Pastor's Message: Challenging yourself with a new way to goal-set

New Year’s resolutions are now underway—for at least the next two weeks. Wouldn’t it be better to resolve to never undertake New Year’s resolutions in the first place? In practice, we already never follow through with the resolutions we promised. Most New Year’s resolutions are broken almost as quick as we made them. Some of the novel New Year’s resolutions may include promising to be nicer, promising to go to church more than once this year, promising to be a better Christian, a better neighbor, and maybe, just promise to not be as mean as you were last year.

A new suggestion should be to “challenge yourself” as opposed to just making empty promises that you’ll follow through with New Year’s resolutions. You can challenge yourself to improve on your past accomplishments and challenge yourself to forget past mistakes and move on. This type of goal-setting is far more longterm, because one should never stop in challenging oneself for the rest of one’s life. Challenging oneself can take the forms of being open to new experiences, and improving one’s character. These types of life challenges take more than a year to accomplish. This is certainly better than making bogus promises to ourselves and others that we will do something new this new year that we ultimately fail to do.

The words of Jesus Christ should echo in our hearing: “Again, you have heard that it was said to the people long ago, ‘Do not break your oath, but fulfill to the Lord the vows you have made.’But I tell you, do not swear an oath at all: either by heaven, for it is God’s throne; or by the earth, for it is his footstool; or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the Great King. And do not swear by your head, for you cannot make even one hair white or black. All you need to say is simply ‘Yes’ or ‘No’; anything beyond this comes from the evil one.” (Matthew 5:30-37).

Basically, we are warned not to make foolish promises that we cannot keep, since it is human nature to not follow through. We should resolve to challenge ourselves not to make promises we can’t keep, and rather trust in the One who kept His promise 2,000 years ago that He would never leave us nor forsake us.