Why New Years Resolutions Never Resolve
Copyright by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved
Many believers tend to follow the larger culture’s custom of making “New Year’s Resolutions.” We are not exempt from the tendency to see January 1st as a time to make an attempt to start fresh in areas of our lives with which we are dissatisfied. In the case of Christians the attempt is often related to stubbornly habitual sin.
I gave up on such resolutions several years ago. It is not that I do not have sin in my life, quite the contrary. It is just that I tend to share the view of a rock band that had a hit song in the 1980’s entitled Nothing Changes on New Year’s Day. When you think about it the sense of “freshness” that hangs about this time on the calendar is really an illusion. It is one that appeals to the accurate sense all human beings have that they are in regular need of new starts. The ushering in of another four numbers on the calendar resonates with this need in all of us and seems to be the obvious time to try something new that will hopefully better our lives, but it is an artificial delineation with no real meaning.
The word try is significant here. Our resolutions tend to be centered, more often than not, on self-effort and this is why they almost inevitably end up frustratingly unfulfilled. When the hope for change in life revolves around just a change of mind about something, coupled with trying to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, the inevitable result is failure. There is a reason why new gym memberships spike around the beginning of any given year. There is equally a reason why the surging number of unfamiliar faces glimpsed at any gym in January and February predictably disappears in March and April. Willpower-driven pledges are almost always a dead-end, and it does not typically take long to get there.
We live in the age of “self-help”, a term that has to be one of the most oxymoronic in recent history. As biblical Christians we should know this, but the truth of the matter is that many of us do not (witness the rise of the “Christian self-help” sections of religious bookstores, a doubly oxy-moronic label when you think about it.) Believers are by no means free of the futile tendency to continue to try to fight the flesh with the flesh. We often give lip-service to relying on the power of God to effect real and needed change in our lives. Unfortunately our continuing failures, both individually and corporately, to live differently than the rest of the world belie such claims.
Please don’t get me wrong, a change of mind about something in our lives that is offensive to God and destructive to us is a good thing. The problem comes when we have difficulty truly surrendering to Christ the effort to eliminate whatever the sin happens to be. We certainly need to come to the place of decision that a certain habitual transgression truly has to go. What we do not need is to then believe on either a conscious or subconscious level that we somehow have any real strength to make it go. It is one thing to change our minds, but it is quite another to allow our Lord to change our hearts in such a way that genuine deliverance from sin occurs.
A works-oriented mentality regarding sanctification is just as faulty as one regarding salvation. We have no incipient power to achieve either pardon for our sin or victory over the sin that remains in our lives once that pardon is obtained. In both cases the power has to come from God through the shed blood of Jesus, received as a gift. It was His resolution to die on a cross for us that really matters when it comes to attaining any real and lasting victory over sin…and New Years is no better or worse time than any other to remember that fact.