According to the authors of Atomic Habits and Tiny Habits, you can form new healthy habits and get rid of old ones when you consider your identity, environment, and habit design. Each new year as a family, we usually look at the young Jesus in Luke chapter 2 verse 52 and how he kept growing and increasing in four different areas: favor with God (spiritual), favor with man (social), wisdom (intellectual), and stature (physical). “And Jesus kept increasing in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and people.” Luke 2:52 (NASB).

Becoming Your Identity

I learned from these two books that we were focused more on outcomes than our processes and identity when setting goals. This year, consider focusing on your identity and what you want to BECOME and not just your OUTCOMES. For example, instead of saying, I want to lose X amount of pounds, why not become identity-focused and say, I want to become a healthy fitness practitioner in my eating, exercising, sleeping, and Bible meditation. More simply you can say to yourself, ”I am a healthy fitness practitioner.” Then when faced with the myriad of choices during the day, I could ask myself, “what would a healthy fitness practitioner choose to do right now?”

Identifying Your Identity

May I suggest that you write out the identity you are or want to become for those four areas: spiritual, social, intellectual, and physical. My spiritual identity is: I am a child of God through faith in Jesus. I want to become a child of God filled with God’s Word, Spirit, and love. That’s the spiritual identity I want to realize I am and want to become. An identity could be as simple as ”I am a healthy person” or ”I am a good friend.” After deciding our identity in the four areas, we can design tiny habits to change our behavior. Design tiny habits that are easy to do, take less than two minutes, and are satisfying.

Designing Tiny Habits

The Tiny Habits author provides a formula for designing our habits: B = M.A.P. When all three M.A.P. elements come together, we do a particular behavior. M.A.P. stands for motivation, ability, and prompt. The Fogg behavior curve shows how “prompts” to do a particular behavior only happen when our motivation and ability fall above an action line. The action line separates how easy or hard something is to do based on our ability and how much or little we want to do it based on our motivation. So if something is easy to do, we need to have just enough motivation to do it when prompted. Or if we have a lot of motivation to do something but it’s too hard to do it, we won’t usually do the behavior. That’s why it’s important to make tiny habits that are easy to do. We can remind ourselves to do a new tiny habit by being prompted by a different habit we already do. He gives the example of using the ”prompt” of an existing habit, brushing his teeth, to remind himself to immediately do two pushups. Easy to do and remember. This tiny habit eventually grew into doing more pushups and exercises. The Atomic Habits author points out that you should make the initial habit only take two minutes and give yourself some type of reward, even if it’s just a smile and pat on the back.

Breaking Bad (Habits)

One way to break a bad habit is to substitute a healthy tiny habit when prompted to do an unhealthy habit. Or to eradicate the prompt that leads up to that bad habit. The Apostle Paul talked about this in the letter to the Ephesians when he talks about how we should ”put off” the old way of doing things and ”put on” the new person and behaviors of a child of God. Paul said, “that you put off, concerning your former conduct, the old man which grows corrupt according to the deceitful lusts, and be renewed in the spirit of your mind, and that you put on the new man which was created according to God, in true righteousness and holiness.” Ephesians 4:22-24 (NKJV).

Meeting Deep Needs the Wrong Way

Practically speaking, if you are on too much social media, why not remove the app from your phone and read a good book instead. You can just have a good book handy and say I’m just going to read a couple of paragraphs instead of looking at these social media posts. Also, the author of Atomic Habits points out that the habit feedback loop consists of cues (or prompts), cravings, responses, and rewards. He rightly states that our cravings result from deep underlying needs that are tied to our biology, and in my view, our deep-down God-given spiritual needs for love, security, recognition, food, water, approval, the desire and means to physical reproduce, and so on. So you probably don’t want to use a bad habit of smoking a cigarette to meet your deep need for security or confidence because it can’t and won’t to meet those needs. All of our bad habits are doing something similar to us if you think about it. If I do bad habit ,X, to meet some deep need ,Y, then it may meet need ,Y, in the short term but have long-term bad consequences, Z. These bad habits are being influenced by what Paul calls ”deceitful lusts,” our cravings. Still, we can choose to respond with a different, more godly, and healthy action or habit.

From Identity and Habit to Destiny
Another way to change our habits and behavior is by changing our environment, including those we hang out with. Today, we invite people into the ”homes” of our minds that we wouldn’t consider inviting into our physical homes. How do we do this? Through social media, movies, videos, and other virtual means. These influences in our virtual, social environment can influence us for good or evil. Reading Psalm 1 this morning, I was reminded that we are blessed when we don’t walk with the ungodly, stand in the way of sinners, and sit in the seat of the scornful but delight in God and His word and meditate on His Word day and night. Making a consistent effort to change my thought patterns and environment into healthy ones is where all good behaviors and habits start. As the old adage says, ”Sow a thought, reap an action. Sow an action, reap a behavior. Sow a behavior, reap a habit. Sow a habit, reap a character. Sow a character, reap a destiny.” What’s your identity? What tiny habits can you design and do that coincide with your identity to lead to your destiny.

A white pastor just asked to speak to me about the George Floyd death and the protests that followed. It made me want to talk to my son about it. I ended up asking him what he thought about it. He said it was Ferguson all over again. I texted him, “Yep. Sad. I’m getting numb to it.” It was also sad to see this week a black TV reporter being arrested and others encouraging looters to be shot.

There are different ways to look at this. One from a social perspective. Another from a spiritual perspective. From a social perspective it just shows how the systems in America are set up to prejudge and condemn to death a black man. It shows that white superiority exists not just in the deep South or the upper echelons of government but it also exists in the so-called liberal, church-going Midwest.

I’m not going to comment right now about the riots. But I will say that one of the mechanisms we have to come at this socially is to peacefully protest. And the words of George Washington Carver who said, “I will never let a man ruin my life by making me hate him,” ring true today. Let us not ruin our communities through rioting, setting fires, and throwing rocks. Let us not let others’ hate ruin our hearts by answering with our own hate. Socially it is true that we need to use voting and election powers for systemic change. But this type of racism and white supremacy shows up not just in the police force but it shows up in the inferior school systems for black kids, the white majority institutions that make it hard and expensive for black kids to enter and to complete their majors, and sadly it shows up in one of its most hurtful forms in the church. This subtle and not-so-subtle hatred and superiority complex show up in the attitudes, actions, and words of some people who call themselves Christians.

Jesus experienced those who thought they were spiritually superior to him in the form of the Pharisees and the Sadducees and the religious leaders of that day. So much so that they saw fit and thought they were justified to kill Jesus on the cross. Jesus never deserved to be killed. And we know that this unjust killing originated from the upper levels of the evil spiritual and wicked forces of Satan. And the virus of sin still ravages the heart of man and woman to make him or her hate, kill, steal, and destroy, other men, women, and children. Jesus himself said that Satan has come to steal, kill and destroy. But Jesus came that we might have life and might have life abundantly, to the full. So before we condemn others who show outright hatred and murder, remember it was Jesus who said that if we hate someone in our heart we have committed murder in the heart. Jesus said to love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. It is when we can do this that we have overcome hatred and can move forward toward justice.