How Do You Live a Godly Life?
How do you live a godly life?
How do you create godly habits?
Those questions went hand-in-hand for me. Whatever a godly life was, I was going to achieve it.
But then this verse came crashing into my life, a lifeline:
“Cease striving, and know that I am God.” — Psalm 46:10 (NASB)
Growing up, I always heard the “be still” version of that verse. But recently someone offered me this translation.
Cease striving.
Big exhale. It was the right message at the right time in my life. With a quality-time loving wife, two children, working full time, serving as an associate pastor, and starting seminary, “busy” had become a laughable word. What’s beyond busy?
But the truth is, there is a grace for the season I’m in. And I don’t know that I understood grace until it was so needed. Grace is hard to understand—much less experience—when you believe you’re supposed to be perfect.
From a young age, I have been a performer. I do things to be praised, to be accepted, and—probably most of all—to avoid being rejected because of failure. Now, that’s a deep conclusion, but a lot of hard work of soul excavation has revealed that.
So, habits are a complicated topic for me. They’ve always been a way to get a whole lot done consistently…and as soon as possible.
Lose weight? Habits. Get stuff done? Habits. Build wealth? Habits. Be successful? Habits.
But cease striving? What habits will produce that? Isn’t that a paradox, anyway?
After all, the habits I was striving to create may have produced some success on paper, but they also produced an almost constant state of fatigue bordering on exhaustion. Overwhelm.
And these were “good” habits: waking up early, daily prayer and liturgy, Bible reading, book reading, and more “success” habits like these.
I had always understood that habits are equal to doing. Do these things every day and keep doing them and you’ll get what you want faster than you think. But I had never really done the deep work of determining what I was hoping to get, what I really wanted, from all those habits.
For someone avoiding, at all costs, rejection due to failure, this view of habits was dangerous because it reinforced a self-reliance rooted in shame.
And shame is the opposite of grace.
This is a good place to pause for a moment and ask the question:
What are your habits rooted in?
It might help to sit with that question, inviting the Holy Spirit into it—allowing Him to tell you the truth, and allowing yourself to hear it.
The Grace of God? Or the Shame of Self?
This may be a bold claim, but I believe all of our habits are either rooted in grace or shame.
For example:
Shame tells you that you are not enough, and you must become enough by your own power. It convinces you that you can.
Grace tells you that you are an image-bearer of God, and invites you into growth from glory to glory, from a place of identity—not to earn an identity.
As George MacDonald said, “because we are the sons of God, we must become the sons of God.”2 This is sanctification.
Shame tells you to strive to overcome your lack, and thus convinces you that lack is everywhere in your life.
Grace reveals that you lack nothing (Psalm 23:1), and invites you to rest in what your heavenly Father has made available to you (Luke 15:31).
Shame tells you to be perfect, that perfection is possible to achieve and that you must maintain it.
Grace reveals that Christ makes you perfect, which really means “complete” (Matthew 5:48). Grace tells you that wholeheartedness is possible, and it produces rest.
Getting to the Root of Your Habits
The problem is that you can’t tell what your habits are rooted in just from the actions you take, because habits rooted in grace or shame may produce the exact same actions.
What can you do? Start at the beginning. What’s behind your habit cue?
According to James Clear, author of Atomic Habits, every habit is formed by following a four-step loop: cue, craving, response, and reward.3
So, let’s say your habit is morning Bible study, which may be several habits all linked together.
You wake up at a specific time, make coffee, settle into your spot, open your Bible, and begin reading.
The cue is your alarm going off in the morning. If you’ve built habits, the actions above happen with little resistance.
But let’s get behind the cue. What made you set an alarm? What made you decide to start studying the Bible?
The truth is, it may be a mixture of motives, but something is at the root. Perhaps you want to grow closer to God, but maybe the deeper reason is that you want to fulfill an unspoken obligation to read the Bible in order to get God’s approval.
And that motive may be rooted in a desire to get your parents’ approval by performing something they elevated as necessary to get God’s approval.
A major clue could be this: how do you feel when you miss a “godly” habit, like Bible study?
Roots are hard to dig up. But we’ve been given the Holy Spirit, and each other, to excavate our souls.
Habits of Grace: Daily Agreements with What God is Doing in Your Life
I don’t want to build habits to self-achieve the things I believe will gain God’s approval while holding off rejection that comes from failure.
Instead, I want my habits, every action, to be daily agreements with what God is doing in my life, His work of sanctifying me and growing me from glory to glory. That’s grace.
I don’t want to be fighting against a current of failure, striving to exhaustion to reach a destination of “godly living”.
Instead, I want to get into the slipstream of Jesus’s leading, working with the pull of His love to become who I am in Him. That’s grace.
Perhaps that’s a way of interpreting what Jesus meant when He said “my yoke is easy and my burden light” (Matthew 11:30).
It’s not a life absent of a yoke and burden, but it’s one He gives you, knowing you can carry it, knowing you will be strengthened by it, knowing that, because it's Jesus-shaped, you will grow into His likeness, without striving.
Cease striving, friend, and let grace shape your habits.
Notes:
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George MacDonald, Abba, Father!, Unspoken Sermons.
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Clear, James. Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones. Avery, 2018, 47.
