Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. Point out anything in me that offends you, and lead me along the path of everlasting life. [Psalm 139:23-24 (NLT)]
The tradition of New Year’s resolutions goes back over 4,000 years to the ancient Babylonians (whose new year began in mid-March with the spring equinox). During their 12-day celebration called Akitu, they either crowned a new king or reaffirmed their loyalty to the old one. To ensure the gods’ favor, they promised to return borrowed items and pledged the repayment of all their debts.
Around 46 BC, Julius Caesar altered the calendar and began the year in January to honor the two-faced Janus—the Roman god who could look back into the past and forward into the future at the same time. Romans believed that the rest of the year would go pleasantly if that was how they spent its first day. Trying to spend January 1st as happily as possible, there were games, feasts, gifts, sweet treats, and plenty of wine while complaint, gossip, and quarrels were avoided. By making sacrifices to Janus and promising to live a better life, Romans believed the year ahead would bring prosperity and success.
Did you spend yesterday as pleasantly as possible—with no spats or spite? Did you start the new year with a resolution or two? While pledging to become a better person in the coming year or promising to return borrowed items and pay one’s debts are good goals for 2025, the majority of our New Year’s resolutions usually have something to do with health, exercise, or diet.
Before resolving to floss, eat more vegetables, or run a 5K, we should pray and ask God what He would like to see us change. “Search me, O God,” is what could be called a dangerous prayer because, when we ask God to search, we should be ready for what He finds. Chances are that it will have nothing to do with developing better dental or nutrition habits.
Asking God to examine our innermost being is like asking Him to perform exploratory surgery in search of sin. While a surgeon may not find a malignancy, God is sure to find plenty of areas in our lives that need excising or change. In medicine, a surgeon usually removes a malignancy if it is found. In God’s hospital, it’s a little different. If He finds disease or malignancy in our hearts, after pointing it out, He expects us to repent and turn away from it.
According to Drive Research, only 9% of those who make New Year’s resolutions successfully keep them all year. Sadly, our spiritual goals can fail as readily as the non-spiritual ones. For 20 years, one Christ-following friend has resolved to read the Bible, cover-to-cover; so far, she’s not gotten past Leviticus! Perhaps we’d do better if we remember that we can’t change by ourselves. While will-power alone might keep us away from Dunkin’ Donuts or Krispy Kreme (at least for a while), it’s not enough when we’re combating spiritual enemies. Fortunately, we are empowered by the Holy Spirit and, through Him, all things are possible—even reading the Bible.
Let us remember that Jesus is in the business of transformation. He transformed water into wine, the blind into the sighted, the lame into the strong, and the diseased into the healthy. He changed the churning sea into calm water, a few morsels of food into a feast, and the dead into the living. Jesus’ miracles of transformation continue today. He turns darkness into light, anger into peace, fear into hope, animosity into love, selfishness into generosity, mourning into joy, shame into honor, and sinners into saints. If you’re still not sure what your resolution should be, you can always borrow Jonathon Edward’s: “Resolution One: I will live for God. Resolution Two: If no one else does, I still will”
May you have a blessed new year.
The object of a new year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul. [G. K. Chesterton]
Tomorrow, December 6, is the Feast of St. Nicholas (or Sinterklass). Although it is difficult to know fact from fiction, we do know that St. Nicholas was born around 270 AD in Patara, a city in Lycia (modern day Turkey). The son of wealthy and devout parents, it was his uncle, the Bishop of Patara, who took charge of his spiritual life. Nicholas became the Bishop of Myra in Turkey, quite likely attended the council of Nicaea, spent seven years imprisoned under Diocletian Persecution, and died on December 6, around 343 AD. While we don’t know much about the man, he must have had a great impact on the early Christian church because, by 450 AD, churches in Asia Minor and Greece were named in his honor and, by the mid-6th century, the Emperor Justinian dedicated a church to him in Constantinople.
In C.S. Lewis’ children’s fantasy novel The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the youngest child, Lucy Pevensie, happens upon an enchanted armoire and steps into the magical world of Narnia. Upon returning, she rushes to tell her siblings of her astonishing adventure. Hearing such a tall tale and finding no concrete proof of its truth, her older siblings assume the story to be a figment of her imagination. They take their concern over her falsehood to their wise elderly uncle. He cautions them to use logic and consider Lucy’s story carefully. He points out there are only three possibilities: either she’s lying, crazy, or telling the truth. After pointing out that lies usually are more plausible than Lucy’s inexplicable tale, he asks if she’s lied before. The children admit she’s always been truthful. After pointing out that none of Lucy’s behavior indicates mental illness, they all agree she can’t have gone mad. He then suggests that since she’s neither a liar nor crazy, they could consider the possibility that Lucy’s story is true.
Pope Francis recently visited Singapore and, when speaking to young people at an interfaith meeting, he is reported to have said “All religions are paths to God.” After comparing the various religions to “different languages that express the divine,” he added, “There is only one God, and each of us has a language to arrive at God. Some are Sheik, Muslim, Hindu, Christian, and they are different paths [to God].” While the pontiff was encouraging interfaith dialogue, his words are troubling. I will not presume to know the Pope’s meaning or intention with his comments. Nevertheless, I find it important to address how the world understood the pontiff’s message.
I was married fifty-seven years ago today. When I promised to love, comfort, honor, cherish, forsake all others, and to have and to hold my husband “for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health” until we parted at death, I had no idea just how bad “for worse” could get, how little money “for poorer” might be, or that sickness could mean much more than a case of the flu. I certainly never pictured us growing old with wrinkles, white hair, hearing aids, bifocals, arthritis, and the limitations that come advanced years.
Although three places in Scripture tell us that the Lord proclaimed ten commandments and wrote them on stone tablets, those tablets weren’t numbered (especially not with Roman numerals)! The original languages of the Bible (Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek) didn’t contain punctuation and the earliest manuscripts didn’t even have spaces between the words. While the words in Scripture are God-breathed, the punctuation was at the discretion of later copyists and translators. Without numbering, punctuation, or paragraphs, we can’t know for sure where one commandment ends and the other begins. As a result, while Jews, Roman Catholics, Protestants, and Orthodox Christians all observe the Ten Commandments, their commandments are not all the same!
