Resolved

Jonathan Edwards, the great pastor and evangelist of the First Great Awakening in the 1730s and 1740s, composed a list of seventy resolutions for his life.  As I read them, I was struck by his intentionality.  In our microwave culture, it is increasingly difficult to slow the pace and get perspective on how we are living.  

Here are just a handful of Edwards' resolutions, which he read every week:

5. Resolved: Never to lose one moment of time, but to improve it in the most profitable way I can.

6. Resolved: To live with all my might, while I do live.

7. Resolved: Never to do anything, which I should be afraid to do if it were the last hour of my life.  

14. Resolved: Never to do anything out of revenge.

24. Resolved: Whenever I do any conspicuously evil action, to trace it back, till I come to the original cause, and then, both carefully endeavor to do so no more, and to fight and pray with all my might against the original of it.  

30. Resolved: To strive every week to be brought higher in religion, and to a higher exercise of grace, than I was the week before.

70. Resolved: Let there be something of benevolence in all that I speak.