A New Devotion - Old Habits Worth Breaking

Here's a new devotion that I wrote. It's based on the passage below. You can find a recording of this devotion at the bottom of the page.

Galatians 2:11-21 [Contemporary English Version]

When Peter came to Antioch, I told him face to face that he was wrong. He used to eat with Gentile followers of the Lord, until James sent some Jewish followers. Peter was afraid of the Jews and soon stopped eating with Gentiles. He and the others hid their true feelings so well that even Barnabas was fooled. But when I saw they were not really obeying the truth that is in the good news, I corrected Peter in front of everyone and said:

Peter, you are a Jew, but you live like a Gentile. So how can you force Gentiles to live like Jews?

We are Jews by birth and are not sinners like Gentiles. But we know that God accepts only those who have faith in Jesus Christ. No one can please God by simply obeying the Law. So we put our faith in Christ Jesus, and God accepted us because of our faith.

When we Jews started looking for a way to please God, we discovered that we are sinners too. Does this mean that Christ is the one who makes us sinners? No, it doesn't! But if I tear down something and then build it again, I prove that I was wrong at first. It was the Law itself that killed me and freed me from its power, so I could live for God.

I have been nailed to the cross with Christ. I have died, but Christ lives in me. And I now live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave his life for me. I don't turn my back on God's gift of undeserved grace. If we can be acceptable to God by obeying the Law, it was useless for Christ to die.

Old Habits Worth Breaking

For years, I was a fingernail-biter. I’m not proud of that fact, but that was just the way it was. Now, to tell the truth, I don’t understand why or even when it started; but for most of my life, I’ve bitten my fingernails. In fact, I’d bite them right down to the pink, with no white showing. Man, I’ve even nibbled at the skin around the nail; that’s how bad my habit was. And even though I knew it looked terrible when I did it and the results were actually personally uncomfortable, I couldn’t seem to break the habit, until about three years ago. And then, for some reason, I was able to stop. Of course, I’d like to say it was an answer to prayer or the result of some direct intervention of God, but I don’t think that’s what happened. Instead, I just decided that I wasn’t going to bite my fingernails anymore. And even though, every now and then, I fall off the wagon, I’ve done pretty well in breaking this old habit. As a matter of fact, for the last few years, I’ve done something I don’t think I’d done in decades; I actually used a nail file. You see, for me, this was an old habit worth breaking.

And you know, it’s interesting; I think that’s exactly what Paul was dealing with when he confronted Peter over his choice of dinner companions. You see, from Paul’s perspective, Peter fell into an old habit when James sent some Jewish followers to Antioch. Instead of eating with his Gentile brothers and sisters, Peter allowed some deep-seated fears and assumptions to separate himself from other believers, because Jews just weren’t supposed to eat with Gentiles, or so he thought. And that was why Paul confronted him; this was an old habit no longer appropriate in this new world, a reality in which our relationship with God is grounded in God and not who we are or what we’ve done. And for Paul, Peter had forgotten this when the visitors showed up and went back to his old ways; therefore, he confronted the one called “The Rock.”

And I’ll tell you, I think the same applies to us. Whether they involve the assumption that we can earn God’s favor by the words we say or the promises we make or that we can be justified in not showing love to our neighbors when we don’t think they deserve it, these ideas represent a reality that’s no longer valid, not after we accept that our ultimate destiny is about God, not us. And even though that may fly in the face of what we were taught when we were younger and that’s still promoted in our world, spiritually judging and condemning men and women based on standards that we’ve actually created ourselves, well, I think that’s a lot like me biting my fingernails. It’s an old habit worth breaking.