Into the New Year: Embracing Humility, Letting Go of Failures, and Trusting in God's Promises
Many of us participate in making New Year’s resolutions. We look at our lives and we decide to make new habits because we see it as time to grow. We have the best intentions to keep these promises. However, the statistics show that most people give up on their resolutions by February 1st. We give up on our promises so quickly. We make promises to ourselves at this time of the year perennially and the statistics show that most give up only a month in. This says something about the human condition. We consistently fail to keep our promises to ourselves and others.
It gets worse too. We not only fail to keep our promises this time of year, but it can very well lead to negative consequences emotionally and spiritually. In my own experience, when I fail to come through on something, it can lead to falsely tying my worth to that failure. It can lead to my identity being shifted from the immovable love of Jesus to my mistake. I begin to base my worth, value, and feelings about my life on those failures. When I begin to feel this trying to define me, my first response is to fix it in my own strength. And what I do know as a fact is that I am not the only one trapped in this cycle.
We seek to fix this cycle in a few ways. The first is to try to make ourselves feel better by covering up those mistakes with successes in other parts of our lives. This can lead us to pride and an inability to cope with our fallen reality. The second is to become consumed by failure to the point of self-loathing. We can start to not like who we are because we are unable to fix our problems. However, there is no path through either one of these options that will make us whole. These options do not provide a way to a healthy life. They either make us think too highly or too lowly of ourselves. When we are in this cycle as Christians, we may want to examine if our life is an example of salvation by works and not grace. There is a chance we may be living like our salvation is earned by being good and doing good works rather than accepting the grace Jesus provides. And if there is anything we know about following Jesus, we cannot save ourselves by any means. Then the question becomes, how can we escape this cycle?
My experience tells me to start by focusing on the promises of God and not my own. These promises speak of a God who set out to rescue you, to redeem you, to heal you, to transform you, to make you flourish, to give you purpose, to intimately be with and know you, to chase after you with unrelenting love, to set the world right, to right all wrongs, to remedy and comfort all pain and suffering, to bring a new Kingdom, and to sacrifice himself in our place. Simply put, when we spend time with these promises, when we focus on these promises, when we commit them to memory, and when we learn to trust them, we begin to forget about the cycle. We forget about letting our failures define us or lead us to try to fix them on our own and His promises begin to tell us who we are. The promises begin to tell us that the Lord covers our most egregious sins and that we must be more loved than we ever thought possible. If we practice this together consistently, the powerful voice of Jesus and what He thinks of us will crowd out any other voice and He will lead us to freedom. God sees us, and Jesus’ life shows us what He thinks of us. We are His sons and daughters with whom He is well pleased. Failure, mistakes, self-loathing cannot change it.
Happy New Year!
Pastor Luke Burke