For as long as I can recall, I’ve never been one who is given to making New Year’s resolutions. I haven’t faulted those who do—but in my own personal experience, I saw them as relatively pointless. My sentiments behind this were simply that if you earnestly wanted to do these things, you should just do them, rather than make much ado about nothing. That’s not to say the goals in and of themselves are unimportant, but rather, what resolutions often seem to be is an exercise in futility, where people make lofty goals and aspirations, yet fail to follow through on them year after year. We all know there is an incredible spike in gym memberships and attendance this time of year—but give it a few weeks and things will settle back to “normal” and people will go back to eating cheeseburgers.

It was not until I started to read through the resolutions of Jonathan Edwards that I found myself drawn to the idea of making such personal resolutions. Here was a man who looked to the Scriptures and gave his earnest attention to obeying them by making the best use of his time on earth. His resolutions were thoroughly Biblical and practical and as we look back on his life, we can see the ways these things shaped his heart and mind. In other words, Edwards wasn’t merely a man who made much ado about nothing in his resolutions. He was a man that earnestly desired to glorify God in his life yet realized his own proclivity to fall short of that aim. I believe his resolutions were made for the purpose of refocusing his heart toward eternal things—to remind himself that he was bought with a price—that he is therefore a slave to righteousness, through the grace of Christ.