Let's Change Our Habits (February 8, 2026)

A bad habit is like a comfortable bed - easy to get into, but hard to get out of.

First, we build our habits, then our habits build us.

Good habits are hard to acquire, but easy to live with. Bad habits are easy to acquire, but hard to live with.

Can someone change their height? Color of their hair? Color of their eyes?

Such is the risk for sinners. Sin can become so ingrained - in a person, a cult, a radical movement, a nation - that there is no hope of turning back, of repenting. People can sin so much that they become enslaved to it. It becomes their master, dictating the very course of their lives. They cannot break their bond to it. That was the case with the people of Judah: they had sinned beyond the point of repentance. Consequently, the judgment of God was set, fixed, sure to fall. Nothing could change the certainty of judgment because the people had resolved that they would not turn back to the LORD.

Sin becomes a habit in our lives and gains power over us; habits gain power by every repetition of an act. For example, money attracts money, learning increases learning, joy brings joy. It is so with goodness: good habits lead us to acquire still better habits, while the poor fellow who has once earned a bad name, and who is shut out from the helps and privileges that ordinary men enjoy, will generally cultivate his evil propensities and strengthen only such habits as are bad.

Several acts of sin in life seem to be of little consequence in themselves, but they all have a terrible significance, for habits are just made up of little acts and each one affects the next act more. Here’s an example on how each habit act builds upon the next act. We know that if a stone is dropped from a height, it falls so many feet - sixteen feet during the first second. The next second it does not fall the same number of feet, but has acquired increased speed, and falls four times the distance it did during the previous second, and each succeeding second the speed is greater and swifter. The earth has a stronger gravitating power over it, draws it more quickly down, and it acquires momentum and gathers increasing rapidity as it falls. That is precisely the case with sin. It moves slowly at the start; but when it has begun, it increases in force and speed and dashes down the steep incline with resistless might.

The power of habit steadily grows till it dominates the will. We cannot explain this phenomenon; the fact we know, and it is of vast importance that we should know it. A repetition of the same thoughts and actions is so apt to ensure their continuance that it is one of the most difficult things in the world to check this habitual operation of the mind and give it a different direction from that in which it has been wanted to flow. Even habits which relate to matters of indifference become inveterate and are with great difficulty modified and overcome.

So, we need to change those BAD habits, right? Has Jeremiah uttered the whole truth? Can nothing be done if years of habit have bent our nature into one shape, and that shape is deformed? Are we helpless if character has already been made crooked and perverse by the continual warping of evil habit? Is there no hope that the Ethiopian can change his skin or the leopard his spots?

But that which is impossible with men is possible with God. We cannot change the Ethiopian’s skin or the leopard’s spots; but God can. He who made the machinery of the mind can, when it is broken, fashion it anew, and restore it to its functions. It is possible to convert the soul which has long been accustomed to do evil; but such conversion is as much the work of God as the creation of the soul was at the beginning.

When once we are linked to Christ, that union breaks the terrible chain that binds us to the past. “All died.” The past is broken as much as if we were dead. It is broken by the great act of forgiveness. Sin holds men by making them feel as if what has been will always be - an awful entail of evil. In Christ we die to former self. By changing the affections and the desires of the heart, Christ roots out every wrong action and implants the germ of every virtuous deed. His solution is not reformation, but regeneration - not new resolves, but a new birth.

Obedience is the essential spirit of the Christian life; Christ’s command to us is “Follow Me”; it is not ours to understand where we are to go, just to follow Him, where He will lead us. The future is veiled before our eyes, it is not part of our business to inquire into the consequences of our discipleship that is in His hands.

It seems in our lives that we are who we are and there is no change. We must turn our habits over to God and allow Him to change us into whom He wants us to be.

When we start to change our lives and change our habits, we can finally get out of the ruts in our lives!!!