Orders will be processed after the Christmas Holiday.

Podcast: A Realistic Approach to New Year’s Resolutions (David Murray)

December 27, 2021 by: Crossway

This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.

Forming Habits in a New Year

In today's episode, David Murray talks about what Christians should think about the value of resolutions and what it should look like to work hard to establish good habits while also relying on God’s grace and power.

Reset

Reset

David Murray

Although burnout is growing increasingly common among men in ministry, it doesn’t have to be inevitable. Pastor and counselor David Murray offers men gospel-centered hope for avoiding and recovering from burnout, setting a more sustainable pace.

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Podcasts | RSS

Topics Addressed in This Interview:

00:57 - An Opportunity to Reset

Matt Tully
David, thank you so much for joining me again on The Crossway Podcast.

David Murray
Thanks, Matt. We’re becoming podcast buddies here.

Matt Tully
That’s right. This is, by my count, our fourth time talking together on The Crossway Podcast. Some of our long-time listeners might remember that you were actually one of our very first guests on the show over two years ago now. It’s a joy to get to talk with you again.

David Murray
Thanks, Matt. It’s an honor to be on The Crossway Podcast and especially one of the first guests on it. That’s a great privilege.

Matt Tully
Absolutely. We were so excited to get to talk with you. Today we’re going to talk about New Year’s Resolutions. It’s that time of year again where, in just a few days, we’ll be entering into 2022 and leaving behind 2021. I remember as we were nearing 2021 people saying, Oh, it’s going to be so good to leave 2020 behind!Little did we know that we were going to get another kind of crazy year. Has this last year been kind of crazy for you as well?

David Murray
Yes. It’s been crazy in a few ways. It was the first year I started in a new congregation. Your first year in a new congregation that’s a COVID year, that’s not a great start. We moved houses, my wife got a new job, one daughter graduated, one son is getting married—a pretty busy year.

Matt Tully
The whole change of year often is a time when we think about this idea of resolutions. We are kind of looking back on the year before and probably often we are dissatisfied with something. We want to see some change in our lives. We want to do something differently, so we take the opportunity of the new year to maybe reset and make some resolutions. Just generally, have you made New Year’s Resolutions in the past? Are you planning to do so again this year? What do you think about that whole topic?

David Murray
I think the New Year’s turn is a great opportunity to reset our lives. I think it’s a God-given gift. The beginning of a new year, of course, wasn’t the same in biblical times, but there was a time where God’s people marked that change in the Old Testament. They began it with a feast and some events that were particularly associated with that time. I think we do have a biblical mandate for it, and I think it just makes common sense as well that we use these changes to make changes—changes in the year to make changes in our lives. I’ve tried various things over the years. I do try to take advantage of that. I think my biggest mistake has probably been trying to change too many things at once. This year, just as this last year, I’m really going to focus on one spiritual habit and one not-so-spiritual habit. I don’t like making that distinction, so maybe instead I should say one change that is very directly related to my spiritual life and one change that will affect my spiritual life, but it won’t be typically regarded as spiritual.

04:32 - The Top 5 New Year’s Resolutions

Matt Tully
I want to get into that distinction between spiritual and unspiritual things that we often want to do in a little bit, but I thought it would be fun to start with something else. I found a list of some of the top New Year’s Resolutions that people tend to set, and I wonder if you could comment on them—if you’ve had any of them as your own, or something like that.

David Murray
I can tell you right now I’ve probably tried all of them.

Matt Tully
The very first one, and people might expect this one, would be to get in shape; get healthy. Is that something that you ever tried to set as a New Year’s Resolution?

David Murray
Yeah sure. And again, I want to think of spiritual health and physical health, but I think we also can diversify that a bit and make it a bit of a bigger concept—mental health, emotional health, relational health. In each of these categories I think you can have some resolution to improve and make some progress, and, again, trying not to do too much at one time. I think a general category of improved health—including that biblical, holistic look at the whole person, is a very helpful way to approach it.

Matt Tully
Number two was to eat better.

David Murray
Yes, same thing. One of the areas that I’m really focused on this year—actually, I would say it’s my biggest focus on the more physical side, but I expect it to affect me spiritually—is to really work on eliminating foods that cause inflammation in the body and trying to eat foods that are more calming. All the research is showing that so much of current illness and disease, in the US especially, is caused by inflammation. Food is not the only component in that, but it’s a major component. I think the more we can reduce that, then the healthier we’ll be. I do believe the longer we’ll live and the more we will avoid cancer. I just view that as medical research that helps me fulfill my responsibility to God to steward my body well.

Matt Tully
Number three is stop procrastinating. That one may be a little bit unexpected. What do you think about that resolution?

David Murray
I don’t view myself as a terrible procrastinator apart from one area, and that’s administration. Doing podcasts, writing, sermons, writing books—no problem at all there. I’m like, Let me at it! I can’t get to it soon enough. But when it comes to actual paperwork—emails, organizing my finances, keeping up with health insurance—that is just agony for me. Thankfully, I’ve got a great wife who carries me in these areas. I think all of us have certain tasks we dread, and that’s where procrastination comes in.

Matt Tully
Yes, and it might look a little differently for different people. Okay, we have two more: get more sleep was number four.

David Murray
That’s something that I’ve learned in the past that I feel I’m in a good habit of now. I get a minimum of seven hours of sleep, but I’m aiming for seven and half hours. I would love to have eight hours each night, but certainly, I know that if I go any less than seven I am heading for stress. My arthritis will inflame, I’ll be foggy in my thinking, I’ll be rash in my decision making. So, I’ve learned that lesson, I believe, through painful experience, but I would really encourage anyone who is not doing it—you think you’re adding to your life by skimping on sleep, but I think we lose it at the end of our lives. One way or another we have to pay for it.

Matt Tully
And perhaps even before the end. We’re losing it in that we’re not doing as good of work or we’re neglecting certain people in our lives—important relationships.

David Murray
Absolutely.

Matt Tully
The last of the top five New Year’s resolutions that I found was reducing stress.

David Murray
It’s interesting, Matt, because when you actually put together these other four, it ends up reducing stress. I think you can see the whole thing goes together as a package. That’s something that you and I have talked about a lot online and offline, just that need to try and view ourselves as a whole and not divide up our lives. I think that you can’t actually reduce stress unless you work on these other areas of resolution, habits, etc.

Matt Tully
As you look at those five resolutions that, again, were the top five on the one list I found, I looked at a number of places and many of them were overlapping with these. What do you take away from the fact that they do sort of hang together and have a certain similar vibe to them? They are all things that many of us would say, Yeah, I’m really struggling with that on a regular basis. What do you think that reveals about how we, maybe as Americans or generally as humans, are thinking about our lives?

David Murray
If you look at the research, very few of these things were concerns one hundred or one hundred and fifty years ago, especially more than one hundred and fifty years ago. It’s a modern complex of issues that is related partly to industrial revolution, partly to electricity and enabling us to work in the early morning and late at night, partly to the mass manufacturing of food that has really caused our diets to deteriorate, maybe especially the digital revolution that has really changed our whole lives and blurred a lot of boundaries between home and work, between rest and labor. Therefore, you’ve got all these issues that are rising. I think gradually over that time but really accelerated in the last twenty years, and there’s no sign yet of it slowing down. I’m not sure if people realize how much the digital component has played into each of these issues where we’re finding, Hey, things are not going well and I need to change it.

11:38 - Should We Be Suspicious of Self-Care?

Matt Tully
More broadly to this issue of resolutions, my experience is that many Christians can feel somewhat conflicted by this idea, especially New Year’s resolutions—the idea of picking a time in the year and saying, Alright, this is when I want to make this change. It seems like sometimes the concern, especially if you look at a list like we just talked through, some of them are a little bit too unspiritual or too unfocused on "self-help." I think that even relates to a broader suspicion of anything that hints at self-help or, perhaps to use a newer term: self-care. Speak to that. Have you noticed that suspicion that Christians often have? How would you respond to that?

David Murray
It’s definitely there. I don’t think it’s as bad as it used to be. I think that has certainly been a problem in the past, and it still is a problem, but I think there is a greater appreciation among the wider Christian public of these connections: the way body depends on soul, depends on mind, depends on your environment. So I think there is a greater awareness that you can’t really, strictly speaking, separate your spiritual life and your other life. Rather, a biblical view of life is a whole life. God did not just make us as souls; he made us bodies and souls. He did not just make us individuals; he made us to be in community. He didn’t just make us so that we get a whole new genetic makeup every time; he made it so we inherit that from our parents and these specific environments which influence and shape us as well. So, I think there is a lot greater awareness and it’s growing. I think a lot will depend on your motive, your method, and your aim. Your motive: Why am I doing this? Is it to get a six pack and make myself more attractive to the girls? Or, if you’re a female, is it to get a more shapely figure that will make me more attractive to men? Or is it that this is a body given to me by God, redeemed by Christ, purchased by blood, indwelt by the Holy Spirit, and, therefore, I have to give it back to him in service and worship? You can have two people doing exactly the same thing but for completely different motives. One is secular and the other is spiritual because of the spiritual motivation.

Matt Tully
It seems like some of the major concerns that Christians would have with the self-care movement that we see all around us all the time is that it can have this selfish and self-centered and surface level preoccupation. Do you think that is a real concern? As you look at Christians, are we falling prey to that in such a way that we really do need to stand up and say, No, that’s actually too emphasized in our conversations.

David Murray
What I’ve noticed in so many areas of life is the errors are on both sides of the extreme. You’ve definitely got your idolatry of the body and of the self—a self-centered life. On the other side you’ve got the total neglect of the gift of a body and the gift of a life and no responsibility taken for ones own health, and even portraying that as super spiritual. Both extremes are to be avoided. They’re both unbiblical. We are not to idolize, neither are we to be bad stewards of what God has given us. I think that a lot of the dangers of selfish focus can be changed—can be redeemed, as it were—not just if we focus on a different motivation but a different method. For example, let’s say we are resolved to eat better, get fitter, and sleep more. Am I doing that just independently and in my own strength, determination, and will power? Or, am I praying to the Lord for his help and seeking that really conscious dependence on him as I do this? Am I doing it as a way of drawing me to God rather than as a way of making me more independent of God? That changes all of life. That means you can garden to God’s glory if you’re doing it in dependence on him. You can drive your car to God’s glory. There are people who can preach sermons and pray without any dependence on God, and you can have other people who are doing secular things (or non-spiritual things), but they’re doing in a spiritual way and, therefore, much more pleasing to God. I remember an old saying by somebody that goes like this: Jesus did natural things spiritually and spiritual things naturally. I think that’s a beautiful balance and cohesion in that approach to life. It means you don’t end up with this severe divide. You don’t end up separating the natural from the spiritual and the spiritual from the natural.

Matt Tully
Would you even go so far as to say that we shouldn’t use those adjectives when we talk about our lives and the things that we are called to do?

David Murray
I think it’s helpful to use them as a stepping stone away from them. It’s hard to reinvent terms. The world has stolen so many words from us and you’re tempted to just give them up. What I like to do is reclaim the words and begin to redefine them and repackage them and represent them. But to make just a whole new vocabulary, or just reject any misused words, I don’t think we’ll make any progress there. But using our Christian mind to redefine commonly used words, I think that’s the way to go.

18:04 - Hard Work vs. Relying on God

Matt Tully
You said something a couple of minutes ago that I wanted to dig into. You noted the relationship between hard work and setting goals and making habits. That hard work and how that relates to this idea of relying on God’s strength and his grace—it seems like Christians can think those two things are mutually exclusive. Have you observed that? What would you say to that kind of mindset?

David Murray
For sure, but I don’t see it in the Bible. I’ve noticed it especially in Paul’s epistles. There you have, I think probably, one of the most determined men that have ever lived. A man with one of the strongest human wills that has ever been on this planet. He’s full of determination; he’s full of resolution. And yet, everything he does is in dependence upon God. It’s a will that was going 120 mph in one direction, and God didn’t suddenly change him at his conversion so that now he’s just a kind of weak, irresolute, wimpy guy. No, he takes that same will, strength, and fervent zeal and he redirects it towards the Lord. In Philippians he speaks of it being God who works in us both to will and to do of his good pleasure. So, what Paul has done there is he’s saying, I’m not willing or doing any less than I used to, but now it’s God’s will in doing that comes before that and that enables that.

Matt Tully
In your book Reset you talk about these three concepts: the motivating power of grace, the moderating power of grace, and the multiplying power of grace. Unpack those for us and how those relate to what we’re talking about.

David Murray
The motivating grace—why do you do what you do?—you get some people who will do everything out of law or personal endeavor. That is one of the great contributors to burnout. It’s literally that. Research and medical science has shown us that stress actually makes the body inflamed—it increases the redness, as it were, inside. Grace, I believe, comes in and tamps that down because our motive is completely changed. Moderating: let’s say you’re a perfectionist and you’ve got these high standards and you’re striving, striving, striving. When you fail, it’s like a complete disaster, you berate yourself, you flagellate yourself. But grace comes in and says, That’s my standard, but I failed. Lord, I confess. Fresh start. Off we go again. I’m learning my weakness here. Grace completely changes the whole idea of failure and not reaching our own standards. Multiplying grace is where instead of saying everything depends on me—I’ve got to work all these hours of the day and night or else my church, my business, or my family will fall apart—is saying, All I’ve got is five loaves and two fish, but, Lord, you can multiply them. You can do more with my little than I can do by trying to multiply it myself. Then you’ve got releasing grace which is releasing control to God. Instead of being a controller and trying to micromanage everything, you’re saying, Lord, I release it. I’ve done what I can and now it’s over to you—whether it’s with children, money, church troubles. Then, that last well of grace of receiving grace, it’s the grace to receive, which doesn’t come easy to some of us to see God giving us the gifts of sleep, sabbath, friendship, church fellowship, leisure, or recreation. It’s receiving them as his good gifts rather than feeling guilty about them and returning thanks to him. If we are drinking from these five wells of motivating, moderating, multiplying, releasing and receiving grace, then that’s going to completely change us inside and out and it’s going to be a grace-powered life.

Matt Tully
That’s such a helpful framework for thinking about the way that God’s grace meets us in our own effort, our own work, our own habits. It’s not like it’s an either/or, but they actually go together when we’re thinking rightly.

David Murray
I think we’ve talked about this before, but I really feel that we have a way too restricted view of grace. When you limit it to, you might say, the doctrines of grace—which are massively grace-full already—in comparison to all the grace that God has for us, it’s a big part of it but not the whole part. I want us to embrace the doctrine of grace more and more and more. I want us to expand our view of grace. The more grace that we can get, then I believe the healthier we’ll be overall.

23:52 - What Does the Bible Say about Healthy Habits?

Matt Tully
A lot of this relates to this idea of habits. If I had to guess, many—if not most—of what often constitutes New Year’s resolutions for us could be summarized as some way to create healthy habits in our lives and then stick to them. Does the Bible have anything to say about habits or habit formation?

David Murray
I would argue, Matt, that sanctification is habit formation. It’s nothing less than that; it’s more than that, you know? Habit science, obviously, does not include things like union with Christ, justification, dependence on the Spirit, using the power of Christ’s cross to empower us and forgive us and restart again. Habit science ignores all that, but you may say habit science comes in at the end of the biblical habit process—biblical sanctification—and I believe it’s there that we can learn a ton from the secular world. It’s not the secular world; it’s God’s world! If people in the secular world have discovered truths and facts and rules—principles that God has packed into nature—then they’re just discovering what God has already put there, and they have discovered it for our good. So, you’ve got things in Scripture like Put off the old man and put on the new. That’s habit formation, but what does that mean? How do I do that? The Bible doesn’t give us a ton of details, or much detail at all, about how to do that. I think you can work out some by common sense, but habit science can really give us a ton of detail as to how you can put off something old and replace it with something new. You’ve got the fruits of the Spirit—love, patience, meekness, self-control—how do I get that? I think that’s where, again, habit science can come in, not to displace God but to ask God to use it and to really help us really understand who we are, how we work, how we change. I found James Clear’s book, Atomic Habits, extremely helpful in my own sanctification in helping me to understand how God has made human nature. As far as I know James Clear isn’t a Christian, but I think he’s done a lot of Christians good service.

Matt Tully
I think sometimes the response from a Christian to that—maybe the suspicious Christian—would be that the answer to how do I put on the new self and put off the old—these bad habits that I may have—is that it comes down to the power of the Spirit working within me (and maybe that’s undefined in how that actually works out in practice) and a determination and a willingness to do the work and to say no. We need a commitment to it, and if we would only truly believe the gospel truly and fully, we would be able to do that stuff. I think on the flip side there’s maybe this suspicion of what maybe could be called habit hacks that we might read about in some of these books, and the claim would be that those are temporary at best. They’re a Band-aid for the problem that you have, but they’re not really going to stick or last. How would you respond to that kind of thinking?

David Murray
I agree with it to an extent. Again, I think if you bring in habit science, habit hacks, and life hacks and that’s all you do, that’s not going to work. Some people do have some success. We have to be honest; people do change. But the vast majority of us are not going to keep going, so what’s the answer? Is the answer to abandon how God has made and how people have discovered how human nature changes? No. It’s to begin where God begins—with the gospel, with faith, with prayer, with dependence on the Holy Spirit, with Christian fellowship and accountability, with worship. Let’s get all that ground work in and we don’t leave it behind; it comes with us. It’s not like, Okay, I’ve done that, so now I’ll go to the secular. No. Everything is built on that. If you go through the Bible, there are just hundreds of imperatives, and they are far more than just believe the gospel more, far more than just be filled with the Spirit. Paul gets extremely specific, and so does Jesus. So we have to get very specific too. If Jesus and Paul and the other biblical authors had decided to give us the details for how we change in every area of life, we would have ended up with The Practical Works of Richard Baxter as our Bible—four massive volumes of tiny print. But the didn’t do that. They’ve given us enough to help us change, to help us analyze this world, to help us understand the rules of diet, exercise, taking care of our eyesight, our hearing, our teeth—all of which are gifts of God and all of which we have to give an account for. I’m not saying let’s jump into habit science. No, we start and we stay with the gospel, and we build on top of that and what has proven to be helpful in every area of life—what is reliable, credible, scientific help. Just as we do in every area of life. I always think about preachers. They do work on sermons. They don’t just sit there and wait for the Spirit to fill them with words—not in the study and not in the pulpit—but they sit there and they stand there in the pulpit depending on the Spirit and doing the mental work that the Spirit tends to use. It’s not one or the other. Going back to Paul, God works in us to will and to do of his good pleasure. He works so we work; and when we work, he works. It’s very mutual. It’s very much together; it’s never apart.

31:01 - Practical Tips Related to Habits

Matt Tully
You mentioned the book Atomic Habits. Are there any other practical tools or concepts or ideas that you have gleaned from "secular" science that have proven very helpful for you, particularly related to your spiritual habits?

David Murray
One of the books I’ve found very helpful is called The Power of Full Engagement by Tony Schwartz. He’s a Harvard Business School professor and bestselling author, and what he realized was that, as he was trying to become more productive and useful in life, that better time management just wasn’t cutting it. It could only take you so far because you only had so many hours in the day. He turned his efforts and research toward energy management. What he found was that there were four elements of energy in every human being. There’s physical energy—how healthy are you? There’s emotional energy—how happy are you? There’s mental energy—how well can you focus on something? And there’s spiritual energy (as he called it)—why are you doing all this? What is your purpose? What he basically argued was that for us to feel and have greater energy, you have to keep filling up in these four areas. You can’t just fill up in one. So, how healthy are you? The healthier you are then the more physical energy you will have. How happy are you? You can have tons of physical energy, but if you’re miserable at what you’re doing you won’t do it very much. If you’re happy at what you’re doing, then you will produce a lot more energy. Mentally, how well can you focus on something? You can have someone who sits at a computer for two hours and is all over the place and distracted. You can have someone else who sits there for ten focused minutes and can actually accomplish as much as the two-hour person. And then you’ve got the spiritual component—getting your why—and Christians obviously have a ton more motivation than secular people here. We’re doing it for the Lord, we’re doing it for the One who loved us, died for us, shed his blood for us, who’s taking us to heaven—we’ve got a much bigger why. Our spiritual tank should be a lot bigger. So, as I’ve thought about my life and my service to God, I do feel it’s part of my worship of him to keep working on filling these four tanks. Then Schwartz went on to talk about the two modes of energy. With each of these tanks, you’re either in expenditure mode or you’re in income mode. You’re either draining it or you’re filling it up. When you drain it, you then have to take some time to fill it up again. So, I think that’s helpful always to be thinking, Have I been draining this one too much? Do I need to pause and fill up one of these tanks again? Then, the last area—and I think this is the key to the whole thing—is four elements of energy, two modes of energy, one wall of energy. He’s basically saying that the higher and the thicker you can build the wall between income and expenditure of energy the more energy you’ll have when you’re working and the more quickly you will refill when you’re resting. The big problem today is we don’t have that wall anymore. We work when we are at home and we are playing when we are at work. The Internet especially and our digital devices have basically demolished that wall so that we are never fully off and we are never fully on. He’s basically saying to us that the higher you can build that wall—expenditure on one side and income on the other—the far more productivity you’ll have when you’re working and the far quicker you will refill when you are resting. To me, that’s just invaluable for helping me serve the Lord in a responsible way, and it guides me in my habit formation as well. If I can say this, I believe it’s made me more holy and more useful to the Lord.

Matt Tully
That reminds me of something you said earlier. You mentioned how you’ve noticed that some of these "unspiritual" ideas—let’s say the tanks of your physical energy, emotional energy, relationships—can have a direct impact on your spiritual life and the things that we would typically view as "spiritual." Unpack that a little bit. How have you seen that dynamic play out in your own life?

David Murray
Take that mental tank, which is about how focused you are on what you’re doing—if I’m sitting and working on my computer and every five or ten minutes I check my email, my texts, what’s going on in the world—

Matt Tully
I’m sure most of us have no idea what that feels like.

David Murray
I’ll just have to tell you. I’m such a terrible sinner in this! If I do that as a habit throughout the day, I have zero hope of sitting with my Bible and concentrating because my mental concentration tank is empty.

Matt Tully
You haven’t cultivated the habit of focusing in general.

David Murray
Right. If I try and pray, within five minutes my mind has got into the habit of, Hey, check your email. Hey, you better make sure this hasn’t happened on the Internet. So, I think making sure you’ve got a really good mental tank with high quality fuel in it in your daily life is going to help your spiritual life, and help you listen to sermons as well. I think emotionally, if you’re depressed or run down emotionally, you can’t really expect to have a happy spiritual life. It just doesn’t work. Your emotions are not separated like that. They carry over. Therefore, building joy into your life—taking a walk in nature, a hobby—that carries over into your spiritual life too. But if you are just running, running, running and not even doing the things that bring you joy, you can’t expect to have joy in the Lord.

38:00 - How to Handle Setbacks

Matt Tully
One of the most discouraging things that I think we’ve all experienced at some point is setting a personal goal or resolution and then falling short for some reason—not fulfilling it. I think it’s especially hard when we kind of know, That was my fault. I could have done it, but I just didn’t for some reason. My own experience is that it can be pretty demotivating and, actually, at times sink us into even less healthy habits than we were before in this kind of ironic twist. Have you ever experienced that?

David Murray
Never. No. I don’t know what you’re talking about, Matt. Every single resolution—just 100% kept. No, I wish! I think the first thing is to begin with prayer and ask the Lord, Lord, what do you want me to change in my life? I tend to focus on one thing if I can. My mistakes in the past have revolved around just trying to do too many things at one time. Habit science says that if you can affect a new habit for about thirty to forty-five days, then you more or less made a new habit. It’s much harder to go back. So, better to do one at a time every thirty to forty-five days than trying to do five things all at once, none of which will get to thirty-five days. Ask the Lord, Lord, what’s your priority for me? Just seek that. Ask people who know you best and who pray with you what area to focus on. God can use them to speak into our life. So, focus on a big thing—focus on one thing. Then, if you go to habit science, James Clear talks about this. There are four laws of habit formation. Number one is make it obvious. Let’s just take exercise as an example. That would basically mean putting your running shoes at the door and your running clothes beside them the night before so that when you get up in the morning you actually see it. It’s obvious. That’s called the cue, or the trigger. Secondly, make it attractive. He would say things like, Get some new running shoes and some new running clothes so that you actually feel good in it. Do some research on the benefits of exercise, not just long term but in the immediate: you’ll feel better, you’ll be sharper, you’ll feel you have accomplished something. That builds a craving. Start with cue, then that grows into a craving. The third thing is make it easy. That’s the response to the craving. If you’re saying, I’m going to run ten miles, that ain’t easy and it ain’t going to happen. He talks about things like on day one, open the front door to go running. And that’s all! Or, do one press up. But what he's basically saying is that if you make that your aim and you make it easy enough, you’ll actually start to do it. If you make a mountain too high, you’ll never climb it. But once you open the front door, you tend to think, Well, I’m out here now. I might as well take a step or run to the bottom of the driveway and back. Or, I’m down on the ground anyway, so I might as well do two press ups. Keep the bar very low so that it’s easy. Fourthly, make it satisfying. That’s the reward. It goes cue, craving, response, reward. That’s when I say to myself, Okay, if I do two press ups today then I get to . . . * and you think up rewards. For me it would be to go fishing. Or it could be a smaller thing like watching a favorite show. I’m not going to let myself watch this show tonight unless I actually do that. So, you make it rewarding and that builds a cycle and the cue, craving, and response will begin to build on themselves. The reverse is true too. If you’re wanting to break a bad habit, make it invisible, make it unattractive, make it difficult, and make it unsatisfying. In other words, punish yourself, as it were, for it. I think we bring in grace here, too, in that we fail. Even one press up—some of us won’t do that. But bring it to the Lord and say, Lord, I did feel like this was your calling to steward my body better. This is hard for me. I confess I’ve failed. I haven’t done it for a couple of days. I want to start again. The great thing is I can get rid of that guilt by having it washed away in the blood of Christ. Lord, I’m so weak and I need even more of your Spirit than I thought I needed. Maybe I can get a Christian brother to phone me or text me every morning to make sure I bring in the Christian community*. Again, you’re just trying to mix these two worlds in an integrated, holistic way that doesn’t over stress one or the other. There’s nothing like getting a fresh start to get you freshly motivated. Leave guilt behind and start again. Christians should have greater motivation, better methods, better aims, and better resilience in their habit formation than any non-Christian.

43:45 - What Is Your Why?

Matt Tully
For me, I’ve noticed that in situations like that where I haven’t reached a goal I wanted to reach or haven’t been as consistent as I wanted to be with something, my tendency can be to be so focused on pushing through, fixing that, and getting back on track. Or, I can feel so discouraged that in either case I don’t spend the time it takes to think about why I didn’t hit that goal and why I wasn’t able to stay consistent. Is that an important step that you think we would do well to slow down and assess? If so, what are the different causes, in your experience, for why we often don’t stick to our resolutions?

David Murray
I don’t think we should be too hard on ourselves. I think if we ground everything in identity—who I am before God does not depend upon whether or not I am accomplishing, progressing, or changing. We keep coming back to the fact that regardless of how I did today, I am a child of God. I am fully accepted. I am loved. God doesn’t kick me to the curb because I didn’t run today or because I ate chips today or whatever. Keeping that at the core of our being, reminding ourselves of that, then we’re not going to end up saying things to myself like, Why did I do this? Oh, it’s because I’m useless. Oh, it’s because I’m just not a disciplined person. No. I’m a child of God. These habits, or failures, do not define me. I keep this in front of me: my Father loves me, wants the best for me, is encouraging me, and will never give up on me. That’s my baseline. And then I go to, Okay, what are the whys that are a bit more practical. For example, Bible-reading in the morning or running. I have found that the key is the night before. The problem is not in the morning; the problem is the night before. In other words, not getting to bed early enough. Not setting myself up with a good night’s sleep with a good sleep routine beforehand. Our body clock loves regularity and routine. That’s where I would usually think to myself, Okay, the problem is not the morning. The problem is the evening before. Then, just work back from that. I think as well that you’ve got to get to things like idolatry in your heart. Is there something that I am giving priority to over this? My own personal comfort, my own love of ease—if we’re motivated by building big muscles, I just don’t think that’s going to keep us going for long. So, I think asking about your why—What is my why?—is going to help us purify our motive as well as fuel us going forward.

47:18 - How to Set Attainable, God-Glorifying Resolutions

Matt Tully
Maybe as a last question, I wonder if there are any other practical tips or advice that you would offer the Christian listening right now when it comes to setting good, attainable, God-glorifying resolutions for the new year?

David Murray
I think if there’s one thing that I learned from James Clear’s book it’s the power of littles. He talks about—if I can remember the stat of this—if you change 1% a day, because of the power of compounding, if I recall rightly, you’ve changed 100% in thirty-seven days. It’s hundreds of percentages before the end of the year. Fact check me on that. Whatever it is, it’s a staggering number, and it really encouraged me, David, don’t aim for the Everest. Aim for the molehill. Then, another molehill, and another molehill, so that ever day I am just making that small advance. Breakthroughs are made at the end of a lot of littles. We don’t usually make these breakthroughs up front, but you’re going along—and I can’t remember this exactly—there was something about bamboo in that book. It spends about two years—more than that even—underground, and then in something like three weeks it grows twenty or thirty feet. James Clear had a few examples of that where just little, little, little. It’s unseen, nobody is noticing, it would appear nothing is changing, and then there is this breakthrough—and we would say a God moment. That really encourages me to keep going, even when I’m not seeing breakthroughs, ultimately God can give me a breakthrough. Then, he gets all the glory because I realize that all I contributed was these tiny littles. So, make it small, make it specific, make it doable, make it regular, and do everything powered by the gospel and depending on the Spirit for the glory of God. If we do that, I believe these habits will drive us closer to God rather than away from him.

Matt Tully
David, thank you so much for helping us think a little bit more biblically about the idea of New Year’s resolutions and setting good habits in our lives. We appreciate you taking the time.

David Murray
Thanks, Matt. I’m passionate about it because I see the world just so full of passion for change—self-change, self-help, transformation. If you go into book shops and look at the bestsellers, that’s what they’re all about. I’m wondering, Where is the Christian in this? If anyone should be about transformation, and if anyone can be transformed by the renewing of our minds, it’s the Christian. So, I hope and pray this podcast will inspire, motivate, and enable so that we can put the world to shame and say, Look what God can do!

Popular Articles in This Series

View All

Podcast: Help! I Hate My Job (Jim Hamilton)

January 06, 2020

Jim Hamilton discusses what to do when you hate your job, offering encouragement for those frustrated in their work and explaining the difference between a job and a vocation.

Crossway is a not-for-profit Christian ministry that exists solely for the purpose of proclaiming the gospel through publishing gospel-centered, Bible-centered content. Learn more or donate today at crossway.org/about.