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Bad habits are not easy to break. St. Augustine, during
his long (and often reluctant) movement toward
Christianity, famously prayed, “Grant me chastity, Lord,
but not yet!” Augustine’s prayer reminds us of a basic
human truth: Not only is it difficult to break our bad
habits, but it can be difficult to want to break our bad
habits.
It took Augustine years of struggle
until he found himself weeping under a fig tree in a
garden and opening the Bible for answers. What he
discovered was this message in Romans 13:13–14: "Let us
live honorably as in the day, not in reveling and
drunkenness, not in debauchery and licentiousness, not
in quarrelling and jealousy. Instead, put on the Lord
Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to
gratify its desires."
In that mystical moment under the fig
tree, these words settled into Augustine’s heart and he
realized that he was being grasped by a God whose love
is bigger than human sin. He was free, then, to go
forward confidently — indeed he became a model of
Christian living. But Augustine’s conversion under the
tree was not the end of his bad habits: It marked only
the beginning of a lifelong struggle to live well before
God and other people.
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Deliver us from temptation
The words from Romans 13 that spoke to Augustine’s heart
may not seem particularly poignant to us: Our struggles
are not exactly the same as
the temptations faced by that fourth-century Christian.
But all of us, like Augustine, know the reality of
temptation. We constantly struggle to
live well in this world, to put aside our harmful
behaviors and bad habits —whether overspending,
overeating, procrastinating, gossiping, and so
forth — and put on the Lord Jesus Christ.
The good news is that we have already
been clothed in Christ’s righteousness. Breaking our bad
habits begins with the grace of God, and this grace is
already present with us. Sealed by the Holy Spirit at
our baptism and renewed each week through word and
sacrament, we’ve been set forth to live the lives that
God desires for us. As Martin Luther liked to say, a
good tree will automatically bear good fruit.
But what sounds easy in theory is
difficult in practice. No matter how good our intentions
are, sin comes to us so easily and those sinful habits
become so easily entrenched! The fact that we have been
saved by God’s grace does not keep us from developing
and cultivating bad habits: We are, in this lifetime,
always under the influence of sin.
(continued
on next page)
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Years ago, a friend showed
up at my house for dinner with a rubber band around his wrist.
“What’s with the rubber band?” I asked. “Oh, that,” he said with a
grin. “I’m trying to break a bad habit. Every time I do the thing
I’m trying not to do, I snap myself with the rubber band.” I didn’t
ask for details about the bad habit, but I was curious to know
whether the rubber band was helping. “Does it work?” I asked. My
friend replied, “Not yet. So far I just have a really sore wrist!”
Habitual sins are hard to
break. The biblical author who best articulated our human struggle
with habitual sin was the apostle Paul. He wrote in Romans 7:15–20:
I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want,
but I do the very thing I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I
agree that the law is good. But in fact it is no longer I that do
it, but sin that dwells within me. For I know that nothing good
dwells within me, that is, in my flesh. I can will what is right,
but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I
do not want is what I do. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no
longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me.
Many of our bad habits are
so deeply entrenched that self-punishment (whether by rubber band or
some other means) will not help us escape them. As a monk, Martin
Luther punished himself severely for all of his shortcomings, but
these punishments did not make him a perfect human being or even a
better monk. They just intensified his fear of God until he reached
the point where he hated God. It was from this fear that Luther
needed to be rescued, and no amount of self-discipline or punishment
could rescue him. He finally found his rescue through the words of
Paul:
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