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In 2008, may God help evangelicals grow in their ability to faithfully live out and proclaim the gospel of his Son, crucified and raised to save sinners.

Already looking for an out from your New Year's resolution? Maybe theology can help. David Powlison, editor of The Journal of Biblical Counseling, admits he has never made a New Year's resolution in 58 years. He concedes that many resolutions express a profound desire for moral reform in how we behave, what we eat, who we cherish, and so on. But according to Powlison, resolutions often expose a self-sufficient, man-centered theology that will fail us by the time February rolls around.

"They make no reckoning with either the chief end of man, or the madness in our hearts while we live, or the inexpressible gift of God to sinful, dying people," Powlison writes. "Self-referential resolutions function within a self-salvation project, however noble and desirable the proximate ends in view."

Not that all resolutions are bad, Powlison adds. He cites the Nicene Creed and church-membership covenants as godly resolutions. These illustrate the keys to lasting resolutions: God-centered theology and the support of Christian community.

• David Instone-Brewer has launched Tyndale Tech, with electronic resources for biblical studies. He opens with a post about the future of communication.
  
  
• Our of Ur unveils its top 10 posts from 2007. Many of the posts, such as Willow Creek's repentance, deal with the intersection of theology and the church.
  
  
• Tom Ascol of Founders Ministries interviews one of the church planters defunded by the Missouri Baptist Convention. There is never a shortage of examples for how not to handle a theological dispute.
  
  

"For consider your calling, brothers: not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God. And because of him you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption, so that, as it is written, 'Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.'"

Collin Hansen is a CT editor-at-large. He is the author of Young, Restless, Reformed: A Journalist's Journey with the New Calvinists (Crossway, April 2008).

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January (Web-only) 2008, Vol. 52