“Pete” was an addicted, adulterous, angry man. His was a maudlin story of mistreatment, injustice, and rejection. Poor Pete! What he needed was a New Year’s resolution, right? Another addict once told me he wished he could remove his brain, scrub it, and put it back in. No, neither a memory scrub nor a try-harder resolution would fix Pete.
I get it. The New Year is a natural time to re-evaluate life. A quick glance at the past, to remember or regret. An eye to the future, to hope or change. If we could gin up the discipline to keep New Year’s resolutions, we probably wouldn’t need them. Yet the yearning of the soul is for life to be better, for me to be better. That is why Pete was sitting in my office.
The Bible is a book for the tortured soul. It pulls no punches in describing the human condition. The many deeds of the flesh cause regrets, anxieties, and fitful sleep. “Immorality, impurity, sensuality” start one list of human frailties. It includes “enmities, strife, jealousy, outbursts of anger.” It hammers the point home with “envying, drunkenness, carousing.” You can see Pete in this list. Perhaps you see yourself.
It’s a book for the tortured soul because it has the only solution. How would you like for yours to be a life of “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control”? In contrast with the deeds of the flesh, this is the “fruit of the Spirit.” These begin to season the character of those who “belong to Christ Jesus” (Gal. 5). In another place it says, “If Christ is in you, though the body is dead because of sin, yet the spirit is alive” (Rom. 8:10). Come to Him in repentance of what you were, in faith in who He is, and you’ll find hope and life.
Pete received Christ that day. A few weeks later a startled Pete reported his old desires were actually changing. He was making new memories. He needed not a resolution, but a renewal which is only found in Christ.