The God Who Makes All Things New: Biblical Resolutions for the Year Ahead

God speaks through Isaiah with a command that sounds almost impossible: "Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past." This is not a call to amnesia. God is not asking Israel to erase their history. He is asking them to stop living there. Stop setting up camp in yesterday. Stop letting last year's failures define this year's possibilities. Stop replaying the mistakes, the losses, the regrets on an endless loop — because God is doing something new. Every January, the world makes resolutions. Lose weight. Save money. Read more books. And by February, most of those resolutions are forgotten. The problem is not willpower. The problem is that secular resolutions are rooted in self-improvement — and self-improvement runs out of fuel. Biblical resolution is different. It is not rooted in what you can do for yourself. It is rooted in what God is doing in you. "See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?" God's new thing is not a self-help program. It is a sovereign act. God is the subject of the verb. He is doing. He is making. He is creating. Your job is not to manufacture the new thing. Your job is to perceive it — to open your eyes, to pay attention, to align yourself with what the Creator is already creating. The evangelical conviction is that the new thing God does is always connected to the Gospel. "If anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: the old has gone, the new is here." The ultimate new beginning is not January 1. It is the moment you were born again. And every New Year after that is an opportunity to go deeper into the new creation that Christ has already made you.

Jeremiah wrote Lamentations in the aftermath of the worst disaster in Israel's history: the destruction of Jerusalem. The temple — the dwelling place of God — was rubble. The city was burned. The people were exiled. Everything that defined their identity was gone. And in the middle of that devastation, Jeremiah writes the most astonishing statement of faith in the Old Testament: "Because of the Lord's great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness." New every morning. Not new every January. Not new every decade. Every morning. God's mercies have a 24-hour shelf life — not because they expire, but because they are replenished. Every sunrise is a fresh delivery of grace. Every morning is a clean page. Every day is a new beginning, whether the calendar says January 1 or July 17. This is the foundation of biblical resolution-making. You do not need to wait for a new year to start over. You do not need a dramatic moment, a crisis, or a calendar change. You need a morning. And God gives you one every single day. For the evangelical Christian, this daily renewal is powered by the Holy Spirit. Paul writes: "Be transformed by the renewing of your mind." The renewal is not a one-time event. It is a daily process — the Spirit reshaping your thinking, your desires, your habits, your character. New Year's is simply a cultural marker for what God does every day: He makes you new. He renews your mind. He refreshes your calling. He restores your joy. And He does it not because you earned it, but because His compassions never fail.

Paul had a past. He had persecuted the church. He had held the coats while Stephen was stoned. He had dragged believers from their homes and thrown them in prison. If anyone had a reason to be paralyzed by the rearview mirror, it was Paul. But Paul wrote: "One thing I do: forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus." Forgetting what is behind. That includes the failures — Paul's violent past. But it also includes the successes. Paul had planted churches, written letters that would become Scripture, and seen the risen Christ. He could have rested on his accomplishments. Instead, he pressed on. The past — good or bad — is not the goal. The goal is "the upward call of God in Christ Jesus." So what does pressing on look like in practical terms this New Year? It looks like opening your Bible before you open your phone. It looks like joining a small group instead of just attending Sunday services. It looks like having a conversation about faith with your neighbor. It looks like forgiving the person you have been avoiding. It looks like tithing for the first time. It looks like signing up for a mission trip. It looks like saying yes to the thing God has been nudging you toward for months. Biblical resolutions are not self-improvement projects. They are responses to the upward call. God is calling you higher, deeper, further. He is doing a new thing. The question is not whether God will be faithful this year — Lamentations already answered that. The question is whether you will perceive it, respond to it, and press into the new thing God is doing in your life.