Blake Glosson

Atomic Habits and Bible Intake: How Tiny Changes Add Up

It’d be silly and dangerous to give up on healthy eating if you didn’t feel happier or stronger as or right after you ate. The same is true of Scripture reading. We shouldn’t measure success entirely by whether or not we feel pleasure as we read. Not every Scripture passage should cause even the healthiest Christian to feel surface-level happiness. Don’t chase after a feeling; chase after nearness to Christ.

In his best-selling book Atomic Habits, James Clear tells the story of a friend who lost over 100 pounds through diet and exercise. Clear’s friend began with a goal of going to the gym for five minutes daily. (He even set a timer and faithfully left the gym each day after five minutes.) By making his goal achievable and repeatable, he became someone who went to the gym every day. Once this practice became a habit and lifestyle, he began tweaking it over time (for example, he started exercising for longer than five minutes). Eventually, his exercise and diet habits led to transformation.
Like physical transformation, spiritual transformation is the gradual reward of consistent habits. Even when you don’t immediately feel the effects of your Bible intake, you can be confident your spiritual fitness improves little by little each time you engage with God’s Word.
Consider four ways Bible intake parallels diet and exercise habits and why even our smallest efforts matter.
1. The First Two Minutes Are the Most Important
Clear notes the heaviest weight in the gym is the front door. The same is true of most habits: it’s not the habit itself, but starting the habit, that stops most people.
Clear encourages readers to replicate his friend’s minimalist approach to habit-building, even starting with two-minute routines (rather than five minutes) to make starting and replicating behaviors simple. (He calls this the 2-Minute Rule.)
If you don’t already have a rhythm of Bible reading, commit to reading for two minutes every day. Make daily reading as achievable as possible. By doing this consistently, you’ll become someone who reads the Bible every day. That’s a huge step. From there, you can tweak the habit as you wish. Clear observes, “A habit must be established before it can be improved.”
You cannot improve what you don’t already practice.
2. THe Most Rewarding Outcomes Are (Almost Always) Delayed
Clear notes that our outcomes are a “lagging measure of [our] habits.” We’re who we are today largely because of the habits we’ve built over the past few weeks, months, and years. It’s not what we’ve done most recently but most consistently that shapes us.
One workout or protein-rich meal won’t drastically strengthen your bones. Yet a consistent exercise routine and calcium, vitamin D, and protein intake over months and years will improve bone health significantly. Likewise, spiritual health is a lagging measure of what we train and feed on consistently. Bible reading isn’t only for the here and now but also for how it forms us over time.
Beyond the cumulative benefit of Bible reading, you’ll be surprised at how often God blesses you (and others through you) a few days or weeks after you read a certain passage.
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How to Give (and Receive) Repentance

We have a responsibility to communicate our needs to those closest to us. It’s not loving to sweep their sins under the rug or to tolerate their annoying habits without saying anything. This will only enable their behavior and feed bitterness in our hearts. Repentance is a gift of God that leads to life and healing (Acts 11:18; James 5:16). Let’s cherish it, cultivate it, and live in gratitude and dependence on God as we seek to model it in our lives.

Imagine you’re on Family Feud and Steve Harvey gives the following prompt: “We asked 100 sinners, ‘Name one reason why you do not repent of your sin to one another.’ The top seven answers are on the board.”
What do you think the most common responses would be? I’d offer these seven.
We don’t repent because . . .

We’re completely blind to our sin, or we don’t think our sin is bad enough to warrant repentance.
We don’t think the other person deserves our repentance. Maybe we think he sinned first, or he sinned more, or his sin caused our sin, so we refuse to repent until he does.
We don’t think repenting will help anything. Sometimes we fear our repentance will fuel the other person’s pride, appear to ignore her faults, or lead to further conflict. So we stay silent.
We are too proud. Repentance means admitting we were wrong—and that we need mercy—which requires Christlike humility. Sometimes we don’t want to stoop that low.
We are too ashamed of our sin or too afraid of the consequences. Repentance also means giving up (the feeling of) control over our own reputation and putting ourselves at the mercy of others. This takes vulnerability—something many people run from.
We don’t want to change. Biblical repentance requires turning—changing our behavior—which can feel a bit like heart surgery. Many resist confessing their sin because they love it too much to give it up.
We don’t know how to repent. Many people never had repentance clearly modeled in the home or taught in the church, leaving them unequipped to put it into action.

Why Should We Confess Our Sins to One Another?
James 5:16 gives us a helpful starting point: “Confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, that you may be healed.”
This verse gives us at least two motivations to confess our sins to one another:
1. Because God commands us to.
2. Because God commands us to for our healing.
Repentance is not a punishment God makes us pay after we sin; it’s medicine God uses to heal us from our sins’ ravaging effects. God uses our repentance to enliven us (Acts 11:18), refresh us (Acts 3:19–20), restore us (Luke 15:11–24), cleanse us (1 John 1:9), and enrich our fellowship with him and with one another (1 John 1:6–7). Repentance is not a curse to fear, but a gift to cherish.
How Do I Repent of My Sin to Someone?
Repentance can be hard, but it doesn’t need to be complicated.
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