New year’s resolutions

It's that time of year when certain sorts of people flirt with the idea of New Year's resolutions. I once made such lists. After multiple failures and subsequent guilt, I made a resolution to give up on resolutions.

However, any Briefing readers who are of a resolution-making cast of mind would do well to dip into Jonathan Edwards's list of 70 resolutions, made when he was 19. Here's a selection:

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Being sensible that I am unable to do anything without God's help, I do humbly entreat him by his grace to enable me to keep these Resolutions, so far as they are agreeable to his will, for Christ's sake. Remember to read over these Resolutions once a week.

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8. Resolved, to act, in all respects, both speaking and doing, as if nobody had been so vile as I, and as if I had committed the same sins, or had the same infirmities or failings as others; and that I will let the knowledge of their failings promote nothing but shame in myself, and prove only an occasion of my confessing my own sins and misery to God.

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24. Resolved, whenever I do any conspicuously evil action, to trace it back, till I come to the original cause; and then both carefully endeavor to do so no more, and to fight and pray with all my might against the original of it.

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25. Resolved, to examine carefully, and constantly, what that one thing in me is, which causes me in the least to doubt of the love of God; and to direct all my forces against it.

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28. Resolved, to study the Scriptures so steadily, constantly and frequently, as that I may find, and plainly perceive myself to grow in the knowledge of the same.

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31. Resolved, never to say anything at all against anybody, but when it is perfectly agreeable to the highest degree of Christian honor, and of love to mankind, agreeable to the lowest humility, and sense of my own faults and failings, and agreeable to the golden rule; when I have said anything against anyone, to bring to it, and try it strictly by the test of this Resolution.

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37. Resolved, to inquire every night, as I am going to bed, wherein I have been negligent, what sin I have committed, and wherein I have denied myself: also at the end of every week, month and year.

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56. Resolved, never to give over, not in the least to slacken my fight with my corruptions, however unsuccessful I may be.

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Any of those would be an excellent resolution for a new year.

Read the full list at: http://www.apuritansmind.com/ChristianWalk/ResolutionsOfJonathanEdwards.htm.