Your Future Self Will Thank You

by Drew Dyck

  “He leaned forward, boring in on me with those piercing blue eyes. ‘The Bible tells us to pray without ceasing and to search the Scriptures. And I do that.’”

  “You pray without ceasing?” Jenkins asked.

  “I do,” Graham said, “and I have every waking moment since I received Christ at age 16. I’m praying right now as I’m talking to you that everything I say will glorify Christ.”

  Next Jenkins asked Graham about his habit of searching the Scriptures.

  “Wherever I am in the world, in someone’s home, my home, a hotel room, here in my office, anywhere, I leave my Bible open where I’ll notice it during the day. Every time I see it, I stop and read a verse or two, or a chapter or two, or for an hour or two. And this is not for sermon preparation; it’s just for my own spiritual nourishment.”

  Jenkins asked how he gets back into the habit when he misses a day or two. The evangelist “cocked his head and squinted.”

  “I don’t think I’ve ever done that.”

  “You never miss?” Jenkins asked.

  “No, I said it’s nourishment for my spiritual life, and I don’t want to miss a meal.”

  During the conversation, Jenkins remembered looking over Graham’s shoulder and spotted the evangelist’s open Bible “on the corner of his desk … just as he said.”

  For Graham, praying and reading the Bible weren’t optional add-ons; they were core-deep practices. He understood that they were vital to his spiritual health, so he built these rhythms into his life. Prayer and Scripture reading had become ingrained, automatic, as natural as breathing.

  HOLY HABITS

  It might seem like Scripture doesn’t say much about habits. After all most English translations of the Bible contain only one use of the word “habit.” In Hebrews 10:25 it says we should “not giv[e] up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing.” But Scripture has plenty to say about practices and patterns of behavior. It urges us to meditate on God’s Word “day and night” (Josh. 1:8), confess our sins (James 5:16), pray consistently (Luke 18:1), seek justice (Isa. 1:17), dwell on “whatever is lovely” (Phil. 4:8), “walk humbly” with God (Mic. 6:8), and “speak the truth in love” (Eph. 4:15 NLT). It also contains hundreds of warnings against destructive patterns of action, including the “practice of sinning” (1 John 3:9 NLT), being “conform[ed] to the pattern of this world” (Rom. 12:2), being “drunk on wine” (Eph. 5:18), and being slack in your work (Prov. 18:9). What are these patterns of vice and virtue if not habits?

  God also prescribes routines and rituals designed to build holy habits into the lives of His people. The number of routines and rituals in the Old Testament is dizzying. God commanded the ancient Israelites to observe seven sacred annual feasts, keep the Sabbath, tithe their income, purify themselves, worship regularly, and present offerings and sacrifices at the temple. Though the New Testament frees Christians from having to keep the whole Jewish law, there are still sacraments like baptism to symbolize our spiritual rebirth and the communion meal to remind us of the sacrifice of Jesus. On top of this, our weekly gatherings include rituals designed to instill beliefs and behaviors to bring us closer to God and each other.

  Even in “low church” settings that don’t use the liturgical calendar or recite ancient creeds, there’s often a rather predictable cycle of songs, prayers, and preaching each Sunday. There’s Sunday school or midweek small group meetings. These rhythms shouldn’t be legalistic duties; at their best, they foster belief and help give individual members much-needed support for the tough task of living the Christian life. These habits are not designed to save us. But as pastor John Starke put it, “There are specific spiritual habits that put us in the way of transformation and change.”14

  A few years ago, I listened to an online talk from a man who gushed about how brilliant the church is to establish such rhythms. He waxed eloquent about singing Christmas carols, looking at religious art and old churches, and the experience of paging through the Bible. The surprising thing about the talk is that the speaker, Alain de Botton, is an atheist. He completely rejects the idea of God and the doctrines of the Christian faith. So why was he praising religion? Because he realized that, by failing to employ the practices of the religious, secular people were failing to make their ideas take hold. “We tend to believe in the modern secular world that if you tell someone something once, they’ll remember it…. Religions go, ‘Nonsense. You need to keep repeating the lesson 10 times a day. So get on your knees and repeat it,’” he said. He wasn’t being critical of this insistence on repetition. “Our minds are like sieves,” he continued. “So religions are cultures of repetition.”15

  He also celebrated religion’s practice of “arrang[ing] time” by means of the calendar. This was a way to ensure adherents “will bump into certain very important ideas” throughout the year. He also extolled how religions “set up rituals” that remind us to do important things as the result of these ideas. He observed that these rituals aren’t just mental; they’re physical as well. “The other thing that religions know is we’re not just brains, we are also bodies. And when they teach us a lesson, they do it via the body.”

  The point of his lecture was that atheists should start “stealing from religions” to better communicate their ideas and provide a richer experience of life. Though I disagreed with de Botton’s atheistic beliefs—and have serious reservations about whether it’s possible to tease out religious practices from religious beliefs—I was fascinated by his insights. He made good points. Essentially what he said was that many religious practices are set up to change people and profoundly modify their behavior. They’re designed to cultivate habits.

  The rhythms you follow as part of a community of faith might seem restrictive or even boring at first. Repeating truths you already know and believe and singing songs you know by heart might seem a little strange, especially to outsiders. But it makes a lot of sense when you understand human nature. Like our atheist friend said, we’re sieves. We need to be continually reminded of what’s important. We also need repetition if habits are to form around these important beliefs. James K. A. Smith believes that habits aren’t manmade tools for improving our behavior; they’re how God chooses to shape us.

  We are creatures of habit, that God knows this (since he created us), and thus our gracious, redeeming God meets us where we are by giving us Spirit-empowered, heart-calibrating, habit-forming practices to retrain our loves. This is the means of the Spirit’s transformation, not an alternative to Spirit-shaped sanctification.16

  Ultimately, it’s the habits that are built into our lives that shape (for better or worse) who we end up becoming. This is how the prominent nineteenth-century American psychologist William James put it: “All our life so far as it has definite form, is but a mass of habits—practical, emotional, and intellectual—systematically organized for our weal or woe, and bearing us irresistibly toward our destiny, whatever the latter may be.”17 We’re not powerless against our habits. In fact, in the next chapter we’ll discuss how we can change them. But we ignore their power at our peril. As Christians, forging holy habits is crucial to our spiritual growth. “The goal of the believer,” wrote J. I. Packer, “is to become in action what they are in heart.” Habits help us translate what we believe into how we behave.

  Before brain-imaging studies or double-blind experiments could be conducted, William James understood the power of habit from observing the world around him. But it’s important to note that this “mass of habits” that moves us “irresistibly toward our destiny” doesn’t happen all at once. Habits start small. They begin with little actions. But over time they snowball. Eventually they change the landscape of our lives. C. S. Lewis wrote about this phenomenon.

  Good and evil both increase at compound interest. That is why the little decisions you and I make every day are of such infinite importance. The smallest good act today is the capture of a strategic point from which, a few months later, you may be able to go on to victories
you never dreamed of. An apparently trivial indulgence in lust or anger today is the loss of a ridge or railway line or bridgehead from which the enemy may launch an attack otherwise impossible.18

  In the next chapter, we’ll explore how we can break bad habits and form good ones. By doing so just maybe we will eliminate the “bridgehead from which the enemy may launch an attack” even as we lay the foundation for “victories you never dreamed of.”

  Self-Control Training: Entry #5—Prayer Continued

  WELL, IT TURNS OUT I’m not much of a prayer warrior.

  I struggle to spend a mere fifteen minutes a day talking to God. And I have a hard time concentrating when I pray. Well, that’s an understatement; my mind wanders like a feral cat. Here’s a sample of my interior monologue when I try to pray:

  Dear Lord, thank You for this day … this day … man, I’m dreading that 10 a.m. call. Maybe I can reschedule. Speaking of the schedule, are we visiting my parents this weekend? No, that’s next weekend. I hope the traffic isn’t too bad … Oh, right, praying. Lord, I pray for my kids. I thank You for them. Please protect them and … my son’s been so stubborn lately. Is it just a phase? Maybe I’m too soft on him. I thought I was going to be a strict parent, but I’m a bit of a pushover. Right, right, praying. God, I pray for the missionaries our church sends out. I pray for that family in India … I wonder if I could live in India. I love Indian food. Maybe I’d get sick of it though if I had to eat it every day. And it’s probably a little different from the Indian food we have over here. But those curries are amazing. I think warmer cultures just have better food, I mean objectively better. Ack! I’m supposed to be praying. Lord, please bless those missionaries in India, eating that delicious Indian food …

  You get the idea. I have a hard time staying focused when I pray. Sometimes, when my timer goes off, I realize that I’ve spent most of the time daydreaming. Though I feel like a bit of a failure, I’m going to keep at it. Having a better understanding of how habits work has encouraged me. I know that the early stage of forming a new habit is the hardest. For the first thirty to sixty days, any new routine will feel challenging, even unnatural. But once it becomes a habit, it requires less effort. So, for now, I’ll just keep blundering through these prayers. Perhaps over time my concentration will improve.

  I also picked up a helpful tip for what to do with my wandering mind. It came from German theologian and Nazi-resister Dietrich Bonhoeffer. During WWII, Hitler closed all the seminaries, so Bonhoeffer ran a secret underground seminary for a small group of men. Bonhoeffer required his students to meditate for two hours each day on a passage of Scripture. But the students were struggling. They came to Bonhoeffer and complained that their minds kept wandering away from the text and back to the troubles at home. “Follow your mind where it goes,” Bonhoeffer told them. “Follow it until it stops and then, wherever it stops, make that person or problem a matter for prayer.”19

  I found this strategy liberating. Rather than feeling bad about my wandering mind, or even trying to rein it in—I could follow it. And when I did, I realized Bonhoeffer was right. It often led to people or problems, which I could pray about. It turned out to be a great way to find worthwhile topics to bring to God. Maybe my wandering mind isn’t so bad after all.

  Chapter 6

  Training Your Elephant

  Building Healthy Habits into Your Life

  “The strength of a man’s virtue should not be measured by his special exertions, but by his habitual acts.”

  —BLAISE PASCAL

  Benjamin Franklin had an impressive résumé. When the early American wasn’t inventing the lightning rod, bifocal eyeglasses, the odometer, clean-burning stoves, or the flexible urinary catheter (really), he was busy engineering the US postal system, organizing the first fire department, starting the University of Pennsylvania, or writing bestselling books. Oh, and in his spare time he helped found the United States of America. (It’s amazing what people got done before Netflix.)

  But there was one area in which the famous polymath was a failure: in his attempt to achieve moral perfection. Franklin was twenty when he “conceived the bold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection” and he tackled the plan with all the vigor and naïveté of youth.1

  This was the plan. Whenever young Ben faced a moral decision, he resolved to make the right choice. “As I knew, or thought I knew, what was right or wrong, I did not see why I might not always do the one and avoid the other.”2 In his mind, it was simple. If he knew what was right, he could do what was right … every time. Easy peasy. He also sprinkled in a little religion, beseeching the heavens each day to strengthen his efforts. “And conceiving God to be the fountain of wisdom, I thought it right and necessary to solicit His assistance for obtaining it.”3

  Yet Franklin discovered that what seemed simple in theory was anything but in practice. “I soon found I had undertaken a task of more difficulty than I had imagined,” he wrote in an understatement for the ages. What was the problem? “While my care was employed in guarding against one fault, I was often surprised by another; habit took the advantage of inattention.” In other words, even as he made progress in one area, he lapsed in another. Just as he seemed to be on the cusp of conquering one vice, another would pop up.

  Instead of gliding up the mountain of moral perfection, Franklin found himself stuck in the valley, playing an endless game of whack-a-mole with his vices.

  Furthermore, he realized that noble intentions were no match for bad habits. “Inclination was sometimes too strong for reason,” he concluded. “The mere speculative conviction that it was our interest to be completely virtuous was not sufficient to prevent our slipping.”4

  But Franklin wasn’t about to give up. Not that easily. The poster boy for industriousness devised a system to bolster his quest toward moral mastery. First, he settled on thirteen virtues that he wanted to develop in his life: temperance, silence, order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness, tranquility, chastity, and humility.

  Then he made a chart with the days of the week running horizontally along the top of the page and the virtues running vertically down the left margin. Each time he failed to embody one of the virtues, he would record the indiscretion with a black dot next to the virtue he’d violated.

  He also hatched a plan to solve the whack-a-mole problem. Rather than trying to make progress in all thirteen virtues at once, he would tackle them one at a time. “I determined to give a week’s strict attention to each of the virtues successively.”5 He hoped that devoting a week to each virtue would allow time for a new habit to solidify before moving on to the next virtue.

  Franklin was confident of his new plan. He anticipated having to make fewer and fewer black marks in his “little book.” Soon he would have “the encouraging pleasure of seeing on my pages the progress I made in virtue, by clearing successively my lines of their spots, till in the end, by a number of courses, I should be happy in viewing a clean book.”6

  The fine-tuning yielded modest results, but alas, the clean book never materialized. In fact, Franklin recorded so many black marks that big holes began to appear in his little book. He was forced to transfer his charts to a sturdier memorandum book with ivory leaves that he could wipe clean and reuse.

  Franklin finally acknowledged the outcome of his audacious quest. “I never arrived at the perfection I had been so ambitious of obtaining, but fell far short of it.”7 Still, Franklin, ever the optimist, was grateful for the meager progress he did make and convinced the experiment yielded innumerable benefits. “I was, by the endeavor, a better and a happier man than I otherwise should have been if I had not attempted it.”8

  Perfection would have to wait for the afterlife. Two years into his bold experiment, he wrote a witty epitaph for his future tombstone, likening his deceased body to a worn-out book that would “appear once more, in a new and more elegant edition, revised and corrected by the Author.”9

  It’s easy
to laugh at Franklin’s naïveté. Did he actually think he could expunge all vices from his life? Most of us would concede that moral perfection is impossible, at least on this side of eternity. If the achievement were possible, the indomitable Benjamin Franklin would be the one to pull it off. But he didn’t stand a chance. Franklin started off aiming for perfection, but discovered even modest growth hard to attain. Why did Franklin fail? As we’ll see below, Franklin anticipated some key practices of habit formation. As usual, his instincts were prescient. But his actions also betrayed some crucial misunderstandings that sabotaged his success.

  INVESTING YOUR WILLPOWER

  For me, reading the research on willpower has felt a bit like riding a roller coaster. There were highs, lows, and a few sudden turns. The first dip: discovering that willpower is a finite resource—in other words, that it runs out. Yes, the finding makes sense, but I harbored a belief that if I were just inspired or committed or crazy enough, temptation would always bounce off me like bullets off Superman’s chest. But like superhero stories, that notion is pure fiction. Willpower is limited. It runs out, leaving you vulnerable to sin.

  Next, the roller coaster lurched up. I discovered that willpower could grow! Just like curling weights gives you bigger biceps, using your willpower makes it stronger over time. Yes, some of us are born with sad and spindly willpower muscles and have to work extra hard to see improvement, but it’s possible. It’s just a matter of hitting the gym.

  But then came another drop: I found that willpower is not enough. The research is clear. It doesn’t matter if you are the Arnold Schwarzenegger of willpower, it will be depleted just in the regular course of life. You might hold out a little longer than other people, but you’ll run out. That’s why we need habits. As we saw in the last chapter, developing good habits preserves your willpower. You rely on instinct and routine rather than conscious effort. Habits make virtuous behavior automatic.