Habits

We are such creatures of habit, and not all of our habits good, nor all of them bad. This is true for both the children of God, and the children of the world. The presenting problem for the children of God is that they were once children of the world and the old habits of the world are hard to shake. Lancelot du Lac confessed, “How hard it is to take out of the flesh, that which is bred in the bone” [La Morte D’Arthur, Mallory]. The problem is that what people generally want is their own way, to be the god of their lives. That of course was the sin of Adam and Eve and it's written in our DNA.

The children of the word live by knee-jerk reflexive action. No matter how bad they feel they are quite capable of saying, “When shall I awake? I must have another drink” [Proverbs 23:35].

Even my dogs are creatures of habit. I usually feed them around six in the evening, but last week because of our own schedules I fed them an hour earlier twice. As I did that, I knew that for the next few days at five o’clock they would be looking at me with beseeching eyes saying, “Where is our dinner?”

Establishing new habits and shedding old ones doesn’t happen accidentally, it takes both the grace of God, and responsive decisions on our part. Isaiah may say, “Morning by morning he awakens, he awakens my ear to hear as those who are taught” [Isaiah 50:4c]; but in the final analysis we have to decide to get ourselves out of bed in order to listen.