Every Good Resolve
Feed Your Faith in 2026
We want to help you make resolutions that actually satisfy this new year. Join us for Every Good Resolve, a video series with David Mathis that will help you form everyday habits that increase your joy in God.
Series Overview
In this Every Good Resolve Study Guide, you can watch the full series and then reflect with provided questions below—individually or together with a small group. Each episode has additional resources from Desiring God to feed your faith as you create resolves this year.
- Intro: Resolutions That Last
- Bible: Food for the Starving Soul
- Body and Exercise: Movement to Magnify God
- Prayer: The Trouble with Talking to God
- Sleep: God’s Gift to the Weary
- Church: The Magic of Words in the Body of Christ
- Food and Drink: Fasting, Feasting, and Daily Bread
Intro: Resolutions That Last
In this opening episode, David shows why joy—not willpower—is the missing link between resolutions and lasting change.
Resolutions that last are the ones, with God’s help, that give rise to new habits, and new habits produce lasting change. Habit is the God-given and often-overlooked missing link between good resolutions and real change. When a habit is undertaken in pursuit of your joy, it becomes life-giving and life-changing.
Questions for Further Thought and Discussion
These questions are well-suited for personal reflection or discussion with a friend or small group.
- What is one way you hope to benefit from these short videos?
- Think of a past “resolution” you made but never followed through. What could you have done differently? In what way can you strengthen yourself to follow through this year?
- The pursuit of joy is often the missing link to forming life-changing habits. What joys will you receive if this resolution becomes part of your life?
- Consider God’s appointed channels for your health and growth as a Christian: (1) his word, (2) prayer, and (3) the covenant fellowship of your local church. And consider what assistance these channels might receive through (1) exercise, (2) sleep, and (3) food. Of these six topics, which one sticks out most? Which both meets a current need and is something you actually desire to change?
- A good plan for new habits will be both realistic and enjoyable. If you try too much at once, you won’t last for long. What new regular habits would help you bring your resolution into reality, one small degree at a time? Craft your plan. Consider how your plan will be both realistic and enjoyable, as well as how you might involve other people in your plan.
- Spend a few unhurried minutes reviewing Paul’s prayer in 2 Thessalonians 1:11-12. What guidance and hope does this prayer provide for how to make and pursue new resolutions? Finish by writing out a prayer for yourself, that your resolution, and the accompanying habits and resulting life change over time, would serve to enhance your marveling at Jesus, and so his being glorified in you.
More on Habits and Resolutions
Bible: Food for the Starving Soul
In this episode, David shows why feeding daily on God’s word is essential, not just for knowledge about God, but for sustaining spiritual life and joy that comes from knowing him personally.
Saturating your life in God’s word is not only a wise practice, but the first and foremost of God’s channels of grace for the Christian life. God gave us a Book. So for 2000 years, Christians worldwide have been People of the Book.
Questions for Further Thought and Discussion
These questions are well-suited for personal reflection or discussion with a friend or small group.
- Consider your current practice (or new plan) for feeding on God’s word. Ask: When? Where? How, and for how long?
- What is the biggest threat to your daily intake and nourishment of God’s word? How can you plan to overcome this temptation?
- Do you savor God’s word on a regular basis? On a scale of 1-10, how quickly (or slowly) do you tend to move through God’s word as you read? Do you ever “go deep” in God’s word as you read? How might you linger in a passage for longer than it takes to simply read it?
- What would it look like for you to engage the Bible — not just by reading it — but by feeding upon God’s word? How could you intentionally stir your soul to delight in God as you read?
- How will prayer (responding back to God) relate to your hearing from God in his word? What might you ask God (briefly) before feeding on his word, and how might his word then lead you in prayer that follows?
More on Bible Reading and Meditation
Body and Exercise: Movement to Magnify God
In this episode, David helps us see how caring for our bodies through exercise can magnify God rather than distract us from him and serve spiritual joy.
Praying before, during, and after exercise is one small but vital way to make it Christian. Unbelievers get joy from exercise. We want more than that; we want to have spiritual goals and taste spiritual joys.
Questions for Further Thought and Discussion
These questions are well-suited for personal reflection or discussion with a friend or small group.
- Describe a time when physical health (or sickness) plainly affected your soul, or when the condition of your soul impacted your body.
- We know that our bodies matter to ourselves and to others. How might it affect your life to really believe that your body matters to God?
- What two lessons do we learn from Paul in 1 Timothy 4:8: “while bodily training is of some value, godliness is of value in every way, as it holds promise for the present life and also for the life to come”?
- What does it mean that “exercise is an acquired pleasure”? How does knowing this help us keep our exercise resolutions?
- How would you describe your current levels of physical activity? What modest, doable, and enjoyable next steps might help you move the needle? Write out a prayer for God to help you start and keep this goal.
More on Body and Exercise
Prayer: The Trouble with Talking to God
In this episode, David addresses why prayer often feels difficult and how understanding our neediness and sin can lead us into freer, fuller communion with God.
We humans have a complicated relationship with prayer. On the one hand, we’re all creatures, needy to cry out to God for help. On the other hand, we’re all sinners, tempted to run from him in our disobedience. The result: we struggle with prayer.
Questions for Further Thought and Discussion
These questions are well-suited for personal reflection or discussion with a friend or small group.
- In what ways do you enjoy prayer, and in what ways do you find prayer to be a struggle?
- What would it take for you to fill your everyday life with more regular Godward thoughts and genuine prayers?
- Humans, even unbelievers, very naturally ask God for physical things, but we’re far slower to praise him and confess our sins and ask for spiritual gains. How can you mature as a Christian to pray for more than material blessings?
- How often do you pray with others, and in what life-giving ways might you pray together more often?
- What’s your realistic plan for growing in the next three months as a man or woman of prayer? And what reward do you envision enjoying through such growth?
More on Prayer
Sleep: God’s Gift to the Weary
In this episode, David reframes sleep as a gift from God rather than something that inhibits us from productivity and trains us in trust, humility, and joyful dependence on him.
Do you get less sleep than Jesus? The answer for most of us is almost certainly yes. Jesus had no electric lights and pixelated screens to keep him up late. Apparently, he felt free to take naps in boats. And Jesus had no sin. We’re often kept up unnecessarily by sinful inclinations.
Questions for Further Thought and Discussion
These questions are well-suited for personal reflection or discussion with a friend or small group.
- Spend a few unhurried minutes reflecting on Psalm 127:2, “It is in vain that you rise up early and go late to rest, eating the bread of anxious toil; for he gives to his beloved sleep.” What does God seem to be saying to you in this verse?
- Every night your sleep is telling you something. What message is God sending us in requiring we spend so many years of our lives unconscious, inactive, exposed, and utterly dependent?
- How did Jesus “sanctify” human sleep? In what ways did Jesus seem ready, when needed, to sacrifice his sleep?
- Describe your current sleep patterns. What needs improvement when compared with Christlike rest? In other words, in what ways are you not doing your part to open your hand to God’s gift of sleep?
- How might you craft a plan for sleep that imitates Jesus’s rest and his readiness to sacrifice sleep in the call of love?
More on Sleep
Church: The Magic of Words in the Body of Christ
In this episode, David shows how committed life and fellowship in the local church multiplies joy and becomes one of God’s most powerful means of grace.
Shared joy is doubled joy. In a world of non-committal communities and on-again, off-again commitments, embrace countercultural fellowship. Give your word, keep your word, share your words, and experience the rare joys that many people today, including many professing Christians, do not enjoy.
Questions for Further Thought and Discussion
These questions are well-suited for personal reflection or discussion with a friend or small group.
- Describe a time when “the magic of words,” from the mouth of a fellow Christian, served as God’s means of grace to your soul.
- If you are a covenant member of a local church, what prompted you to join? If you’re not a church member, what keeps you from joining?
- Spend a few unhurried minutes comparing Hebrews 3:12–13 with Hebrews 10:24–25. What does God seem to be impressing upon you through these passages?
- Honestly evaluate your own faithfulness to be present and active in your church this past year. In what ways could you be a more active and engaged member of your local church? What regular excuses are you tempted to make for flaking on your church?
- Look forward to the year ahead. In what ways might you grow in engaging with fellow Christians and making better use of the magic of words for others’ good (and your own)?
More on Church Fellowship
Food and Drink: Fasting, Feasting, and Daily Bread
In this episode, David helps us see how feasting and fasting can rightly order our loves and renew our hunger for God above his gifts.
God designed our bodies not only for food — to eat and enjoy his world — but also to go long periods of time in fasting. Fasting accompanies heartfelt prayer in expressing special longing for some divine provision or help, and going without such a basic comfort highlights God’s value beyond his blessings, focusing our affections afresh on him.
Questions for Further Thought and Discussion
These questions are well-suited for personal reflection or discussion with a friend or small group.
- Are you surprised to learn that Jesus feasted? What warning does Jesus have for us in our feasting?
- What is Christian fasting, and how is it a gift from God? What warning does Jesus have for us in fasting?
- How might our praying for “daily bread” help us find a healthy baseline from which to enjoy the benefits of occasional feasting and fasting?
- How often have you fasted as a Christian? How might you make the most of this powerful tool God has given you in times of special need?
- How might you, very practically, cultivate the daily habit of happy self-control by making every meal holy?
More on Food and Drink
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