The Resolutions

See then that ye walk circumspectly, not as fools, but as wise, redeeming the time, because the days are evil. EPHESIANS 5:15–16

Between 1722 and 1723, in his late teens and early twenties, Edwards drew up seventy resolutions governing how he intended to live. He kept them beside him and read them over once a week for years. They are among the most quoted and most misunderstood documents in his corpus.

The preface everyone skips

Before the first resolution, Edwards wrote a short preamble which changes the meaning of everything that follows, and which is almost always omitted when the list is reproduced. He states that he is unable to do anything without God’s help, and asks God by His grace to enable him to keep these resolutions, so far as they are agreeable to God’s will. Read the list without that, and it is a young man’s programme of self-improvement by willpower — and an oppressive one. Read it with the preamble, and it is something else entirely: a set of intentions laid before God by someone who has already conceded he cannot execute them. The distinction is exactly the one Edwards would spend his life defending. The resolutions do not produce grace. They are how a man who has received grace proposes to spend his time.

What he resolved

The themes recur, and they are worth listing because they show what a God-centred life looked like to him in practice. Time. He resolved never to lose one moment of time but to use it in the most profitable way he could. The urgency about time never left him, and it is connected to his view of eternity: a short life, an endless consequence.

So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom. PSALM 90:12

Intensity. He resolved to live with all his might while he lived. Not to drift, not to coast, not to spend a life half-engaged.

The perspective of death. Several resolutions turn on a single device: to act now as he would wish he had acted when he came to die. He resolved never to do anything he would be afraid to do in the last hour of his life. It is a remarkably clarifying test, and it can be applied immediately by anyone.

Go to now, ye that say, To day or to morrow we will go into such a city …Whereas ye know not what shall be on the morrow. For what is your life? It is even a vapour. JAMES 4:13–14

Scripture. He resolved to study the Scriptures steadily, constantly and frequently, so as to grow plainly in knowledge of them. The ordinary. A striking number concern eating, drinking, sleep, speech and temper — the unglamorous machinery of a life. He resolved to guard what he said about others, to examine why he was angry, to be moderate at table. He evidently understood that a life is lost in small increments.

The danger, honestly stated

The Diary he kept alongside these records a good deal of discouragement. He falls short repeatedly. He is dissatisfied with himself. There are stretches of spiritual dullness that he notes with distress. This should be said plainly, because the Resolutions have done harm to scrupulous readers. A person already inclined to perfectionism can take up this list and construct from it a machine for self-condemnation, in which every review produces fresh evidence of failure and the whole exercise drives him further from the God it was meant to serve. That is not what they are for, and Edwards’s own preamble refutes it. The resolutions are aspirations held before a God who is already reconciled, by a man who has already stated he cannot keep them unaided. Anyone who cannot hold them that way should leave them alone.

The enduring value of the practice, stripped of its dangers, is that Edwards made his intentions specific and reviewed them. Most of us have vague desires to be more disciplined, more prayerful, more generous, and vague desires accomplish nothing because they can never be checked. Edwards wrote his down, in concrete terms, and looked at them weekly. You do not need seventy. You might manage three.

The ordinary machinery

It is worth setting out how Edwards actually spent his days, because the Resolutions can give the impression of a man sustained by heroic acts of will, and the reality was far more ordinary and far more imitable.

He rose very early — often between four and five — and worked in his study for many hours, by some accounts as many as thirteen a day. He read with a pen in his hand, and filled notebooks continuously: the Miscellanies, in which he worked out theological problems over decades; notebooks on Scripture; the Images of Divine Things. Paper was scarce and expensive, and he used both sides of everything, including, on one occasion, the receipt for a slave he had purchased. He rode alone on horseback for exercise and for thinking. When an idea came, he would pin a small scrap of paper to his coat to fix the thought, and returned home some days with his coat conspicuously fluttering. In the evening he read to his family and prayed with them. Sarah managed a household of thirteen and a stream of visitors, and by every account made the study hours possible. It should also be said plainly that the labour of enslaved people in that household made them possible too.

Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might. ECCLESIASTES 9:10

What is instructive here is how unremarkable the components are. Early rising. Long hours. Writing things down. Regular exercise. Reading with attention. Family worship. Reviewing his intentions weekly. None of it requires genius, and the genius he did possess would have produced far less without it. Edwards’s output — roughly twelve hundred surviving sermons, the treatises, the notebooks, the correspondence — was not the product of inspiration arriving. It was the product of a man being at his desk.

Seest thou a man diligent in his business? he shall stand before kings. PROVERBS 22:29

There is encouragement in this for people of ordinary ability. Most of what lasts is produced by unremarkable people doing unremarkable things for an unreasonable length of time. The resolutions matter less than the habit of returning to them.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Write three resolutions — specific enough to be checked — and set a weekly time to review them. 2. Begin, as Edwards did, by admitting to God that you cannot keep them, and asking for grace. Without that preface the exercise is dangerous. 3. Apply his test to one decision this week: would you do this in the last hour of your life?

4. Audit one day honestly. Where did the hours actually go? 5. If you are prone to scrupulosity, use these gently or not at all. The list is a servant, and it makes a cruel master.

A PRAYER

Lord, I have wanted to be a different sort of person for years without ever saying concretely what I meant, and so nothing has changed.

I am unable to do anything without Your help. I confess that before I resolve anything, so that my resolving does not become another way of trusting myself.

Teach me to number my days. Let me live with all my might while I live, and let me not do today what I would regret in my last hour.

And when I fail, keep me from despair. My standing with You was never built on my consistency. Amen.