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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).
Amen!