New Year, New Me: Gospel Edition

With a new year comes the all-too-familiar resolutions. Typically, we begin our plans with excitement and devotion but end up feeling exhausted and overwhelmed when faced with the reality of our lofty goals. The new year creates a sense of pressure that we need to be the best version of ourselves, which requires endless lists of ideas that are supposed to help us embody the popular cliche, “new year, new me.” Of course, aspiration and dedication are essential for improving ourselves, but the sense of individualistic and burdensome stress that often accompanies such dreams can leave us feeling empty and unaccomplished.

I, too, fall prey to this self-focused urgency to commit to new resolutions. But daily teaching the Gospel message of God’s faithfulness and gifts to my students has provided a new perspective on the new year and any attempts to create a “new me.”

The joy of the Gospel is that there is nothing we do to recreate ourselves. As stated in 2 Corinthians 5:17, “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!” Scripture is clear: simply being “in Christ” is what accomplishes our renewal.

Furthermore, Ephesians 2:1-10 discusses the fact that we, as sinful beings, were “dead in trespasses and sins… But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved— and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.” In other words, we have already experienced our first resurrection, that of God transforming a dead sinner into a living representation of God’s grace. Again, Scripture reveals that God does all the work in creating the “new me.”

So, as we go into this season of resolutions, remember that we have already been re-created in Christ, and that God sees us through His Son. The burden of this reconciliation fell on God, who is faithful despite our sinfulness, and sent Jesus to die and rise so that the “old me” would die and be replaced by the “new me.” This means that our new year endeavors can pour forth from a joyful and comforted heart, one that knows our status before God is already renewed. We simply get to live out that burden-free reality in this new year.

Emmalyn Doyle, Christ Lutheran School, Phoenix, AZ