Now that you’ve quit your New Year’s Resolution…
It’s the end of January, and the odds are good that your New Year’s Resolution is just a faint memory. In fact, studies tell us that most people can’t keep their resolutions past the first week of the New Year. Maybe we can’t keep our resolutions because we are doing it wrong.
Most of us tend to make resolutions based on one word: WHAT.
What do I want to accomplish in 2017? What do I want to do with my life? What do I want to weigh? What debt can I eliminate? What trips do we want to take? What can I buy this year? Our tendency is to always focus on the WHAT.
Leadership experts tell us to focus on another word: WHY.
Learning the WHY before the WHAT will help to motivate and keep us going. “Why do I want to lose weight?” The answer is to live a healthier life. “Why do I want to eliminate debt?” The answer is to save for your kid’s college tuition. Knowing the WHY helps keep us focused when the WHAT loses its motivating factor.
But let me suggest another ‘W’ that is often forgotten, and can help us accomplish our WHY and our WHAT. That other ‘W’ is WHO.
WHO do I want to become?
In John 5 we read about Jesus passing by a paralyzed man, who spends his life begging on the streets. Jesus asks him a very interesting question: “Do you want to get well?” Now, you would think he’d respond with a resounding “yes” but instead, he starts making excuses. “No one will help me get into the healing pool,” he tells Jesus. In his mind the WHO he was and would always be was a paralyzed man. He never saw himself as a healed man who could walk, and Jesus wanted him to start thinking about himself as someone who had been healed.
Most of us see ourselves the way we think others see us, like our parents or our friends, and it’s easy for us to settle into the roles of the ‘out of shape funny guy,’ ‘the shopaholic fashionista,’ or perhaps ‘the reclusive miser, who is respected but rarely seen.’ But how does God see you? Who does He want you to become?
Consider the Fruit of the Spirit:
- A person who loves without condition or expectation.
- A person who finds joy, even in the darkest of times.
- A person who is peaceful, regardless of circumstances.
- A person who has patience, even in traffic.
- A person who is kind, even to waiters and incompetent telemarketers.
- A person who is gentle with their kids during instruction.
- A person who is good, even when others take shortcuts.
- A person who is faithful, even when others bail.
- A person who has self-control and practices saying “no.”
If I start with the WHO, I can back it up with the WHY, and then I can begin to develop my list of WHAT I need to accomplish.
Think of it this way: I can simply decide I want to get out of debt by stopping the spending and hiding the credit cards and when an offer comes along, one which is too good to ignore, I can quickly justify the need to make the purchase. By deciding I want to be a person who has self-control, then I would have my WHO.
Next, I would back it up with the WHY, because I don’t want my kids to learn that instant gratification is the way to live. I don’t want to be a slave to my appetites. I want to save for my kids’ future, and also my retirement, so if I don’t take responsibility for myself now, then one day someone else will be responsible for me, my bills and my health. Now I know my WHY.
From there I can strategically determine the places in my life where I need the most self-control. I might say to myself “I’ll wait 24 hours before I make any purchases,” “I will eat dessert only once a week, instead of once a day,” or “I will limit my TV watching to only a few hours each week, instead of several hours each day.” Now I have my WHAT.
In 2017, instead of writing down a list of the WHATs we will quickly forget, let’s learn what’s at stake by us not knowing what God created us to be.