“See, I Am Doing A New Thing!” (Isaiah 43:19)

Does the prospect of another new year excite you? Do you feel like you are awash with possibilities or inundated with problems?

Your perspective might hinge on how you view New Year’s resolutions. Our family’s New Year’s Day dinner always includes going around the table to make public our resolutions. Some are typical (“I’m going to lose 20 pounds”), unusual (“I’m going to learn karate”), and sweet (“I’m going to help my baby sister learn how to read”). Some I’ve heard for the last 5 years (“I’m going to clean out the garage”). To tell the truth, I can’t recall my resolution from last year – or anyone else’s.

To me, more than making a change for the better, a new year offers a welcome return to “normalcy” after the hectic holiday season. Sure, the Christmas decorations need to be take down and—sometimes—there’s snow to shovel, but January has always been a sort of hilltop experience for me. I actually made it through another year.

I know it’s not that way for everyone. Ringing in the New Year means we turn yet another corner into the unknown or uncertain future. It often is a stark reminder of how fast the years are going and how fleeting our lives really are. And, if we focus on all the resolutions we haven’t kept or we should be making, it can be a real downer.

Life coaches and advice columnists alike seem to think if we just write our resolutions down and keep them in a safe place to return to and reflect on throughout the year, we’ll have better luck in keeping them.

You know, that doesn’t work for me. More often than not, I forget to refer and reflect—then I feel guilty when I do find that piece of paper or that journal page with the “new rules” of life. And what do I do as a result of that guilt: I rebel by ditching the list or rationalizing why I didn’t follow up.

That didn’t work with the Law of the Old Testament, either. What did God find out after he gave the 10 Commandments to Moses? People didn’t breathe a sigh of relief that they had a set of rules to follow and a list of expectations to fall back on. No, they pretty much rebelled against all of the commandments or looked for loopholes. Make something off limits, and the more appeal it has.

Now, I’m not saying that resolutions are worthless and goals are bad—just our mindsets. So much is made of these new changes that we can forget how far we have come and the positive changes we’ve already made. And sometimes the idea of making the change is so daunting that we just give up on ourselves.

God didn’t give up on us. He realized that it was impossible for us to completely follow codes of behavior. He realized that the Law was not bringing human beings closer to Him; in fact, they had created a wall of separation. And He loved us so much that he found a better way. And that way was His Son Jesus.
Second Corinthians 5:17 reads “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!” Only Jesus has the power to change us; we can’t do it alone.

The apostle Paul writes in the seventh chapter of Romans that the Spirit of God is let loose in our hearts: “Now, by dying to what once bound us, we have been released from the law so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit, and not in the old way of the written code.”

Any positive change that is in line with God’s plan for your life is a matter of letting go of your self-condemnation and letting in the Spirit of Jesus Christ. No matter who you are, no matter what you’ve done: that is one resolution that anyone can keep.