Happy February, everyone! My guess is that there's some study out there that would tell us that by February 1st the vast majority of people have already fallen through on their New Year's Resolutions.
The problem is, our will power is like my butt-ugly, brown, split-level house meeting my HV/AC unit.
When our butt-ugly, brown, split level house was built in the mid-80's, the heat pump that was purchased for it was right at or just below what was needed for the amount of square footage for the house.
But the people who owned the house before we did knocked down the back wall and built a rather sweet addition. It's a nice sun-room/den area, with a great high ceiling, currently decorated in primary colors for our 6, 4 & 2 year old.
All of this is well and good, except the heat pump is still the same heat pump--purchased with several hundred less square feet in mind. And so, as the greater Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area rests our Southern thin-blooded selves in night-time lows in the teens, the little heat pump that really can't is running constantly to keep up with the demand.
Plus, the thing is original with the house. It's old and inefficient. It just can't really do the job...but to buy a new one would require someone in our household to sell a kidney on Ebay to pay for it. I'm voting for the 2-year-old, she won't know what hit her.
Our will was designed to function in a friction-free environment. We weren't made for conflict, laziness, or resistance of the magnitude that we face post the exchange of life in the Garden for life in the Land of the Ruins.
And so our will-power needs retro-fitting. It cannot handle the demands we place on it. And (here the analogy breaks down) our wills have also been tainted by this sin nature. We've added on all these temptations and challenges that weren't original to our design AND we've also done damage to the "machine" that is our will in the process.
So we need a new will. And the problem is, we can't do it ourselves. Thus, the gift of redemption, and the promise: "You will receive power from on high."
Christianity is not "suck it up, try harder, pull yourselves up by your bootstraps." This, alas, is the conflation of some kernels of Christian teaching with one of our favorite American myths: the self-made person.
We like to think that we have the capacity to rescue ourselves. But if we could do this, we wouldn't need God to come and rescue us, and the whole Jesus on the cross thing is just a charade, an act.
But Jesus on the cross is God's fierce answer to our myth of self-reliance. You can't do this on your own. That's why God has come in Jesus Christ--to do for you what you cannot do for yourself.
It is a mixture of foolishness and arrogance that we demand to attempt (and fail) to do for ourselves what he has offered to give us for free because he knows that we cannot accomplish it any other way.
And so God meets our need for the redemption of our wills. We simply constantly hand over our will to the Lord, asking for him to redeem it, replace it, heal it, soften it, and empower it for the works he's given us to do.
Including getting you back to the New Year's resolution gym.
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