Show Notes
In this episode, Derek Vreeland discusses the significance of habits over resolutions, especially as the new year begins. He emphasizes the importance of establishing rhythms and habits for spiritual growth, contrasting the concepts of training versus trying. Derek explores the ‘habits of the heart’ and ‘habits of training’ as essential components for transformation in the Christian life. He encourages listeners to embrace the process of forming new habits in 2025, highlighting that consistent practice leads to profound change.
Books mentioned in this podcast:
By the Way: Getting Serious about Following Jesus by Derek Vreeland
Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle
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Transcript
Narrator: Welcome to Peaceable and Kind, the podcast where we explore the transformation. Each week your host, Derek Vreeland, will delve into the stories, scriptures, and practical steps that help us embody these essential Christian virtues.
Derek Vreeland: Welcome back to another episode of Peaceable in Kind. I am your host, Derek Vreeland. I hope you are having a good start. To this new year 2025, and I’m glad you’ve taken some time today to listen to this episode. I want to talk today about the power of habit. This is the time of year when we begin to think about starting new things. As I have shared in the past, I am a Christian. whose life is oriented around the sacred calendar, the Christian calendar. So in one sense the Christian calendar, or the Christian New Year, begins end of November, beginning of December. But I also recognize that there is something about changing from December to January, the end of a calendar year and the beginning of something new. So in January, people are thinking about new things, doing new things, and of course, people are always talking about New Year’s resolutions So how are you doing? We’re a couple of weeks now into a new year. How are you doing with the resolutions that you set? I personally am not a huge fan of New Year’s resolutions. I mean, it’s something fun to talk about on New Year’s Eve. Hey. What are you gonna do in this new year? Are you participating in dry January? Are you going back to the gym? Or, you know, it’s fun to have those conversations. I’m not a real big fan. of New Year’s resolutions because I don’t know if they really last. I don’t know if they have the staying power A couple years back, I did set a New Year’s resolution to be nicer to my wife and lay off the jokes and the sarcasm So if you don’t know me, I am one half theologian and very serious and studious. The other half I’m pretty silly and I really enjoy jokes. I tell people that I remain on social media primarily for good theology and the jokes. I feel like sarcasm is a spiritual gift. And while my kids say I’m not as funny as I think I am, I’m often thinking through jokes and often that joking comes through in sarcasm and my wife and I are getting ready to celebrate 30 years of marriage and we dated four years before we got married. So for well over thirty years my wife has had to put up With my jokes, with my sarcasm. So a number of years back, I thought, you know what? In the beginning of a new year, I’m gonna be nice to my wife. No jokes No sarcasm. If she has something to say, I will listen and not respond with some kind of sarcastic joke Well, I didn’t even make it to January 2nd before I broke my resolution. Because I told her on New Year’s Eve this was my resolution and a day into it, she was like, what happened to your resolution? And I’m like, I can’t. Can’t help it. The jokes are there. They’re they’re there for the taking. And so for me, I have found that rhythms and habits are much more effective than resolutions and goals. Now again, I’m not opposed to resolutions, to goals and goal setting. In fact, I feel that I’m oriented towards that. I identify as an Ennegram three and I get great pleasure from setting goals and accomplishing those goals. So I’m not opposed to it. But for long-term effective outcomes, I have found that rhythms and habits are much more effective than resolutions and goals So as we are starting a new calendar year, 2025, the new year is still young. What kind of rhythms and habits are you going to begin to implement in your life? And I’m thinking in particular about your spiritual life. I do believe that we are integrated beings. And so our physical life and our spiritual life are interwoven. They connect together. So whatever kind of new habits and rhythms you’re starting, whether it’s for your physical life, maybe you’re going to eat different, exercise different, maybe it’s for your spiritual life. You’re gonna pick up a new spiritual discipline. Just had a friend text me asking about Bible reading plans. People think in the new year in January, hey, let’s read through the Bible in a year. And I’m for all of those. And but I’m thinking in particular today about those particular rhythms and habits that will form and shape you in the ways of Jesus. So let’s explore together the power of habits. And habits are not bad, by the way. Often I hear people talk about habits in terms of bad habits. You know, things like biting your fingernails or junk food diets or uh putting things on credit card when you know you can’t pay it off, uh the endless scrolling on social media when you know there’s work to do, those kind of bad habits. And certainly There are bad habits, but not all habits are bad. In fact, I believe that good habits and rhythms produce a good life. And here are why habits are better than resolutions. I heard this from John Ortberg years ago. Ortberg said, what you cannot do by trying. You can do by training. I see that line from Ortberg as two different Ways of living, two different paradigms. There is a way that is based solely in willpower and effort and trying The other paradigm is that of training. Because as followers of Jesus, it is God the Holy Spirit who is at work forming and shaping us into the image of Jesus for the joy of God the Father, it’s the Spirit’s work to change us. So in the Christian tradition, spiritual formation is not the same thing as self help We don’t change ourselves by our own efforts and energy and by trying really, really hard. It is God the Holy Spirit. It is that work of grace that is forming and transforming our hearts. But We can choose to work with the Holy Spirit in this work of formation or work against the Spirit And so it is Christian habits, those things that we do habitually, that allow us to participate in God’s work of forming and shaping our hearts I’m reminded of the Dallas-Willard quote when Dallas said very famously that grace is not opposed to effort, it’s opposed to earning. So the habits and the practices that we have, it’s not that we are earning God’s favor, God’s grace, God’s work of formation. Certainly in the practice of habits, there is work to be done, there is effort, but I do believe Ortberg has laid out these two paradigms, these two Ways to go forward, the way of trying and the way of training. Let me illustrate it like this So I’m not much of a gym guy. I do all my running and exercise outdoors. I like to be outside. I’m not a gym guy. And it’s funny, actually, you can see the failure of New Year’s resolutions by gym memberships and participation. At least what I’ve been told is that gyms are filled up in January and then completely empty by the end of February. I don’t know if that’s true. I’ve heard that. I tend to believe it. So I’m not a gym guy, but let’s say that I wanted to bench press 300 pounds. Now back in high school, I think my max was like 175. I’m 6’2, about 225 pounds. So today, if I were to bench press 300 pounds, that would be a great feat So let’s say that this is what I wanted to do. I want to bench press 300 pounds. So I could go into the gym and I could find one of those real strong muscle-bound guys to spot me and load up that bar with enough weight to equal 300 pounds. And I could lay on that bench, grab that bar with the help of my spotter. He could lift it off the rack. And he could be in my face with all the motivation, you know, clapping and encouraging, come on, man, you can do it. And I could try. with all of my strength and my muscles and my heart and my body and my mind and give it my best try But how many of you know that I can either bench press 300 pounds or I can’t? Trying has very little to do with it So if I were to try today to bench 300 pounds, I could try as hard as I wanted to, and I am confident that I would absolutely fail. I can’t bench 300 pounds, no matter how hard I try. But what if I went to that same gym and I found a trainer and I hired this trainer and said, hey, look at my upper body. You don’t have much to work with. Give me a training plan by which I could increase my bench press to get to 300 pounds. I’m sure if he looked at my slight upper body, he’d probably chuckle a little bit and he said, How much time do you have? And let’s say he developed a 12-month plan for me to work out upper body multiple days a week. Now, if I showed up at the gym, which does require intentionality and effort, but if I showed up with not a trying mentality, but a training mentality. And I went a couple days a week, within a couple of months, I would develop a habit. And through that habit of training by the end. I would be able to bench press 300 pounds. And what’s the difference? The difference is training over trying. And I see the habits that way. Christian habits, if we’re thinking about the spiritual life, are a way of training in the way of Jesus And I don’t know of any other way to become like Jesus other than Jesus-centered habits Without habituation, I have no hope of growing to the full stature of the measure of Christ. Habits are powerful and habits are absolutely essential. And so a training mindset in the practice of habits includes accepting things like boredom and routine or rhythm That’s why for me I tend to lump habits and rhythm together. And what people often think about If they’re going to practice a new habit, is wow, if I continue to do the same thing over and over, it sure sounds boring. And in a sense, routine and habits can be boring, and so we have to go into the practice of a new habit Acknowledging this is not always going to be pleasurable, easy, or fun, but the practice of habits has the power to transform us, to take us where we want to go. A few years back, I wrote a discipleship book entitled, By the Way, Getting Serious About Following Jesus. And in that book, I have a chapter on habits. And I have a little section that I wanted to read for you because it really sums up what I believe is a necessary first step in forming a new habit and that is accepting and welcoming boredom. Here’s what I write in by the way. Welcoming the boredom associated with our habits becomes key in reaching our goals. Becoming like Jesus, fully at home in the Trinitarian life of God is thrilling The steps to get there can be monotonous. To be honest, sometimes following Jesus is boring. So welcome the boredom. Sometimes following Jesus is repetitive. Accept the routine. Sometimes following Jesus is quiet. Cherish the silence. Sometimes following Jesus is slow. Embrace the pace. We need Christian habits to form us in this new pace of life in pursuit of Jesus. So, yes, forming new habits can be boring, it can be monotonous, it can feel like a rut or a routine. So accept that. Embrace the pace of habits because I promise the practice of Christian habits will lead us in fully into the life of Jesus And I see habits as twofold. I see two different kinds of habits. First, we have the habits of the heart. That is, we practice the Christ-like qualities that we want to see in our own heart In other words, if we want to be patient people, like Jesus is patient, then we practice patient things. So that’s the habits of the heart. The habits of training that I alluded to earlier, these are the spiritual disciplines or the spiritual pathways we walk down that we might be formed in the way of Jesus. And what habits do is they form and shape our hearts, that is, our desires. Habits have the way of changing what we want to do. And so you may not want to get out of credit card debt. You might not want to start exercising. You might not want to start a new prayer and Bible reading plan initially. But if you will give yourself to a certain habit, it will form and shape your heart I’ve expressed in other episodes of this podcast that I went years without praying consistently, until I learned a liturgy of prayer, a form and a shape of somewhat repetitive prayer. And as I put that into practice, the habit of first reading prayers until I memorized them, then reciting them. And over time it changed my heart. So now I love my morning Bible reading and prayer time because of the power of that habit. So let me talk about these two different kinds of habits. First, the habits of the heart. That is, practicing the qualities we see in Jesus so that we can possess them. The habits of the heart come to us from the ancient Greeks. I’m thinking about Plato, Aristotle, particularly Aristotle, and his emphasis on virtue. Moral virtue. And by virtue we mean a certain kind of moral excellency. We’re talking about character and integrity Virtues are important because virtues lead us towards the good life. Aristotle, in his book The Nicomachean Ethics, opens with these lines: Chapter 1, Book One, Opening Lines from Aristotle. He writes, Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action as well as choice, is held to aim at some good Hence people have nobly declared that the good is that at which all things aim So the way Aristotle saw life is that everything we do, every decision that we make, in fact every practice, every question, uh even artistry, all of it is aimed towards something we define as the good And I think Aristotle is right, because I think all people are wanting, desiring, orienting their life towards some kind of good as they define it. Now Aristotle would define the good in terms of the Greek word eudaimonia, which is defined as happiness or human flourishing. For Christians, we define the good within the character of God, God’s self. So Jesus becomes for us the definition of the good, or maybe we can call it the good life. So Aristotle would say that we’re all headed towards some kind of good. Aristotle goes on to say the virtues give us the kind of character the kind of inclination to live a life directed towards that good. So the habits of the heart are practicing the virtues until we obtain them. So in the Nicomachian ethics, Aristotle would say that Men become builders by building. Those who become musicians become musicians by playing their instrument. And so, Aristotle would say: we become people of justice by doing just things. We become temperate by doing temperate things. We become brave by doing brave things. And so for Aristotle, there is this beautiful harmony between our being and our doing. Our being, our heart, is formed and shaped by the things that we do. That is our habits. From my own life, I see in my running history that I didn’t become a marathon runner by going out and trying to run a marathon. I became a marathon runner by the habits of training. You can also say it this way, I became a runner by running I think about my friends who are musicians, and they would say the same thing. The way you become, for example, a guitar player is by playing guitar. So you become a musician by doing, by playing the instrument. I became a runner by running. When I first started running when I was thirty-five years old, that was fifteen years ago, I became a runner because I, well, felt very out of shape and I wanted to do something just to get in shape. And so I tried one of those couch to 5K programs. And uh I remember when I first started, my very first week, I had these walk-run intervals where I was jogging for one minute and then I would walk for nine minutes. And I remember the end of that week, I had a one-minute run for my last interval, the last day of that week. And I thought, I’m gonna push it, I’m gonna run two miles And I was doing my running at a high school track. And when I looked at my stopwatch and I was at a minute forty-five, I thought I was gonna die. When it hit two minutes I could barely catch my breath. I found a shade tree and I leaned under that tree and literally laid on the ground. And I thought I was going to die. Now I went from there to running my first 5k, running a couple of half marathons before running a full marathon Now, how did I go from that very first week of training where I thought I was gonna die to running 26. 2 miles? It was the habit of running I developed this habit and that habit began to change me on the inside. That was 15 years ago when I first ran my first 5K. 15 years ago. And just yesterday, where I’d live, it was cold and snowy, so I ran 45 minutes on the treadmill. I hate running on the treadmill, but why did I do it? Because after 15 years of running three to four times a week, it changed my desire. I ran yesterday because yesterday was a Wednesday and it’s a running day. These habits of the heart, putting into practice what you want to become, has real power of transformation. They can change our desires. So those are the habits of the heart. We Pursue and we do the kind of things we see Jesus doing so we can become the kind of person Jesus was. The other kind of habits are habits of training. And the habits of training, again, are what are classically called the spiritual disciplines. Things like prayer, scripture, communion, fasting, observing, the Christian calendar. And I like the metaphor of spiritual pathways. I like to think of a packed down trail through a wooded area. Spiritual pathways are like trail walking or trail running or backpacking, where somebody before you blaze that trail And so many people have walked down that trail before you that it’s all packed down. In the Christian tradition, we have these spiritual pathways And they are essentially wrapped up in prayer and worship, things like that. And I’ve come to find that long-lasting implementation of these habits habits of prayer, scripture reading, worship, requires rules and liturgy. So not only are Habits not a bad thing. Rules are not a bad thing either. Now perhaps you were raised in a legalistic rule-based religion. And I know that can be devastating. Rule-based religion when you are simply trying to follow a moral code of do’s and don’ts. That’s not the way to spiritual transformation. So certainly some rules or an over-emphasis on rules can be bad But in general, rules are necessary to give frame and structure and meaning to our activity. So for example, think about playing a board game with no rules. Imagine playing Monopoly. And if you’re like me, I played Monopoly with my kids growing up, but I dreaded it. Because you go around and around and around that board, obtaining properties, paying rent, and it feels endless. I was always quick to want to trade properties so whoever I was playing, one of my kids or whoever, could get a monopoly and win the game so we could end it. But imagine trying to play Monopoly when there’s no rules. There’s no rules about rolling the dice. There’s no rules about how to buy property, how to pay rent. If it was just a free-for-all, it would be meaningless and pointless. So in the Christian tradition The rules that we have are often given to us in the form of liturgy. Liturgy is the form and the shape of our prayer and our worship. Liturgy is transliterated from the Greek word liturgeo. It’s most often translated in the New Testament as service or minister. And the word itself it means the work of the people, but it has come to mean the scripted forms of worship that we participate in personally and congregationally. And I didn’t grow up with liturgy. I considered that a part of dead tradition. But as I have grown and matured in the Christian faith, I’ve seen the value. of the rules, the shape within liturgy given to us by tradition. Bad traditions are bad, but good traditions can be helpful I love the quote from Jaroslav Pelikin. He was a uh Yale uh church history professor, and he one time said in a lecture Tradition is the living faith of the dead. Traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. And I suppose I should add, it is traditionalism that gives tradition such a bad name I’m not interested in traditionalism, that is tradition for tradition’s sake. I am interested in tradition As the collected Christian wisdom of those who have lived before us in the Christian faith, the people who blazed these trails, these spiritual pathways And from my experience, nearly all forms of Christian worship have traditions and forms and liturgies, whether we use that word or not. We tend to have our form and shape of worship. So the question is: do we have good liturgies or bad liturgies? Do we have true liturgies or false liturgies? Do we have beautiful liturgies or ugly ones Liturgies or plans towards worship and prayer, these are the habits of training in the spiritual life. So let me ask, what are some of the habits you can form this year? What’s an area of your life that you would like to see transformation and growth? And so ask yourself, do I need to form some new habits of the heart? So for example, if you’d like to grow in patience this year, what are some of the habits of patience you can do? For example, you could choose the longest line at the grocery store and develop the habit of standing in that line and keep your phone in your pocket. Maybe you need to form some habits of training. Maybe you need a new habit of prayer or scripture reading Maybe church attendance has been hit and miss in 2024. Maybe in 2025, part of your training is showing up not at the gym, but showing up at church on Sunday morning. I’m not sure what those habits are for you, but I want to encourage you to form new habits and new rhythms in 2025. I believe if you do that, if you stick with those habits, that over time you’ll see the magic. You’ll see the power of habits. If you form a new habit, those habits with the corresponding grace of God will form a new you. So thank you for joining me for this episode. If you haven’t already, would you consider leaving a rating or a review? And if you enjoyed this episode, would you share it with someone? That helps us grow the channel. I appreciate you being with me on this episode. Go in peace and be kind.
This transcript was generated with AI and may contain errors.