A biblical approach to new year's resolutions
Issue #142
Happy new year. In Ephesians 5, Paul instructs us,
Watch, then, carefully how ye walk, not as unwise, but as wise, redeeming the time, because the days are evil; because of this become not fools, but understand what is the will of the Lord. (Eph 5:15-17)
Since we are commanded to redeem the time always, it is wise to periodically take stock of how well we are doing, and adjust our efforts accordingly.
The new year is a natural time to do this.
Whereas some Christians pooh-pooh the idea of making new year’s resolutions, seeing this as worldly wisdom, it is in fact a wise application of various patterns that God teaches us in the scriptures.
For example, resolutions follow the same pattern as vows, which we find throughout the scriptures. It is not so much stated as assumed that men will make vows, both to God and to each other, because this is fitting and natural when we discern some weighty need to get a thing done.
Israel’s calendar, which God instituted for our instruction also, was set up to ensure the periodic repetition of important rituals, starting with the Passover as the start of a new year. Similarly, its purity laws instruct us symbolically in the need for periodic examination—especially Leviticus 13.
Obviously the new year should not be the only time we ever think about our goals and plans, and how well we are achieving them—but it is a fitting time to think especially about these things. “To everything a season, and a time to every purpose under the heavens” (Ecc 3:1). The new year is no more arbitrary than the start of a new week. Just as it is important to observe the Lord’s Day, so it is important to observe the new year. God set the sun in the sky partly to be for signs and for festivals, and for days and years (Gen 1:14). We should observe them. He designed us to. It is natural and good.
But how should we go about making resolutions for the new year?
There are plenty of practical resources out there covering the more obvious elements of this, so we’re going to take a different approach. Let’s talk about deeper principles.
Paul, in telling us to redeem the time, also gives instruction on how. At first it seems puzzling:
and be not drunk with wine, in which is dissoluteness, but be filled in the Spirit, speaking to yourselves in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord, giving thanks always for all things, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, to the God and Father. (Eph 5:18-20)
If Paul is intending to give a singular, exhaustive description about how we should be redeeming the time, this makes little sense. But if he is rather describing what our method should look like more paradigmatically and foundationally, it makes perfect sense. He is contrasting our fleshly desire to “let go” with the spiritual gift of “holding on.” Drunkenness is disintegration; losing ourselves, losing awareness of the moments we are situated in, abandoning our hold on them, and thus our dominion over them. We lose control to some extent, because control is hard—but we don’t stop acting, doing, behaving. So our acting and doing and behaving becomes evil, foolish, dark.
Of course, we can do this in many ways that do not involve alcohol. Twitter, for example, is a paradigm case of an addictive (enslaving) inebriating agent—something that causes people to lose their inhibitions and act in foolish and unseemly ways. Yet rather than turning back from it, they feel an increasing draw to return to it more and more often.
This is the kind of thing Paul is warning against. And his antidote is the Holy Spirit. He would not have us filled with spirits, so to speak, but with the Spirit. How? The method he recommends is to fill ourselves with the word of God. This becomes more obvious when we compare this parallel instruction in Colossians 3:16:
Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, in all wisdom, teaching and admonishing each other, in psalms, and hymns, and spiritual songs.
He points us to the Psalms for this, as they are designed not only to be easily remembered—being songs—but also to give the Spirit special expression and power through singing.
For more on the connection between singing and spiritual warfare, see Bnonn’s sermon below:
Singing Psalms is God’s own advice for redeeming the time. But we can draw further principles from this in seasons when we are especially reflecting on our efforts at “time-redemption,” and seeking to do to better.
One of the main principles is to look to all the wisdom literature, of which the Psalms are the heart. Another is to remember that redeeming the time is essentially an act of dominion. So it makes sense to look to the wisdom literature written specifically to instruct us in good dominion-taking—the book of Proverbs.
This brings us to…
Our free & easy 31-day Discipleship & Dominion course for January
Here’s something you can easily do this January to get better at exercising dominion, to identify where you have not redeemed the time well, and make a plan to course-correct—to be a more capable man, husband, father, and leader:
Read one chapter of Proverbs each day.
Pull out one actionable idea from that chapter.
Ask God to strengthen you to act on it.
Act on it.
That’s it. End of course.
OK, less of a course and more of a challenge.
On our private members’ Discord server, we have a channel dedicated to this Proverbs Challenge during January.
Members share what they learn in each chapter of Proverbs, and how they are acting on it.
If you’d like to be part of this, we’re offering a discount on our membership—just twelve bucks a month, instead of $19.
Obviously you get much more than just a channel for the Proverbs Challenge. We have 22 topical channels ranging from #sex to #fatherhood, #culture to #church, #manly-skills to #marriage, and everything in between.
This is where you can see us speak more candidly—and you can get counsel from a community of men who are working at exercising dominion on Christ’s behalf.
You can, of course, cancel at any time.
The “bigness” of a mission is achieved and experienced in little moments
By Michael
My son is currently in what his coach calls “hell week.” It basically involves practice twice a day, with sessions starting at 5 am and another at 3 pm. Athan is a bit beat up from it all. This marks his first year wrestling as a freshman in a highly competitive weight class (144 lb). His eye is slightly blackened, and his knee is bruised. He got pinned multiple times during his first scrimmage. However, every morning when I wake up to take him to practice, he is already up and ready to go. He is developing both toughness and resolve.
One of my life’s goals (or missions) is to establish an intergenerational Christian household. You can break that goal into three major stages:
Becoming marriageable
Getting married
Having and raising children.
Each of those stages are made up of little moments. They often feel insignificant at the time. So they are easy to overlook and under-appreciate.
But big things are made of small things.
The drive to and from practice is me raising my son into a man. It’s me encouraging my son in a hard but worthy pursuit. It’s me teaching him what type of father he should be. It’s me being there. After I’m gone, his memories will be filled with me. In that sense, I will continue to father him and even my grandchildren from heaven.
Those short 10-minute drives are laying a life’s foundation.
Big goals will remain pipe dreams if you don’t give yourself to the little moments.
Along a similar vein, it’s helpful to make your perceived world as small as possible.
Many men achieve much less than they could because their view of the world is too large. They spend so much time on social media, and very little forming real-world relationships and trying to steward what is actually in their control.
The result is that they have a great deal more knowledge of the world outside their control than God designed them to manage. And usually it’s a view curated to show them everything negative. All Ls, no Ws.
Naturally, this makes them feel angry and frustrated at everything and everyone “out there”—and morally superior.
It’s a highly effective way of sapping a man’s strength. Keep him fixated on the rings of the world that are too wide for him to manage, so he never learns to manage the things within his ambit.
Having a modest but clear vision of your world is much better than having a sprawling but cherry-picked vision of the world. You can’t have a world-scale mission. You can only have a you-scale one.
That time we had to deal with a Christian porn circle led by an ex-FBI agent
Here’s why Michael stepped back from his involvement in the manosphere, and a major reason I have expanded the focus of this ministry to be more holistic…
A few years ago, Michael wrote a post on our Facebook page that read:
What is lust? It is a sexual desire ordered toward a woman who is not your wife. What is the ‘second look’ of which this presumably young man speaks? It is sexual desire ordered toward a woman who is not your wife.
An anonymous account under the name “Author Wade” made the following comments on the post:
Gentlemen, first I am a beneficiary of your ministry and grateful for your work. Thank you for the concern regarding my mortification of sin, or presumed lack thereof.
I repudiate lust. It is a sin worthy of the fires of hell. But God gets to define what a sin is, not us. Looking at a woman, who is not ours (assuming you mean wife) with sexual desire or appeal is not how Scripture defines it. If this were true, we could not have sexually desired our wife before she was our wife.
In my book, I take this wholistic approach to sexuality. I’m sure most on this page would agree with my conclusions regarding sex/gender roles for men and women.
We strongly disagreed. There’s an obvious difference between sexual attraction and lust.
We weren’t entirely sure what this guy’s deal was—but something was off. At that time, Author Wade was heavily self-promoting, and it wasn’t unusual to find posts by him in our general circles. Some of them seemed helpful. But after our interaction with him, our Spidey-senses said to not share any of his content.
Then in October ’21, Michael posted on modesty, and people repeatedly tagged Author Wade on it. We weren’t sure why until someone explained, “…some anonymous account by the name Author Wade talks a lot about modesty and Song of Solomon. He says bizarre stuff like sharing naked pictures of your wife to others isn’t sinful.”
Btw, if you’d prefer a biblical articulation of modesty as a spiritual pattern rather than your typical “here’s how many inches is too high/low”, check out the True Magic episode on this:
Anyway, we had come across this depraved amateur porn thing before—but not through Author Wade. In the absurd world that the internet is, there was already another semi-popular website that advocated that Christians can use “ethically sourced porn.”
In the beginning of ‘22, people started asking again about Author Wade and his views on pornography. We confirmed that it was the same “ethically sourced porn” wickedness being pushed in a few dark corners of the Internet.
But it was even worse than that.
We weren’t directly involved, but we learned about it through Les Lanphere, who confronted Author Wade:
I’ve been grieved for days about this. Confronting him, trying to sound the alarm, and as I did I realized he isn’t only promoting it, but he’s fully participating in it. In other words, he has convinced his wife to help him produce porn which he shares with other like-minded Christians that he knows, who, in turn share their homemade porn with him. Yes, Author Wade is participating in a Christian porn ring.
It turns out his book that he released years ago taught his view, encouraging this behavior, but in such a way that not many people really caught what he was promoting. I spoke with him on the phone for a couple hours. I learned that he’s got about 15 Christian couples that he trades porn with online. He doesn’t hide any of it. He’s an open book. He’s convinced SoS encourages this behavior.
None of this was in dispute. Author Wade taught that certain forms of porn are okay. He made this porn himself, and distributed it among those who name Christ as Lord.
Michael made a few calls and found out who he was. In a crazy twist, his LinkedIn showed that he was an ex-FBI agent. That’s right. There was a former (which probably should be in scare quotes) FBI agent encouraging young Christian couples to produce and share videos of them doing sex acts.
Michael made all this public on his Facebook page because he had a ton of mutual friends with Author Wade. IGTBAM and he were in the same content space, and groomers needed to be exposed.
Author Wade eventually took down all his social media pages, removed his book from the Internet, and seems to have been quiet ever since.
Here’s what a believer previously influenced by Author Wade wrote to Michael:
I wanted to thank you for exposing the deceit of [Author Wade] and to encourage you to continue doing so.
I became very close with [him] over the past year. He had me completely deceived and duped. (I am responsible before God for falling for it, but still.)
Dude is a complete psychopath with absolutely no biblical argument. And his statements MATTER because they appeal to a certain crowd in the church.
I oppose him with all my might and thank you for doing so as well.
We’ve been told that we’ve changed quite a bit. Maybe in focus—but not in what we believe. We remain glad that we got to bring the gospel to the manosphere. Michael especially brought it deep into the secular conferences, and he is still friends with many non-Christian people who were connected to that. Obviously they have deep disagreements; but at least they aren’t trying to smuggle their secular practices into the Church.
That being said, the Author Wade debacle was the log that broke the camel’s back. We had already noticed that the number of predators and individuals with creepy behavior in the “Christian manosphere” was growing at a rapid rate. Here are a few examples:
Some men were attempting to normalize polygamy.
There was a Christian therapist who persuaded adult men to participate in a mutual self-pleasure circle with other men.
Couples were suggesting recording themselves engaging in sexual activities so that the husband could later masturbate to it when they were separated.
Men in their late 30s to 50s were telling Michael that they would only marry 20-year-old virgins, and wanted him to make introductions. (He didn’t.)
All of it was twisted and depraved. When Michael initially started It’s Good to Be a Man, he was an associate pastor in a very small Presbyterian church. His visibility was low. However, that is no longer the case. He now oversees a larger church that he is committed to protecting. And although my church is tiny, I am equally committed to protecting them. Although we both plan to continue writing on sexuality, we have intentionally crafted content to alienate the right people—and we have intentionally shifted our focus to be more pastoral and full-orbed. We do not apologize.
Notable:
Sports Illustrated Published Articles by Fake, AI-Generated Writers. We asked them about it — and they deleted everything. But…this is junior league compared to what’s happening in tech:
Finally, don’t forget you can get a third off our membership group:
Until next time,
Bnonn
Great post, Bnonn!