It surprises many people I talk to, but it’s true that the more you do something the more you like it.
Most of us assume that we keep things special by only doing them occasionally. There is a pleasure that comes from the occasional activity, but what we love we do. Our tastes are formed by what we put ‘in our mouth.’ I’ve told the story before of my colleague who gave up sugar, retraining her palate such that she no longer liked sugar, but carrots were wonderfully sweet. Our habits form us.
Which means we should think about habits carefully. If you want to love reading the Bible, read the Bible. You can train your loves by choosing discipline and we need to know this so that we persevere through the time when we don’t love something until we do.
This, framed the other way around, is why habitual sin is difficult to break: because we love it. We don’t want to, and the Spirit reframes our loves for us, but we’re trained by what we do. Our affections are more malleable than you might think.
This has lots of applications in the Christian life and in the Church. If you pray, you’ll grow to love prayer. If you stop going to church, you’ll stop wanting to. There are a thousand other examples.
Of course, there are a multiple of reasons that it’s not as simple as that to retrain our habits. There are also other reasons that we do or don’t love things, love isn’t only based on what we do, but it’s not less than that either.
The application I’d like to draw out is one that’s dear to my own heart, as regular readers will know: The Lord’s Supper.
I used to be in a church that celebrated the Lord’s Supper so irregularly that the pattern seemed to be ‘when we remembered that this is a thing Jesus said to do.’ Everyone was sort of bemused about why we did it but we’re obedient (sort of), so we do it.
The church I’m currently in celebrates the Lord’s Supper monthly, or there abouts. People do care about it, but not that much more.
I have a friend who has planted a church in Newcastle who celebrates the Lord’s Supper weekly, and has since the church began around his dining table. He would report that his people have grown in their love of Communion, even if they don’t entirely understand it. He told me the other day that people who are away for a Sunday for whatever reason, tell him on their returned that they missed taking bread and cup together.
This is as it should be. The early church celebrated the supper weekly (1 Corinthians 11), and extra-Biblical sources like the Didache explicitly tell Christians to celebrate the Supper weekly (IX.1ff).
Say you have a eucharismatic conviction like mine, but the people in your church find the Lord’s Supper a weird ritual because you don’t do anything else ritualistic and there would be opposition to doing so more frequently: what do you do?
Obviously, you teach on it, but what else? Perhaps you choose to use more elevated language when you speak about it, but I think if you want hearts to change with minds you need to change what we do as well as what we think. Try celebrating the Supper more frequently, as the climax to your meeting, give it time and I think the Lord will do his own work. Habit combined with the Holy Spirit is an unstoppable combination.
For the rest of us, who don’t get to influence these things in our churches? Remember that habit changes your loves and consider your life in this frame. Where do you want your love to increase and decrease? What can you do about it?
Change requires more than habits, but never less.
Photo by Drew Beamer on Unsplash
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