In the typical flurry of secular articles about the new year, two messages seem loudest. Half the articles triumphantly declare that this can be the year you become the best version of yourself and achieve your dreams. The other half reject the hustle; they tell you that you’re enough as you are and that you should enjoy life instead of striving.

These messages seem like opposites, but they share an important thread: self-focus. As Christians, we ought to consider every turning of the season in light of God’s wisdom, not our own.

Throughout the centuries, pastors and theologians have used the opportunity of the new year to encourage believers. Let’s listen to their advice for the year ahead.

1. Rethink your definition of a ‘happy’ new year.

What do you wish for the year ahead? A fresh calendar brings the opportunity to examine our lives and pursue growth in health, relationships, work, service, and sanctification.

At the end of 2026, will your happiness depend on how well you stuck to those goals? It’s possible you’ll get all your dreams and more. But what if this is instead a year of grief, loss, and disappointment?

Thomas Charles, an 18th-century Welsh minister, wrote in a letter to friends, “Every new year must be a happy one, while we live thus as sinners with and upon Christ. . . . May you and I begin and end every year with, and in dependence upon, the dear Redeemer, till at last we finish our course with joy.”

We’re sinners, but we have Christ. That truth is a bottomless fountain of joy. Let’s thank him and find joy amid whatever 2026 brings. As Charles Spurgeon preached in 1885, “Praise is our ever new delight; let us baptize the new year into a sea of it.”

2. Make the Bible your steady ground.

Countless Christians resolving to read Scripture more have turned to Robert Murray M’Cheyne’s Bible-in-a-year plan. M’Cheyne, a 19th-century Scottish minister, wrote in his introduction to the plan,

The approach of another year stirs up within me new desires for your salvation, and for the growth of those of you who are saved. . . . What the coming year is to bring forth who can tell? . . . Those believers will stand firmest who have no dependence upon self or upon creatures, but upon Jehovah our Righteousness. We must be driven more to our Bibles, and to the mercy-seat, if we are to stand in the evil day.

M’Cheyne freely admitted the year ahead could contain great sorrow and difficulty. But he knew where he could find steady ground: He was committed to clinging to Scripture and helping others do the same. He prayed for dependence, not power to achieve his dreams.

We’re sinners, but we have Christ. That truth is a bottomless fountain of joy.

Spurgeon said something similar to his congregation on New Year’s Day 1860: “I wish, my brothers and sisters, that during this year you may live nearer to Christ than you have ever done before.”

How can you prioritize Scripture this year? And, especially if you’re a pastor or church leader, how can you help others do this?

3. Pray to the God who supplies all your needs.

“You can do it.” “You’re already enough.” Amid these cultural messages, heed Spurgeon’s less flattering portrait of humanity: “We are just a bag of wants, and a heap of infirmities. . . . We are full of wants from the first of January to the end of December.”

But there’s good news too: “Here is the mercy, ‘My God shall supply all your need.’” We can pray confidently because we know the promises of the God we pray to.

Echoing the apostle Paul’s admonition to “pray without ceasing” (1 Thess. 5:17), Spurgeon wrote, “The motto for this year must be, ‘Continue in prayer.’”

Instead of relying on your willpower, strength, and planning this year, humble yourself before the throne of grace. You’ll find all you need, even if you don’t get everything you want.

4. Get ready for Christ’s return.

What are you working toward this year? Scribbled in your calendar may be a huge work project, a marathon, a milestone birthday, or a cross-country move.

The 19th-century bishop J. C. Ryle didn’t have any of those goals in mind when he said in a sermon, “I ask you a plain question at the beginning of a New Year. Are you ready?” Two of the possibilities he was thinking of were our death and Christ’s return.

We ought to live with the constant knowledge that Christ is coming back soon (Rev. 22:20). Ryle went on,

Fight a better fight, and war a better warfare every year you live. Pray more. Read more. Mortify self more. Love the brethren more. Oh! that you may endeavor so to grow in grace every year, that your last things may be far more than your first, and the end of your Christian course be better than the beginning.

Spurgeon had the same perspective, encouraging believers to see the shortness of the time in front of them: “We are a day’s march nearer home, a year’s march nearer home.” Do you think of this new year as another repetitive turn around the sun or as a marker that your eternal joy is closer than ever before?

5. Rejoice in grace all the way home.

John Newton, an 18th-century pastor and former slave trader, often preached to young people on New Year’s Day, and he wrote a hymn each year to accompany his sermon. His famous “Amazing Grace” is believed to have been the hymn for 1773.

We ought to live with the constant knowledge that Christ is coming back soon.

When Newton described himself in the hymn as a “wretch,” he meant it. He wrote in his diary on that January 1, “My exercise of grace is faint, my consolations small, my heart is full of evil, my chief sensible burdens are, a wild ungoverned imagination, and a strange sinful backwardness to reading the Scriptures, and, to secret prayer. . . . But my eye and my heart is to Jesus.”

Look to God’s amazing grace this year. Whatever your failures, let your eyes and heart rest on Christ. Newton’s song can be yours in every single year the Lord grants you:

Through many dangers, toils and snares
I have already come:
’tis grace has brought me safe thus far,
and grace will lead me home.

Whether or not you’re the type to make New Year’s resolutions, you should resolve to heed the wisdom of Charles, Newton, Spurgeon, Ryle, and M’Cheyne. They point to the oldest source of wisdom: our eternal God.

News Source : https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/old-advice-new-year/