Should Christians make “New Year’s Resolutions?” The answer is “yes,” as believers are under a Divine order to “excel still more” (1 Thess. 4:1, NASB)—to “be fruitful in every good work” (Col. 1:10) and to “grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ” (2 Pet. 3:18).  

But why do most fall short of their yearly resolutions? In this podcast, Scott Brown and Jason Dohm, joined by special guest Mat Dewing, attack the problem head on. They explain the need to make resolutions that matter and are “SMART”—specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-specific. And if you have a bad day or week? Persevere, “knowing that the testing of your faith produces patience. But let patience have its perfect work, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking nothing” (James 2:3-4). 

Tis the season for New Year's resolutions. Should Christians make them? Yes, why? Because we're charged to excel still more. On this podcast, we've got Matt doing, we're gonna talk about an acronym.

I can't wait to share it with you. It's based on the words SMART, S-M-A-R-T, specific, measurable, we'll tell you the rest later. ["Smart, Measurable, Measurable"] So, Matt grew up on a dairy farm. He lives in Northeastern Pennsylvania. He's married to Janice.

They have eight kids and He's a teaching elder at a church called Hope Community Church up there. He's serving with his dad. That's really neat. Hey, I know a few guys that do that. That's really, really nice.

That's a great blessing. He also serves as a board member on a church planting movement in the Middle East, but he's an entrepreneur, he's a licensed physical therapist, he's an athletic trainer, He's started, you know, started a company in the space of physical training and fitness and but and he's now the VP of sales at a large national physical therapy company and he operates a division of about 75 clinics in the mid Atlantic area. So, hey, it's just so good to have you and your experience with us. And you've helped us at Church and Family Life over the years in mentoring some of our young men in our internship program. We've had a lot of conversations.

You've been a huge encouragement to me, Matt. I really, really appreciate you. That's been a joy. Been a joy to be part of that for sure. You do an amazing job with those young men.

And yeah. Thanks. Enjoy. So here we go again. I want to start off by speaking the obvious.

And I want to talk about America's top New Year's resolutions. This is right off the internet. Must be true. Are you ready? Americans are just so consistent.

Exercise more, 44%, eat healthier, 42%, spend more time with family and friends, 34%, lose weight, 31%, live more economically, 30%, spend less time on social media, 24% improve my performance on my job 23% okay the list goes on but those are pretty common I don't think these any of these would surprise us and I'm confident you know probably most of us here have had resolutions like that. So let's talk about why they fail. Let's sort of talk about the numbers. Why do most people fail in fulfilling their New Year's resolutions? Yeah, I mean, all kinds of reasons, but I guess you chose the fitness guy, because that's a big one, isn't it?

A lot of the times at the new year, it is, you know, activity related. I want to move more or I want to lose weight, these kinds of things. But, you know, whatever it is in life that we're trying to change, The majority of times we set out to do something with New Year's resolution, the majority of the times they fail. And I think one of the big reasons is, I mean, there's a multiplicity of reasons, but one big one is we bite off more than we can chew. Yeah.

Right? We make these large grandiose goals and we don't think to chunk them down in bite size achievable realities. And so when we don't quickly achieve this overarching dream, we give up, you know, we, especially, I think so, so much in our culture, right? We're the microwave generation or the microwave society. Hey, if, If what we see this so often in our world is if I can't, if I have a physical problem and I can't take a pill or get cut, oh, don't ask me to set goals six weeks out and actually try to work at them every day to accomplish it.

That's hard work. So yeah, I think one of the big reasons is that we're not getting clear in just setting too big of goals. So in your business, you've seen people start off gangbusters January 1st, and you've got a front row seat of talking to these people who finally fall off. What do they say to you? Yeah, you know, the one, the picture that is helpful, I think, and a lot of people say, oh yeah, this is what happens, is imagine you're driving down the road on your way to work and you get a flat tire, right?

We've all been there, no fun. And so you have these moments where it's just going through your head. How am I gonna get to work? How am I gonna accomplish everything? Like, what do I do?

And finally you get out and you either call AAA or you get out the jack and you fix your tire, put on the spare tire. And I don't think there's anybody that has gone to so much despair that they pull out their jackknife and slash the other three tires. They're just like, this is so bad. I might as well just slash them all. And this is what we do though with many of our New Year's resolutions, right?

We're making a little progress. We've actually had a couple days or a week or two weeks. We haven't seen the result yet, right? Cause the results lag behind our efforts. And so we're putting this effort, we don't see the results yet.

We get a flat tire, right? We have that flat tire moment. And instead of just recognizing it's a moment in time, needs a little tinkering, we just go and we slash all the rest of the tires and just quit. And so if we can think of it from that standpoint, it's just to say, you know what, to recognize when, you know, everything is not we think of a bar graph up into the right, you know, as time goes on, I'm going to have this steady improvement. But I've never seen anything in life that works out that way.

There's this quick growth, and then a little plateau, and then some regression. And then it's a decision. Do I want to get back on the growth path? And some of these blips in the graph can happen on a minute by minute basis, right? Not just day to day or week by week, because so much of it is a battle of our mind.

And I think if we could be more patient with some of the goals that we've set for ourselves and set more realistic and incremental goals. It's just be kind to ourselves. You know, I run into this all the time talking to guys about family worship. You know, they start off really well. Maybe they run for a while, you know, pretty strong.

And then they wane. And then they're really, really discouraged. And I always say the same thing to them. Hey, Everybody's like that. Every man I know, I'm like that.

You know, I do well, I do worse. I do well, I do worse. And you can let that be a source of condemnation or heaviness or anything like that. I like the way you said that, it's kind of the story of our life. We don't jet straight, you know, straight up, we go, our graphs are jagged.

Yeah, that's right. So maybe I can even take us back even earlier than what we've been talking about and ask and try to answer the question, is this even Christian activity at all? Should Christians be tangled up in New Year's resolutions? And I'm not necessarily making the case that New Year's resolution, there's anything sacred about that. Clearly, there's not.

But while it's not exclusively Christian, I think it is Christian to resolve to make progress. I just want to roll out a couple of texts of Scripture that I think prove that. The first is 1 Thessalonians 4, verse 1. Paul writes, finally then, brethren, we urge and exhort in the Lord Jesus that you should abound more and more, just as you received from us, how you ought to walk and to please God. If you just ask yourself the question, are you walking as the Lord Jesus and Paul taught us how to walk to please God, you would have to say, sort of, sometimes there's a lot of room for growth, and Paul actually, in 1 Thessalonians 4.1 is calling us to grow.

There is a sense where we know what we're supposed to be doing, we're doing a level of it, and we need more and more, And that really is simply resolving to make progress. Here's another one, 2 Peter 3, 18, where Peter writes, But grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. To Him be the glory both now and forever. Amen. So, he receives glory when we grow in the grace and knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ.

We really aren't supposed to stand still. We're supposed to be making progress, and especially in the faith. So one of the things you brought to our attention, Matt, is how critical it is that you make the right resolutions. And so you say that they should be resolutions about things that really matter. I think part of our problem is if it was really a priority to us and if it was, and or if it was easy to do, we would have done it last year, we wouldn't need to make a New Year's resolution.

It's sort of saying it wasn't a big priority to us here to four. And so one of the things we can do for ourselves is to focus on the things that really ought to be priorities for us. Yeah, if we're going to make resolutions, it ought to be a biblical value, you know. What are your thoughts on that, Matt? Oh, I couldn't agree more.

And in fact, the scripture, James 2, came to mind too. And I think so much of our growth comes through trials, doesn't it? And I think so much of it comes through whether we're willing to embrace them as something good God has put in our life or despair over them. Right? So James 1, 2 through 4, count it all joy my brothers when you meet trials of various kinds for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness and let steadfastness have its full effect that you may be perfect and complete, lacking nothing.

And so I think when we consider those trials joy, we lean into them, which produces growth. But here's one that came to mind for me. And I just said this actually yesterday. I've had some challenges lately that have tempted me to think negatively and despair on a couple fronts. And so when I preach the gospel to myself, I say, no, you are to rejoice in all circumstances.

Again, I say rejoice. And so I said, okay, here's my, this moment resolution, which is the curious gratitude. And so I set a smart goal for myself. I think maybe people would benefit from this concept of SMART goals. It's an acronym, S-M-A-R-T.

And if you're going to have a resolution that will stick, you know, use this paradigm, which your goal should be specific, right? And so in my mind, I've got this general, I'm worrying, I'm thinking about negativity. My general thought is, boy, I'd like not to be that way and I'd like to be thinking more positively. That's kind of nebulous. But if I can drill that down to something specific, gratitude, okay?

I am going to be specifically more thankful. And then make it measurable. And so for me, I came up with two things. I said, I'm gonna journal two pages every day. And my one page, I can be thankful for, I'm gonna be thankful on one page every day and I can say the same things over and over.

But on the second page, I'm gonna make myself every day say something different that I haven't written the day before. And I'm also gonna at the family dining table, and we did this last night, It was a lot of fun. We go around the table and we'll do this every day. I'm getting ahead of myself to say T is time specific. And for me, I said, I'm just going to do this through the end of the year.

I'm going to do it through December 31st. This personal journaling and with my family. And what we're gonna do as a family, we're gonna go around every night and we're gonna say two things we're thankful for. You can say the same one thing every night, but the second thing You could have not said any other night, right? So we're just making something very measurable.

The third SMA, A is attainable. Don't shoot for the moat, right? I'm gonna spend four hours in solitude every day for the next three years doing nothing but pouring out my gratitude. That's not going to be attainable for me. But journaling two pages and having a quick discussion around the family table, that's attainable.

And keeping it and making it relevant. So the relevancy is this is important to my spiritual life always, but especially at this point. And then time sensitive, just put a time bound on it. Many times our goals don't get met or our resolutions don't get met because we don't measure them. If you can't measure it, you can't manage it.

You gotta put some measurable steps to what you want to achieve and then put some timeframe around that as well. Hey, that's gold. That's really good. That is so helpful. And really, you know, God, when he saves the soul, he calls them to bear fruit.

The whole principle of being fruitful and multiplying the parable of the talents, you know, shows us that we should be stretching. You know, we should be trying to multiply what God has given us. I think resolutions fit that way of thinking about life, that we excel still more, like the apostle Paul told Timothy. You know, we set the things in the past behind us and we reach to the upward call of God. That's Christianity.

Christianity is moving forward. Christianity does make resolutions. In the Old Testament, you have people going into the temple and making vows before God. The book of Ecclesiastes talked about that. He says, don't make vows rashly.

If you're gonna make a vow, make it something that you're gonna complete. So the Christian really is under divine order to bear fruit and making resolutions is a big part of it. But hey, I love that acronym, smart. That's helpful. Yeah.

Well, one of the things that you said that really resonated with me was, you know, essentially trying to hit the home run, going for something that probably isn't realistic and looking for exponential change. When really, often when you go for exponential change, you get discouraged, you end up with no change. If you go for incremental change, just incremental improvement through time is really how most people make the significant gains in their life. It's not the home runs, it's base hit, base hit, base hit score. And So we should be aiming for that.

To me that just has to do with routines, habits, arrhythmic life. I wanna be a big advocate for arrhythmic life. Do many of the same things on autopilot. Hey, probably 25 years ago, you went to a sales training event where this trainer said something, I'll never forget it. He talked about being wildly successful.

How do you be wildly successful? What did he say? Yeah, are you wired to be wildly successful on autopilot? Meaning, don't set up to have to have Herculean effort to get good results. Actually set your patterns so that they deliver good results as a matter of course, so that you are wired to be successful on autopilot.

It's a really helpful way to think about things. Yeah, routines, autopilot, those things are really helpful for fulfilling resolutions. Yeah, I mean, think about it from a pilot standpoint, navigating a ship or an airplane, if you're one degree, one degree of change over a long period of time is a massive difference in destination. And so, you know, as we're moving through life, just dialing one at a time. In fact, the research shows that if you try to change two variables, it's exponential in the failure rate.

Whereas if you keep it to just one variable, For instance, and then if you write it down, that the chance of achieving it goes way up. So if you just choose one variable, your chances go way up. Then if you add to that, write it down. And then if you add to that, tell somebody else about it, or tell several people about it, now your chances go way up of achieving it. You know, for one, when it comes to weight loss or having a diet with less inflammatory factors, you know, some people say, I'm gonna cut out all carbs.

But what might actually help someone more is to say, you know what, soda is the worst thing for us possibly, anything we could possibly do. If I'm drinking soda at all, I'll still eat my cookies. I'll still do whatever, but I'm just going to cut out soda. And until that becomes a habit that you're comfortable with, now you can talk about your favorite dessert or desserts. So yeah, just not trying to tackle too much.

This thing about focus on one variable, One of the things that's helped me a lot, and just in terms of daily and weekly exercise, is I realized that if I'm going to, you know, be on a treadmill, I'm not, I don't like it. I don't really like going on a treadmill, but here's what I really like. I like walking outside. So what's helped me in fitness is to do the things that I like to do. And I, I know everything doesn't fit into that paradigm, but I love to walk outside and get in the sun and see what's going on.

And, and I, and I, And I don't want to stare at a wall on a treadmill. Now, some people can probably be really consistent on a treadmill. I found I can be really consistent by walking outside because I like it. Yeah. Absolutely.

Scott and Matt, So here's what I did in preparation for this podcast. I looked up my 2022 resolutions. And I'm humiliated to report that they were in the second place I looked, not the first place I looked, which means it's been a while since I looked at them, right? In December, you might have to look at the second or third place that you look to find your resolutions for the year. I wrote down 10.

I did recognize them. That's good. And I'm about 50-50. So, five or six out of the ten, I have a shot of getting done by year's end. And so, I'm not too happy that I didn't get them all, but I'm pretty sure looking through them, if I hadn't written them down and sort of kept them on my mind in various ways at various points of the year, I don't think I would have gotten to the halfway point.

So I really am glad that I went through the trouble to do that exercise at the beginning of the year. I think I did more this year because I did. And then in looking at the list, there were a couple of things that were really significant, I think, that were accomplished that didn't even make the list. So that's the other thing that should be said. When we make resolutions, Life has a way of putting other things on your plate that you didn't anticipate.

There are opportunities that never make the list, but are really significant opportunities. I was afraid to look at my list, Jason. I'm going to do it after this broadcast. I'm gonna see what we'll see if you can find yours. So, you know, procrastination is a, you know, is a problem.

I like what you you told us, Matt, you have a you have a goal, you know, you starting right now to the end of the year. That's fantastic. You know, I somebody said to me, you don't need a new resolution, you need a now resolution, you need to You need to just do it now and start carrying it out. Yeah. Hey, thinking of January 1 as magical is a mistake.

And Matt, when you were relating that story of making near-term resolutions. There really is nothing magic about January 1 when we identify areas where we need to make progress we can do it then and not wait. There's another issue and I'm just gonna call it opportunity cost because if you're going to do something, it usually means you're not going to do something else. If you're making resolutions, it's helpful to say, okay, what is standing in the way of this? You know, what's in my life right now that if I keep doing it I'm not going to make it.

And I think, you know, commitments to read the Bible, to do various things that are really good for your soul are like that. There are things that have to die in order to make something live, that's just realism about life. So if you make a resolution, you might ought to think about what you should resolve not to do as well. So I had three parting shots, let me shoot them. Number one, go for the top buttons, meaning when you button a shirt, if you take the top button and put it in the wrong hole, it's wrong all the way down.

So pick things that really matter, that if you get it right, other things follow in line as well. Number two, count the cost. Luke 14, this would be a secondary application, but Christians should Heed Luke chapter 14 and count the cost. Have an honest assessment about whether you're really willing to pay the price to make progress in an area. And honestly, if you're not, don't start.

We should be people who count the cost and then follow through on the things that we resolve to do. And then three, all work and no enjoyment of the fruit is not sustainable. You've made these long lists, And if you really accomplish them all, it would be all work and no enjoyment of the fruit. Humans are just not wired to keep going through that. And honestly, that's not even biblical.

We are to enjoy the fruits of our labors as well. So there needs to be some sort of a rational, sustainable ratio of work to enjoying the fruits of what you're accomplishing. Yeah, those are great. Those are great. Matt, final shots.

Yeah, I just think that's so critical that, you know, effective coaches, when they're coaching other people, they don't just stop before, that becomes a critical question to say, okay, now what are the obstacles that are going to keep you from attaining the goals you set? And so I think that is an absolutely critical one, that as we're setting goals, setting resolutions, we need to take the reflective time to say, OK, what needs to go in order to add what needs to go? And to Jason's point about the top button first, I like that. I never heard about it. But I think of it in terms of flossing your teeth.

When we give ourselves to more discipline in our life, it filters out into so many other areas of our life. That if I wake up in the morning and I floss my teeth, make my bed, everything else seems to be done better as well. So yeah, I echo what you guys are saying. Yeah, on autopilot. Wildly successful on autopilot.

One of the most helpful things, at least for me, is just to have things that I just do on autopilot. I know they're right. I don't have to feel like doing any of that. It's just what I do. I'm not run by my feelings.

I'm run by objectives in that sense. But I like my objectives. I think I do them because I love those objectives. Yeah. So, anyway, brothers, thank you.

This is really helpful stuff. Yeah. Yeah, that is really good. You know, the thought that has helped me so much with any life change is think of three triangles, and we have to change our narratives, our self talk is so many times defeating, right? So if we if we're making sure we're, we're having healthy, good, positive, hopeful narratives, the track that's playing in our mind.

And then we give ourselves to the kind of habits you're talking about, Scott. We're just turning an activity into a habit and then building upon that good habit, other good habits. But then the third one is often overlooked, which is community. And this is one thing I think from a fitness standpoint, you know, the general public has not changed over the years. Only about 16% of the population has a gym membership.

Most people don't, But the gym membership is powerful primarily for the community you put yourself in, not so much for the weights that are accessible. Because that's the third component to any sustained change we want to make, which is surround yourself with people who can reinforce those positive narratives and healthier habits. And without that support structure and community, you know, sometimes our effort to change the narratives and change the habits can be short-lived. Amen. Amen.

Okay, that's it. That's a wrap. Thank you for joining us on the Church and Family Life podcast, and we hope you can join us next week and be fruitful, multiply, excel, still more, be wildly successful on autopilot before the Lord. We'll see you next week. Thanks for listening to the Church and Family Life podcast.

We have thousands of resources on our website, announcements of conferences coming up. Hope you can join us. Go to churchandfamilylife.com. See you