Resolve to Do This in 2014 posted by John Sorensen on Jan 01, 2014

Happy New Year!

The ball has dropped in Times Square and our planet is back where it was 365 days ago in its long orbit around the sun.

A New Year now awaits. What are your resolutions for 2014?

Some think resolutions are not for Christians because they rely on will-power to defeat a bad habit, exercise daily, or lose five pounds by March. Come February, most resolutions have failed or been forgotten and those fitness clubs memberships go unused for the rest of the year.

For many resolution makers, the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.

Still, I believe that believers should make New Year’s resolutions. After all, we are told in Scripture that we can “do all things through Christ” (Philippians 4:13). EE founder Dr. D. James Kennedy once said Christians “are really the only ones that should” make resolutions.

Resolutions for believers, Dr. Kennedy said, are not just arbitrary commitments to do what we want or think we ought. Instead, a resolution for the Christian “is a determination to do what God has told him to do.”

I don’t know what God may have especially placed on your heart to do this year, but I do know what’s revealed in His Word.

The “first great commandment,” Jesus said, is to “’love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.’” The second is similar, to “love your neighbor as yourself’” (Matthew 22:37-39).

May I urge you to put those two commandments at the very top of your resolution list for the coming year?

One way to love God is to spend time daily communing with Him in prayer and reading His Word. That’s Christianity 101, but it’s so easy to let the busyness of life crowd out time with God. Don’t let that happen.

And, second, love your neighbor as yourself. The best way to do that is to share the Gospel with others who need to know where they’ll go when they die. The chief concern of Jesus Christ while on earth, Dr. Kennedy said, was to seek and save the lost:

Everywhere He went—whether it was a woman standing near a well, whether it was a little man up a tree, whether it was a scholar coming secretly to Him by night—everywhere, all of the time—Jesus had a passion to bring people to know their Creator, to know their Redeemer, to know Christ. That was His consuming passion.

Resolve this year to make that your consuming passion as well.  And to help, we have a wonderful tool that puts the Gospel at your fingertips and allows you to record your witnessing as a way of life experiences — it’s our eehelps app.  Learn more.