Are You Making God a Bad Habit?

Last night Jon read a quote from David Crowder’s Praise Habit. Allow me to remind you of part of it:

“Countless times I have tried to develop a habit of a ‘quiet time.’ Sometimes it would stick. Sometimes it would not. Guilt would be thick when it would not. But for a long time it became what I did first thing everyday. It was beauty. The internal joy it brought was overwhelming. Then at some point it went hollow. It’s not that it was a bad idea to form a habit of quiet time, but the habit had slyly begun to suck the life out of my relationship with God. I had fallen in love with my spirituality rather than with the one whom I sought, and in the end it left me void and wanting.”

For so long you’ve heard your Sunday school teachers, Jon and Shawn, your small group leaders, your parents, and so many others encourage you to study Scripture, to memorize verses, to dig into the Word. So now we tell you that habits can suck the, well, life out of your spiritual life? How does that make any sense?

The problem with making worship (because that’s ultimately what studying the Bible is) routine is that routines get too comfortable. Some people love routine; it’s predictable and easy and requires no consideration. So if we make God’s Word routine, we’re making God routine. We’re making God predictable and easy and requiring no consideration. Oops. I hate to break it to ya, but God is not predictable, not easy, and He certainly requires all the consideration we can muster.

It’s such a difficult thing to not let your relationship with God become a casualty of routine. But here’s the thing: God is much too big to fix into the box of habit. Intention is absolutely necessary for cultivating a deeper relationship with God, but if intention is all we have, we don’t follow through on making it actually happen.

We are called to cut the cord. Let loose. Pursue God ceaselessly. Don’t make studying the Bible routine; dive in! If we choose to love God as much as we are able, then we can live according to God’s Word. Like Jon said last night, you must seek God with all your heart, you must let God’s Word live inside you, and then you will not be able to keep from praising Him. And with that kind of passion pouring out of you, you will never be satisfied with a routine.

Do you border of making God a habit? What are some ways you keep that from happening? What would happen if we were successful in dedicating our lives in devotion to God’s Word?