Mike Gilland
We are all familiar with the practice of setting New Year’s Resolutions. In pre-COVID times, January would have been one of the biggest months of increased enrollment for gym memberships. Sadly, the expectation that those resolutions (or, promises to ourselves) won’t last to February is as well-known a fact as the concept of setting the resolutions in the first place! We mean well, but more than not, our good intentions are greater than our sense of follow through.
But there is something powerful that we must not lose, regardless of how many times we have attempted and failed at setting a new exercise goal, changing a bad habit, or putting a new discipline in place. This powerful motivating desire to be different, to raise the bar on our goals for ourselves CAN be a true gift to us – if we allow the power of God to lead us in those efforts.
The prophet Isaiah brings such a promise of success to us in chapter 43, verses 18 and 19, where Isaiah records:
18 “Remember not the former things,
nor consider the things of old.
19 Behold, I am doing a new thing;
now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?
I will make a way in the wilderness
and rivers in the desert.
It is one thing for you or for me to set a promise, but it is quite another for that promise to come from God. He is not like us. When it is the Lord that is impressing something in our heart, or initiates a new direction for our lives, those things WILL come to pass. He will see it through. He will make a way, even where there is no visible way.
So, the key to setting a New Year’s resolution that will work in our lives, and with great success at that, can simply be found by asking…is this something that is a good idea, or is it a God-idea? If it is the latter, then take heart. For wherever He guides, He provides.