RR. We asked 1,000 people which habits they wish they could break.

Is there a habit you keep trying to break, or one you wish you could finally build? You’re in good company. 

When John Ortberg asked the Become New community about their habits, more than a thousand people responded. They named struggles with worry, anger, procrastination, screen time, negative self-talk, and much more. Some felt too ashamed even to say what their hardest habit was.

Into that struggle, Jesus says, “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.” But then he invites us to take on his yoke. How can a yoke, an instrument of work, lead to rest?

John explores the difference between exhausting yourself with willpower and learning a way of life from Jesus. Drawing on Dallas Willard and BJ Fogg’s Tiny Habits, he shows how motivation, ability, and prompts shape what we do. Sometimes a meaningful change begins with something as small as moving your phone out of the bedroom or putting away one book at the end of the day.

What’s one habit you’d like to change? Bring it to Jesus without shame, and consider one small step you could take today.

Scripture: Matthew 11:28–30; Mark 12:30

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0:00 The habits we want to change
1:27 You are not alone in this struggle
2:02 Jesus’ invitation to the weary
2:47 The easy yoke versus willpower
3:32 How habits make action easier
4:13 Motivation, ability, and prompts
6:31 Why some habits stick
7:42 Making an unwanted habit harder
8:39 Making a good habit easier
10:38 Choose one small change

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:00

I want to start by thanking all of you who responded when we asked what habits do you have that you want to break or that you want to form? It was amazing. Over a thousand responses came in, and they really helped me think about this topic. And I just want to say if you wrestle with habits, and I know you do, listen to what we all wrestle with. There's not many of these that I could not relate to. Problems around food or my body or using alcohol or misusing alcohol, uh, anger, anger management, being critical, self-talk, that's negative. Negativity was huge. Tons of us wrestle with that. Um, phone screen time, misusing technology, wasting time was huge. Um, eating or picking at my nails, complaining, judging was off the charts. We apparently are a very judgmental group. Lust, pornography, mindless activity, um, using language in inappropriate ways, not exercising, not caring for my body, not being patient enough with other people, procrastinating. I think there were over a hundred folks who talked about procrastination in one form or another, um, wasting time, not handling money while worrying, worrying, worrying. One comment was really poignant to me. One person said, I would be as embarrassed to say what my worst habit is, even in an anonymous survey. And I thought there's so much shame around this, and every one of us experiences this because we get enslaved by something as silly and trivial and mysterious and confusing as habit. So no one be encouraged. You are not alone. We are a mess. We here in the fellowship of the withered hand, I can't do it. We're just a mess. I wish we were all in a room together so we could hear everybody say, Me too, me too, me too. That's part of why we're looking at this stuff. Now it's precisely to people like us that Jesus comes. This is in Matthew the 11th chapter, I think, verse 28, and says, Come to me, all you who labor and you're heavy laden, you're burdened, you're troubled, you're tired, and I will give you rest. And then he says, Take my yoke on you and learn from me. For I'm gentle and humble in heart. You'll find rest for your soul, for my yoke is easy and my burden is light. Now, that's an odd paradoxical thing to say, if you're tired, I'll give you a yoke. A yoke is an instrument of labor. But he says his yoke is easy. So we're not called to be passive. He doesn't say just come here and lay down for the rest of your life. This is to be a very engaged life and yet not defeating, not burdensome, not oppressive to our souls. What is that about? Well, Dallas Willard says that the easy yoke is about learning from Jesus a way of life through which we can be at home with the Father, receive power from the Father. It's opposed to trying to grind my way through life by my own limited willpower. Try to do the right thing now, try to do the right thing now, try to do the right thing now. That's what's that's exhausting. That's the hard yoke. Laying burdens on people. You got to do this, and not giving them any help with how do you become become the kind of person who naturally does what is right, who naturally loves, who naturally speaks the truth. And what that's about is habit reformation. Because God has given us the gift of habit. And when something becomes habitual, then I do it with increasing ease. And it doesn't take a lot of thought or effort or willpower, and I become more effective in it. When somebody is habitually able to play baseball or play the piano, they do it with grace. They do it gracefully. Grace is a sign of habit transformation. But I know, I know, I know. As soon as I talk about habit formation, there'll be some of you, Nancy, I'm talking to you who say, not me. This sounds like the hard yoke again. The idea that I'm just supposed to be some person who is obsessed with this habit, this habit, and who's going to tell me what habits I have to do, and what if I don't like them and it's difficult and it feels mechanical and robotic. So let's talk for a moment about habit formation in Jesus' name with Jesus Way. And I actually want to use uh work by an author who wrote the book Tiny Habits. He's a Stanford design uh guy, BJ Fogg. And he says, when it comes to um cultivating habits or action, there's always three ingredients. Anytime you take action on something, it will involve uh these three elements motivation, ability, and prompt will come together. Motivation is I gotta want to do something. And um, the more you want to do something, the more likely it is that it will happen. I have a friend who loves to surf and who loves to ride horses and so does those things recreationally. Now, in the doing of them, in that practice, habitual strength is being built up so that it becomes more and more effortless and easy and graceful, but it doesn't feel like habit formation. Why? Because the motivation level is so high. Now, on the other hand, uh there's ability. Um, the more that my higher my motivation is, the more likely this behavior or action is to happen. The harder it is to do, the less likely it is to happen. So sometimes I'll hear things that sound like a great idea. My friend Rick is an amazing ability of uh investment expertise and financial management, just knows this stuff back and forth. My son-in-law Zach is amazing with technology. My friend Chuck can build and create and wee wire stuff that would kill me. I would be electrocuted, or somebody else would if I try to do it. I'll listen to him and think, man, I would love to master finances like that or technology like that or mechanics and electronics like that. However, um, for me, it would be so hard. So, motivation and ability, Frog says, are kind of like teammates. The higher your motivation is, the less ability you might have, and you'll still do it. The easier something is, the lower your motivation can be. And without prompts, nothing will happen. So here's a little diagram. I drew this out. Uh we might have something that is a little slicker for you to look at. But uh Fogg says that habit formation and really understanding our behavior is just this easy. You can put motivation on one axis, it can be really high, then I'm likely to do something, or really low, then I probably won't. And then on the other axis is ability. That is, some task could be really easy to do, then it's much more likely to happen, or it could be really hard to do, then it's much less likely to happen. And um, so if something is easy to do and my motivation is high, when the prompt for it comes, then that prompt is very likely to be successful, and I'll probably do it. On the other hand, if that task is really hard to do, and my motivation is really low, then it's probably not going to happen. So uh let's just look at two behaviors with this to make it concrete, and then you can be thinking about how you might want to change one thing, disrupt one bad habit, or begin to cultivate one good one. Uh Ibu Patel, in an article that I read not long ago, is the founder of the Interfaith Coalition in America, and he talked about how he's an early bird in his family when he gets up in the morning so often he just lays in bed and doom scrolls. Just, you know, picks up his phone and starts reading bad things. Now, when you think about doom scrolling, that didn't used to be a thing. Now it is. And a lot of people talked about that. You wake up in the morning, your phone is right there. How high is your motive motivation to just scroll through the phone? Well, it can be quite high. It's kind of addictive. How easy is it to do? It's super easy to do. So that prompt means that in many cases, even though it's not what I really value, it's what I end up doing. So what you might do there is disrupt your ability, make it harder to do. Just put the phone in the other stinking room. And then I got to get out of bed when the alarm goes off. And once I'm out of bed, I'm not gonna be doom scrolling in bed anymore. So something as simple as that can disrupt the habit and uh and and make it less likely that I'm gonna do what I don't want to do. And then on the other hand, there may be a habit I'd like to cultivate. So for me, for example, um, because I'm a P and I'm not a detailed person, not particularly into organization, my office can get real cluttered. I have always loved that old saying if a cluttered desk is the sign of a cluttered mind, what is an empty desk the sign of? However, there is something about walking into a clean, neat office with a clean desk that feels to me like chaos has been thrust back, and my motivation to do work, my sense of freedom is higher. So uh I'd like to have a cleaner desk. But what I what I have always found is that when it comes to having a clean office and a clean desk, um, my motivation for it sometimes is high, sometimes is lower, but it feels kind of difficult to do because it takes time. You have to ask, what's difficult? It's not, it doesn't take a high IQ to clean it out, it just takes time, and often I feel more hurried. So, what I want to do then is make it easier to do. And to start with what VJ Fogg calls tiny habits. And so the commitment that I made was I would just put one book away before I would leave my office at the end of the day. And part of what I'm discovering is I have been doing uh trying to build habits wrong for years and years and years in three ways, but I don't have time to tell you what those three ways are today, so I'll tell you that next time. I have been getting it wrong, and it actually can be a quite simple thing to begin to disrupt wrong habits or cultivate right habits in ways that can be quite powerful, and that's part of the easy yoke. So we'll get into what those three dynamics are, where have I been getting it wrong, and how do you begin to get it right? That's the easy yoke is to change at the level of habit and to take a look at any particular piece of action and to ask what's my motivation to do this, and then um how much ability does it take? How easy or hard is it? And then are the prompts right there where I can see them? So you might think now of what happened in your life that you'd like to um grow or like to disrupt, and how could you shift, either make it harder to do um or easier to do, or increase your motivation for it, or make the prompt more visible or more clear. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. Remember, love is habit forming.

SPEAKER_01 11:29

Changing our lives begins at the level of our habits. And I hope that you are encouraged today to just know that there is a big community of people out there that have habits that we wish could be reformed. And so you're not alone. Sometimes it can feel really lonely when we're facing down a habit and we're like, gosh, how do I change that? And I thought this was really helpful today to just think about maybe one habit you want to grow or you want to reform in your life. And maybe on a scale of one to ten, consider what's your motivation to change? Have you got a habit in mind? What's your motivation to change one to ten? How difficult is it to change that one to ten? And then lastly, what's the prompt that either cues your mind and body into that bad habit? Or what's a prompt you can build to cue your mind and your body into a new habit? I encourage you to spend some time thinking about this today. If become new, you can spend 10 minutes every weekday with Dr. John Orberg. He'll give you a helpful scripture to meditate on throughout the day. He'll give you a great perspective that's rooted in research and academic knowledge, but then he'll also give you a practice to take with you into your day, to try and put that into practice, what you learned each day as you're growing with Jesus every single day. Become new is a global community who are seeking to put Jesus in charge of their spiritual formation. You can be part of it just by tuning in. Find out more at become new.com to make sure you never miss an episode, just text the word new to the number 51504. I'm Tim, channel host. I'm glad you're here.