Old Out Before New In (Part 1)

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I guess I can’t delay this post any longer. I planned to use more blog space sharing how to establish new habits, giving examples from my own life, plus recommendations for online apps that keep the process going on a daily basis. I thought after I finished that, a few weeks from now, I’d be ready to talk about getting rid of bad habits, which will require some deep vulnerability on my part. I’ve come to realize, though, as I began preparations for this week’s post, that “Out With the Old” has to precede “In With the New.” That’s the way it works in my life, and it’s from that point of my recent success in life reconstruction that I must proceed. So let’s begin the conversation about getting the old out.

Bad habits come in two categories: sinful and non-sinful. In the sinful category, we could say unwanted behaviors, irresistible temptations, immoral thoughts and actions, perversions, abominations, and various idolatries. In the non-sinful category, we might refer to annoying, inappropriate, or hurtful thoughts, desires, and behaviors.

First, let’s understand what’s the deal with the negative but not sinful habits.

The primary overarching goal of my life, surpassing all other hopes, dreams, and desires, is that I would live in daily intimacy with Yahweh (God the Father), Jesus (God the Son), and Holy Spirit (the power and person of God living inside believers). If I am in that intimacy, with nothing disturbing or interrupting it, I can live a supernatural life, above and beyond normal life in this world. I can walk and talk with him and hear his voice, his will, his plans for me, and then doing them I can live in a power greater than anyone can know apart from his embrace and guidance.

Outright sin can interrupt that intimacy; I’ll say more about that later. But non-sinful negative thoughts, desires, and actions, though not putting me in the mortally dangerous place that sin does, can still put on hold the moment by moment closeness I would experience by erasing those negative habits.

Here is a sample of my own non-sinful negative habits:

•Purposely looking busy or preoccupied so people don’t approach or bother me.

•Feeling judgment toward people God wants me to love.

•Carrying offense against people who have spoken or done ill toward me.

•Wanting to find a way to “get rid” of someone who is not performing up to my standards.

•Making sure my hair and clothes, even my shoes, are attractive (not simply neat and clean) if I’m going to leave the house, even if only to go to the grocery store.

•…and that’s only a few; of course there are more.

That’s hard for me to write and confess to you, and I haven’t even gotten to the outright sins yet!

First of all, these behaviors can give me the kind of reputation I don’t want to have, without even realizing it. I want to appear a certain way that seems right to me, but I also want people to love and respect me. Somehow, while other behaviors of mine might achieve my relational objectives, the negative ones can easily erase them. This can happen while I remain totally oblivious to it all.

When I first became a pastor, oh so long ago, I was serving a church in Des Moines, Iowa. There were two Sunday morning services, with Sunday School in between. After the first service, instead of remaining in the public area to greet and converse with people, I would “escape” to my office and literally hide there, pretending I was making last minute preparations to teach my Adult Sunday School class.

It was my wife who had to tell me people were saying, “Pastor Jim is not friendly; maybe he doesn’t really like people.” That hurt deeply; I was clueless. I responded, “But people in our Home Bible Study group, and people in my Sunday School class, and friends who come over, all know I am warm, loving, and friendly.” What I didn’t take into account was that my personality was at ease when I was preaching, teaching, leading, or with a small group of friends, but most uncomfortable when wandering through a crowd trying to make conversation. I made great efforts early in my ministry to change that situation, but it wasn’t easy because I had to actually break out of my innate personality in order to do so.

More important, those negative behaviors revealed deeper inner problems that interrupted my relationship with God. When the second greatest commandment is to “love your neighbor as yourself,” how could I say “I wasn’t made with that ability” and still want to be following the Good Shepherd in the destiny he had planned for me to follow? These issues, though not actually falling into the category of sin, made it clear I could not establish positive life habits without first dealing with these negative ones.

Nowhere is the effect of bad habits, even non-sinful ones, more devastating than in a marriage. The problem is, God normally draws two people together who are opposites in personality types. One quiet one loud. One spender one saver. One private person one party person. One early riser one early retirer. One neat one messy. None of these personality differences are in the sin category, yet think of the nightmares they cause in a marriage. This happens because we think the way we are is the “right” way and the other person should become more like us. We’re unable to see both the positive and negative sides of every personality trait. And we’re always combatting the general human desire to please ourselves and have it our own way. Marriage is the most difficult relationship on earth, and yet, the Scriptures say, it is the perfect reflection of our life with God in all it’s glories and complexities.

Now let’s go on to the sin category. Here is where we start laying our truth cards on the table. The Word of God says there is no sin you have been tempted to do that is not “common to man.” Yet we Christians, knowing that all our sins are forgiven if we belong to Jesus, continue to play the same excuse games non-believers play. We don’t want to confess the truth about our sins because we think they are more disgusting than others’ sins, or that we crossed a line that most people, at least the ones we know, never crossed. That’s what the demons whisper to us to be sure we carry never-ending internal shame. Here's the first place we are dead wrong.

I was a very little boy (five) when I first started to masturbate…at nap time in nursery school while my divorced mother was at work. I was absolutely certain I had discovered something no one else knew about. Something inside (my God-given conscience) told me it was not a good thing and I shouldn’t tell anyone about it. I was very much older when I finally faced the fact that this is truly common to humans, especially men. Counseling men as a pastor for many years, it became clear, as is humorously described, that “95% of men did or do masturbate and the other 5% are lying.”

I have since found the same to be true of internet pornography: First, the fact that most men who have a serious problem will admit to having “a little issue occasionally.” Second, the never-spoken reality that porn cannot be separated from the resulting masturbation even in married or otherwise sexually active men. We'll make any excuse so we don't have to face how serious sin is, so we minimize it instead. Even in our current morally decadent culture, men are too ashamed to admit this. And in the years since I was a child, when this was mostly a man’s problem, it has now become true for women, too.

We’re not only dead wrong in our refusal to accept how common every imaginable kind of sin is, but we’re wrong about two other resulting spiritual truths: First, we don’t recognize that correct adjectives for sin include evil, filthy, abominable, and perverse. Once we acknowledge that, we’re in the perfect starting place to destroy these habits. Second, we don’t believe there is nothing, no nothing, no nothing our God is not ready to forgive and cleanse to purity and holiness with the blood of Jesus, nothing that is too evil, nothing that is beyond forgiveness, nothing that has gone on too long. That is, unless we make our own freely chosen life path to reject God and continue to glorify Satan by falling headlong into a lifestyle of sin. Even then, we can turn around and repent, if it’s a true repentence from a broken heart longing for total reconstruction.

Because we don’t believe these truths, we want to ignore, or at least minimize, our sins. We convince ourselves we’re “not doing too bad, considering I’m human; after all I’ve never (fill in the blank) yet.” But “never” and “yet” are words that cover a gigantic self-deception, along with others we use to fool ourselves:

• “All normal men (women) have this issue.”

• “Sometimes I can have a little problem with (fill in).”

• “At least I don’t (fill in).”

• “I know lots of people who do far worse things, and they’re doing fine.”

• “No one will be perfect until we get to heaven.”

• “God knows I’m an ordinary weak human, and he has grace for my weaknesses.”

We cover up what can’t really be covered up. We keep the “secret rooms” of our lives secret, as though the fact that others don’t know the whole truth about us means we’re safe. Can we really be safe from the results of sin, safe from God who has not yet caused lightning to strike us dead?

We don’t know how serious sin is. We’re not aware that we have separated ourselves from God’s presence, because our intimacy with him was always shallow at best. We don’t know the real difference between stumbling (needing daily confession, sprinkling of blood of Jesus, washing dirt from our feet accumulated by walking through the world) and falling headlong into sin. We call it stumbling when we’ve fallen headlong.

We may have been falsely taught a “once saved always saved” theology which means no matter what we do it’s all “under the blood” even though the Scriptures make crystal clear that is not true! To clarify, I'm saying that multitudes say they were "once saved" who never really were.

YES we sin daily, YES we’re forgiven from sins we haven’t yet committed, but also YES we cannot live a life continuously falling headlong into filthy abominations and yet enter the Kingdom. YES repentence is the key to forgiveness which is always available. But then again, YES our continuous idolatrous worship of demons, leaving the threshold of the house of God to cross Satan’s threshold and then choosing to live and worship demons there through our pleasurable immersion in sin is not acceptable or automatically excusable just because we think it’s normal. To say it is normal, acceptable, okay, not a big problem when we have chosen a path of evil we won’t renounce…this is dead serious though not seen to be so by most ignore-reality, Biblically illiterate, falsely preached doctrine followers who insist no matter what is the proof of their lives that they were once "saved."

An interesting Old Testament law that’s described in the book of Leviticus concerns mold that infects the walls of a house. That ancient law required the homeowner to scrape off the mold, wait for a time, and if it did not return, to get the certification of a priest that the mold was truly gone. But if the mold returned, or if the priest could scrape deeper into the wall and find more mold ready to erupt to the surface, the entire house would be condemned and torn down.

I have this mold, actually black mold, in my house. In damp weather, like it is now in winter months, the mold comes through to the surface in various places. I spray it with bleach and it disappears, only to reappear after some time if damp weather continues. I have to stay on top of this, because black mold can be dangerous to a person’s lungs. So I’m diligent to search my walls regularly for areas where it’s reappearing. Just this morning I walked around the house with my spray bottle of bleach. At least I don’t have to worry that a priest is going to condemn the house and have it torn down!

I believe this law was created by God to illustrate the power and effects of sin. It’s like a deadly spot deep inside that at any moment can begin to erupt to the outside, and if not dealt with in a most radical way, will eventually lead to death. If it is something that is caught at the beginning, while only a “stumbling” and not a “falling headlong,” It can be destroyed by true repentence, and then even if we occasionally stumble, we can confess it and renounce it so that we don’t fall back headlong into the old pit.

Satan's demons have an an assignment to continue to tempt us with sin the rest of our lives. But in a truly "saved" Christian, that temptation is coming from the outside to try to stir the weaknesses of our flesh to return to sins that have been removed from us. We might "stumble" again but can quickly forsake them because the cancerous mold is no longer embedded in us.

Next week I will list the sins that have wreaked great destruction in my own and many others’ lives. I will share a most important lesson on the meaning of “crossing over the threshold,” and then I will post “Eight Principles of Destroying Bad Habits.” Once we get the old out, we’ll be ready to let the new in, ready to begin our lessons in creating new habits to reconstruct our outer and inner lives.

Stay with me, dear friends, and be blessed with deeper honesty, that you may be delivered from spending one more day living in deception. Remember, as Jesus said, “You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (John 8:32).

Habits In Habits Out

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“There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision, and for whom the lighting of every cigar, the drinking of every cup, the time of rising and going to bed, and the beginning of work, are subjects of express volitional deliberation. Half the time of such a man goes to the deciding, or regretting, of matters which ought to be so ingrained in him as practically not to exist for his consciousness at all.”

––William James

When something becomes a habit, you’re as close to acting without conscious thought as possible. In that state, no concerns or decisions exist as to whether or not to act, and there are no choices about methods to take. This is because concerns, decisions, and choices are issues we handle in our conscious mind.

We all have morning rituals, to which we hardly give a thought while doing them. How much toothpaste should I squeeze onto the brush today; do I need a minute to think about it? But what about children? The same ritual seems impossible for them; they just want to give up and go back to bed. Parts of it may even be exhausting to them, like tying shoes. But the day will come.

Remember learning to drive a car? Concentrate, take each step slowly so you don’t forget anything. How do people drive and talk and have music playing all at the same time, you wondered? But the day came.

What you thought could never be a habit suddenly becomes one, sometimes because a life change forces you to do things you never had to do before. That happened to me after my divorce. Among other things (we won’t talk about ironing) I suddenly had to prepare all my meals. I always enjoyed cooking, occasionally. But planning, purchasing, cooking, cleaning every meal? It was hard work, but then I began to find great recipes I enjoyed preparing. A key has been to never make something requiring time if I’m in a hurry. Along with discovering recipes, I also increased my ability to put ingredients together on my own for complete and satisfying meals.

Then another habit came along, diet. As this current life reconstruction was getting under way, I knew by the scale, my discomfort, and the tightness of my clothes that it was time. Now I have a whole new system in eating and exercising which has transformed me inside and out. More about that when I go through habits one by one. This post is just the introduction!

Habits are behaviors we don’t need to think about; they’re like automatic reflexes. That can be good or not so good, depending on the habit. If you’re a woman, you may remember your mother saying, “Don’t cross your legs.” But your legs had a mind of their own; you didn’t think and decide each time you crossed them. How about “Don’t slouch,” “Speak up,” “Don’t eat so fast”? We never purposely refused to do these things, but our habits were far ahead of any corrective decisions we might have made to the contrary.

This is especially true with habits we want to change because we know they are sinful or harmful to us and others. They draw us away from the God whose presence and power for living on the highest path we so desire. We want to end those behaviors and create new ones that move in the opposite direction. Yet once again we discover it’s not so easy since we’re already in the midst of the behavior before we’re aware we even started it!

“But each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. Then desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin, and sin when it is fully grown brings forth death.” (James 1:14-15).

We have a parliamentary system for creating habits. Let’s use the example of getting up early. Before it becomes a habit, the alarm sounds and something in you says, “Oh no, not yet,” and the majority vote is to stay in bed. So you hit the snooze button. And maybe you do that three more times before you force yourself, against the majority opinion, to drag yourself out of bed. While you do, you’re thinking, “Maybe I’m not feeling well today. Maybe I ate something bad for me. Maybe I need to catch up on lost sleep. Maybe bad dreams gave me intermittent sleep and I’ll be tired all day.”

Once getting up becomes a habit, though, the motion of throwing the covers off to arise immediately when the alarm first sounds is passed in a second with majority vote, even when part of you might feel a tiny bit of opposition.

I’ve never succeeded in getting up early until this most current reconstruction, but now I know if I don’t start my day at 6:00 am, I may not be able to stick to the rest of my habits, some of which commence immediately upon rising!

Making something a habit is completely different from learning something using your awareness, like if you listen to a teacher or take part in a project. It means practicing something over and over until you’ve actually rewritten the nerve cells in your brain.

Habits begin with a trigger. The 6:00 alarm is the first trigger of my day. That trigger starts a series of habits that have recently and surprisingly become automatic. I get up, turn on lights, open blinds, start the propane heater (it’s winter in Baja and no central heat), and get a teeth-cleaning chewy for my dog Oscar. That will keep him occupied so he won’t bother me as I’m doing my exercises. Then make the bed. Then weigh myself, do bathroom stuff, get dressed. Only then do I go downstairs to prepare breakfast. That one morning alarm starts all those actions, and I no longer spend a moment deciding whether or not I will do any of them. The trigger shoots the bullet, and all those actions are accomplished.

After breakfast comes the next trigger, drinking coffee at the table, which sets off the next set of routines: prayer, Bible, online Spanish lesson, then back upstairs to worship at my keyboard. Keep in mind, this is totally new to me! I can only believe God Himself pulled the initial trigger in response to my deep desires for a pure and productive life to achieve His purposes.

An interesting side note about dogs. Oscar has become the “barometer” of my progress in creating new habits. When I started doing floor exercises, he didn’t know what to make of it. He would try to lie under me as I was doing pushups. He wanted to put his head on my stomach while I was doing situps. He wanted to lick me at terribly inappropriate moments. Now he chews his dental stick and then plops back down in his doggie bed, watching me without interruption till I’m finished. When I started doing fifteen stair flights, he wanted to follow me up and down on the narrow staircase, or nip at my heels as I ascended, which was really annoying. Now, as soon as I go up and down once, he lies down at the top of the stairs and waits till I’m finished! It’s like a positive confirmation that the habit is created.

Unfortunately, habits you want to quit function the same way as habits you want to establish. Triggers, unwanted and undesirable, kick them into gear; we’re often in the middle of doing them before we’re aware they’ve begun. I’ll be giving significant space to the undoing and re-doing of undesirable habits, but let me say here that it’s important to identify the triggers for a habit you want to quit, and to establish new triggers that will stop it in its tracks before its acting out begins. I won’t list the specific unwanted habits just yet, but I believe you’ll recognize these triggers:

Location

Certain other people

What you purposely or accidently see online

Your emotional state, especially depression, anger, sense of failure

Time of day

Loneliness

Cycle (yes, men have them too)

A reward we give ourselves for abstinence

ROUTINES: These are series of actions that start with a trigger. I’ve already discussed how a couple of my triggers are the starting point for a routine of habits. A completed routine leads to the trigger for starting the next one. Routines function like an emotional tuner, meaning you can change your mood just by going right on to the next routine without taking time to stew, pout, or be angry. One guy who runs an hour a day says he’ll run a bit longer if he’s just received unwarranted criticism or rejection. It’s one way that developing habits can keep us at the emotional and spiritual level we want to maintain in our BEing.

Our routines of habits yield rewards. If they didn’t, we’d never persevere in making them instinctual. Some of those rewards are easy to understand, while some are uniquely effective for us while incomprehensible to others.

I hate running. I can’t get past the out-of-breath, painful feet, sweating misery, and I have no desire to ever make it a habit. I can understand, though, the reward it gives to those who love it. I also realize two things: FIRST, running is not for everyone, nor should those who love it not be able to understand why others despise it. SECOND, it is also possible that something we once totally rejected may suddenly become appealing, and then enjoyable. Who knows, one day I may become a runner, but I seriously doubt it.

Some habits that are part of my daily routine are new to me, things I never thought I would do daily, much less enjoy. For most of my life I didn’t have an overweight problem. That meant I may have looked fit, but truthfully, I was never in shape. Little muscular definition, no arm strength, love handles. I was a master at wearing just the right clothes to hide parts of me. Even most recently, when I was 25 pounds overweight, people would say, “Oh, you’re in such good shape.” I wasn’t really interested in impressing anyone that way, but the older I got, the harder it became to walk even the slightest incline and keep breathing, or to lift the five-gallon water bottles and propane tanks I have to buy here. Dead in the morning even if I slept well, drowsy in the afternoon, didn’t want to give Oscar his daily exercise if it meant I had to run around the yard.

Now I exercise as soon as I get up in the morning. I also walk fifteen stair flights up and down before lunch and again before dinner. I could never have believed I would do such things, and even like it! It only proves “something” can happen when our primary desire is to do whatever it takes to BEcome the person we want to BE, something that will change us to DO what we never thought we would want to DO, much less actually DO.

An in-shape body is the least important part of exercising for me. Let me be honest (as I always try to be in this blog). From what I see, the majority of men my age are overweight. Most of them seem perfectly content, and I watch them eat food I limit or refuse, foods I love that seem to shout out my name. It’s natural to think, “Really, if I gain 25 or 30 pounds, will I die? Will it really matter? Will I not go to heaven where I’ll get a perfect resurrection body? So why not ‘eat, drink, and be merry for tommorow we die?’” The reason why not is because there are more important rewards. First and most obvious, I’d rather be in the physical and mental state I’m in now even if it means denying something I really want.

“If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it” (Matthew 16:24-25).

“I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect” (Romans 12:1-2).

I’m sure you’ve had the experience of coming up with a great idea while not sitting at your desk and thinking. I often lose track of counting reps while exercising because an idea pops into my head. Then as soon as I finish, I have to run to write it down. It’s often the very next section of the blog I’m writing in which I was stuck! Or it might be a sudden revelation of the meaning of some Scripture I didn’t understand. Sometimes I stare at the Bible and pray, “Lord, I don’t get this at all and it seems vital; won’t you reveal it to me?” And then nothing, until I’m walking stairs or cooking a healthy meal or doing some other unrelated routine. It's just one more way these habits result in giving me something more worth having than the rewards I used to give myself.

In 2003, a high school in Naperville, Illinois, launched an initiative called “Zero Hour PE” for 19,000 students, who ran on the field or exercised on stationary bikes before their first class. The results were tremendous. While students who only took regular PE classes improved by 10.7% in their reading and comprehension tests, those who took “Zero Hour PE” showed an improvement of 17%.

We could never establish good habits or get rid of bad ones without rewards. People look at others who stick to good habits as highly self-disciplined. But they don’t realize that the habit formers are receiving rewards. They’re a different category of rewards, yet equally or even more satisfying than winning money or eating a whole pizza.

I’m going to get much more specific in the coming posts. Stay with me. And be blessed as you commit yourself to:

“Seek first (whatever will help you live now in the supernatural realm of) the Kingdom of God, and his righteousness, and then all these things (all you long for both here and hereafter) will be given to you” (Matthew 6:33).

How to DO So You Can BE

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In the last two posts, I shared what it is we DO that prevents what we want to BE. I wrote ten examples from my own life, many of which I'm sure you could relate to.

Today we begin the next phase of Reconstruction, but first a reminder. I've already shared the most vital foundational principle. It’s the principle that should carry us all the way through a Life Reconstruction: "The Goal is Always to BE."

Whether we’re changing or re-arranging, disposing or composing, re-using or refusing, deciding or abiding, our purpose in each life adjustment must lead to what we long to BE. Not to appear, not to do, not to seem, not to impress, not to surpass, but to BE.

While being inspired by a Japanese writer’s book on Minimalism, one of the things I decided to DO was get rid of unnecessary furniture. Not like a true minimalist, because it’s not my goal to BE one! But display tables for knick-knacks, extra bookcase of books I’ll never read again, and anything I kept to impress visitors…all needed to go. They no longer represent what I want to BE.

I disposed of a large desk, the kind that has a hutch on top with cubbyholes that were empty because I could never decide what to keep in them. It was impressive in size but more than I needed. My original plan was to find something smaller but nicer and in dark wood.

One corner of my bedroom is my “office” (see the photo), and it’s been downsized to exactly what I need and nothing more. A tiny table that's perfect for my laptop, a sofa table for easy access to what I use daily, and a printer cabinet with file and supply drawers. The computer table is blonde, the sofa table is tan, and the printer table is black. I’m perfectly content and realize I need nothing else; I want to BE someone who doesn’t need others to positively comment on anything I own, drive, wear, or do! Let me remind you; for me this is a serious change.

Along the path of this blog, I hope you are being challenged to distinguish what you want to BE from what you no longer want to BE. I hope in this stage you will begin to seriously separate vital from worthless reasons for your activities, lifestyle, priorities, and the habits that sustain them.

We usually use the word “habit” to define reflex actions that seem automatic due to constant repetition. My plan was to examine my habits, evalute them, and then use a method to establish new habits.

First, I need new habits to regulate former good actions that I didn’t do regularly enough.

Second, I need new habits to begin behaviors I wanted to do but didn’t.

Third, I need to undo old habits, not only ones that don’t serve my to BE goals, but most important, those that erupt from my sinful nature connected to temptations from the world, flesh, and demons.

I ended Blog 2 with the question, “How Desperate Are You?” We must answer that question again as we begin this part of our journey. Most people will say they want certain life changes but (there’s always a but) they can’t really say they’re desperate. If that’s true, then you have nowhere to start. You've got to be desperate for something. If you’re anywhere near my age, you might say “finally desperate.” Most of the reconstructions I'm currently building in my life are transpiring becuase I am "finally desperate." Read slowly and answer truthfully these two questions about being desperate:

Are you desperate enough to create new habits by a daily process that would enable you to be what you’ve previously given excuses for not being yet long to be?

Are you desperate enough to destroy old habits by a daily process that would enable you to not be what you never wanted to be but felt you could never change?

“But one thing I do: Forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Jesus Christ” (Phil 3:13-14).

“Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us…In your struggle against sin you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood” (Heb 12:1, 4).

As we seek to set goals to BEcome honorable, godly, fruitful, loving, strong men or women, we have to be careful to keep a balanced perspective and not think in extremes. On the totally negative side are those who never change because they believe:

“I’m only human.”

“This is the best I can do.”

“Everyone has issues.”

“This is earth not heaven.”

Then on the other extreme are those who smooth over the negative realities of their lives with trite positive statements. Often Christians use these phrases to sound “holy” while their lives do not demonstrate the statements' validity:

“I can change.”

“I can win.”

“I can conquer all sin.”

“I can do anything I believe by faith.”

There’s a balance here, since nobody is either hopeless or perfect! The ten negatives I shared about myself in the last two posts are no longer wreaking full-scale destruction in my life. Yet neither are they totally eradicated. Each one is in process of reconstruction, and part of making true changes means I have to rate my success or failure on each one daily. If I’m not truthful in that rating, my progress comes to a halt. My goal is that I could add behaviors that bring me closer to loving and serving God while loving and serving people. My goal with negative behaviors/sins is that some must be totally eradicated, others measurably recede. We know facing temptations will confront us till we die.

Example: I’m doing an online program to learn Spanish. It’s very difficult and can be discouraging to me because it seemed I had an amazing language gift when I was learning Haitian Creole…but not with Spanish! This program does a daily review of words I’ve supposedly learned. I’m shown a picture and have to say what it is. Or it displays a Spanish word and says “what does this mean?” Sometimes there are five words in a row that seem to be on the tip of my tongue but I just can’t get them out. When I click to see the answer, it would be easy to say, “Yes, of course, I remember that now, I know it” and then click the green arrow instead of the red X. It’s so tempting, and I’m doing this alone so who cares if I say I remembered a word that I really didn’t? Let’s just get on with it instead of being delayed because I said “nueve” instead of “nieve.”

This is an example of how something seemingly unrelated can have a direct connection to the kind of person we really want to BE. It’s easy to say, “Well GOD sees.” But that assumes my Heavenly Father wants to punish me for saying I knew a Spanish word when I didn’t. Like he’s got a lightning bolt in his hand ready to be hurled at me. No, that’s not the God of the Bible. Yet, I know if I’m totally honest when I’m the only one (on earth) who knows, it’s going to build what I want to build in my character, understand?

Also, if I say I know a word when I don’t, the app won’t put it into my review again, and I’ll never learn it. But if I check the red X, the app will put it back in the review queue until I really do learn it! So saying I failed and checking the red X puts me ahead in the end. That might be important in the above mistake, since “nueve” means “nine” and “nieve” means “snow.”

In every area of our lives where we really want to change or improve, we have to ask, “What’s the greatest reward I can achieve?” We may actually need to choose between two rewards:

––The rewarding pleasure of eating large amounts of food we love vs. the rewarding pleasure of losing weight.

––The rewarding pleasure of sinful behaviors vs. the rewarding pleasure of being clean and pure inside and out.

Sometimes it’s the timing between two rewards…one now, one later…that makes choosing difficult, because we don’t want to wait for the better reward:

––You can have $50 today or $100 next year.

––You can eat two cookies now or three cookies tomorrow.

What do you choose? There are contradictions between the rewards we see in front of us and those we can obtain in the future. We tend to be “grab what we can now” people, which makes it tough to acquire habits that can turn us into the people we really want to BE.

It's all based on rewards and punishments, which are indispensable themes for acquiring habits. The choices are complicated, though, because taking the reward now (eating the sweets in front of you) might turn to punishment later (weight gain or health problem). If we keep choosing the rewards in front of us, we’ll not only be unable to obtain rewards in the future, but will also end up facing punishments.

Simply put, rewards are things that make you feel good:

            ––Eating good food.

            ––Getting plenty of sleep.

            ––Earning money.

            ––Interacting with your favorite people.

            ––Getting 100 “likes” on social media.

We all know what we “ought” to do:

            ––Lose weight by controlling what we eat.

            ––Exercise instead of lying around.

            ––Get up early instead of staying up late watching movies or scrolling.

            ––Do our work or studies instead of playing games or using our smartphone.

It’s not easy, though. We want the reward of getting up early but we’re enticed by the reward of hitting the snooze button. We want to be sober and alert but we’re enticed by the immediate reward (buzz) of another glass of wine or shot of whiskey. We want to concentrate on our work but the smartphone keeps vibrating in our pocket.

Why can’t we wait for future rewards? It’s because we overestimate the rewards in front of us and underestimate the rewards or punishments in the future. When a reward is quite a distance in the future, we can’t generate the energy to say no to what’s in front of us. If exercising today or not eating another piece of pizza means I’ll lose two pounds tomorrow, I’ll do it. But it could take a month or longer of daily habits to lose those two pounds. The cultural rules for success and the longings of our hearts are to seek the full future rewards, but the longings of our flesh and our human nature have not caught up with that more noble and desirable path.

Willpower is controlled by our emotions. Our bodies will recover if we eat or drink too much, but the emotions of regret, shame, and discouragement make us falsely believe we are hopeless failures who could never stick to new habits. Reduced willpower leads to the inability to tackle the next project or to persevere in the habit we’re currently working on.

The good thing is, it doesn’t take much to give our emotions a boost. A high-five during a race, hearing someone shouting your name, a thumbs-up, can give us all the boost we need to keep on going no matter how we just failed. We can also keep our emotions up by seeing how many days in a row we’ve checked off a completed habit-in-the-making on a “tally app,” which has been a life-changer for me, and about which I’ll share more later.

When we fail, we only need something or someone that encourages us to block out the past, even the immediate past, and launch forward to succeed tomorrow where we failed today (see the Philippians 3 reference above). If our emotions turn positive, our willpower and successful performance will follow.

I’ve also discovered that to create habits I’ll be able to follow with success, I need to set smaller goals and have the reward of achieving them, instead of goals the evil voice of judgment tells me. “What, you’re only going to set a goal of ten pushups? Any teenager can do that. Be a man; you should do fifty!” The goal of that spirit is to make me fail so I’ll give up on life in general. He wants to insure I won't achieve anything honoring what God created me to be. So I set not too lofty goals so I can experience the joy of achieving them!

My Spanish app asked at the beginning how much time per day I wanted to spend. The evil voice whispered, “You won’t learn anything if don’t spend at least an hour a day.” I said, “Get away, demon,” and I set my lessons at half an hour a day. I have no anxiety about increasing to an hour, but rather feel a rewarding sense of accomplishment as I complete my half hour each day.

Fifteen flights of stairs, up and down, twice a day (besides morning exercises). At first I couldn’t breathe after twelve flights. Now I’m doing fine at fifteen, panting a bit but with the joy of accomplishment. I laugh at the voice that says, “Come on old man, can’t you do twenty-five?” I’ve never succeeded at anything like this before, so no voice can convince me it’s not “good enough.” I had enough years listening to that voice discouraging me to the point of giving up. No longer; this reconstruction is real, permanent, and I believe will last.

When firmly in place, habits are actions we take with barely a thought. So how can we turn things we conciously want to do into habits? Next week I’ll start to answer that question.

Be blessed today, and don’t listen to any voice that discourages, judges, or confirms your worst evaluations of yourself. That is NEVER the voice of God.