Breaking Habits of Sin

I have a confession to make this morning. Something that some of us actually may have heard me confessing before. But if you haven't, here's another one. I'm a terrible gift wrapper. Terrible.

Shocking. Unlike a lot of men, when it comes to this sort of thing, I just can't get those edges nice and straight. My paper ends up being really wrinkly. But it also happens if you're a terrible gift wrapper that you usually have one side that looks really nice. One side with those crisp, you know, folded edges and so on.

But then the back is just like an absolute disaster zone. You know, it's little folded pieces with a lot of tape and it just looks shocking. And every now and then when I am forced to give a gift, I have to, you know, like at Christmas time or something like that, I will make sure that I position my gift in such a way under the Christmas tree that the nice edge is the one that you see. Everything else is hidden, pushed back into the tree. Now our lives can be a lot like those wrapped Christmas gifts.

There's a good side that we like to keep crisp and clean. The side we put on display. And then there are aspects of our life we try and keep at the back. But every now and then, if the circumstances are just right, the raggedy, messy, tape encrusted parts of us get shown. Now these past few weeks, we've been thinking through, working through what it means to be winning against this battle of sin.

We've been asking the question, what is it to die to sin and live for Christ? This morning we're going to start looking at practically how do we go about overcoming problem areas in life. Last week, we saw the power the holy spirit gives us not only the ability to overcome sin, but also the desire to do so. But now this morning, I hope we can get a little bit more practical about that. And in order to do so, I want us to have a look at Ephesians chapter four this morning.

I mean, there are so many places. Philippians three is a great place also to have a look. First Peter, as we heard this morning from Kyla, is a great place to look at how we can practically overcome sin. But Ephesians four, and I want us to read just the first verse of chapter four. Just the first verse, and then we're gonna jump down to verse 17.

Ephesians 4:1. Paul writes, I therefore, a prisoner for the Lord, urge you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called. Verse 17. Now this I say and testify in the Lord, that you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do in the futility of their minds. They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them due to the hardness of heart.

They have become callous and have given themselves up to sensuality, greedy to practise every kind of impurity. But that is not the way you learned Christ, assuming that you have heard about him and were taught in him as the truth is in Jesus. To put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires, and instead to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to put on the new self created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness. Therefore, having put away falsehood, let each one of you speak the truth with his neighbour, for we are members of one another. Be angry and do not sin.

Do not let the sun go down on your anger and give no opportunity to the devil. Let the thief no longer steal, but rather let him labour doing honest work with his own hands so that he may have something to share with anyone in need. Let no corrupting talk come out of your mouths, but only such as is good for building up as it fits the occasion so that it may give grace to those who hear. And do not grieve the holy Spirit of God by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption. Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamour and slander be put away from you along with all malice.

Be kind to one another, tender hearted, forgiving one another as God in Christ forgave you. So far, our reading. So how do we move from knowing and understanding that we have been sealed by this holy Spirit who is guaranteeing for us that he will present us blameless one day at the coming of Christ? How do we practically then work these desires for goodness, holiness, righteousness into our lives? Well, the first thing we have to learn about this breaking habits of sin is we have to realise that we've already won.

In the battle, we have already won. If you read the magnificent opening chapters to the book of Ephesians, you'll read there what it means to be a Christian. Paul begins Ephesians by saying, this is who we are. He explains that we've been saved from the greatest threat of our entire life, rescued from everlasting death, and promised, given an unconquerable spiritual life. But not only, says Paul, have we become alive spiritually, we have become God's family.

Paul says in Ephesians 2:19, consequently, you are now no longer foreigners and aliens to God, but fellow citizens with God's people and members of God's household. We are so close to God right now that Paul can say in chapter three, verse 12, we may approach God with freedom and confidence. Not just access with God, not just Jesus' death has, you know, opened the way for us to have access. No. Confidence to approach this God through this access.

The God of all holiness. The God of all goodness, of all perfection. Before we can start thinking about how we win against sin, it's really important to realise this, that in your journey of salvation, at one time your eyes would have been open to the fact that you are firstly a sinner in a very desperate situation. Every Christian sitting here this morning has experienced the anxiety of that moment. You've realised just how holy and righteous this God is.

You realise how frail and weak and broken you are in relation to Him. And you would have asked the question, how do I even begin to please this God? There is so much in us when we get to that point of complete honesty where we realise there is so much in us that would displease Him. But then we hear the good news that a mediator by the name of Jesus Christ came and dealt with that frailty and brokenness. Your identity as a Christian now, if you place your trust humbly in Jesus Christ, is that you as a Christian are now someone that is saved by God's incredible grace through simple trust in that work of Jesus on the cross.

And in view then of this identity, in view of what you have received through this simple trust, the apostle Paul begins talking about holiness with a summary statement that we read in verse one of chapter four. We started this morning with that verse. And that is simply this slogan: Live a life worthy of the calling you have received. Live a life worthy of the calling you have received. I like the NIV translation of that.

Our ESV says, walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called. I like the NIV. It's a nice statement to remember. Live a life worthy of the calling you have received. And this is what it means.

When I was a younger boy, just getting into sport, I remember in the early days of getting into my chosen sport, which was volleyball, a time where my coach selected me to play with a team of guys who were at that stage at a level far higher than I was. They were a year or two older than I was. And in this opens team, it meant that they were all bigger and stronger and more coordinated than I was. Meanwhile, skinny KJ was all arms and legs and knees, Mum says. And I remember after that first training session with this team, whimpering to my coach and asking him, why did you select me in this team?

Did you make a mistake? All these guys are so much bigger than me, so much better than me. And with a lot of wisdom and a lot of grace, he turned to me and said, trust me. I'm trying to grow you into this position. Now this is something similar to how the Bible talks about our fight against sin and our growth in holiness.

When the Bible commends us, commands us to grow in godliness, it says become what you already are. Live a life worthy of the calling you have already received. Tim Keller writes this. He says, think of all the ways that people try and motivate holiness. You can say, no.

I don't want to sin because I will look bad. What will all my friends at church think? You can say, no. I don't want to sin. I'll be excluded from the social circles that I want to belong to.

You can say, no, because God will not bless me. You can say, no, because I'll hate myself in the morning. I will have low self esteem about myself. You could say no and use all those motivations to fight against sin. But all of these motives are really just motives coming from fear or pride.

Fear as in, I don't know what that's gonna cause. Or pride, that's not who I am. I'm better than that. And the irony is that fear and pride are the very things that cause you to go into sin in the first place.

If you think about it, if you go to the crux of why we sin, it is either fear or it is pride. Fear of missing out perhaps, or pride of I think I know better than God. And so trying to overcome sin by using the motivation of guilt or shame is falling into this endless cycle trying to beat sin, which is caused by fear and pride, by motivating yourself through fear and pride. Keller says, you are just using the same old self centred impulses of the heart to keep you compliant rather than experiencing the only thing that will rip you out of that cycle completely, and that is a deep change of the heart. Any other way to try and conquer habits of sin rather than a deep and lasting change of the heart is going to be fruitless.

So what is this deep change of the heart? It's a heart that has been radically humbled. A deep change of the heart comes from coming to see and understand the staggering truth of the gospel that in Jesus Christ, we have received all that God requires of us to be holy. In winning the battle against sin, we have to start a habit then of reminding ourselves of the very important order in which God's word motivates holiness. Become what you already are.

Live a life worthy of what you have already received. And so we find this to be true in our lives, that guilt or shame will never be a lasting motivation for holiness. The only real motivation for holiness comes from joy. The joy of what God has already done in us. But then there is a second blessing or a double blessing, so to speak, in living a life of holiness.

And that is that God's will, God's will for our lives is good, and it produces joy as well. So the second point of breaking habits of sin is by continuing to believe that God's law is good. The Bible says God's law is life. God's word is light. God's will for human life is to be healthy and wise and secure.

God's will, which remember, is the measurement of a holy life. God says, this is how you are holy. Do these things and you will be like me. God's measurement of a holy life is obedience to His law. But that law in itself produces joy.

Some time ago, I watched a fascinating TED Talk online. TED Talks are free online lectures that experts from all across the world can sort of present. And it's sort of just this collective idea of putting information and ideas worth sharing, they call it, out there for people to hear and understand. And one of these TED Talks, a man by the name of AJ Jacobs, who's a journalist and a lecturer, decided to live a whole year according to all the Old Testament laws found in the Bible. I've used this example before.

He decided to live every law in the Old Testament, all of them, for a whole year. So, I mean, the big ones we know, he didn't eat any pork. He didn't work on the Sabbath. He went down right into not wearing clothes sewn together from two types of fabrics. So even those peculiar ceremonial or civic laws that as Christians we understand have been satisfied in Christ, dealt with by His sacrifice on the cross, he decided to live all the Old Testament laws.

He, however, AJ Jacobs, is an atheist. So he says he started this year long experiment as a bit of a joke. But as you listen to this TED Talk, there's one point that he says something amazing, and he only says it as an aside, but that is that he experienced happiness during this period. Isn't that interesting? During his talk, he was clearly not converted.

He was clearly not sold on the idea of God and God wanting a relationship with him. He was happy, in fact, to joke about God. But in just a little moment of honesty, in a way that I don't think he had grappled with quite yet at that time, he said that he felt a sense of joy in living this obedience to God. Fascinating. This is why Psalm 1 says, blessed is the one, blessed is the one who lives according to God's will because they are like trees planted by streams of running water.

That's what it says. He is like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in season, and its leaf does not wither. So if we want to break cycles of sin, we also need to trust and believe that God's desire for us is much better than our broken, harmful cycles that we blindly follow. It's a conscious decision to say, yes. I trust that if I don't pursue this lifestyle, if I don't pursue these decisions and choices, if I don't go down that train of thought anymore, God's will, God's law produces joy in me.

That is a faith moment. I hear so often people saying, people should live this way, but there's a little asterisk in God's word that says, this does not apply to me. Trust me. It applies to you.

Breaking habits of sin can be done by believing God's laws are good for my life. And then finally, we need to get practical. The weakness of preaching on the winning against sin is that it can remain very conceptual. I've realised that as I've been talking about it these past few weeks. I can stand here and I can share with you what the Bible says, and they are some great promises.

They are some real truths. But we can also just sit here and listen. And we can be convicted, and we can be challenged, and we can be encouraged. But two days from now, we're back at home. We're back at our workplace.

We're back with our family. And these things that we hear and these things that we are challenged with, man, they just get forgotten. We find ourselves falling back into those old patterns of thinking and behaving. But the Christian life has to be grounded in what we do as much as what we believe. And in our passage in Ephesians, this is what Paul is trying to get his people to believe and understand and do.

He says, the pattern of our life starts with our mind. Verse 17, he says, now this I say and testify in the Lord that you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do, no longer live as the Gentiles or the unbelievers do in the futility of their minds. So the call is not to live as unbelievers do, Paul says, but where it begins, that futility, in the futility of their mind, but be transformed by the gospel. Verse 18, they are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them due to their hardness of heart. But verse 20, that is not how you learned Christ.

Assuming that you have heard about Him and were taught in Him the truth that is in Jesus. To put off your old self which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires and rather to be renewed in the spirit of your minds. It's that same word, the same language of Romans 8 that we've read before in previous weeks. Being convicted and challenged about sin is one thing, but we are encouraged to put off the old self, to get rid of it, to not harbour it anymore, to not endure it, not to be patient with it anymore. Get rid of it. Cast it off like a smelly set of overalls, and put on the new self.

How do we do this? By the renewing of our minds, by the way that we think, the patterns of our thinking and processing. So I wanna share with you something this morning that I think I hope can be really practical for how we break bad habits, how we begin good habits. I read an article, a blog article written by a Doctor David Murray, who's a professor of Old Testament and practical theology at the Puritan Reformed Theological Seminary in the States. His blog, if you want to read it, is called Head, Heart, Hand.

In one of his articles, he refers to a book by a man called James Clear called Atomic Habits. And in this book, it's a four step analysis of how habits are formed and, alternatively, how habits can be broken. Now James Clear is not a Christian, I believe. And he's not writing from a biblical perspective on the mind and how we process these things. But what I found helpful is that he understands the brain.

He understands neurological pathways and how behaviour can be managed. And so you may take or leave it, but I find it very helpful. Now James Clear says there are four steps involved in forming a habit. Step one, a cue. A cue.

A cue triggers your brain to initiate a certain behaviour. It's a bit of information that predicts a reward and therefore leads to a craving. A cue can be the smell of a cookie. A cue can be the sound of an object. It can be an action.

A cue can be getting up in the morning because, and we all of us probably know this, a cue, getting up in the morning means going to the bathroom, putting on the kettle. Opening the blinds. That's a cue.

It begins with a cue, then it goes on to a craving. That's the second step in the phase. Craving is the motivation to change something, to change our situation, our current status quo to receive a reward. The reward might be to taste a delicious cookie. Without some level of motivation, without a craving for a change, we have no reason to act.

We stay in that situation. What you crave is not necessarily the habit itself. What you crave is a state, a change in the state that you find yourself in. In this state, I don't have a cookie in my mouth. In a changed state, I will have a cookie in my mouth.

Step three is then the response. This is the actual physical habits that you perform. This can take the form of a thought or an action. The response is something you do in order to get that reward. Okay?

That's a pretty easy to understand one. It's what you do in order to get that reward. And then finally, the fourth step in that process is the reward. They are the end goals of every habit. A reward can be the satisfying feeling that you get from that change.

That reward is also part of the lesson that you learn on whether or not you should do this again or not. So it reinforces the process. The cue, so at this up at the top there is about noticing the reward. The craving is about wanting the reward. The response is about obtaining the reward.

And then obviously, the reward is enjoying the reward. Now go through these four steps a few times and you've created a habit. Go through that process: cue, craving, response, reward, and you create a habit. And so those are good things to do when you are wanting to produce a healthy habit for yourself, a good habit to follow.

Clear explains that there are a few things that can be associated with creating good habits with this. Firstly, the cue. How to make sure that we can start good habits is to make the cue obvious. The second thing is to make the craving attractive. Thirdly, is to make the response easy.

And then lastly, to really make sure that that reward is satisfying. So let's put this into practice. We may say, I wanna be better at, more consistent with Bible reading. That's a good habit. The cue for Bible reading could be a time cue.

05:30, I set my alarm. I'm gonna wake up half an hour earlier than I normally do. 05:30, when it's still quiet, still peaceful in my house before the rush of getting ready. Another part of that cue could be turning on the kettle. As soon as I turn on that first kettle in the morning, I know it's time for Bible.

The second step is the craving that is initiated from that. The craving is again, this is now more in the mind, is I will experience sense of wonder or a sense of peace, a sense of connectedness with God from God's word. And that creates a motivation in me to read it. The response, this is the moment where you open God's word and start reading the sections that you've planned to read. This is the action in order to get the reward.

And the reward then finally is a sense of satisfaction, a sense of closeness to your Lord, a sense of starting the day with strength and a great perspective on the day. That is the reward. Do that a few times and you are creating a habit. So if you wanna start a good habit, you ask yourself, how can I make it obvious? How can I make the cue obvious?

Put the kettle and my Bible together. Make it obvious. How can I make it attractive? How can I make it easy to do? And then how can I make it that reward satisfying?

Then helpfully, Clear also talks about how to break bad habits. And this is perhaps even more relevant to our talk this morning. How to break bad habits. All you need to do is invert that process. So in order to break a bad habit, you make the cue invisible, you make the craving unattractive, you make the response difficult, and you make the reward unsatisfying.

So to break a habit or a sin of lust, you don't watch shows that cue you, that trigger you. You unfollow Instagram accounts that might trigger you. You let your eyes bounce off people who might not be dressed very modestly. You remove the cue. You make it invisible.

The second thing, this breaking of habits is to make the craving unattractive. You tell your heart these truths that we've been working through these past few weeks. You tell your heart that you won't find satisfaction in giving into that craving. There's nothing that is greater than loving God's law. A craving starts in the mind.

So this is a battle of the mind. Remind yourself of better things. Truths that are worth holding onto. The third, the response is to make it difficult. When a craving kicks in and it's there and it's really hard to avoid and you may not be even winning against, you know, those thoughts, the response, you've got another option and that is to make it difficult.

Go for a run. Take a cold shower. Go to the gym. Those things will make it difficult to give in to any of those temptations. And then finally, make the reward unsatisfying.

If you've given in to the craving, if you've responded again with a bad habit, stop and reflect. There's no need to beat yourself up about it because it's already done. There's no need to feel guilty because we know that guilt never motivates truly for lasting change. You are already saved. You are already loved by God.

There is nothing you could do now that's going to take you any further away from Him because you are at your closest with Him. But dwell on it a bit. Reflect on it. How did I get here? What process did I follow to wind up here again?

What needs to be shored up in my processing next time? Ask yourself, do I feel satisfied right now? Do I like this feeling that I'm feeling? Is this feeling really worth having? Has it produced joy?

If it's a bad habit, it's a habit that doesn't fit with God's will for yourself, you will realise, no. It hasn't produced joy. Instead, it's produced harm or pain or a loss of closeness with God or guilt. And so that's how we break bad habits. We deal with the cue, the craving, the response, and the reward in the same sort of time.

But we ask ourselves, how can I make the cue invisible? How can I make the craving unattractive? How can I make the response difficult? And how can I make the reward unsatisfying? I hope that's helpful.

I hope that sort of gives us some really helpful ways to think about it. In closing, when it comes to dealing with sin practically, there's no point in trying to pretend like we're badly wrapped presents and that one side is gonna get us through life. It's gonna give us a sense of happiness and joy. Our life can be far more joyful when we give ourselves over to what God wants for us in those areas we are wrestling with. You don't have to fight this battle against sin from a motivation of guilt, however.

That's never a strong and lasting motivator. Fight the battle knowing you've already won the war. Fight the battle as a holy person. Become what you already are. Remind yourself that God's will is good.

That following God's will will produce good life and joy. And then get practical. Plan, prepare, reflect, and start on those good habits. May God bless us in that process as we continue to do this. Let's pray.

Father, we thank you for your word this morning that has been practical, has been useful. We know that even your apostle Paul wrestled with thorns in the flesh, things that he wrestled with, things that he struggled with as a part of being human and frail. None of us, Lord, are without sin. None of us will be guaranteed a perfect life. But as Paul says, what we do is we strain towards that finishing goal.

We cast off what is behind us and push forward to what is in front of us. We ask, Lord, that you will give us the strength, the perseverance, the patience with ourselves that we need. Give us a conviction by your Spirit of the areas that we need to give attention to. But, Father, also give us joy in every step of the way, even in our failings, Lord, in the promise that you are there with us, and you will produce what is good in us because you are invested in the outcome. Thank you, Lord, for that promise.

In Jesus' name, we pray. Amen.