The New York Times published an article about New Year’s Resolutions a couple of weeks ago. And the idea now in 2025 is that making New Year’s Resolutions is actually unhealthy because it means you aren’t truly accepting yourself; it isn’t loving yourself well to admit that there are areas that you want to change. It seems like our culture has finally become too fragile to make New Years’ Resolutions. In all fairness, it can be defeating to simply build a wall of human resolve that hopes to withstand the storms of daily life. Busyness, unexpected turns, procrastination and bad habits batter our walls of resolution until they break down and we just feel worse. A resolution is basically a wall of our will against the storms of life; a line in the sand against the rising tide of life’s problems. And sand, the Bible says, is exactly the problem. Jesus says that a life that weathers the storms is not determined by the height or the thickness of the walls we build, but by the foundation upon which those walls are built. Resolutions are good, but we need a firm foundation to put those walls upon. Walls that are built on sand just keep sinking lower and lower so we have to constantly work to keep building them higher and higher. And lines in the sand have a tendency to be erased by rising tides of daily life. So what is the foundation? Join us in the gospel of Matthew as we learn that the firm foundation of our lives is hearing and doing the words of Jesus.
