Are Your Habits Helping or Hurting?

    In “Tale of Two Cities”, Charles Dickens tells the story of a physician who was imprisoned in a French penitentiary for twenty years. Unable to practice medicine, but wanting to keep himself useful and occupied, he took up the trade of shoe cobbler while incarcerated, making and fixing shoes for his fellow inmates. For twenty years, he could be heard working away in his cell late at night, tapping away, repairing the shoes of prisoners. Finally, during the French Revolution, he was set free to go home and return to medicine. But the doctor could not handle the change and his new freedom. Returning to his home, he had a servant build a room in his attic identical in size to his prison cell. In the years leading to his death, neighbors could hear him tapping away, making and repairing shoes late at night, never to return to medicine.
    The fact that we are creatures of habit is a good thing. It enables us to be far more productive, and to accomplish many more things than we otherwise could. If we had to think through everything we do daily, we would be hindered in so many ways. But the vast majority of things that we do, we do on autopilot. I’m not thinking at all about the locations of the keys on this keyboard as I am typing. If I had to think about where each letter was located and which finger I would use to type it, this blog would take me hours to finish. As it is, while thinking through some concepts and doing research for what I write, may take a fair amount of time, typing it takes only a few minutes. I’m typing by way of habit and muscle memory. It’s how most of our accomplishments in life come about. We do the busy work by habit, freeing our minds and creative processes to function efficiently.
    But habit can also become a curse. Addictions, habitual life dominating sins, angry reactions to others, etc., are a struggle for us to overcome because of that same tendency for repeated behaviors to become ingrained in our lives as habit. In this case, a man lost not only his years while in prison, but all the years afterward because he could not release himself from the twenty year prison mentality that developed in his mind. Pretty sad.
    Maybe that’s your struggle. The Bible declares that those who are in Christ have been released from the guilt and the reality of their past. Paul says that we are “dead to sin.” But we have trouble getting out of the routine of that old way of living. Changing habitual behavior is hard. Changing a habitual way of thinking is harder still. So in Romans, Paul told the believers to consider their old way of living to be dead, and their new way of living to be life. He said, “You also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus. Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, to make you obey its passions” (Romans 6:11–12).
    Having become followers of our Savior Jesus Christ, we are to consider our old ways of sin, those old nasty habits, to be dead, enabling the power of Jesus’ resurrection to give us a new way of thinking and behaving. You don’t have to be imprisoned any longer! You can become what God initially intended you to be! You’ve been freed! Now live the life of freedom.