Jonathan Edward’s Resolutions for 2018

To start this new year, I just finished reading Jonathan Edward’s 70 Resolutions. He wrote these as a teen-ager and read them every week to keep his mind focused and renewed.

Below are 15 Resolutions that stood out to me the most. These are the ones I particularly need to apply and remember in 2018. Which ones stand out to you?

1. Resolved: I will DO whatever I think will be most to God’s glory; and my own good, profit and pleasure, for as long as I live. I will do all these things without any consideration of the time they take. Resolved: to do whatever I understand to be my duty and will provide the most good and benefit to mankind in general. Resolved to do this, whatever difficulties I encounter, and no matter how many I experience or how severe they may be.

2. Resolved: I will continually endeavor to find new ways to practice and promote the things from Resolution 1.

3. Resolved: If ever – really, whenever – I fail & fall and/or grow weary & dull; whenever I begin to neglect the keeping of any part of these Resolutions; I will repent of everything I can remember that I have violated or neglected, …as soon as I come to my senses again.

4. Resolved: Never to do anything, whether physically or spiritually, except what glorifies God. In fact, I resolve not only to this commitment, but I resolve not to even grieve and gripe about these things, …if I can avoid it.

5. Resolved: Never lose one moment of time; but seize the time to use it in the most profitable way I possibly can.

17. Resolved: I will live in such a way, as I will wish I had done when I come to die.

20. Resolved: To maintain the wisest and healthiest practices in my eating and drinking.

24. Resolved: Whenever I do any conspicuously evil action, I will trace it back till I come to the original cause; and then I will carefully endeavor BOTH 1) to do so no more AND 2) to fight and pray with all my might against the source of the original impulse.

28. Resolved: To study the Scriptures so steadily, and so constantly, and so frequently, that it becomes evident – even obvious – to myself that my knowledge of them has grown.

30. Resolved: To strive to my utmost every week to be brought to a higher spiritual place, and to a greater experience of grace, than I was the week before.

48. Resolved: With the utmost niceness and diligence, and with the strictest scrutiny, constantly be looking into the state condition of my soul, so that I may know whether or not I have truly an interest in Christ at any given time. I will do this so that, when I come to my end in death, I will not have neglected to repent of anything I have found.

49. Resolved: That Neglect never shall be, if I can help it.

56. Resolved: Never to give up, nor even slacken up, in my fight with my own corruptions, no matter how successful or unsuccessful I may be.

61. Resolved: I will not give way to that apathy and listlessness which I find artificially eases and relaxes my mind from being fully and fixedly set on God’s Grace. Whatever excuses I may have for it, whatever my listlessness inclines me to do, or rather whatever it inclines me to neglect doing, I will realize that it would actually be best for me to do these things.

65. Resolved: To exercise myself in all my life long, with the greatest openness I am capable of, to declare my ways to God, and lay open my soul to him: all my sins, temptations, difficulties, sorrows, fears, hopes, desires; and every thing in every circumstance. (See Dr. Manton‘s 27th Sermon on Psalm 119.)