As a new year begins, many people seek to improve themselves by making New Year’s resolutions. Some people see this practice as hopelessly legalistic, while others see it as a helpful spiritual discipline. Whatever your view, if you find yourself discussing the making and keeping of New Year’s resolutions, it can be interesting to cull your Accordance library for mention of the word “resolutions.”

To do this, open the Search All window and select [All Tools]. The easiest way to do this is to select [All Tools] from the Search drop-down menu of the Resource palette, then enter the word “resolutions” and hit return. In a few seconds every mention of “resolutions” in your library of Accordance tools will be listed for you.

By default, Search All results are sorted by Importance, meaning that hits in article titles will be listed first, followed by hits in the article contents. Sorted this way, we can see right away that the works of Jonathan Edwards, who is famous for his 70 resolutions, appears very close to the top.

Resolutions

As I went through the results, I found that I was more interested in looking in particular kinds of tools, such as collections of quotations, so I changed the sort to Alphabetical. Sure enough, there were a number of good quotes about resolutions in Gathered Gold and Quotations, as well as in the Quotations field of Webster’s Dictionary. In addition to those, I found some interesting discussions of resolutions in John Piper’s Sermons, the Select Works of John Wesley, the Life Application Study Bible, and the Puritan writer Henry Scougal.

Try doing this search yourself. If you’ve got a broad library of Accordance modules, you’re sure to find some interesting gems.