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Let’s say that you have just arrived at work. Before you get out of the car, you reflect on the drive. You don’t remember it. The daily commute is a habit. You’ve made that trip so many times that your mind released you from paying attention to the commute. I’m talking about kinesthetic memory. It’s the ability to do something without full cognitive awareness. Some people call it muscle memory. I call it habits. Regardless of how you label it, the Lord gave us this means of grace to help us function at maximum capacity. There are many examples of good habituations.
It would blow our minds to think about the number of things we do each minute of the day that require no literal thoughts. The Lord did an amazing job creating us. Think again about your drive to work.
I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it very well (Psalm 139:14).
The upside to habits is that you can’t live without them. There is too much going on to be a single-tasking human. Nobody knows this better than a mom with young children. She is not allowed to do one thing at a time. If she could not develop good habits, she would go crazy, literally. Carrying a newborn in her arms and making hot tea while talking to her three-year-old is an art. Oh, and the phone is blasting a tune from her husband, “Another one bites the dust.” She responds instinctively, without thinking.
Then there is sin, humanity’s common adversary. The nature of sin implies that habits are not always good for us. Sometimes, habits take us to destructive places in our lives and relationships. The downside to sinful habits is that we must guard our minds by giving reflective thought to the bad things we do without thinking. More than likely, you do those things because of well-developed patterns. Like the drive to work, you can get in a relational scrape with a friend in a nanosecond, not realizing how you got there because you have developed bad habits. Repentance is never complete until you change those habits.
Too often, a person will sin, confess their sin, and ask for forgiveness, but never change the habits that caused the sin (Ephesians 4:22-24). Repentance means we have changed our old way to a new way that looks like Jesus. We must do more than acknowledge what we did wrong. We must do more than ask the offended for forgiveness. If sin is a pattern in our lives, we must take our souls to task and unpack the things that have dulled our minds and captured our hearts, keeping us doing what we did. Sinful habit patterns are our call to think about how we came to the place of mentally disengaged behavior.
This perspective is why I write about the motivations of the heart that lead us to do the things we do. If we eat too much, weigh too much, or have other sinful practices, we must deal with the underlying issues of the heart while interacting—secondarily—with the behaviors. So, lets delve more into our behaviors and how our habits give shape to them. If you’re going to change, you must dig deep to get at the heart-motivated causes of your habits. I’m using overeating to illustrate, but you can apply these ideas to any bad behavior. Anger, porn, oversleeping, and smoking are four common bad practices that tempt people to indulge themselves. I want you to substitute whatever your bad habit is with my illustration of overeating.
Mable is overweight. She knows it but does not know what to do about it. Mable read my thoughts on overeating and seems to be getting a handle on her anxiousness and worry patterns—the heart issues that feed her desire to eat too much. She also understands her craving for comfort and control, which are born out of a spirit of fear. But Mable continues to eat more than she should. She has not addressed those un-perceived thoughts that trigger her to go for food. Mable is like a sleepwalker. She moves about her home, nibbling-to-scarfing, without realizing what she is doing. Though she may be tacitly aware, she doesn’t fully understand it. Her habits are part of her psyche—her soul: the non-organic part of her. Because all habits work this way, she cannot change until she “wakes up” and realizes what she does to herself while in this soul sleep.
Habits can be what we do every day and can also be what we do seasonally. Seasonal habituation could be just as detrimental—holidays, birthdays, or anniversaries. For many of our brothers and sisters, the Christmas holiday is the stimulus for bad habits. They eat too much because of the ubiquity of food. For others, it’s their first season without someone, so they indulge themselves. These bad habits can become the everyday makeup of a person’s life. It is who they are. Perhaps you know someone like this and are not surprised by their actions. Over time, you accept them as they are without helping them overcome their caught-ness (Galatians 6:1-2). There are three primary reasons for not being a better friend:
If you want to help them, you must look for their trigger points when addressing their habituated patterns (everyday lifestyle habits). Trigger points are what happens to a person that motivates them to develop their habit. Here are a few examples:
All four people wrongly responded to the trigger points in their lives. At one time, they probably could have walked away from their negative responses to sin, but now they can’t. They used to be in control, but now their habits control them. Their sinful reactions to the sinfulness in their world are as unnoticed as the lady who does not remember her morning drive to work. She arrives and reflects on the journey, amazed she made it without killing someone. The overeater finishes the ice cream and reflects on what she did. Her sadness motivates her to eat more—another bad habit.
Brothers, if anyone is caught in any transgression, you who are spiritual should restore him in a spirit of gentleness. Keep watch on yourself, lest you too be tempted. Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ. For if anyone thinks he is something, when he is nothing, he deceives himself (Galatians 6:1-3).
The first thing to do for the habituated person is to talk with them about their habituation. Draw attention to what is going on in their lives. Help them see the benefits and liabilities of habits. They must understand how the Lord gave them habits to survive and how the devil twisted the Lord’s kindness to destroy them (John 10:10). As they gain clarity, they begin unpacking the process that habituated them. Start with the trigger points—the things they do when temptation comes. Discover the sinful stimulus that motivates them to respond to problems with bad practices. Discern their caught-ness. If this is the beginning stage of bad habits, it won’t be hard to stem the tide. However, if this has been a habituation for many years, your work will be challenging. Walk through all the triggers. There may be more than one, especially if they have developed a pattern of wrong responses to adverse circumstances.
Typically, there may be only one trigger in the beginning—the angry husband. In this scenario, the wife began to eat after each time he railed at her. Overeating became her habit. With no one challenging her response to his sin, she began to eat when any conflict, difficulty, or unnerving situation came into her life. Now, she is controlled and managed by many triggers. You want to spend time with her to talk about all the negative situations in her life and how she habitually responds. She is genuinely caught in her sin, though the original cause was not her fault. Make sure this is clear to her. She is the sinning victim—a person who sins in response to being sinned against. She needs to cultivate the awareness to recognize what is happening to her and how she responds to her husband’s actions.
This process takes much prayer. She must regularly engage the Spirit, asking Him to illuminate her mind to what is happening in these moments. It would be great if she learned the habits of pre-praying, praying at the moment, and post-praying. These are cultivated attitudes and behaviors of prayer before the temptation comes, during the temptation, and after it leaves. Whether she fails or not, she must become a prayer warrior to break this habitation. Passive obedience is not enough. She must actively engage God. Teach her other habits, too. For the overeater, she can make healthy selections like carrots, apples, oranges, or celery. She does not have to stop eating but must eat more nutritiously. Finally, teach her about the grace of God that works in her failures because she will fail. Encourage her. Let her know it’s okay to fail. She is not going for unbroken, idealized perfection; she is going for gradual transformation. She will never be perfect. She wants to create a pattern of positive habits while factoring in the possibility of episodic failures.
When helping the habituated, ensure they agree to allow you to speak into their lives. Changing years of bad habits will take much work, and they cannot do it alone. Make plans to connect with them occasionally. As they progress, you may be able to address the other issues connected to the bad situation in their lives. It would be great if they stopped tormenting themselves, but for now, you need to stabilize them by helping them break the bad habits.
Rick launched the Life Over Coffee global training network in 2008 to bring hope and help for you and others by creating resources that spark conversations for transformation. His primary responsibilities are resource creation and leadership development, which he does through speaking, writing, podcasting, and educating.
In 1990 he earned a BA in Theology and, in 1991, a BS in Education. In 1993, he received his ordination into Christian ministry, and in 2000 he graduated with an MA in Counseling from The Master’s University. In 2006 he was recognized as a Fellow of the Association of Certified Biblical Counselors (ACBC).
