Oswald Chambers, in My Utmost for his Highest, appropriately comments on this day just before we begin to think of the New Year: “Our Lord never patches up our natural virtues, He remakes the whole man on the inside…The life God plants in us develops known virtues, not the virtues of Adam but of Jesus Christ.”

Most of us like to make out of the need for personal improvements, like being overweight or being a repeat procrastinator, New Year resolutions that we know we might keep at for a week or two but will abandon soon.

So I am thinking that this year, I am not going to attempt to diet, or to be less of a procrastinator. Instead, I am going to pray that Jesus will do me over inside, where I really live. I will pray I will lose the old virtues of Adam onto which I have held to far long, and to pray for the virtue of Jesus Christ. I know it will be painful, and that family and friends will turn against me as I look differently at the world. But the wounded hands of Jesus, who died for the sinners of this world that they might become new in Him, beckon me as we move towards 2015.