A statement of purpose for the new year

I'm no great fan of New Year's resolutions: quite the reverse. For a perfectionist like me, resolutions often come unstuck, resulting in legalism, guilt and (once I fail to live up to them) a spectacular throwing-off of the reins. Change becomes about meeting my standards rather than responding to the God who forgives and transforms me.1

Once I realised this, I stopped making resolutions. But this year, I tentatively stuck my foot in the waters of the New Year's resolution once again. My resolutions aren't vows. They're not promises. In fact, they're not really resolutions (I don't have enough confidence in myself for that!). They're prayerful commitments, shaped by the Bible: a description of the life I want to live as a woman who's received God's grace (Titus 2:3-5, 11-14; 1 Tim 5:10).

Here are my eight resolutions - my statements of purpose for the new year.

1. To keep Jesus at the centre. To seek his glory instead of my own, to receive his grace instead of wallowing in my guilt, to trust in his greatness instead of being overcome by anxiety, and to rejoice in his goodness instead of giving in to self-pity.2 To keep my eyes fixed on Jesus so I don't grow weary in doing good (Hebrews 12:1-3 NIV).


2. To invest time in keeping my eyes fixed on Jesus. To give the first part of my day to God's word and prayer, even when I really need to get something else done. To read more faith-encouraging books than faith-destroying books. To have a go at memorizing a book of the Bible.3


3. To put my primary responsibilities first. To love, help and care for my husband. To love, teach and train my children, especially my daughter, showing her what it means to be a woman of God. To be faithful and purposeful in caring for our parents. To care for our home, not giving in to laziness or neglect.


4. To serve my brothers and sisters in Christ. To love and encourage younger women without worrying about what they think of me. To think less about whether our church serves my needs and more about how I can serve others and help them grow. To give time to the Christian friends and prayer partners that God has given me.


5. To do good in our community. To chat about Jesus every chance I get, with gentleness, honesty and courage, trusting God to work in people's hearts. To love, not counting the cost. To engage in people's lives, not retreat. To keep an open home.


6. To be prayerful, loving and brave in my writing and speaking, using them to glorify Jesus and encourage others. To make sure that online life - blogs, Facebook, Twitter, emails - don't steal time that belongs to face-to-face relationships. To treat these things as a useful servant, not a master.


7. To care for my body and health so I can serve Jesus more energetically. To trust God in times when my health, or my family's health, gives way.


8. To look to God's grace, because I know that all of these things are beyond me.

I'd love to hear some of your resolutions - at least those that are suitable for public ears and encouraging to others!


1. For a helpful perspective, see David Powlison on New Year's Resolutions.
2. See chapter 5 of Tim Chester's You Can Change.
3. Colossians, if you're curious! A great book for keeping your eyes fixed on Jesus.


This post first appeared at The Briefing.

image is by danielmoyle from flickr

how lazy is your diary?

There's one thing you can be sure of this year: what happens will surprise you. But how do you plan for the unexpected?

I love this suggestion (a little late, but still timely!).

And the big one: make sure your ‘diary’ for 2010 looks lazy. What do I mean by that? I mean that we often overfill our regular commitments at the start of any year because it all looks achievable. But often it is only achievable provided that: a. you never get another cold (shouldn’t be too hard to pull off); b. your estimate of your current commitments in terms of time they require is spot on (it’s not like things take more time than we think right?); and c. no new projects show up, and no new people show up who need caring or serving. If your diary looks lazy, you will have the time you need to respond to the divine appointments that God brings across your path – people to connect with, unbelievers to share Jesus with, the needy to care for. Remembering that we aren’t justified by our activities, but by God’s grace, gives us confidence to make the diary a bit less dense in 2010.

from Happy New Year HT Nicole

image is from Bonnie BonBon at flickr

David Powlison on New Year's Resolutions

David Powlison on New Year's Resolutions. A bit out of date (I just got back from holidays). Beautiful.

a year of grace

I look back over the year, and all I see is failure.

I'm sitting at my favourite table in my favourite cafe, sipping sweet spiced chai from a large mug. The table is on a verandah shadowed by oak trees, and I can glimpse the occasional train flashing silver through the thick leaves. There's an open notebook in front of me, which I surreptitiously cover whenever the waitress approaches. I'm writing, trying to unknot the tangled snarls in my head.

At the top of the page I write, "I'm pretty disappointed in myself."

And then the list. Over-busyness. A cluttered house. Over-eating. Lack of exercise. Prayerlessness. Disorganisation. Chores not done. Opportunities lost. So many sins, so many failures, so many unmet resolutions. I should have learned by now. I shouldn't need to learn! I should get it right, right from the start. The perfectionist in me reacts like I did as a child to my test results. "You got 95%? What about the other 5%?" All I can see is the 100% I didn't get.

But as I write and pray, I begin to see the past year in a different light. I think back to term 1, when God took Tim Chester's You Can Change and Ed Welch's Issues in Biblical Counselling and turned me upside down and inside out. I think back to Easter, when God's grace became so blindingly brilliant that it was that all that I could see. I think back to term 3 , when I learned more than I wanted about what happens when I attempt too much ministry outside the home.

This has been a year of grace. A year not of perfection, but of progress. A year when God used suffering to push me into a new shape. A year when I came to see the love of Christ more clearly. A year when my self-control, my ability to say "no", grew just a tiny bit stronger. A year when I gained a little more courage to share my faith. A year not of completion, but of growth.

And so I face next year with confidence. I'm confident that I'll fail. I'm confident that I'll struggle. I'm confident that I'll keep on sinning. I'm confident that no list of carefully designed resolutions will give me some measure of perfection.

But I'm also confident that I'll grow. I'm confident that the gospel will feel new to me, over and over again. I'm confident that I'll make progress, as God's Spirit changes me (1 Tim 4:15). I'm confident that the love of Christ will seem bigger by the end of the year (Eph 3:17-19). I'm confident that, in every circumstance, God will make me more like Jesus (Rom 8:28-30). I've seen him do it before, and I know he'll do it again.

So I turn to a blank page in my notebook and start a new list. It only occurs to me later that instead of writing a list of new year's resolutions, I've written a list of prayers. They cover more ground than my usual resolutions: there are prayers for the coming year, prayers for my family, prayers for others, prayers for myself. It's God, not I, who will make next year one of grace and growth. And so I pray.

images are by tonyhall and aussiegal at flickr

better than resolutions

You might remember that I had no time to write New Year's resolutions this year. As a result, they've been gathering in my head for weeks, like dustballs in a neglected corner.

Excercise more. Eat less. Read the Bible every day. Pray. Spend more time with school mums. Spend relaxed time daily with my kids. Limit my computer use. Limit my blogging time. Spend relaxed time with my husband. Communicate well with my husband. Have monthly date nights with my husband. Read a book about homemaking. Organise my home. Organise my time. Organise my life. Pray with friends. Keep on top of my spending. Read books, lots of books. Research topics, lots of topics. Give my 2 year old time to dawdle as we walk to school. Memorise bits of the Bible. Memorise bits of the Bible with my kids. Read a book about grace. Work really hard at enjoying grace. Floss.

As you can see, I'm the queen of resolutions. Some I've started, and some I'll probably never start, which is just as well with some of them. But I'd give all these resolutions away, if God would answer for me this one prayer from a woman's diary, written over 150 years ago:

Precious Christ, I come with a large request for 1842: it is that You would be the "Alpha and Omega" of it. Do You not say, "Ask what I shall give you?" Yourself, Lord! You have most blessedly given Yourself to me. But I find sweet liberty to entreat more unfolding, revealing, and opening of Your glorious person, amazing work, and matchless love, than I have yet had; and more losing and treading down of SELF, too--that I may be lost in Your fullness, and forgotten and forsaken in Your soul-absorbing glories.

Oh! raise me higher, draw me nearer, that I may daily die, and You live in me more manifestly. I just give myself to You, to live on You, to live in You, to live for You, more and more than heretofore, and that by the power of the Spirit resting on me. I humbly ask that mine may be a large and still-increasing portion; that, under fresh anointing, You, most lovely Jesus, may be more fully known, more loved, more served; for it is to You the Holy Spirit leads, of You He testifies.

Oh, do make this a large, rich, full year! You being increasingly honoured in me, and I increasingly lost in You, and made an increasing blessing to Your dear people. An Ebenezer for past mercies befits me; large and magnificent have been Your bestowments; bountiful and constant Your favors to me--a poor worthless nothing! "Bless the Lord, O my soul--and all that is within me, bless His holy name!"

Thanks Dianna, who sent this resolution in to this blog on New Year's Day.

images are from stock.xchng

resolved: to grow

I have no great faith in New Year's resolutions. I have seen too many resolutions confidently set sail, only to founder on the shoals of my inertia and intractability.

But I just can't resist the start of a new year, like a pristine white page waiting to be written on (or, so as not to mix metaphors, an empty sea waiting for ships to sail ... oh, forget it).

So the turn of each year finds me walking along the beach at Apollo Bay, not making pointless commitments to diet and exercise, but practising what the Puritans called "self-examination": prayerfully reflecting on my life during the last year, asking God to show me key areas of (un)godliness he wants to work on, and committing myself, with God's help, to grow in these qualities in the year ahead.

This year I resolved:

1. to grow in self-control, especially to exercise godly moderation in eating, spending and computer use.

Recently, I've been doing a lot of research on the meaning of self-control, the final fruit of the Spirit (Galatians 5:22-23). I concluded that it means to control our passions, not as an end in itself (as if intense pleasure or feasting are bad, and moderation and self-denial good in themselves) but in the service of love and godliness. (One of these days I'll get around to writing that blog on dieting, and explain my reasoning.)

So we might eat less because it reduces our irritability and laziness, and helps us to serve God more energetically (a far more important goal even than health - see 1 Tim 4:8); spend less so we can be more generous towards others; and use the computer less so we can spend more time loving our family.

2. to grow in my commitment to spiritual disciplines such as regular (notice I don't say daily) prayer and Bible reading.

Now there's a resolution I make every year! I was motivated this time by something I read in Martyn Lloyd-Jones' Spiritual Depression, where he explains that one of the most common causes of spiritual discouragement is simply lack of discipline: distracted by all our modern entertainment options, we put in some screen time or read a newspaper instead of praying or reading the Bible.

It's time for me to sit down and figure out exactly what form prayer and Bible reading are going to take this year, in the midst of a busy life filled with the demands of children: a useful annual exercise.

The key word in both these resolutions is "grow". Oddly enough, I've never much liked talking about "learning", "improving" and "growing. Perfectionist that I am, I'd rather have it all learnt, improved and grown already. But that is exactly what God wants to see in my life: growth.

So I am praying to "grow" in self-control and discipline - not to perfect them, not to make bold resolutions which invite failure, not to adopt amazing new programs which promise success and inevitably fail to deliver - simply to grow, with God's help.

May God help all of us to grow in grace and godliness this year. Amen.