Making New Year's resolutions is easy — keeping them is another story, says the Rev. William Graham Tullian Tchividjian, senior pastor at Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Florida and grandson of famed evangelist Billy Graham.
"I'm not on some campaign against making New Year's resolutions. The making of New Year's resolutions isn't our problem. It seems to be keeping New Year's resolutions is our problem," Tchividjian said Tuesday on "The Steve Malzberg Show" on
Newsmax TV.
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"When I explore what it is that prompts me to make … New Year's resolutions, it's really this down, deep desire to make myself better, to make myself more lovable, more likable … We all do it."
But that's easier said than done, according to Tchividjian, author of the new book,
"It Is Finished: 365 Days of Good News," written with Nick Lannon and published by David C. Cook.
"We don’t really do a very good job of fixing ourselves … because we’re flawed people, we're broken people living in a broken world with other broken people," said Tchividjian, whose parish is in Fort Lauderdale.
'We want to get better, we want to do more, we want to try harder we want to fix ourselves. In essence, we want to save ourselves and justify our existence.
"But it feels like we're living on this performance treadmill where we're constantly doing more, trying harder, doing everything we can to get better. And we all know that we continually fall short."
Tchividjian's says his book, a devotional which contains 365 short readings, one for each day of the year, is meant to help sort out those shortcomings.
"It's essentially saying when we do everything we can to forge our own identity by who we are, who we're connected to, what we can become, we end up living a very, very enslaved, heavy life," he said.
"What really, really grants my life value and worth … is God's love for me, what God has done for me, not what I do. That's hugely liberating to me."
Tchividjian said the book describes how "God's love is unconditional, it's not conditioned on anything we do or don't do.
"It's one-way love, which is far different from any of the kind of love that you and I experience horizontally with other people in our various relationships," he said.
"Just about every single relationship we have is marked by conditionality. The one relationship we can have that is [not] is our relationship with God, which is very different.
"God's unconditional love grips your heart, it doesn't make you want to take advantage of it. It makes you want to love him back."
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