Making Good Resolutions and Carrying Them Out

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · April 22, 1880

FromThe Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, Vol. 55, No. 17

Making Good Resolutions and Carrying Them Out

—Most of the common sneering at good resolutions, as precursors of good deeds, comes from those who would rather make bad resolutions than good ones, or who are content to drift along through life, without taking the trouble to determine on any fixed course of action. Without good resolutions from within we need hardly look for excellent results from without,—wrought upon passive agents by some miraculous exercise of divine power. The Holy Spirit quickens the heart to make all resolutions that deserve the name of good; and “hell is paved” not with such God-sent purposes of amendment and right action, but with the fruits of that reckless wickedness which despairs of moral success, after the speedy failure of some wrongly made plan, based on self rather than on the help of God. A good resolution should be made to rest on a deep sense of right and a basal principle of Christian living, not on any whim of individual decision. Then, too, it ought to be made to go into effect at once. It is not enough to say that to-morrow, or next week, or next year, we will do thus and so. When we can carry a good resolution into instant execution, we ought to do so, and when we cannot, we should perform the purposed act at the very first moment possible, counting all time after that moment, if the act is still undone, as time sinfully spent.—S. S. Times.