Habits: Control your Habits or Your Habits will Control You

[KiwiChristian]

This lesson is just as much for me as it is you.

 

I struggle. Boy, do i struggle.

 

Pray for me, please.

 

 

Habits: Control your Habits or Your Habits will Control You 

Bible Reading: Luke 4:16-30 

Aim: To see the power of habits in directing our future life. 

Introduction: One of the devil’s greatest tools to destroy us is to get us to tolerate, accept and form bad habits early in life. He knows that when a person forms a bad habit, it is very hard to break. 
‘His own iniquities shall take the wicked himself, and he shall be holden with the cords of his sins.’ (Proverbs 5:22). 
The world, peers and the devil tell us to try some sin once, so that we will form a wrong habit. 
Once we have done an action, it is easier to continue it again, until it becomes a regular habit. 
Definition of Habit: A settled tendency or practice that guides our behaviour. It is some action that we do regularly as our custom. It is our automatic reaction to a specific situation. 

I. Illustrations of the need to form good habits (Luke 4:16). 

Question: What is a habit? 

1) Have you ever seen men laying concrete footpaths in a street? They place boards across the wet concrete to prevent people from walking on it until it is thoroughly dry. They keep people off the footpath while it is soft, because if anyone steps on it, their footprints will harden into the footpath as it dries, and the imprint will always remain there. 
People’s minds are just like those cement footpaths when they are wet and soft. If you do something over and over again, you will make such a deep mark in your brains that when you get older you will not get the habit out. You keep on doing it, whether you want to or not. 
2) When you do a thing once, it is easier to do it again. Even cloth and paper finds it easier to do a thing a second time than the first. The sleeves of your dresses and coats fall into the same wrinkles and creases every time you put them on. That is what we call the ‘hang’ of a dress or coat. If you fold a piece of paper once, it quickly forms the habit of folding along the same crease again. 
It is very important for us to form good habits early in life, because first you make the habits, and then the habits make you. 
3) You have seen a little stream running between its banks and over its pebbly bed. Once there was no stream bed there, but many years ago, a little stream began to trickle through, and finally it wore out a bed for itself. Now it cannot leave the bed if it wishes to. This is what you do when you start a habit. You make a course which you will follow later in life. 
4) First you take the train, and then the train takes you. First the stream makes the bed, then the bed guides the stream. 
After we are thirty years of age we are little more than a bundle of habits. You are deciding now by the habits you make what sort of person you will be. If you want to be a good, honourable, strong person, then be sure you form good habits now. 

II. Bible characters who formed good habits 

1) Jesus (Luke 4:16). It was Jesus’ custom to go to the synagogue on the Sabbath day. Jesus’ mother and Joseph taught him by example to go to the Synagogue every Sabbath & feast day. 
Here the Scriptures were read and explained, and prayers were offered to God. 
This teaches us that it is our duty regularly to attend public worship of God. 
It is our duty to maintain public worship and to help others to do it. 
We must show by our example that we love it and we must encourage others to love it. 
Q: Do you have a habit of honouring God’s house and teaching others to honour and love it? 
2) Daniel. Daniel knelt and prayed three times a day ‘and gave thanks before his God, as he did aforetime’ (Daniel 6:10), even though the King had passed a law against such actions. 
3) The ‘House of Stephanas, that it is the firstfruits of Achaia, and that they have addicted themselves to the ministry of the saints.’ (I Corinthians 16:15). 

III. How and Where do we form bad habits? 

1) By mixing with ungodly people, you adopt their thinking. (Psalms 1:1). 
2) By taking cigarettes, alcohol, drugs. ‘I will not be brought under the power of any.’ I Cor 6:12 
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3) By watching bad things. ‘I will set no wicked thing before mine eyes’ (Psalms 101:3). Pornography addicts start by looking at pornography occasionally. Soon it controls them. 
4) By going to an ungodly school. ‘He that walketh with wise men shall be wise: but a companion of fools shall be destroyed.’ (Proverbs 13:20). 
5) By saying bad words. If you mix with people who swear, you will learn to swear. ‘Let no corrupt communication proceed out of your mouth, but that which is good to the use of edifying, that it may minister grace unto the hearers.’ (Ephesians 4:29). 
6) By mixing with angry people. ‘Make no friendship with an angry man . . . Lest thou learn his ways, and get a snare to thy soul.’ (Proverbs 22:24,25). 

IV. What bad habits can we form? 

1) Lying 
2) Anger, temper, rage 
3) Laziness 
4) Alcohol, drug addiction, cigarettes 
5) Late for church 
6) Rejecting Jesus Christ speaking to your mind 
7) Fornication 
8) Pornography 
9) False doctrines 
10) Not putting things away after using them 
11) Disrespect for parents 
12) Procrastination 
13) Accepting weak excuses for not serving God or doing right 
14) Eating too much food or junk food 
15) Complaining, having a critical spirit 
16) Easily offended 
17) Not reading the Bible or praying; putting off family devotions 
18) Worry 
19) Self justification 
20) Pessimism 
21) Hypocrisy 
22) Addiction to shopping 
23) Being unprepared, untidy or disorganized 
24) Selfishness 
25) Disobedient to parents or pastor 
26) Interrupting 
27) Swearing and cursing. 

V. What good habits should we form? See Answers book, page 1134 Daily dozen. 

VI. How can we form good habits? 

1) Know that bad habits will destroy our usefulness and productivity 
2) Bad habits may get passed on to our children 
3) Bad habits make people resent us 
4) Look to Jesus Christ to help us form good habits 
5) Ask God to give you good habits 
6) Start forming good habits as children early in life 
7) Memorize Scripture 
8) Ask your wife and parents what bad habits you have and how to fix them 
9) Look carefully at yourself and ask God to cleanse your heart from bad habits. 

Conclusion: What bad habits have you formed? How will you change them? By replacing them with good habits and asking Jesus Christ for victory over them. Do immediately what you are supposed to do. 
 

[frienduff thaylorde]

Kiwi we shall all be praying one for another.    I guess none have stopped by to say hi.    Hello kiwi.    Praise the LORD>