Resolved for a New School Year
August 20, 2015 | by: Dale Thiele | 0 Comments
Posted in: Pastoral Encouragement | Tags: newness, Jonathan Edwards, resolve
A new school year. A new season. A new chapter. We all like new beginnings, don’t we? They give us fresh opportunities to “reinvent” ourselves, turn a new leaf, and embrace new experiences. This longing for newness is evidence that things in this life and world are not as they should be. Only the power of the gospel brings the newness that “satisfies.” Paul says in 2 Corinthians 5:17, “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.” This newness, though, is not practically worked out in our lives all at once. How should we seek the newness promised in Christ?
Jonathan Edwards, a puritan pastor in the early 18th century, longed for the newness of the gospel to be worked out in his life. He understood clearly that it was only by God’s grace that he would be “renewed in the whole man after the image of God.” He also embraced his responsibility to strive for that growth in newness, as enabled by God.
When Edwards was only 17 years old, he began to write resolutions that centered his attention on striving for this growth, eventually writing 70 resolutions by age 20. He prefaced his resolutions by stating, “Being sensible that I am unable to do anything without God’s help, I do humbly entreat him by his grace to enable me to keep these resolutions, so far as they are agreeable to his will, for Christ’s sake.” Personal responsibility working alongside the grace of God.
Consider some of Jonathan Edwards’ resolutions (read all of them here):
6. Resolved, to live with all my might, while I do live.
7. Resolved, never to do anything, which I should be afraid to do, if it were the last hour of my life.
13. Resolved, to be endeavoring to find out fit objects of charity and liberality.
28. Resolved, to study the Scriptures so steadily, constantly and frequently, as that I may find, and plainly perceive myself to grow in the knowledge of the same.
33. Resolved, always to do what I can towards making, maintaining, establishing and preserving peace, when it can be without over-balancing detriment in other respects.
67. Resolved, after afflictions, to inquire, what I am the better for them, what good I have got by them. And what I might have got by them.
Edwards provides a model for us as we consider a “new chapter” this school year. Will we “strive for the holiness without which no one will see the Lord” (Heb. 12:14)? Will we be intentional in seeking to “walk in the newness of life” offered in Christ (Rom. 6:4)? Can we say with Paul that God’s “grace toward me was not in vain” (1 Cor. 15:10)? Edwards’ resolutions set an example of embracing personal responsibility while humbly depending on God’s grace for the growth of gospel newness.
What are you striving for this new school year? How are you centering your attention on all that God has for you in Christ? What do you want to be different this year?
