David Platt on New Year’s Resolutions
In this video, Pastor David Platt offers a word of caution upon making New Year’s resolutions. There is a clear danger in striving to keep resolutions and changing ourselves rather than living in God’s will for our lives. Pastor Platt encourages Christians to be open-minded to the idea of allowing God to live in and through us.
- The Danger of Full Reliance on Resolutions
- Allowing God to Live In And Through Us
Watch Full Message of “Repentance and Resolutions“
Transcript
All of us who are in Christ, let’s live our lives this year in the overflow of faith in him. And this is so key. I word that very intentionally because this is so key when we think about resolutions on New Year’s Day. If we are not careful, resolutions, the best resolutions, if we’re not careful in the way we approach them, they can only drive us into deeper dependence on ourselves, what we are going to try to do harder this year, how we are going to change ourselves.
But remember that the essence of following Christ, the essence of what was initially displayed in your baptism was a renouncing of yourself, a death to yourself, a death to your every effort to improve yourself, to obey God and your own strength and your own power and your own resolve.
Don’t do that.
Trust In Christ This Year
Trust in Christ. Trust in Christ more this year, and ask him to do these things in you, whether it is in your marriage or in your relationships with others, or in your time in the word. Ask him to produce faith in you to bring that kind of fruit about. Only he can do it. And we want … Don’t we want this next year to be a year in which now we do things that we can manufacture in our own flesh and our own strength. We want to live lives that are clearly compelled, impelled by the very spirit of God in us, doing immeasurably more than all we could even begin to ask or imagine this next year.
We want him to do things in and through us that we could never do on our own. This is not a self-improvement, self-help seminar at the beginning of 2012. That would miss the entire point of Christianity. We’ve died to ourselves. Christ lives in us. We want his life to flow through us, so let’s press into him individually and then as a church, let’s press into him.
