I love the way the late Pastor Jack Miller put it:

“The only New Year’s Resolution I make every year is to collapse more fully on Christ. I trust in Jesus’s resolve, not mine.”

–Jack Miller

I love that imagery – collapsing on Christ. Don’t worry, He can handle it.

The Gospel is the only thing I know that doesn’t just try to control behavior from the outside-in but actually transforms the will from the inside-out. Dependence on Christ actually begins to change what you want. Over time, you begin wanting to want what Jesus wants. No infomercial, no new app download, no pinky swear promise has the power to do that.

So this year, in your life, with your family, in your business, at your job, resolve to trust more in Jesus’s resolve. By next year at this time, you won’t believe what He has done in you.

Happy New Year from The Stone Table.