Even the Best Habits can Wreck Your Life. How? Here's How

When I first saw the article, I thought.  That’s not so bad.   It’s just two pounds.  I’d thought it’d be much worse than that.  Then I realized.   I hadn’t really read the article.   It wasn’t saying just two pounds.  It was saying 2 pounds each month.   All the studies that scientists come up with always amaze me.  And what amazes me more are the people willing to do them, like this one.

Basically, the researchers gave each participant a bathroom scale with a wireless link.  That way the researchers could monitor how much weight they gained or lost during the pandemic.  It turns out, at least in that study, people gained over half a pound every 10 days, or two pounds a month.  Sheesh!  I heard people joking about the Covid 15.  According to that study, it could be the Covid 20 or 25!  

Still, I read the article with a small sense of self-satisfaction.  I’ve actually lost weight during the pandemic.  I decided.  After my wife and son went to Canada (so our son could go to school there) I would work to look better and not worse the next time they saw me.  And I achieved that a bit.  No one is going to put me on the cover of Men’s Health magazine, but I’ve done ok.  And as I felt my self-satisfaction, it reminded me of how deadly these habits we’ve been talking about during Lent can be.  You see. If you don’t watch it, these habits can kill you.  What do I mean?    

Every morning, I weigh myself. (I do it in the morning because I figure that’s when I’m the lightest.)  And, in doing that, I’ve learned two things.  First, my weight can change for reasons I have no way of understanding. Sometimes the change goes in my favor, and sometimes it doesn’t.   And when it doesn’t, it bums me out.  A pound in the wrong direction can derail my day.  I feel defeated.  My scale teacher has given me a failing grade.  I regret the extra potato chips.  I bemoan the 500 steps I didn’t take.   And when that happens, I see so clearly the danger, the danger of what I’ve been talking about for the last five weeks.  

Over these last weeks, I’ve shared a set of spiritual habits that a guy named Justin Earley developed and called the Common Rule(if you’re curious, you can find all of them at his website -thecommonrule.org).  He called it Common because he figured they were the sort of habits that anyone might find doable, not easy, but doable.   And I love these habits.  I wouldn’t have preached on them if I didn’t.  But boy, they carry danger.   And if you let that danger rise up, these habits will not bring you life.  No, they will do the opposite.  They will deaden you. They will even threaten to destroy you.   So, how can you make sure, that these habits, heck this whole religion thing, doesn’t do that to you?  In these words, God shows you the way.  Let’s listen and hear what God has to say.

Ephesians 2:1-10   

These habits that we’ve been talking about these last several weeks have tremendous power.   If you let them work in your life, they will bring you a deeper relationship with God, a better, deeper relationship with those you love, a whole more deeply fulfilled life.   Justin Earley knows that.  Practicing them pretty much saved his life.   I know that, because practicing them has blessed my life too.      

But, like Earley, I know.  These habits don’t only have the power to deepen your life.  They also have the power to wreck it.   And get this.  They’ll wreck it without you even knowing it.  But how could they do that?   How could the very same habits in one case, bless your life and in the other, wreck it.  What makes the difference?  The difference lies in the grace.  It’s grace all the way down.   And if you forget that truth then these habits won’t give you life.  They’ll take your life away. 

Do you remember?  A few minutes ago, I told you how a pound in the wrong direction could derail my day.  But does that make any sense?   Does that pound increase create huge physical dangers for me?   No.   To be honest, I could probably gain way more pounds than that, and I’d be ok.   Will my wife leave me or my son reject me?  No.  Will I lose my job or destroy my finances or get myself in legal trouble?  No, no, and no.  Would it have any adverse effect in any way on what will happen that day.  No, not at all.  So why should it derail my day?   It derails it because of what I believe that pound says about me.  That pound feeds into a lie, a lie that, in its various forms, derails people’s lives all the time.

When that pound derails my day, it’s because I’ve given that scale that weighs me a power it doesn’t have.  That scale doesn’t just determine my weight.  No, that scale now determines my value.    So, when it goes up a little, I can go down a lot.   And that is crazy.   But human beings do that sort of crazy all the time.  

People give power to all sorts of stuff that doesn’t have that power at all.  Maybe they give it to other people’s opinions or their level of success.  Maybe they give it to how well their kids or relationships are doing or how high their bank account is or what car they drive or house they live in or job they have.   They make something that, sure has some importance, but they make it carry ultimate importance.  They act as if that one thing defines their value, as if it quantifies their very worth.   And that’s insane.  And yet human beings do it a lot.  

The writer Artemus Ward said it well.  “It ain’t so much the things we don’t know that get us into trouble.  It’s the thing we know that just ain’t so.”   And all of that just ain’t so.  Nothing that exists on the face of the earth can determine your worth.  Nothing.  But if you act like it can, then it will.   To adapt some wise words from a preacher I admire: “A lie that you believe is truth will affect your life as if it is true.”     

And these habits can become that sort of lie to you.  I’ve told you that I’ve been practicing these habits of the common rule.   But have I been practicing them perfectly?  No way.  I told you last week had hard it is for me to turn my phone off for just an hour a day.   And I get tripped up on the other habits too.   And that disappoints me.  But so far, it hasn’t derailed me, but it could.  It could if I forget what these habits do.   They don’t give me any favor with God.  No, they just connect me more deeply to the amazing, breathtaking favor I already have.  

You see. The habits don’t give you grace.  They just help you get in touch with the grace you already have.  But you can start acting as if they can.   So, if you start practicing these habits, and I very much hope you will, and you mess up (which you invariably well), then give yourself the grace you already have.   Don’t let them derail your life.    But hold on!  Those habits carry more deadly power than just that. 

Let’s go back to my scale problem.   Let’s say, when I start looking at that scale, it starts going down.   Maybe it goes down a bit more each day.   Maybe I reach my goal weight and go beyond.   Maybe I even start thinking about sending some selfies to Men’s Health to show my new physique.   Great, right?   No, not really, at least, not really, if I’m still letting that scale determine my worth.   Because now, what am I thinking?  I am thinking what an awesome dude I am, disciplined, fit, a paragon of character and virtue.    And in my new-found status, I start looking around.   I see my friends who could lose a few pounds and think.  “How sad.  If only they had my steely discipline, if only they could turn from their evil ways, then they would have the joy, the fulfillment I have.”     And that lie is the deadliest of them all.

As someone once put it, “When you start looking down at other people, it’s because you’ve stopped looking up at God.”   And if you’re doing that, you’ve started believing the deadliest lie of all.  You’ve begun to think that you and God have more in common than those other folks.  Sure you’re not God. But you sure are a lot closer to the Divine than those other folks.  But here’s the point, you’re not.   You are not ever closer.   You are not ever because what has saved you is not you getting close to God.  What has saved you is God getting close to you.   

That’s what Paul is telling you in the words we heard.  Human beings didn’t just need a little moral tune-up, a little divine work under the hood.  No, God tells you.  “You were good as dead.”  And dead people don’t get anywhere, much less get close to God.  In fact, God says.  “You were so dead, so lost, that on Palm Sunday you cheered for me, and five days later, you killed me.  In fact, my dying is what it took to save you, to wake you up, to bring you back to life.” 

And these habits, if you do them well, in fact the whole religion thing, can lead you to forget that.  You see.  These habits carry even more danger as you start doing them well.  For then, you can start believing the lie.   You can start think you’ve arrived.    The greatest spiritual disease is not thinking you are sick.  God can work with that.   No, the greatest spiritual disease is thinking you are well.   That’s why Jesus saved his harshest words for the religious folks.  He knew how deadly that form of the lie could be.

Several years ago, we hired a new staff person.   And James had a lot of gifts. He also happened to be gay.  And I gotta admit that I liked that.  I gave myself a little pat on the back for how progressive we were, how open-minded.   We weren’t like those other churches that excluded gay folks from leadership.  No, we had moved beyond that.   And, when James came, I thought I was doing a great job supervising him.  We had lunch every week.  We regularly shared and prayed together.  Then, James decided to take a new position, at a church in Tennessee.   But before he left, we had one last lunch.  That’s when he told me.   

 Several months before, a children’s leader had left because her husband didn’t like the fact that James was gay.    And when, James told me, I made this painful rejection into a joke, and not even a good one.  I said something like, “Sheesh, you gays just mess everything up.”   At the time, James just smiled and moved on.   But that day at lunch, he told me how much my words had hurt, how deeply they cut.   I sat there stunned.  I knew I had said them, and I also knew I hadn’t thought twice about them when I did.   But sitting there I knew.  Those words carried within them such ugly bigotry, the sort of bigotry that I thought had moved past.  Yet, I had said them, and until he told me that day, I had never even seen how ugly they were.   I asked his forgiveness.  He graciously gave it.  

But as I sat there, I realized why I had been so blind to my bigotry.  I had begun to believe the lie.   I had begun to believe that it isn’t grace, it isn’t grace all the way down.   No enlightened thinking of mine raised me up.  No, only God’s grace, only God’s loving me no matter what, had done that.  Only God’s grace could make me see.  But I had forgotten that.  I had begun to look down on others as if I had done the saving, not God.  And that lie, if I kept believing it, would not only blind me, it would deaden that very grace, that very life of God within me.

Here’s the truth.  When God came to us, you and I weren’t just sick.  No, we were dead.  We were so dead that we could cheer Jesus in on Palm Sunday, and then 5 days later, kill him on Good Friday.   And we could do that, cheer Jesus one day, and kill him another, and think the whole time we were on God’s side.   That’s how dead we were. 

But God’s love raises the dead.   God’s love has raised you, from death into life.  God’s love gave you that new birth. God’s love has raised you up to be right now into the heavenly places, given you a seat at God’s family table.  And you didn’t have anything to do with it.  No, God’s love gave you all that.  Think about it this way.  You’ve become like a happy turtle sitting on a fencepost.   And like that turtle, you know.  No way did you get there by yourself.    God’s grace put you there.   And how amazing is that!

So, do these habits.  Weave them into your life.  But know they don’t get you anything. They  only get you in touch with the grace you already have.  It’s God’s grace, God’s grace, all the way up, all the way down.  It’s grace on your great days.  It’s grace on your worst days.    And the more you see the grace, the more you’ll see the love.   And as you do, God will keep raising you up, will keep opening your eyes, will keep giving you the wondrous, beautiful life that only God can.  So, in this Holy Week, celebrate the grace, the grace that has saved you, the grace that has saved me, the amazing, wonderful grace that has saved us all.   For by grace, you have been saved, and this is not your own doing, it is the wondrous, amazing gift of God.