Ep 31: The Seven Habits of Highly Defective People

TRANSCRIPTION

Habits in Spiritual Formation

We’re not actually going to list seven habits today. Today’s episode title is a play on words that pokes fun at our modern preoccupation with “habits” as a sole means to wealth, relationships, and success. As anyone who’s tried to change their character through changing habits knows, it’s not as easy as it looks. And certainly not as easy as some authors and book titles would have us believe.

Let’s Get Caught Up

So, we’re going to start exploring our second key element of formation: habits.

Modern culture and Christianity are struggling today because of what Dallas Willard called the “Great Omission.”  We talk a lot about making disciples, but struggle to actually make them.

If a disciple is an apprentice of Jesus – someone whose life is centered around the journey of becoming more like our King – that message may not have filtered down to many of us along the way.

We’ve explored how a primary purpose of the church is character formation, but as Clyde Reid explained, “… the churches do not change lives or influence conduct to any appreciable degree.”[1]

So, we may find our Christian communities populated with people who know a lot about Jesus, or do good works, or are faithful to the church, but not necessarily people who are so similar to Jesus that we wonder if He is actually in the room somewhere.  People who are so intent on listening to our hearts, so inclined to heal, so adamant that we are worth seeing, worth gazing at, and worth rescuing, that we find their love almost overwhelming.

We’re coming to discover that there is a difference between a modern “good Christian” and someone who loves so deeply, so effortlessly, and so graciously.

In addition to the Great Omission, we’re faced with three other problems that are somewhat specific to our era: The Forgotten Kingdom, The Discipleship Dilemma, and The Formation Gap. The good news is that all three may be resolved and redeemed. This season is all about that last one, the Formation Gap.

The Formation Gap refers to the fact that human beings are formed through a combination of Five Key Elements – it’s just our human reality.  If one human being wishes to become more like another, the process involves the same five elements regardless of the people involved: time, habit, community, intimacy, and instruction.

In terms of our formation into the likeness of Jesus today, we’re exploring whether we experience these elements the way the New Testament church did, and we’ve concluded we don’t – there’s a gap.

Many historic Christian communities (starting with the early church) assumed and experienced all five: relational time, specifically designed habits, intentional community, appropriate intimacy, and increasingly complex instruction as they grew to be more like Christ.

For the most part, modern Christians do not experience many, if not all, of these elements. And that’s what we call The Formation Gap.

We also tend to be self-directed in our discipleship; we may ignore the power and purpose of our own stories, and we forget that discipleship is not really about learning more Christian things. It’s about becoming like Someone else, from the inside out.

Another way of looking at our spiritual journey is in six stages.  We pulled these from the book The Critical Journey.  Unfortunately, most of our church institutions only guide us into and through the first three. When we hit Stage 4 and the Wall, we’re often left by ourselves, without much help or guidance.  That often results in discontentment, loneliness, isolation, and a lack of direction or purpose in our spiritual life.  We’re left to quietly wonder, “Is this all there is?”

So, we’re exploring how we might fill the gap to recreate or enhance specific communities that embody all five elements and are ready and open to help us navigate all six stages. Perhaps we form them in our church, family, group of friends, neighborhoods, or something new.

At Soil and Roots, we call these immersive communities “Greenhouses.”  Jess and I are part of one, and it is, in fact, the most intentional, formative, supportive community we’ve experienced. And our hearts are far better for it.

Ideas on the Bedrock of Our Hearts

And we’ve spent some time exploring one of the most powerful and influential realities of life: ideas.  These often unconscious, hidden assumptions sit on the bedrock of our hearts and govern who we are.  They aren’t so much about facts as they are experienced realities.  It takes a while to wrap our minds and hearts around the concept of ideas, but we’re getting there.

Many of us assume that our belief systems – our statements of faith, as it were – form the very core of who we are, but that isn’t usually the case. There is another level of the human heart underneath our belief systems – and that’s the realm of ideas and desires.  And that’s where we spend most of our time here at Soil and Roots. The roots are our hearts, and the soil is the ideas in which our hearts are planted.

So, we’re exploring discipleship as the process by which ideas of darkness are transformed into ideas of light down at the bedrock of our hearts.  And that happens as our hearts experience Jesus.  Again, ideas aren’t logical conclusions or even conscious thoughts, so they aren’t transformed solely by our willing them to change.

They are primarily changed through relationships. As that happens, we begin to experience the “more” the Christian life has to offer, including a deeper connection to God, others, creation, and even ourselves.  We find ourselves more “integrated” into God, others, and ourselves.

And we’ve concluded that this life-giving formation is by far most effective and helpful when it’s a community effort.  Despite the fact that we live in a time when the Christian faith has become largely privatized, the prevailing loneliness, isolation, and disconnection people are experiencing inside and outside the church remind us of a pivotal, inescapable fact about humanity.

We are made for community.  Real, genuine community that embodies all five elements. And that type of community leads to greater human flourishing.

Introduction to Habits

Let’s move on to our second element of formation, Habits. It’s a very broad, very big topic.

Mortimer Adler wrote a massive book with a title you probably assume I’d like called The Great Ideas, and he expounded on 102 of them, one of which is “habits.”  If you enjoy Aristotle and Augustine, I recommend reading Adler’s full essay on habits, but here are a few summary points:

“Just as clothes are something a person has or possesses in a manner more or less fitting the body, so habits in a psychological sense are qualities which a person has or possesses, and they too can be judged for their fitness.”[2]

In other words, there is often a moral quality to habits, at least in the way we’re defining them.

And the habits we’re exploring are learned.

Adler continues, “…habit is a retained effort – the result of something done or experienced.”[3]

Perhaps when you were a kid, you walked your dog, and you discovered you enjoyed it.  So, you now have a habit of walking your dog. But perhaps as a kid, you were bitten or attacked by a dog.  Your habit now is to cross the street if you see one.

So, the habits we’re exploring are primarily the result of experiences and relationships, meaning the habits we formed back in our stories.

Here’s the simple definition of Habits in our Soil and Roots lingo:

A habit is a repeated pattern of our Eight Heartview Indicators.

There’s a simple picture that illustrates Heartview on the Resources tab at soilandroots.org.  You can see the Eight Indicators there and how they interact with our hearts.  Our hearts bubble up their true ideas and desires through our thought patterns, emotions, behaviors, words, relationships, health, and how we use time and money.

We all have certain recurring patterns of thought.  How we think about God, others, ourselves, and our engagement with creation and culture.

Our emotions tend to follow certain repeated patterns.  How we feel about God based on our circumstances, how we feel about ourselves, how we feel about our loved ones, and how we feel about creation and culture.

We have all sorts of habits related to our speech, our spoken words.  Not just what we say, but how we say it. And what we don’t say.

Our habits include repeated actions or behaviors.

We discover habits in who we form relationships with, how those relationships progress, and who we don’t form relationships with.

And we have recurring patterns in our health and in how we treat time and money.

So, we may be pessimistic thinkers. Maybe we tend to initially evaluate people and events through a critical lens. We may have a habit of developing relationships with seductive, exploitative people.  We may have a habit of spending money to cope with pain and anxiety. We may unconsciously fill our days with tasks, activities, meetings, and other stuff because we feel guilty about spending too much time in so-called “downtime.”

So, when we talk about Heartview and habits that characterize a deep disciple, we’re talking about a comprehensive perspective of how a person typically operates in the world.

And because a disciple is someone whose life is ordered around becoming like Jesus, we compare our habits with those of Jesus and those of His closest friends. And we journey together within our communities and Greenhouses to transform our habits into His habits.

Habits and the Heart

Sorry for the double negative here, but we don’t develop good or bad habits for no reason.  In other words, our habits don’t form by themselves.

Back to the dog, we walk our dog because we enjoy it, and it’s good for our dog.  But if a dog bit us as a child, we may scurry away when we see a dog because we want to avoid being hurt again.  There are reasons for our habits.

Also, we don’t sin for no reason.

We often miss this in modern Christianity.  We acknowledge our sin and chalk it up to the fact that we’re all sinners, which is true. But stopping there also halts the process of discovery, potential healing, and transformation.

Yes, we’re sinners. But what desires and ideas on the bedrock of our hearts persuade us to sin? What do we love that is tempting us to sin? What harmful wounds may be leading us to harm others?

On the flip side, we also obey for good reason. We have good habits because of whom we love.

Another way to define habits is the way ancient writers did: virtues and vices.  When our habits align with ideas of light, those are virtues.  When our habits align with ideas of darkness, those are vices.

Virtues and vices are both there for reasons, generally because of past experiences and relationships, our stories.

So, habits are directly and tightly tied to what we truly love and to the ideas that shape those loves.

Habits and Heartview go hand in hand.  We can tell, based on evaluating the repeated patterns of our Eight Indicators, what and who our hearts desire and the ideas that form us…the reasons our habits exist.

The Chicken or the Egg?

So, let’s take a look at the age-old question regarding habits.

Is our heart formed by adopting new habits, or do our habits change as a result of a transformed heart?  Is this the chicken or the egg?

Can we change our desires and ideas by simply changing our habits, or do our habits change as a result of our desires changing?

When I was back in college, I attended a Christian conference up in Pittsburgh, and the keynote speaker was Tony Campolo, a somewhat controversial sociologist and professor in the Christian world.

He told the story of counseling a man who claimed he was no longer in love with his wife, and the guy asked Campolo to affirm that he should leave her.

If I remember the story correctly, Campolo said, “Yes, you can leave her. But not until you’ve done this first. I want you to make a list of 50 things you did for your wife when you first fell in love with her.  Then for the next month, do those things.  Come back after that, and we’ll talk.”

The man groaned and complained, but agreed.

A month later, the man returned.  He had made the list and done the things he did when he first fell in love. As a result, he had fallen back in love with his wife.  He no longer wanted to divorce her.

His habits changed his heart.

Well, there’s another famous Tony. Tony Horton, the exercise guru.  That guy is in his mid-sixties but looks like he’s 25. Want to look like Tony Horton?  Just follow his workout and nutritional habits.

I tried one of his routines a while back in my 30’s. I almost died. His habits did not change my heart – they almost stopped it.

How do we contrast the first Tony with the second Tony?  In one case, habits changed the heart. In the other, they most certainly did not.

If there are only seven habits of highly effective people and all we have to do is do them, why aren’t we all…highly effective?

More seriously, what about people struggling with addictive habits who enter AA or Celebrate Recovery, or inpatient or outpatient treatment centers, only to ultimately lose their battle with addiction?

We seem to know the right habits to suggest overcoming addiction.  But sometimes our desires and habits just don’t get on the same page. Many people recover, but some don’t.

So, which is it? Do habits change hearts, or do hearts change habits?

Well, as with many things related to the complexities of being human, the answer seems to be both.

I’ve joked with you before that for my entire adult life, I’ve bounced up and down in a 25lb range. When I’m heavier, I force myself into good habits, and I lose weight.  Then I rediscover the joys of frozen custard and chicken fingers, and I desire the pleasure those give me more than being thin, and so up in the hot air weight balloon I go again.

The reality is that I don’t always want to be healthier; I want to experience the pleasure of food.  And not just in moderation. If I could eat frozen custard in moderation, I could maintain a healthy weight.  But when I desire frozen custard, I desire the entire store.

John Stonestreet and Brett Kunkle wrote a book on raising Christian kids in an increasingly hostile culture, discussing virtue and vice, good habits, and bad habits.

“Aristotle, in his work on ethics, taught that the head was the seat of reason, and the belly was the seat of passion or desire.  Virtuous people rule the belly with the head, and Aristotle thought that could be done solely through habit.

Habit helps, but we’ve all experienced the war that can take place between what we know and what we want.  Often, the belly wins.  That’s why (C.S.) Lewis thought that the head needed help.  To master our passions, we need the moral will.  Lewis called this “the chest.”[4]

They’re referring to a famous quote where Lewis called men who lacked conviction, “men without chests.” They lack the will.

Ok, so sometimes the ideas and desires in my heart can take shape more like Jesus simply by doing what Jesus did.  By practicing the things Jesus did, we can become more like Him.  Our hearts can, in fact, grow to be more like His.

But it may require something more than our intellect and rationalization, and something more than our belly – our desires.  We may need a stronger will.

And yet we’ve probably heard stories of people who came to Christ and were immediately delivered from bad habits: drugs, smoking, alcoholism, pornography.  Once they began to desire Christ, the desire for those other things melted away immediately.  A heart change immediately resulted in a habit change.

Wouldn’t we all like that to be the norm?

Three Summary Points

Ok, here’s what we’ve concluded so far:

1. Habits are repeated patterns of our Eight Heartview Indicators. So how we think, behave, treat money, and so on are related to God, others, ourselves, and creation.
2. As deep disciples, we identify our habits and compare them with those of Jesus.  If there’s a mismatch, we want to determine how our dark habits may be formed into His habits.  That’s the essence of Heartview.
3. Changing our habits may be as simple as just beginning to do the things Jesus did.  We should have healthy expectations that if we do more of those things, they will become habits and our hearts will follow suit. Our ideas and desires will change.

But we recognize that it is not a universal principle.  Sometimes, a change of heart may need to come first for our habits to permanently change.

And we also recognize that there’s an ebb and flow to this.  We’re going to have ups and downs, good days and bad days.  Welcome to being human.

In the case where simply trying to do better doesn’t work, how do we develop our “chests?” How do our hearts develop the will to repeatedly do the things Jesus did?

This is where I depart from some authors and thinkers. Some authors repeat the necessity of just getting back up and doing the same things over and over again until it becomes a permanent habit and the heart changes.

I propose that when simply doing the right habits doesn’t change the heart and we move from virtue back to vice, just trying to gut it out over and over again may not be the solution, and it may end up just frustrating us.

Perhaps developing our will, developing our chest, is a matter of integrating the other four key elements of formation.  That we look at habit formation holistically – not just doing the habit but incorporating it with our relational time, in an intentional community, with confessional and appropriate intimacy, in continued, deeper instruction. Sometimes even our habits are more caught than taught. 

Like I’ve said before, there’s a whole lot we can learn from AA.  Not that everyone who enters AA conquers their addiction.  But they have a fairly deep grasp of what it means to be human and the key element of habits.

And we can’t escape the necessity of authentically engaging our stories.  If we look at discipleship as a life-long journey in all four relationships, I think modern Christianity is weakest in embracing our relationship with self and creation.  We may be stuck in various vices, and no amount of “trying to do better” helps.  That could well be an invitation to dig into our hearts and our stories to address woundedness and harm there, in a safe, trusted environment.

Practicing Being Present on a Plane

I’ll finish by illustrating this with a story.

Most of the stories I share on the podcast are from my own life, primarily because I’m terrible at telling other people’s stories.

A few episodes ago, we explored that a deep disciple is present in time.  When we’re with someone, we’re with someone. We’re attuned to their hearts, not just their words.  This is also an example of habit.  We can develop the habit – we can practice – being attuned to someone in the time that we’re with them.

I’m practicing this habit because this has been an area of struggle for me.

Even though I’m not present with other people most of the time, I did get one interaction right recently.

I was flying back to Dallas from Detroit a few months ago, and that’s about a 2.5-hour flight.  I’m an introvert, so when I fly, my habit is to find my seat, immediately put my headphones in, and start reading, pretending I’m asleep, or watching a movie. Pretty much anything that signals to the other people in my row that I’m unavailable.

That’s harder to do when you get a middle seat, and on this flight, I got a middle seat. So, I found my seat, and the woman sitting at the window had obviously listened to this podcast, because she had her earphones in and was pretending to be asleep.  So far, so good.

But as I sat down, before I could put in my earbuds, the woman on the aisle engaged me in conversation.  And you know how this works – I immediately knew what I was going to be doing for the next 2.5 hours.

As it turns out, she was delightful.  We chit-chatted about our families, where we’re from, and politics.  And then I realized this would be a great place to practice being present. Could I tune in to see if I could hear her heart, and just not the chit-chat? So, I put my book away and put my earphones aside.

And as I attuned to her, I realized she was lonely. She’s a wife and mother, but her husband works all the time, her kids are entering their teenage years and no longer particularly interested in her, and she’s feeling that loss.

She mentioned she had once worked for a church, and so I asked her what her religion was.  She was Russian Orthodox.  I’m fairly curious, so I started asking her questions about Russian Orthodoxy because I don’t know much about it.

At one very natural point in the conversation, I asked her how someone in the Russian Orthodox Church becomes reconciled to God?  My new friend clearly understood sin, so how does someone become restored to God?

She laughed out loud and immediately replied, “They suffer.”

I asked, “What do you mean?”

She said, “We suffer.  That’s how we’re saved.  Our people have suffered and suffered for years, so we come back to God through suffering.”

That resulted in a half-hour, very vibrant dialogue on grace, salvation, the Kingdom, and that, although we do suffer, we aren’t saved through suffering – our salvation is a free gift from our loving Father.  A loving Father who created her, deeply values her, and wants nothing more than to be in a deep relationship with her.

She was stunned.  What I had shared with her was an idea so radically different from the ideas in her heart that she wasn’t sure what to do with it.  She said out loud, “I’ve never heard this.  I’m not sure what to do with it. I just need to think about it.”

We talked about the Kingdom a bit more, and then the conversation naturally drifted into other things.  We exchanged emails, and then we got off the plane.

Had I been my usual self (someone not always attuned to listening for someone’s heart), the conversation would have gone very differently.  But God graciously reminded me of this new habit I’m working to form, and so I tried it out. And it worked out just fine.

Discipleship is a journey.  Sometimes wholesale changes are good and right, but most often God gently moves us in a direction as we become more attuned to Him.  Discipleship is intentional, but that doesn’t mean it’s all at once.

So, let’s relax, breathe, and maybe just pick one or two things we’ve learned so far and try them out. You just never know what God might do with one small step.

[1] Willard, D. (1998). The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life in God (p. 223). Williams Collins.

[2] Adler, M. (1992). The Great Ideas:  A Lexicon of Western Thought (p. 287). Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

[3] Adler, M. (1992). The Great Ideas (p. 287). Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.

[4]Stonestreet, J. & Kunkle, B. (2020).  A Practical Guide to Culture: Helping the Next Generation Navigate Today’s World (pp. 145-146). David C. Cook.