We are coming up to the end
of a new year and the beginning of another.
With the holidays and the celebration of New Year’s Eve we tend to make
resolutions to be better in the New Year.
You can end this sentence, “This year I promise I will…” with a variety
of endings. Most likely it would be a
good thing to be resolved, but promise without action means nothing. Promising to diet is great until you realize
you still have five batches of cookies to eat.
The promise of exercise is great until you realize that you have gone so
long without exercising that the first session you exercise again make you
stiff for a week. Resolutions are often
better remembered as great ideas that you haven’t been able to keep in the past,
but this year will be different. And
what makes it worse, is most resolutions are things that we should already be
doing. Call it willpower, lack of time, or whatever you will, but we are sinful
humans and we tend to be good at finding excuses for not doing the things that
we ought to be doing already. Exercise,
eating healthy foods, and other resolutions are things that we should be
attempting to do anyways, without “New Year’s Resolutions.”
We make the resolutions to
become better human beings though because we know that we are not perfect. We know that we should be better, but we seem
to be unable to overcome our shortcomings.
Even Paul had this same problem.
In Romans 7:19-20 he declared “For I do not do the good I want, but the
evil I do not want is what I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no
longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me.” Because of our fallen nature we are unable to
fix ourselves.
Thanks be to God that we
don’t have to fix ourselves. We have the
Savior that came as a baby to take away all our brokenness and to declare to
the entire world that we are a blessed child of God. He had no need for resolutions because he
came in perfection to wipe away all imperfections. We can rejoice that God has done what we
could not.
Go ahead, make New Year’s
resolutions. Remember, even if we fall
short another year, we are still children of God.
God's Blessings,
Vicar Shupe
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