Seventy Resolutions of Jonathan Edwards: Pressing On in
Short answer: The Seventy Resolutions are a list of personal commitments Jonathan Edwards drew up around 1722 and 1723, while still in his late teens and early twenties, as he prepared for pastoral ministry. They are not a ladder to heaven or a second gospel. They are the private disciplines of a young believer who knew he was not yet what God was making him, and who wanted to live deliberately before God rather than drift. Philippians 3:12-14 gives the apostolic shape of that same life: Paul says he has not already obtained or been made perfect, yet he keeps reaching forward. Edwards aimed at the same thing: not self-made righteousness, but a sober, prayerful, lifelong pursuit of God in Christ.
What Edwards Actually Wrote and Why
Edwards began the resolutions after a period of serious thought about his own soul, and he kept adding to them over roughly two years. He prefaced the whole list with a statement that he was depending on God for help to keep them, and he resolved to read them over once a week, and more often if needed. That detail matters. A man who thought his own will could carry him never would have written a prayer for divine help at the top of his list. He knew the flesh is weak, that good intentions evaporate by Thursday afternoon, and that only grace sustains a resolve.
The resolutions cover time, speech, eating and drinking, anger, reputation, suffering, and death. Some are a single line; others are longer. One resolves to do whatever is most for God's glory, whether or not it costs him. Another resolves never to speak anything but what is true and edifying. Another commits him to live as if he were already dying, and to treat each hour as a trust from God. They are not abstract ideals. They are field orders for a man who expected to be tested in ordinary hours of an ordinary week.
He did not publish them. They were found among his private papers and only became well known later. That is significant for how we read them. These were not written to impress a congregation or to build a reputation for seriousness. They were written for the one audience that already knew everything: God, and a conscience laid open before him. Private resolution is different from public performance. It is the sort of thing Jesus described when he told his disciples to give and pray and fast without trumpets, trusting the Father who sees in secret.
It is easy to turn such a list into a monument. We can admire Edwards's seriousness and then either feel crushed by it or make a hobby of imitating it. Both responses miss the point. The resolutions were a means, not a savior. They were a young man's way of asking, in concrete terms, what love for God looks like on a Tuesday. If we read them rightly, they should drive us not to self-improvement projects but to Christ, who alone supplies both the will and the work.
Philippians 3:12-14: The Apostolic Pattern Behind the Resolutions
Paul's words in Philippians 3:12-14 give the theological frame for everything Edwards attempted. The apostle had more grounds for confidence than any of his readers, yet he says plainly, "Not that I have already obtained, or am already made perfect" (Philippians 3:12). A man who had planted churches, seen visions, and suffered shipwreck still says he is incomplete. If Paul had not arrived, no resolution list will make us arrive either. That is not defeat; it is honesty, and honesty is the floor every real pursuit of holiness stands on.
What does he do with that honesty? He does not sit down and wait. The same verse continues, "but I press on, that I may take hold of that for which also I was taken hold of by Christ Jesus" (Philippians 3:12). Notice the order. Christ laid hold of him first. Paul's striving is a response to being apprehended, not an attempt to earn apprehension. That single sentence dismantles the whole self-help reading of the resolutions. Edwards resolved because he had been laid hold of, not in order to be laid hold of.
The imagery in verse 13 is athletic and forward-leaning. Paul says he does not count himself to have taken hold, but one thing he does: forgetting the things which are behind and stretching forward to the things which are before. He is not paralyzed by past failure or inflated by past success. Both are set aside. The hand is already extended toward what is ahead, musculature tensed, eyes fixed on a point further down the road. That is the physical posture of Christian discipleship, and it is exactly what a young Edwards was trying to put into words.
Then verse 14 names the goal: Philippians 3:14 says, "I press on toward the goal for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus." The prize is not a certificate of personal achievement. It is the high calling of God, a calling that runs upward from God to us rather than from us to God. We run because we have been called, and the finish line is fellowship with the one who called. Read that way, Edwards's resolutions are not oppressive. They are the stride of a runner who knows exactly where the line is and who is waiting at it.
Resolved, Yet Not Self-Righteous
The most common charge against the resolutions is that they are legalism dressed in colonial clothing. The charge is understandable but wrong, at least when aimed at Edwards himself. His list opens with a prayer for God's help. His theology, preached and written across a lifetime, insisted that sinners are saved by grace through faith and that even our best works are tainted by mixed motives. A legalist does not pray for help; he assumes he already has what he needs. Edwards assumed the opposite and said so at the top of the page.
Still, there is a real danger we should name. Anyone can copy the form of the resolutions while missing their foundation. We can make a list, keep it mostly, and quietly begin to feel that God owes us something for the effort. That is the older brother in the parable, dutiful and resentful, convinced he has earned what the father gives freely. A resolution list kept without the cross at the center becomes a ledger of our own righteousness, and ledgers like that always leave us either proud or despairing.
The remedy is not to abandon discipline but to relocate it. Paul says in Philippians 3:12, "I press on, that I may take hold of that for which also I was taken hold of by Christ Jesus." The pursuit rests inside a prior embrace. I run because I have been caught. I discipline my body not to purchase acceptance but because I already have it in Christ, and I want my life to match the gift. Discipline in that key is gratitude with a schedule. It is a daughter of faith, never its mother.
Edwards himself would have said something similar. His resolutions were the shape his love for God took, not the price he paid to secure it. Christians have differed through history about how much structure and planning belongs in the devotional life. Some have kept detailed lists and found them a gift; others have found that their lists became a snare and wisely let them go. Both can be faithful, provided the ground under both is grace. What no one can do is stand before God on the strength of his own resolve.
Counting Days: The Resolutions and Psalm 90:12
Several of Edwards's resolutions press on the shortness of life, and here Psalm 90:12 is close to the surface: "So teach us to count our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom." Moses is not recommending morbid introspection. He is asking God to teach a skill that no one learns on his own, the skill of numbering days. We naturally live as though time is unlimited, putting off what matters for a tomorrow that may never arrive. Counting days is arithmetic done in the presence of God.
Wisdom, in Moses's prayer, comes through that arithmetic. When I know my days are numbered, I stop postponing repentance. I stop deferring the hard conversation, the confession, the forgiveness, the generosity. The person who truly counts his days does not become gloomy; he becomes serious about what actually matters. Edwards wrote that he resolved to live as if he were dying and to do everything as if it were his last act. That is not morbidity. It is the practical shape of a heart that has learned to count.
Paul's running imagery in Philippians 3:14 assumes the same thing. A race has a fixed distance. There is no time to wander into the stands or turn back and relive a stumble at the starting line. The athlete who counts the laps runs differently than the one who assumes the race will go on forever. So it is with our lives. Numbering our days produces urgency, and urgency, rightly directed, produces a focused life rather than a frantic one.
Notice, though, that numbered days do not mean joyless days. Moses's prayer asks for wisdom of heart, and a wise heart is a glad heart. The person who lives in the light of his mortality is freed to love present things without clutching them. He can enjoy a meal, a friend, an evening because he knows each one is a gift he did not earn and cannot keep. The resolutions, read through Psalm 90:12, are a young man learning to receive his hours as gifts rather than consume them as entitlements.
Training in Godliness, Not Merely Trying Harder
1 Timothy 4:7-8 supplies the word that best describes what Edwards was doing: "Exercise yourself toward godliness." The Greek behind exercise is athletic, the same root our word gymnasium comes from. Paul is not describing a vague intention to do better. He is describing repeated, patterned, sometimes tedious training. You do not drift into godliness anymore than you drift into running a marathon. You decide, you show up, you repeat, and over years the capacity grows. "Exercise yourself toward godliness" is both a command and a picture of slow, cumulative work.
The verse also tells us what to refuse: "But refuse profane and old wives' fables" (1 Timothy 4:7). Training requires selection. Not everything offered to us is worth our attention, and the mind has a limited capacity. Edwards's resolutions created a kind of filter, committing him to speech that was true and edifying and to pursuits that had God's glory as their aim. That is what discipline actually does. It is not mainly about adding more; it is about refusing what will not strengthen the soul.
And then the promise: godliness holds promise for the present life and for the life to come. Christian training is not merely an obligation; it is an investment with a guaranteed return, though the return most often comes slowly and looks like character rather than breakthrough. The person who trains in godliness becomes patient in a way he was not, gentle where he once was harsh, steady where he once panicked. These are not dramatic events. They are the ordinary crop of a life that has been repeatedly exercised.
This reframes the resolutions entirely. They were not seventy magic sentences that changed a man overnight. They were the plan of someone who understood that godliness grows by practice under grace. Paul commanded the discipline; God gives the growth. The farmer plows and waters, but he cannot make a seed sprout. So Edwards wrote and re-read his resolutions, doing his part, trusting the Lord of the harvest for the fruit.
Seeking Things Above, and Pressing Toward What Is Ahead
Colossians 3:1-4 fixes the direction of the whole life: if you were raised together with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. The verb is imperative, and it is plural, addressed to a whole church. Seeking here is not a vague spiritual mood. It is a deliberate redirecting of attention and desire toward a person who is actually there, exalted and reigning. The Christian life has a fixed reference point, and it is not inside us.
Paul's next phrase in verse 2, set your mind on the things that are above, not on the things that are on the earth, tells us where the battle is fought. It is fought in the mind, in what we habitually turn our attention toward. Edwards's resolutions are full of attention management: what he would think about, say, do, and want. He understood that a life drifts toward whatever it dwells on, and so he tried to aim his mind deliberately rather than let it wander where it liked.
There is also a promise attached. In verse 3 Paul says you died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God, and in verse 4 he says that when Christ, who is our life, is revealed, then you also will be revealed with him in glory. The pursuit is not open-ended and uncertain. It has a certain destination, secured by the one in whom our life is hidden. We press on because the outcome does not depend on the strength of our grip but on the one who holds us and will appear in glory.
Read together with Philippians 3:14, this gives us both directions of the Christian life: upward in desire, forward in time. We seek what is above while we press toward what is ahead. The resolutions, at their best, were one young man's attempt to hold those two directions together in ordinary days. He looked up to Christ enthroned and he leaned forward to the prize in Christ, and between those two he spent his hours.
The End of the Matter and a Young Man's Ambition
Ecclesiastes 12:13-14 closes the Old Testament wisdom book with a summary: Ecclesiastes 12:13-14 says, "This is the end of the matter. All has been heard. Fear God and keep his commandments; for this is the whole duty of man." The Preacher has chased every dead end and reported the results. Then he lands on two things, reverence and obedience, and he says this is the whole of it. Nothing Edwards wrote improves on that sentence. The resolutions are simply one application of it, worked out line by line in one life.
Verse 14 adds the reason for seriousness: God will bring every work into judgment, including what is hidden. That is uncomfortable to modern ears, and it should be. It means no private list is truly private. It also means the small, unseen resolutions matter, both the ones we keep and the ones we quietly abandon. Edwards aimed his life at that audience of One, and the resolutions were his way of remembering that no corner of a life is off the record.
It is worth noticing that Edwards was a young man when he wrote these. Ambition in youth usually wants a name, a position, a reputation. Edwards wanted to be godly. That is a strange ambition in any era, and it is a good one. It does not require unusual talents or a platform. It requires what Paul describes in Philippians 3:12, the willingness to admit you have not arrived and to keep reaching for what God has already set before you.
The church has often been helped by such private ambition. Not because the resolutions are inspired, but because they show a real believer working out in the open, before God, the shape his devotion would take. If they stir us, let them stir us to the same thing Edwards sought: not to be known for zeal, but to know Christ and to be found in him.
Practical Use Without Turning It Into Another Law
What should we do with the resolutions? The first thing is to read them as a case study, not a covenant. They were written by one man for his own life, not given by God to his church as an obligation. Scripture commands godliness, prayer, truthfulness, and self-control; it does not command seventy specific resolutions. So the resolutions offer wisdom we may borrow, not a law we must impose. That distinction will save us from the guilt that comes when our own lists inevitably fall apart.
Still, there is something to borrow. Many believers have found that a simple written aim, revisited weekly and prayed over, helps them far more than a vague desire to do better. That can be as modest as one sentence: to speak what is true and edifying, to treat each morning as a gift, to do the next thing for God's glory. The point is not quantity. The point is deliberateness, turning drifting intentions into definite and prayerful purposes. One honest resolution kept by grace outweighs a hundred impressive ones.
Second, expect failure and know where to take it. Edwards did not keep his resolutions perfectly; no one does. The right response to a broken resolve is not to tear up the paper in self-disgust, nor to lower the standard until it is easy, but to confess the sin, receive forgiveness through Christ, and begin again. That is exactly what Paul describes when he says he forgets what is behind and reaches forward. The runner who stumbles does not lie on the track; he gets up and keeps going.
Third, keep the goal in view. The resolutions can become an idol if we make our own growth the great subject of our lives. Christ is the subject. The prize is the high calling of God in Christ Jesus, not a better version of ourselves admired in a mirror. If a list helps you love him more and depend on him more deeply, use it thankfully. If it turns your eyes inward and makes you proud or despairing, drop it. Edwards would have agreed. The point was never the list.
What the Resolutions Cannot Do
A resolution cannot forgive sin. It cannot cleanse a guilty conscience, and it cannot produce the new birth. Only the blood of Christ atones, and only the Spirit gives life. Any use of Edwards's example that treats personal discipline as a substitute for the cross is a distortion of the gospel. Paul is emphatic in Philippians 3 that his own righteousness, blameless as it was by the standard of the law, he counted as loss for the sake of knowing Christ and being found in him. He says he has not already been made perfect, and that is exactly why he runs.
A resolution also cannot guarantee growth on schedule. Some disciplines bear fruit quickly; others take decades. Faithfulness is measured by obedience over time, not by visible results. Pastors have watched believers train diligently for years before an obvious change appears, and others grow unexpectedly fast. We are not the ones who make seeds grow. What is left to us is to exercise ourselves toward godliness and leave the increase to God, trusting his patience with our slow progress.
Biblical fidelity check
Philippians 3:12-14 establishes several things plainly. It establishes that even an apostle had not arrived at perfection in this life, that holiness is a matter of ongoing pursuit rather than a single completed achievement, and that the pursuit is grounded in having already been laid hold of by Christ. It establishes a forward posture: forgetting what lies behind, reaching for what is ahead, pressing toward a goal. It also establishes that the goal is the high calling of God in Christ Jesus, a prize given by God rather than earned from him. Nothing here supports the idea that Paul was unsure of his standing before God; the chapter overflows with confidence in Christ.
The passage does not establish that a believer can lose salvation by failing a resolution, nor that spiritual progress is measured by how many rules one keeps. It does not teach that discipline earns justification, nor that feelings of unfinishedness mean God has rejected us. A common misreading says Paul was anxiously striving to make himself acceptable, as if the race were a treadmill and the prize uncertain. That is wrong because verse 12 roots the running in Christ's prior hold on him, and verse 14 presents the prize as a calling from God, not a wage for performance.
Other passages that speak to Philippians 3:12-14
The theme of pressing onward is not isolated to one chapter. 1 Corinthians 9:24-27 pictures the Christian life as a race run to win, with self-control as the training that makes the running possible. Colossians 3:1-4 directs the same energy upward, telling believers to seek the things above where Christ is seated. 1 Timothy 4:7-8 supplies the language of exercise, commanding training in godliness with its promise for this life and the next. Ecclesiastes 12:13-14 and Psalm 90:12 add the frame of reverent obedience and numbered days. For further study, see A Divine and Supernatural Light: A Bible Study from Jonathan Edwards’s Classic Sermon, God Glorified in Man’s Dependence: A Bible Study from Jonathan Edwards’s Classic Sermon, Heaven Is a World of Love: A Bible Study from Jonathan Edwards’s Classic Sermon, and Jonah and the Lord of History | Jonathan Edwards.
Frequently asked questions
What were the Seventy Resolutions of Jonathan Edwards?
They were a private list of personal commitments Edwards wrote around 1722 and 1723 while preparing for ministry. He resolved to live for God's glory, to watch his speech and time, to number his days, and to depend on God's help to keep them. He intended to read them weekly. They were never published in his lifetime and were not intended as rules for other Christians, but as his own disciplined response to grace.
Do the Seventy Resolutions contradict salvation by grace?
Not as Edwards framed them. His list opens with a plea for God's help, and his wider theology insisted that sinners are saved by grace through faith, not by works. Philippians 3:12-14 makes the same point: Paul's striving follows Christ's prior hold on him. Resolutions can become legalistic if we trust them for acceptance, but used rightly they are the grateful shape that love for God takes, not a payment for his favor.
Should I write my own resolutions?
Scripture does not command it, so treat it as wisdom rather than law. Some believers have found a short, prayerful written aim, reviewed regularly, genuinely helpful for focus and growth. Others have found detailed lists become a burden or a source of pride. If you write one, keep it brief, keep it prayerful, and keep the cross at the center. If it turns your eyes inward, let it go.
