Why Your Good Intentions Are Not Enough

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Most of us consider habits our enemy. They seem to enslave us to things we don’t want to do. Breaking them requires huge effort. However, not only do we need to break old bad habits, but we need to establish new good habits. When we do, habits become our friends, our servants, our allies!

Building good habits requires intentionality. Bad habits occur without intention. If you want habits to be your friend, then you have to choose them. If you don’t, you’ll have bad ones by default. The problem is that we have all chosen a good habit only to see the old habit win out over time. The discouragement can be overwhelming because our intentions were so good and our failure to carry them out so absolute!

Why do we fail? Because most of us try to do it in the power of our own natural strength. While it is possible to develop a good habit based on sheer will power, the sustainability of that can be very difficult. For example, suppose you decide to read your Bible thirty minutes a day because you know it’s a good habit that will serve you well. Six months later, not only are you not reading thirty minutes a day consistently, but you have forgotten that you were even trying to. And when you remember, you feel condemned.

So what is the answer? Learn how to let the same Spirit that raised Christ from the dead, which also dwells in you (Rom 8:11), empower and enable you. We cannot carry out the good things we want to do on a consistent basis. We all fail at doing the right thing and we fail consistently. But God is able to get the job done through us when we are ready to cease from our own self effort. Join me for the next dispatch for details!