Why trying harder to grow in your faith doesn’t work. And what does.

Humans are complicated. We don’t even understand ourselves much of the time. We have hidden motives that push us toward acting a certain way. There are “tapes” that play in our heads from things we grew up with that provide a silent undercurrent, drawing us in a certain direction almost without our realizing it. 

I’ve been learning more about how what we think affects what we love and how we act. I listened to an excellent podcast where John Mark Comer was interviewed about spiritual disciples. He mentioned the same idea that what we think about affects what we love. You can listen to the whole podcast here.

We’re trying to grow in our faith and become more like Jesus. What we do is based on what we love. What we love is based on what we think about. Therefore, when we want to change our actions, we should back up and think about what we think about. 

One way that western Christians tend to look at spiritual growth is to simply try harder to do the things that Jesus taught. Try harder to be loving, to forgive, to be patient, to be generous. Does that work? Maybe for a little while, but it doesn’t bring lasting change. Willpower will only get us so far. That’s why New Year’s resolutions are so pointless, by the way. 

I believe that in order to really see lasting change in our lives, we need to go much deeper than trying to change the surface actions that we do. We need to look at the “why’s” of our actions and go down to the core beliefs that fuel those actions. If you’re not getting any hot water in your second floor faucet, the real problem isn’t usually the faucet - it’s probably in the basement with the water heater.

We frequently try to do this growth and change thing backwards. We look at our actions and try to change them. But our actions are just an outward expression of what’s inside. Jesus said that “the mouth speaks what the heart is full of” Luke 6:45. He also told the Pharisees to stop worrying about cleaning the outside of their cups when the inside was dirty.

"Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence.” Matthew 23:25

The Pharisees focused on outward behavior - did everyone eat what they were supposed to and not eat the bad stuff, or did they “not work” on the Sabbath as the 10 Commandments specified. They added rules to what was in the Bible just to make sure that no one came close to violating what was in there. All focused on external behavior. Do we do the same things? Is my dress appropriate? I can’t swear or smoke or yell at my kids in public. Are we on time to church and look all put together? 

We have it all backwards. The actions are just the end of the trail. If we really want to change our actions we need to back up. Way up. 

We generally do what we want to do. Yes, you may not have wanted to go to work this morning, or may not have wanted to shovel the driveway or mow the lawn, but you want a paycheck, you want to be able to drive out of your driveway and you don’t want your neighbors to shake their heads at you because your grass is 2 feet tall.

When you have free time, you do what you want. You watch on TV what you want, you play that game you want, or read that book you want. We yell at our kids because we’re angry and we want to yell. We flip off that slow driver because we’re frustrated and we want to. We swear at our spouse because we want to. We don’t want to read our Bible and pray, so we don’t. We don’t love going to church, so we don’t. 

Our desires and love fuel our actions. And our actions make up our life.

OK, so if we want to change our actions, we need to change what we desire and what we love. How do we do that? In John Mark Comer’s interview that I referenced earlier, he said that we need to “curate” our desires. I thought that was an interesting word to choose. The dictionary.com definition of curate is to “pull together, sift through, and select for presentation”. 

What are you thinking about right now? What were you thinking about before you started reading this blog post? Why were you thinking what you were thinking? Were you thinking about politics and the state of the world? If so, you were probably thinking about that because you read a news article or listened to a radio show or broadcast about it. Were you thinking about your grocery list? A recent fight with your spouse? The TV show you watched last night?

We think about things that we’ve been putting into our minds. In the Comer interview, when he suggests “curating” our desires, we do that by being selective about what we put into our minds. What do we watch on TV? What do we read? Where do we go when we surf our phones? What news articles do we read and how many of them do we read?

If we want to grow in our faith, we need to follow Paul’s command in Philippians 4:8: “Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable - if anything is excellent or praiseworthy - think about such things.”

What we think about will affect what we desire. What we desire will affect what we do. What we do makes up our lives. 

One way that we curate our desires is through spiritual practices or disciplines. More on that next week.

How will you “curate” your desires today? How will you change what you allow into your life in order to change what comes out?