I have a new post over at The Gospel Coalition: How to Make Your Resolutions Stick. In it, I offer some reflections on planning and motivating New Year’s Resolutions. Here’s a snippet:
We need to cultivate desires that will sustain our disciplines—a vision of how we want to change that is substantive enough to keep us going when the going gets hard. Last year, I wrote this article about grace-motivated dieting. In it, I argue that diet and exercise should be motivated by the benefits of health, rather than social pressures, vanity, and the idol of youth. In particular, we should think about how our health affects our ability to love and serve others.
The same goes for any other resolution. Are we motivated by guilt? Are we motivated by fear of others? Are we motivated by idolatry? Start by understanding your motivation, and then discerning whether there’s a better way to keep motivated.
