In Defense of New Year's Resolutions

Some people criticize the idea of committing to a new habit or pattern after toasting in the New Year. I never understood why.

Who decided that a commitment is only worth making if one keeps it perfectly? Take marriage for example. Does anyone honestly believe that spouses perfectly keep their marriage vows, "to love and to cherish from this day forward..." Who are we kidding? Most spouses do this on a half time basis at best, vacillating between fair and partly cloudy in their ability to convey the selfless love and devotion that they promised at the altar. And over half of all marriages end in divorce. As sobering as it sounds, human beings are by nature promise-breakers. As more and more people will grow up in single parent homes, live through a painful divorce, or bear the scars of abuse at the hands of someone they trusted, we have fewer and fewer examples of faithfulness and promise-keeping.

But we need to keep trying. We need to keep making promises, identifying shortcomings, and resolving ourselves to a better way. Our lives depend on it.

What's the alternative? Who wants to live with the cynicism which condemns an individual to broken patterns, simply because the undoing of those patterns involves a lifetime of struggle?

In the year 1519 Martin Luther, who almost singlehandedly changed history by bringing about the Protestant Reformation, nailed a groundbreaking document to the door of the Wittenberg chapel. This document is known as the "95 Theses," a list of accusations and assertions that rejected and corrected the abuses of the Roman Church.

The first of Luther's 95 Theses reads, "Our Lord and Master Jesus Christ... willed that the whole life of believers should be repentance." My translation: the 2nd most famous figure in history, quoting the single most famous figure in history, declares that our entire lives should revolve around confessing our broken patterns and side-stepped promises, and the resolution to live more faithfully.

If he were alive today, Luther would probably criticize New Year's resolutions, not as a waste of time, but for being too infrequent. In fact, he favored daily resolutions, which he referred to as "daily dying," which was the daily recommitment of one's life to a God whose mercies are new every morning (Lamentations 3).

Notice the underlying assumption here: both before and after we resolve ourselves to more faithful behavior, we will continue needing to confess our faithless behavior. We never grow out of our need for life-change. We never outrun our natural orientation to cutting corners. We never rise above our tendency to turn away from promises, and from God Himself.

So thankfully, through the gift of repentance, we access the power of Divine forgiveness, and with it, the grace to try again. In our daily re-comittment to faithfulness, God expects us to heavily rely upon His faithfulness and forgiveness. In many ways, the Cross of Jesus represents God's admission that our resolutions, New Year's and otherwise, are as essential as they are frail.