Let's Bust a Recap : Jonathan Edwards' Resolutions & Advice to Young Converts

Well, we are just about halfway through the month of March and I'd say it's high time to kick this little blog back into gear. The other night, I pulled all the books I wanted to recap off my shelves and realized there are way too many and if I didn't get back in the saddle soon, we'd have to give this whole endeavor up altogether. 

So today, we're going to start by talking about the first thing I read this year: Jonathan Edwards' Resolutions & Advice to Young Converts. This little 40 page booklet earned a place on my 2022 book list on the advice of my husband, and I spent the first week of the year reading a little bit of it each day. What with the global, time-honored tradition of making resolutions at the dawn of each new year, this seemed like the perfect place to start. 

As a Christian and a pastor's daughter, I was pretty familiar with Edwards' resolutions. My dad keeps some of them pasted in his Bible and I remember seeing those all the time as I grew up. But I don't remember ever reading all 70 of them, and I didn't realize the letter he wrote to a young Deborah Hatheway containing 19 points of advice for young converts had been so widely reprinted and often paired with his personal resolutions.

Jonathan Edwards is probably most famous for his role in the Great Awakening during America's colonial era and particularly for his sermon entitled Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. While this sermon is usually held up as a classic example of "fire and brimstone" preaching, that characterization is not actually in line with descriptions of Edwards' preaching style. He was a soft-spoken man who was burdened for people to experience the grace of God. If I'm being honest, before I finally read these resolutions for myself, I had the idea they would be somewhat harsh, graceless, and impossible given Edwards' reputation as a stoic Puritan. 

But I was pleasantly and humbly surprised to learn that his resolutions, along with the invaluable inclusion of his advice to young converts, are perfectly seasoned with grace and mercy. While his resolutions are certainly lofty and the perfect attainment of them indeed impossible, several of them entail his appropriate response to his own failure of the others. It's such a balanced, heavenly, fitting list of goals that there's nothing to argue with, and I understand why my dad keeps them in his Bible. I'm thinking of choosing several that personally resonated with me to copy into my own Bible now.  

The booklet itself is very nicely put together with a few black and white photos and a helpful introduction by Stephen J. Nichols and was published in 2001 by P&R Publishing Company. Edwards penned his resolutions throughout 1722 and 1723, and he wrote the letter to Miss Hatheway containing his advice to young converts in 1741. I can't recommend reading through Edwards' resolutions for yourself highly enough. I was so deeply encouraged in my reading of them, and I know I will continue to come back to them. I think it's important for every human being to resolve how they will live their lives, and particularly for Christians to submit their resolutions to Biblical authority. Reading Jonathan Edwards' is a great jumping off point for people who have a hard time articulating those resolutions for themselves. All in all, I'm sorry I waited so long to read these for myself. Ten out of ten; will read again.