If you want to improve yourself, it’s a good time to be alive. It’s hard to keep up with all the books coming out about how to be ultra-productive, build systems and habits, and maximize your life. Not only that, but we can buy all kinds of tech to help us. We can even build personal AI agents that coach us throughout the day on how to live the best possible life.
Some of these books and tools can be helpful. They also come with two problems. First, they’re exhausting. Rather than improving our lives, we can quickly find ourselves buried in an endless list of self-improvement problems. Second, they never get to the real issue: the human heart.
Self-improvement will never lead to the life you want. There’s a better way.
Jeremiah points to the solution in Jeremiah 31:33-34:
For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the LORD: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people. And no longer shall each one teach his neighbor and each his brother, saying, ‘Know the LORD,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the LORD. For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.
Through Jeremiah, God promises us three things that self-improvement will never give us.
A New Heart
Our problem isn’t just how we act. Our problem goes much deeper. We don’t just need tweaks in our behavior; we need a total transformation at the deepest level.
The problem is sin, which affects who we are and everything we do. Our sin runs so deep that Jeremiah can say that our hearts are inscribed with sin (Jeremiah 17:1). No matter how much we try to improve ourselves, we’re incapable of changing who we are at the deepest level.
God promises to solve this problem by changing us at the deepest level. This passage doesn’t describe a gradual transformation; it describes a complete replacement. He promises to give us new hearts that are capable of loving and pleasing him.
You can’t hack your way to a new heart. You can only receive it. God offers this new heart to his people by his grace, not by human effort.
A New Relationship
No matter how much we try, some are going to do better than us, and we are going to do better than others. Some of us have more opportunities and capabilities than others. Things aren’t evenly distributed.
God promises this will change. We won’t need others who know more about God to tell us about him. All of God’s people will know him. The knowledge and enjoyment of God will be shared equally among all who trust him. Everyone will enjoy an intimate personal knowledge of God.
New Forgiveness
God not only promises a change; he promises to deal with the failures. “I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.” God will finally and fully deal with our sin, past, present, and future.
We do not have to keep running on the self-improvement treadmill. It is exhausting, and it does not work. Books, systems, tools, and habits will work to a point, but they can’t produce the change we need at the deepest level.
But God can. God promises to produce a total change in our lives at the deepest level. He promises a new relationship in which we can know him intimately. And he promises us forgiveness of sins. We can stop trying to become someone new. Instead, we can come to the one who promises to us new.
