Tuesday, 7:45 a.m. The alarm clock glowed in my face, reminding me that I needed to log in to work in 15 minutes. I said good morning to my husband, jumped into a pair of sweatpants, brushed my teeth, and grabbed a bowl of cereal to eat while catching up on messages from my coworkers.
This is how every day went for months.
I didn’t see any problem with my routine—I’m not a morning person and don’t like to be up any earlier than I have to—but my husband gently pointed out that my priorities seemed out of order.
“I want to start the day by connecting with you,” Zack said. “When you check your phone first thing in the morning, it feels like it is more important to you than I am.”
Then it hit me. Does God feel the same way? I wondered.
I realized that my habits were reinforcing my tendency to prioritize work over my relationship with Zack and my relationship with God. I asked myself, What am I saying to myself when work is the first thing on my mind when I wake up? Who am I prioritizing? Why?
We’ve since found some answers and built a new routine for our mornings, and it’s stuck for five months and counting. In asking myself why it’s so much easier to stick with this rhythm than following ideas from social media or sporadic urges to do better, I realized I’ve given this routine more thought and care than I have most habits.
We won’t want to change until we know why we need to. We won’t know how to change until we know what we’re really aiming for. As the Bible continually emphasizes, good habits start with questions about our own motivations.
In many cases, we hardly have to convince ourselves that we need to change. We’re aware that we reach for desserts too often, we neglect the exercise our bodies were made for, and prayer often can be our last resort. We could all come up with a number of habits we’d like to change.
But we often miss the chance to go a layer deeper and think about who we are becoming. We often forget to see ourselves as characters in the story of the gospel, living it out or rejecting its truth in our daily actions.
Justin Whitmel Earley, author of Habits of the Household, says, “Our routines become who we are, become the story and culture of our families.” Earley calls habits “little routines of worship, and worship changes what we love.”
When I woke up 15 minutes before work, I was prioritizing comfort, sleep, and a prompt work attendance over so many other things: a few minutes of prayer, a healthy breakfast, a hug for Zack. I shaped myself in habits of hurry; I worshiped productivity.
The problem wasn’t that I was starting early or had a short morning before work. It was that I had allowed my heart to worship work, and thus I neglected the other responsibilities God had given me. I was starting to love success and recognition over all else. I would check work messages on evenings and weekends and respond immediately to coworkers even during designated off-hours. Without realizing it, I was telling myself every morning that success at my job was the most important thing in my life.
The Bible has much to say about the rhythms of our daily lives, including an entire book (Leviticus) with detailed instructions for what to eat, how to deal with medical issues, and how to celebrate holidays. Moses reveals the reason for attending to these details: They are “so that you, your children and their children after them may fear the Lord your God as long as you live by keeping all his decrees and commands that I give you, and so that you may enjoy long life” (Deut. 6:1–2).
Habits are worship—or lack thereof—and good habits prime us to love God. Then, our love for God primes us for good habits.
“Seemingly tiny habits cause major spiritual growth,” writes Hanna Seymour, author of the forthcoming book Everyday Spiritual Habits. She adds that our “run-of-the-mill and even chaotic days are fertile soil for producing a spiritually deep and rich life.”
As Jesus said, “Those with a noble and good heart, who hear the word, retain it, and by persevering produce a crop” (Luke 8:15). When I was offering the first fruits of my time and energy on the altar of work, my life did not produce a crop. My fields of righteousness were withering. I had the fruit of ambition, not the fruit of the Spirit.
When we find problems in our priorities, we shouldn’t immediately try to change our behavior. We should start with our hearts.
One of my college professors once assigned an essay from Miroslav Volf about “plumbing the depths”—diving into our own hearts with prayer and honesty to discover the motives under our actions. Reflection brings meaning, my professor said. This isn’t something we need to do every day or even every week, but some practice of reflection is essential for an intentional life.
“Desire and reward drive our habits,” writes David Mathis, an editor at Desiring God, and “the ultimate goal of cultivating holy habits is having Jesus.”
Practically, this often looks like asking ourselves questions, and the new year offers a fresh opportunity to do so. Some good starting questions are “Why isn’t this habit working?” or “Who am I becoming in light of this habit?” Seymour suggests asking, “Who do I want to become, and what small spiritual habits can I start to help get me there?” Then, like little children, we can ask ourselves why again and again. And we finally start to go deeper.
What hasn’t been working? I’m having trouble getting up in the morning. Why? I go to bed late and don’t get enough sleep. Why? I scroll Instagram because I don’t want to go to bed. Why? I’ll be stressed and tired tomorrow morning. Why? Work is my top priority, and I’m scared to mess up.
There’s my real reason: I am idolizing work. Once I see my logic out in the open, I can ask God to rework that narrative and rewire my heart.
James gets to the root of a problem through a similar type of questioning:
What causes fights and quarrels among you? Don’t they come from your desires that battle within you? You desire but do not have, so you kill. You covet but you cannot get what you want, so you quarrel and fight. You do not have because you do not ask God. When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures. (4:1–3)
There’s the root: “You ask with wrong motives.” “You do not ask.” That answer seems a long way from “What causes fights?” Similarly, the roots of our behavior might seem far from our habits. We might be surprised by what God unearths as we prayerfully examine our hearts.
After we find the root, we can start a process of thoughtful trial and error: Starting a new habit that forms us to be more like God, asking him for help, and receiving his grace as we fail and try again.
“We can’t be holy in the abstract,” says Tish Harrison Warren, author of Liturgy of the Ordinary. “We learn the craft of holiness day by day in the living of a particular life.”
Of course, even with intentional reflection and thoughtful plans, it takes time and perseverance to unlearn old habits and replace them with better ones.
Mathis writes, “Christian perseverance is not passive.” One of the few times the English word habit is used in the New Testament, Mathis says, it is talking about perseverance (Heb. 10:24–25). We need Spirit-fueled strength and accountability in the church to make lasting habits. (To fight cycles of sin or addiction, we often need more—but never less—than introspection and accountability.)
Sometimes, though, our habits only last a few weeks. Some habits don’t work in our lives, even when we care about our goals and think we understand the root issues. We try—and fail. When that happens, another round of reflection often helps us discover what’s not working. That helps us understand whether we need to change a habit or ask God to change our hearts.
Zack and I recently adjusted a habit that we’d had trouble sticking with: In the summer months, we took a 15-minute walk together after breakfast. As the weather got colder, we gradually fell out of the routine until one day we realized we had dropped it. We still wanted to maintain our time together in the morning—to us it communicated, “You are important to me”—but taking a walk felt miserable in the dark and freezing temperatures.
So we found an alternative. In the winter, instead of going outside, we spend a few extra minutes waking up together, cozy in bed. In this case, it was our habit, not our hearts, that needed to change.
It takes a lot of energy and time to get out of the ruts we’ve fallen into. But what’s more exhausting is staying there. As Earley says, “What’s heavy is continuing to do nothing. What’s burdensome is continuing to follow default cultural habits.”
Our old habits are heavy. Jesus’ burden is light. And when we cast our burdensome patterns at his feet in prayer and reflection, we can increase our clarity of mind to worship him.
Elise Brandon is a copy editor at Christianity Today.
