Regarding New Year’s Resolutions: Don’t Do Anything

What are you demanding of yourself that in truth you do not have the ability to give?

I was planning to tell you in this article how to Christian-ize your New Year's resolutions. I would have recommended you read in the Bible about God’s will for your life, such as the Great Commission and the Golden Rule, and then told you to pray for a while. Finally, I would have advised you to make a plan using James Clear’s wisdom about habits. And that would have been good advice.

But then I remembered a conversation I recently had with a congregant. Let’s call him Phil. (As far as I know, we don’t have a Phil in our church—and if we do, it’s not that Phil.) 

The specific circumstances of Phil’s life are not relevant for us. Just know that he is, as the psalmists would say, suffering anguish and distress (Ps. 116:3). Tears have been his food (Ps. 42:3), and I saw them as we spoke. At times, his body even started shaking as he told me of his afflictions and the thoughts that torment him—and there is no sign that circumstances will let up. He feels trapped beneath a weight he cannot hold. 

On top of all that, Phil wishes badly he was a better Christian. He is angry at himself for not loving God more. For not evangelizing more. For being a sad Christian. He feels like a fake. 

There’s a scene in the 2016 film version of Les Misérables that I think of often. Monsieur le Maire, a.k.a. Jean Valjean, happens upon a disturbance between Fantine and the austere inspector Javert. Fantine is at the nadir of her life. A series of injustices have cast her into poverty, and she is desperate to provide for her daughter. Her only recourse is to sell her hair, her good teeth, and finally her body in prostitution. On top of all this, she has contracted tuberculosis. 

One evening a man forces himself upon her, and in fighting back she strikes him across the face. Javert sees only the last part of the encounter and believes the man’s lie that he was lost when she tried to rob him. Jean Valjean, on other hand, is looking on at the situation from a distance and perceives that this woman is in great distress and is physically unwell. He stands up to Javert with this memorable line: “She needs a doctor, not a jail.” Then he scoops her into his arms and carries her to an infirmary.

Phil, too, needs a doctor, not a jail. He needs to receive the loving care of the Great Physician and to be released from the jail of his own condemning thoughts. 

So when we meet Phil’s dilemma, what are we to do? Should we help him construct a plan for how to start evangelizing more? For how to get happy again? For how to get out from under his afflictions?

“Resolve to fix in your mind and heart what God has already done for you.”

No. Of course, we want those things for Phil, but if we focused on them we’d be asking him to make bricks without straw. What Phil needs most is not to try and be good for God, but to give the little energy he has to thinking of all the ways God is good to him. 

And now I say to you: what are you demanding of yourself that in truth you do not have the ability to give? Where are you trying to make bricks without straw? Which condemning thoughts are you repeating over and over though God himself says that in Christ there is no condemnation? 

I am convinced that the main reason we do little for God (let alone “enough”) is that we think too little of what he’s done for us. We have this habit of trying to generate our own spiritual lives, which is impossible. There is no spiritual life; there is only the Spiritual life. We are either living by the Spirit or by the flesh—by his strength, or ours; at his leading, or ours; from our merits, or his. The Spirit generates the life of faith. 

We must remember that before Jesus says “Go and make disciples” he says “Come to me.” And what do we get when we come to him? 

The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.

    He makes me lie down in green pastures.

He leads me beside still waters.

    He restores my soul.

He leads me in paths of righteousness

    for his name's sake.

Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,

    I will fear no evil,

for you are with me;

    your rod and your staff,

    they comfort me.

You prepare a table before me

    in the presence of my enemies;

you anoint my head with oil;

    my cup overflows.

Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me

    all the days of my life,

and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord

    forever.

(Psalm 23)

When we come to Jesus, we get refreshed, fed, led, protected, corrected, honored, and chased—chased, like a sheep being herded by a sheepdog*—by his goodness and mercy, all the days of our lives.

If you are in Christ, that is what is true of your new year. Before you do anything, God is already doing all of that for you in Christ. 

So before you make a plan to lose weight or read more or spend more time with your family or make more disciples or quit porn or be more loving, resolve to fix in your mind and heart what God has already done for you. What he does for you now. What he will do. How good and tender and kind he is to you.

Before you do anything, do nothing—nothing but reflect on the goodness of God. And let that drive your doing.

* I owe this concept to Tremper Longman III, Psalms: An Introduction and Commentary, ed. David G. Firth, vol. 15–16, Tyndale Old Testament Commentaries (Nottingham, England: Inter-Varsity Press, 2014), 137: “Verse 6a personifies God’s covenant attributes of goodness (ṭôb) and love or loyalty (ḥesed), picturing them as following the psalmist. A better translation of the verb might be ‘pursuing’, and if so, and if the shepherd metaphor does extend into the second stanza, then goodness and love act like the shepherd’s sheepdogs, helping the shepherd to keep the sheep going in the right direction.”