The Holiness Habit

Get rid of every filthy habit and all wicked conduct. Submit to God and accept the word that He plants in your hearts.

James 1:21, GNT

Holiness is a habit. It’s much more than that, of course. It’s a characteristic of God Himself, displayed perfectly in Christ and imputed to our accounts by grace through faith. But in practical terms, holy living means daily discipline. We form habits, then they form us.

That’s why we must weed out bad habits regularly, just as we weed our yards. An untended garden soon deteriorates into a weed patch, and an untended life does the same. It requires the discipline of the hoe to produce hollyhocks in our fields and holiness in our lives.

In his book How to Say No to a Stubborn Habit, Erwin W. Lutzer writes, “We are responsible for our own sin—including those sins ‘which so easily beset us.’ The fact that we do something wrong habitually does not relieve us of responsibility. On the contrary, it may make the sin all the worse. So we must take personal responsibility for our own habits and not shrink from calling them sin.”

Ask the Lord to help you identify “weeds” in your life, and replace them with holy habits that produce a crop of righteousness.

The Christian must see that bad habits are ultimately spiritual issues.

ERWIN W. LUTZER