"​​​​New Year's Resolution:

Just Let Yourself Be Loved" 

Do you know, if you died today, where you’d go?” 

“When did you get saved?”

“What’s your New Year’s Resolution?”

I’m not sure if it’s just the round-about way my brain makes connections, but these questions all bring up the same sense of pressure to perform, and the same inevitable guilt at knowing I’m not going to keep that resolution. Which is why I’ve stopped making New Year’s Resolutions.

And it’s why I let go of hoping in my own power to save myself (in the eternal sense).

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Growing up, I learned about the ‘sinner’s prayer’ before I got to grade school, and made sure to pray it on my knees, to get it ‘right.’ Of course, at the time, I didn’t know what really went into that prayer, I just knew it was what the TV evangelist told me would be good enough for God to love me enough to save me. I don’t think I’d even had chicken pox yet before I got the fear of eternal damnation planted by the Christian TV babysitter.

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But just like New Year’s Resolutions, which often grow out of something we’d like to change about ourselves, something we feel badly about or have been told to change, deciding for ourselves to work our way into Heaven by giving our lives over to God and asking God to change or remove everything about us which (we’ve been told) must be against God’s will, doesn’t usually lead to real change. It tends to lead to anxiety, hyper-vigilance, or resentment about having this pressure on in the first place.

Have you ever had this kind of pressure, this kind of let-down, to make a resolution and not keep it? To promise to do ‘better’ and fall back into an old habit?

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God surely wants what’s best for us, Jesus came to give us life abundant! And no matter how hard we try to do better, to be ‘better,’ it’s not how we get into Heaven when we die. It’s more like, living in community with honesty, compassion, and grace, is how we live in Heaven on earth. Forgiving ourselves when we miss the mark, treating one another with understanding, approaching differences with curiosity rather than with judgment, is how we follow Jesus for the here-and-now and follow that prayer for ‘on earth as it is in Heaven.’

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But that question about salvation? About knowing where we will go when we die? That’s already answered, already taken care of. It has nothing to do with saying the right words while in the right posture, with going to the altar once and never again messing up. 

Do we know where we’re going? Absolutely. How? Jesus took care of it. When were you saved? About 2,000 years ago, and every day since, and every day into the future, and right now, because Jesus already took care of it. So what’s your New Year’s Resolution this year? Maybe don’t sweat it. Maybe just let yourself be loved.

Grae and Peace,

Pastor Andrew Tobias Nelson