Resolutions

The new year has begun and many noble hearted souls have made some resolutions.  Papers are filled with ads for exercise equipment and gym memberships.  Additional ads for ways to stop smoking, getting organized or building your portfolio are everywhere.  Businesses know they must strike while the iron is hot and it is very hot when New Year resolutions are made.  Even if no one keeps their resolutions for more than just a month, the sales have been made and the profits put in the bank. 

Personally, I don’t usually make resolutions.  In the summer I walk Molly four miles every day.  In the winter I walk her three miles a day.  I figure the extra hour it takes me to get dressed and undressed for winter weather compensates for the one mile of walking I missed.  I am a writer, so therefore I have no money to put into a portfolio and if I got organized I wouldn’t know where anything is.  My beloved bride has tried for years to make my office into “efficiency central”, but I have never quite grasped her methodology and prefer to find my things on little pieces of paper stuck in piles with other little pieces of paper all over my desk. 

At issue, however, is why do people make resolutions?  Mostly it is because they want to be better: better fit, better health, better organized, better in general.  That is an admirable goal and we would all benefit from being better people in general.  But being a better person in general does not satisfy a deeper longing of mankind.  That desire is to be “Better Enough” to please God. 

That is a goal we cannot reach.  From Genesis to Revelation the Bible makes it clear that we are sinful.  It isn’t an illness we can take a pill for and get over.  It isn’t a defect that we can work on and get rid of.  It is in the very essence of our human nature and while many people strive to be better citizens or family members, they cannot get rid of the sinful condition that separates us from God.  Only God can take care of that problem.  He did it at the cross of His Son Jesus Christ.  Christ took our sins upon Himself so that in Him we can have forgiveness and a new life that is seen by God through the righteousness of His Son.  Luther said that each day we should say, “I am baptized.”  By this he means that we should see that we have died to the old self and we are now alive to the new man in Christ.  Each day with that statement we are saying, “I am resolved today to live with, by and for the Christ who died for me.” 

James Fillmore wrote the hymn, “I Am Resolved”.  It can be our theme song for each day of each year.  “I am resolved to follow the Savior, faithful and true each day; heed what He sayeth, do what He willeth, He is the living way.”

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