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.
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