Hello, everyone. Welcome to the new year and before we uncorked 2020 on the podcast, I have a favor to ask of you

We love to serve you on this podcast and we want to serve you even better in the year ahead and beyond and

To serve you better means we need to know you a little bit better into that end

We put together a brief survey that takes just a few minutes to fill out

It will be up until the end of January if you're willing to help us out go to

Desiring God.org forward slash survey. That's desiring God.org forward slash survey and I'll mention that address again at the end of our first episode of

2020 which starts right now

Pastor John some Christians believe in New Year's resolutions other Christians mock resolutions and most Christians

Is simply avoid resolutions altogether

But we are getting a number of email questions on this from both resolution setters and resolution haters

So the question for you is this for the Christian our New Year's resolutions helpful

Are they harmful or they just a setup for a vengeful failure? How should we think biblically about resolutions?

Well, there's always Tony. It depends on what you mean by resolutions if you mean

Declarations of what you intend to do by dint of willpower

Then that will not only probably fail

If it doesn't fail, it's not Christian either

So if it fails it fails and if it succeeds it fails

Because that's not what the Christian life is

It's not live that way not at the beginning of a year not at the beginning of a day or beginning of an hour

You don't screw up your willpower to obey a command

And resolve to do a thing by virtue of strong resolution and call that Christianity

It's it's not the mystery of holiness is that we live our lives in the strength of another

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