Make Habits, Not Resolutions

Justin Whitmel Earley

“If our hearts always followed our heads, we would not need to practice the things we learn… But that’s not how humans work, which is why the biblical understanding of [becoming like Christ] is not just about education and learning but about formation and practice as well. We are tasked not only with learning the right things, which takes concentration and thinking, but also with practicing the right things, which takes formation and repetition.”

Change is the deepest dream of the human heart. We’d all like to become someone new. It’s also the great promise of the gospel—that Jesus makes all things new.

As one year fades into another, the whole world gets caught up in the dream of change. In a way, this is wonderful. There is common grace in a calendar that regularly presents us with opportunities to reconsider how we live. The flurry of resolutions reminds us that we really do long to be made new.

But there’s also a dark side. We waste the redemptive desire to be made new on resolutions that have no power to change us. Many of us make ambitious, sweeping resolutions; and in less than a month our collective amnesia sets in. Our hopes will be quietly discarded, and our remarkable capacity to forget will be the only thing that saves us from the embarrassment of it all.

So here’s a challenge for right now: Don’t make resolutions—make habits.

Unlike resolutions, we actually become our habits. There are no changed lives outside of changed habits. And if we want to actually change, we need to take a sober look at where our habits are leading us.

POWER OF HABITS

Habits form who we are, because habits are little liturgies of worship.

Think about it. A habit is something you do over and over without noticing it. We wake up and we scroll Instagram. We roll up to the stoplight and check our texts. We get a controversial work email and check the news headlines instead of facing the task.

We might be vaguely annoyed at these things, but we probably don’t think of them as deeply formative. We are terribly mistaken.

At the root of each of these little liturgies is a search for something fundamental—our eyes search the photos for a vision of the good life; at the stoplight we itch for a connection with another human; in difficult work moments we realize we’d rather numb ourselves with distraction than face the pain of life itself.

Humans were made to worship, so we can’t stop worshiping. Ever. And under each of these tiny, ordinary, and tremendously powerful moments lies a habit of worship. In a world where new technological habits are emerging in every aspect of our lives, to do nothing is actually to do something quite extraordinary. It is to submit to a strange and deformed modern order of worship.

This presents us with a problem: If we want to be formed in the love of God and neighbor, we must take hold of our habits.

MODERN PROBLEM, ANCIENT SOLUTION

For millennia, communities of Christians have committed to communal patterns of habit as a way to resist formation in cultural habits and embrace formation in the love of God and neighbor. This practice has various names and forms, but in the monastic context these communal programs of habit were sometimes called a “rule of life.”

Some think these practices are legalistic. This is understandable, because if we were to try to pursue habits to earn God’s love, they would be. But when we’re so enamored with the love of God that we decide to order every bit of our lives accordingly—that’s simply responding to the beauty of our Savior. Habits before love is legalism. But love before habits is the logic of grace.

The fascinating thing about our modern moment is that we’re already semi-consciously adopting a new rule of life. But this new rule of life isn’t designed by those who care about our formation in the image of Christ—it’s formed by companies that want to attract our attention and sell it to advertisers. To do nothing is to adopt a competing rule of life that’s trying to get you to believe you’re loved because of what you buy, post, read, accomplish, or think. To do nothing is to submit to a rule of life that tries to talk you out of beauty of the gospel.

We urgently need to wake up. There’s a better way, and it lies in crafting a rule of life that uses ordinary habits to form us in the gospel.

We don’t need new resolutions—we need a better rule of life. We need counter-formational habits that will invade our moments of waking, our rhythms of work, and our patterns of community. We need tiny habits that point us to the gospel of Jesus in moments both big and small.

This is why I invite communities to try the Common Rule.

ADOPT A COMMON RULE OF LIFE

The Common Rule is a communal pattern of four daily and four weekly habits designed to counter the chaos of our modern technological life. It’s meant to be done with other people, and it’s designed to push ordinary life toward love of God and neighbor.

You can read more about the habits in the following pages. There are daily habits like Scripture before phone and turning your phone off for an hour a day of presence. There are also weekly habits like sabbath and pursuing intentional conversation with friends.

These habits are designed to disrupt the patterns of cultural formation that currently frame our lives and introduce habits that push us toward community, toward presence, and toward believing the gospel more deeply.

So here’s the challenge: Don’t make resolutions. Instead, find a couple of friends in your church or small group, consider the Common Rule suggestions, and spend the next month building life-changing habits.

And, remember, our habits won’t change God’s love for us, but God’s love for us can and should change our habits.

Habits from The Common Rule

I. Daily Habits

1) Scripture Before Phone: Refusing to check the phone until after reading a passage of Scripture is a way of replacing the question “What do I need to do today?” with a better one, “Who am I and who am I becoming?” We have no stable identity outside of Jesus. Daily immersion in the Scriptures resists the anxiety of emails, the anger of the news, and the envy of social media. Instead it forms us daily in our true identity as children of the King, dearly loved.

2) Kneeling Prayer Three Times a Day: The world is made of words. Even small, repeated words have power. Regular, carefully placed prayer is one of the keystone habits of spiritual formation and is the beginning of building the trellis of habit. By framing our day in the words of prayer, we frame the day of love.

3) One Meal with Others: We were made to eat, so the table must be our center of gravity. The habit of making time for one communal meal each day forces us to reorient our schedules and our space around food and each other. The more the table becomes our center of gravity, the more it draws our neighbors into gospel community.

4) One Hour with Phone Off: We were made for presence, but so often our phones are the cause of our absence. To be two places at a time is to be no place at all. Turning off our phone for an hour a day is a way to turn our gaze up to each other, whether that be children, coworkers, friends, or neighbors. Our habits of attention are habits of love. To resist absence is to love neighbor.

II. Weekly Habits

1) One Hour of Conversation With a Friend: We were made for each other, and we can’t become lovers of God and neighbor without intimate relationships where vulnerability is sustained across time. In habitual, face-to-face conversation with each other, we find a gospel practice; we are laid bare to each other and loved anyway.

2) Fast from Something for Twenty-Four Hours: We constantly seek to fill our emptiness with food and other comforts. We ignore our soul and our neighbor’s need by medicating with food and drink. Regular fasting exposes who we really are, reminds us how broken we the world is, and draws our eyes to how Jesus is redeeming all things.

3) Sabbath: The weekly practice of sabbath teaches us that God sustains the world and that we don’t. To make a countercultural embrace of our limitations, we stop our usual work for one day of rest. Sabbath is a gospel practice because it reminds us that the world doesn’t hang on what we can accomplish, but rather on what God has accomplished for us.

4) Curate Media to Four Hours: Stories matter so much that we must handle them with utmost care. Resisting the constant stream of addictive media with an hour limit means we are forced to curate what we watch. Curating stories means that we seek stories that uphold beauty, that teach us to love justice, and that turn us to community.

— JUSTIN WHITMEL EARLEY is a writer, speaker, and lawyer from Richmond, Virginia. He is the author of The Common Rule, Habits of the Household, Made for People, and The Body Teaches the Soul. Justin is married to Lauren, and they have four sons. You can join his email list on his website: justinwhitmelearley.com. Lightly edited and reprinted with permission from the author. The Gospel Coalition. Justin Whitmel Earley, “Make Habits, Not Resolutions,” https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/make-habits-not-resolutions (originally written December 31, 2018).

Discussion:

  1. What do you think the author means by habits form who we are, because under them is what we worship?

  2. Why is it important to remember both parts of “Our habits won’t change God’s love for us, but God’s love for us can and should change our habits”?