The old year goes out with fanfare. Restaurants create elaborate menus for New Year’s Eve dinners. Shopkeepers dress their windows using party clothes to entice customers to buy their sparkly offerings. Friends and family ask, “What are you doing for New Year’s Eve?” In New York City, crowds stand for hours in Times Square waiting for the ball to drop. Here in Bermuda, we watch a giant onion descend in historic St. George’s and then sing the famous ode to the old year, Auld Lang Syne. while fireworks burst overhead at midnight. Now that February has arrived and the excitement has passed, I wonder if the new year is already old.
Common Resolutions
The new year arrives with anticipation. Here are five common topics for new year’s resolutions include:
• Mental health/self-care
• Fitness
• Weight loss
• Diet
• Finances
When the New Year Becomes Old
We expect to succeed in the goals we set for each new year. Depending on how ambitious our resolutions are or how little motivation we exert to pursue them, we often cast these promises aside as carelessly as a noisemaker after the celebration is over. New year stops trending on social media. We settle into familiar habits. Studies show as many as 80 percent of resolutions are abandoned by February. However, it is comforting to know that God is not constrained by time as we are. He exists outside the boundaries of days, months, and years. God can breathe newness into our lives whenever He wills it.
I often think of the miraculous stories in the Bible evidencing God’s power to create a new experience in the lives of those who needed Him. In one dramatic circumstance, Saul encountered Jesus on the road to Damascus. Saul’s mission was to persecute and harm Christians. However, his interaction with Jesus resulted in a new mission, to spread the gospel as part of the very movement he was trying to suppress. An unnamed woman pressed through a crowd, desperately seeking a change in her situation. A brief touch of Jesus’ garment gave her a new life of hope and healing.
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These are biblical examples. Can God deliver newness in our post-modern experience, or must we struggle alone? Statistics like the one I already shared vary on the percentage of people who keep their resolutions. At times, the numbers can appear deflating and discouraging. Instead of focusing on forced goal setting or a list of do’s and don’ts, what to cut from our lives, or what we want to lose, why not focus on God filling our empty vessels in 2023?
New and Improved Resolutions
Therefore, for each common resolution, we can add scripture to increase our chance for success:
Improved mental health – And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Philippians 4:7 ESV
Focus on fitness – But they who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings like eagles; they shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not faint. Isaiah 40:31 ESV
Lose weight –- Let us also lay aside every weight and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, Hebrews 12:1
Improve diet – Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body. 1 Corinthians 6:19-20 ESV
Increase finances – Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. Matthew 6:19-21 ESV
3 Things God Will Make New in 2023
Do you have a yet-uninitiated diet plan stuck to your refrigerator or are you hesitating starting that gym membership? Is the new year already old to you? Don’t beat yourself up. On Day One or Day 257, we can make a choice to act differently. Here are three things God is always willing to make new:
1. Heart – I will give them a heart to know Me, for I am the Lord; and they will be My people, and I will be their God, for they will return to Me with their whole heart. Jeremiah 24:7
2. Mind – And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect. Romans 12:2
3. Future – For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the LORD, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future. Jeremiah 29:11
Even if we have already stumbled in our goals for the new year, God reminds us that He can make us new whenever we seek it. Second Corinthians 5:17 says, “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!”
Thank you, Sherma!