If you’ve made some resolutions for 2024, consider this: Like other exercises of raw willpower, most New Year’s resolutions fail miserably.

According to research, only 8% of Americans who make resolutions stick with them. In fact, the research also reveals that 77% of people maintain their resolution for the first week, but only 19% for two years.

Willpower Is Weak

We all know that change is challenging. Even when doctors inform heart patients they’ll die without stopping dangerous habits, only 1 in 7 will make a successful shift.

“People have a very misguided notion that you can actually change fast,” says Harvard researcher Lisa Lahey, author of the book “Immunity to Change.” “It’s just not true.”

“People don’t recognize and sufficiently respect that there are powerful forces at play that are [operating] at an unconscious level that make it hard for us to change,” she adds.

As we think about New Year’s resolutions, it’s important to realize something about human nature: People do what they want to do. Thomas Cranmer held this view of human nature (as summarized by Anglican historian Ashley Null), “What the heart loves, the will chooses, and the mind justifies. The mind doesn’t direct the will. The mind is actually captive to what the will wants, and the will itself, in turn, is captive to what the heart wants.”

So making a resolution and summoning up all your willpower do little good if, ultimately, your heart isn’t in it. Does this mean you should abandon any hope of change? Not at all. If you’ve made a New Year’s resolution, here are a few things to keep in mind.

Is It a Good Resolution?

Try to determine if the resolution is actually good. Are you planning on working out more? If so, is it because you want to be a good steward of the body God gave you or is it vanity? In reality, it is probably some of both. But what is the driving desire? Is it a good one?

Just Do It

If your resolution is, in fact, a good one, just do it. Go ahead and work out more, smoke or drink less, read your Bible more, pay down your debt and save more for retirement, focus on your marriage, spend more time with your children. Every once in a while, people start a New Year’s resolution and it sticks. But most don’t. That happens because 1) we are sinners (see Rom. 3:23) and 2) our hearts are idol factories (see Jer. 17:9, Col. 3:5).

Grace Actually Works

The reality is that your resolution is likely needed because, like everyone else except for Jesus, you are not loving God with your entire being and not loving your neighbor as yourself. These two failures lead to havoc, discord, pain and destruction.

Jesus gave us the basic requirement: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets” (Matt. 22:37b-40).

That basic failure is why we need the gospel: Jesus’ life, death and resurrection deal with the guilt and the stain of sin. It’s also why we so often fail at our attempts to improve ourselves.

But Jesus also gave us the Holy Spirit, who can change our desires and empower us to love God and neighbor. As Paul tells us, “it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure” (Phil. 2:13). With us and our willpower, Jesus says, change is impossible, “but with God all things are possible” (Matt. 19:26b).

God Gives Grace to Change

As Cranmer realized, our wills are captive to what our hearts love, and we are powerless to change ourselves without the work of God’s Spirit changing our desires. As you work through your New Year’s resolutions and ask God to work on your heart, here’s a prayer from the Book of Common Prayer:

Unless otherwise indicated, all scripture quotations are from the ESV* Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version*), copyright© 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.