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.

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.

We can change
Yet there are ways in which we can begin to chip away at our harmful patterns, buoyed by our relationship with God and our relationships with other people:

1. Set reasonable goals. When I was a little girl, every January, I would promise to eat all of my vegetables, go to bed on time, and never fight with my sisters. With deliberate attention to my resolutions, I would proudly persist in my good behavior for perhaps a week or two. But then the cauliflower would be slightly overcooked, or my little sister would play with my toys, or I wouldn’t feel sleepy at bedtime. With a single slip, my entire reconstruction of myself as a new person would come crashing down and the whole list of resolutions would be relegated to the messy pile of papers under my bed! Sound familiar?

So start small. Don’t try to change everything at once. If you first accomplish one reasonably easy goal, it will be easier to think about tackling a more difficult one.

2. Persist. Conventional wisdom is that it takes 28 days to form a habit. Think of a good habit to replace the bad one. Write it into your calendar for the next 28 days and try to act on it each day. For instance, if your bad habit is to forage for a sweet treat when you first get home from work or school, try taking a short walk instead.

3. Expect to backslide. Since bad habits are often more immediately gratifying than good habits, it may take 28 times to develop a good habit and then only one time to slide back into the harmful pattern. Expect that this will happen. When it does, take a moment to lament the difficulty of living with fallen human nature. Then take a deep breath and move on.

4. Forgive yourself and start again. God is full of mercy. We can be confident in the depth of God’s forgiveness that will always welcome us. We, too, are called to forgive ourselves. When your struggle to break a bad habit fails, forgive yourself and start over. One down; 27 to go!

5. Find an accountability partner. The extent to which you share the details of your bad habits with another person is up to you, but God gives us community in order that we might strengthen and uplift one another. Find someone you trust and agree to be accountability partners as you work on breaking your bad habits. Check in on one another and encourage one another.

Augustine wasn’t alone in the garden the day that he discovered Romans 13:13–14. He was with a friend, Alypius. As the words of Scripture spoke to Augustine’s heart and he resolved to put on Christ, he shared his newly discovered Bible verses with his friend. It was Alypius who pointed out with excitement that the following verse exhorts us, “Welcome those who are weak in faith” (Romans 14:1). Alypius took this exhortation seriously and from that point forward he became Augustine’s partner in the struggle against his sinful habits.

6. Pray. Augustine’s moment with Alypius under the fig tree was the culmination of years of struggle, and all along the way Augustine was carried by the prayers of his mother Monica. Monica prayed for Augustine long before his conversion, and after his conversion she continued to pray for him until the moment of her own death. These constant prayers accomplished more than Augustine could put into words.

As you struggle with your bad habit — persisting, backsliding, forgiving yourself, and persevering along the way — pray without ceasing. Pray for yourself and pray for others whose struggles you have glimpsed. Ask others to pray for you.

Finally, don’t be discouraged. We’re saved by a God who became human for the sake of a broken world, and who surely understands our brokenness. Remember that the Holy Spirit is our advocate. Remember that we are strengthened by the stories of those who have gone before us, and that we are called to strengthen each other too. Remember that even the saints struggled. Remember that change requires persistent, hard work. Remember community. Remember forgiveness.

The Rev. Elizabeth Musselman serves as associate pastor for campus ministry at Augustana Lutheran Church of Hyde Park in Chicago. She is also a doctoral student at the University of Chicago Divinity School.
 

Bad habits broken
by Nadia Silver

What bad habit will you resolve to break this year? When we hear the word “habit,” what comes to mind for many of us is addiction. When people name their bad habits, alcohol, tobacco, and food come up again and again.

But just about anything can become a bad habit, if it’s a pattern of behavior that makes us unhappy, affects our relationships with others, or affects our ability to function effectively.

So how can a bad habit be broken? Is a New Year’s resolution enough? If we think it through, it can be.

Most of us think about simply stopping the behavior that’s our bad habit: “I resolve to quit interrupting people this year.” The problem is, we don’t often think about what we’re going to do instead. It’s much easier to do something than to not do something, which just leaves us with blank space, idle hands, to fill — and you know what they say about idle hands.

It’s a lot more effective to deliberately plan to do something specific in place of our bad habit. For example, instead of writing down a resolution to “lose 20 pounds,” try substituting a resolution to “go to the gym 3 times a week.” Or, if you’re planning to break a bad conversational habit, resolve to ask 2 follow-up questions about someone else’s experience before you start to talk about your own.

Meeting our goals is easier when they are specific and measurable. With this approach, we can work to change our bad habits by tying the change to a well-defined positive action that we can track. We know what to do, and we can count how many times we’ve done it. This makes it much easier to create positive change in our own lives.

Dr. Nadia Silver is a psychotherapist and researcher at a university in Chicago.

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