Atomic Habits meets Jesus today on building relationships with Doctor Gary Chapman.
So a spiritual habit is responding to God and paying attention to what he is doing, but doing it at his pace and in his his grace.
The goal isn't to really do some impressive spiritual stuff for a week, but to make this stuff ingrained in our lives. So we are people of prayer and people of the Bible.
Welcome to Building Relationships with Doctor Gary Chapman, author of the New York Times bestseller The Five Love Languages. Well, we want our homes to be places of refuge and a spiritual oasis, but many feel like they're failing at that endeavor. Enter our guest today who want to help you build spiritual habits in the home.
Two entrepreneurial dads will join us Chris Pappalardo and Clayton Green. They want to help you move beyond good intentions to actually practicing these habits. And as always, our host is Doctor Gary Chapman. Gary. My guess is you might have employed some of these habits in your own family, and you had no idea that you were doing that at the time.
Well, I wouldn't have called them habits at the time. You're right. It's just things that I did, I learned as I went. This is true of a lot of us, and that's why I think a book like this is going to be really helpful, because it's taking what other people have found to be helpful, bringing it, you know, to any anybody out there that's willing to read the book. So I think it's going to be a great aid to parents who want to do well, you know, in
raising their children. So this I'm looking forward to our conversation today.
Well, let me introduce our guest, doctor Chris Pappalardo is a pastor editor, writer at the Summit Church in Raleigh, Durham, North Carolina. In that area, he's an author and co-founder of Goodkind, the makers of Advent Blocks, an organization that helps people cultivate the good kind of habits and holiday celebrations. He's married to Jen and is the proud dad of Lottie and Teddy, and alongside him, Clayton Green is CEO
and co-founder of Goodkind. Clayton is also the Summit Collaborative director, where he supports more than 70 independent church plants. The Greens live in Durham, North Carolina with their two daughters, Cara and Susan. Our featured resource is the book Building Spiritual Habits in the Home small steps you can take today. Just go to Building relationships.
Well, Chris and Clayton, welcome to Building Relationships.
Thank you for having us. So excited to be here.
Nice to have a couple of North Carolinians on the program because as you know, that's where I live. So we don't often spoke to people from North Carolina on the program. So great to have you here. And we love the Summit Church and that ministry that you're both involved in. So let's start, uh, Chris and Clayton, uh, with, uh, talking about your families and your ministries and how the two of you became friends. Uh, which one of you wants to start, Chris? You or Clayton?
I'll take this one. Um, Clayton and I had met years ago while we were both at the Summit Church, but we didn't get to know each other until after he left. Went to be part of a church plant in Wilmington, and then came back about, I want to say, uh, eight years ago. And we immediately reconnected and hit it off because we were both trying to figure out how to do real ministry within our homes. Like, how do we translate this stuff that we're doing for work to
the little people that that walk around with us? And, um, it really went from good to great. One year when he reached out to me and said, hey, I've got an idea for an advent resource, and I think you'd be the perfect person to write it, which is what started what is now this partnership with Goodkind. And over and over again, him coming to me and saying, this is hard. I wish we could make it easier by doing X, Y, and Z and me saying, all right, I guess we're about to work on a new project.
Well that's great. I'm glad that God brought the two of you together. At the beginning of the program, we said this book is Atomic Habits Meets Jesus. For those who don't know about that book, why is it so important?
Yeah, that's a, um. It's a good question if you don't know what atomic habits is. James Clear wrote a book and it's it's become pretty popular, and it's helpful for people who want to be consistent with a new habit being a little bit more consistent. So it draws a lot on habit, science and how to be more consistent in your habits. And actually, we kind of make the joke that I'm the habits guy and Chris is the Jesus guy, but, um, it's not exactly like that. Um,
but genuinely, I've read a number of different habits. Science books, uh, switch is one by Chip and Dan Heath. Of course. There's atomic habits. There's the power of habit. I mean, there's a lot of these books, but every time I would be reading these books, Gary, I would I'd be actually applying it to my spiritual life to be more consistent with Bible reading or to to pray more often.
And so I was always applying it there and then what Chris was kind of jesting about there in terms of our relationship is I come to Chris and I'd say, hey, why? You know, the habit scientists say that, you know, reminding yourself is important for being consistent with a new habit. Is that in the Bible? And he'd say, well, actually. And what we found is what James explains in Atomic Habits. You know, God actually wired into our being. And we
see that in Scripture as well. So this book is a marriage of those things where we see the foundation of these things in Scripture, and we see a direct and practical application of it for what it means for our families today.
Yeah. So, Clayton, who's this book for?
Yeah, it's for me and Chris. Right. Most people, I guess.
Right? Yes, 100%.
Right, right, right. Books that they're trying to process and they're actually learning something themselves. So if I would just take that and extrapolate it out, I would say it was it's for any person, but probably a parent who is trying to create an alignment between what they say about their faith and how they actually live their faith. Because sometimes it's hard to actually get consistent in what you're doing on a day in and day out basis.
Back to that story that Chris was saying about advent. The reason we did that is because in 2018, my daughter Cara said to us, Mommy and Daddy, you say that Christmas is all about Jesus, but it feels like Christmas is all about presents. And so she was pointing out a lack of alignment, right? Eugene Peterson would call that congruence where what we were saying and what we were living was somehow mismatched for her. And and we've been trying to work to solve that in our lives.
And this book is the playbook of how we attack those problems.
Yeah. Yeah. Well, we talked about the fact that the habits there's a lot of books out there about habits, and then there's a lot of books out there on spiritual disciplines. So what makes this book different?
Well, part of what makes the book different is that it is a little bit of both. There's a good friend of ours. As we were getting into writing this book, who we said, hey, what's the best book you've read about developing spiritual habits? And the answer he gave was a book written by a non-Christian that had nothing to do with spirituality. But he felt like it's just the most practical thing in terms of helping me develop better habits. And all I do is apply it to Jesus's stuff.
And so we felt like it doesn't. You don't have to just take a really good book on spiritual disciplines and a really good book on habit formation, and then try to figure out how they get along. We said, wouldn't it be nice if these two went together, if we could have it be biblically deep? But also this is really important for us, really, really applicable and practical. So people could read it and say, oh, you know what? I could totally do that. I could do that today.
Yeah, I think folks are looking for that kind of doable things. So so I think in that case that book is going to meet a real need.
Our guests are Doctor Chris Pappalardo and Clayton Green. You can find out more about them and our resource at the website. Building relationships.
Okay, Clayton, define spiritual habits and tell us how you build them into your home. Give us some illustrations of how you get started with this.
Yeah, well, the the book opens with a chapter on, um, five things about God and what that means for our spiritual habits. And those are really, really important for us, defining what a spiritual habit is. Um, it's God starts his the relationship with us. He wants to know us. He's there, but we can't see him. He prefers to work slowly and he is gracious. So that's five things that I kind of rifle through there really, really quickly. But that first one ends up being a really big
and important thing for how we define spiritual habits. We say that a spiritual habits is us responding to a God who loves us and paying attention to what he is doing at his pace and in his grace. The short version of that is we respond and pay attention. So when we're praying, we're not initiating something there, right? God starts. God started the relationship with us. He created us. He is giving us his word. And so our spiritual habit is always going to be a response to a
conversation he has already started. The same thing is true of the Bible. The Bible is God's word to us, right? And so when we sit down to read it, we're not sitting down, initiating and trying to master some kind of new information. We're we're responding to a God who wants to know us and has revealed himself to us
in his word. So a spiritual habit, the way that we define it in the book, is responding to God and paying attention to what he is doing, but doing it at his pace and in his his grace.
Chris, why don't you walk us through the six small steps that you suggest in the book, and then we'll look at them individually.
Sure. Yeah. The six steps are number one. Make it easy. Number two, make it tangible. Number three, pick a place. Number four. Choose your timing. Number five. Make it playful. And then number six. Find your friends.
Okay. Let's go back to. Let's go back to number one. Spiritual habits should start easily. And not just easy, but ridiculously easy. You say, uh, what does that mean?
Yeah. We. The first of the six steps we list is make it easy. And again, the habit. Science books say this all the time, but we just felt like we had to start here and drill it home. Because in our practice and we think we are, a lot of people follow us on this. We get excited about doing some new spiritual habit, either by ourselves or with our family. I'm going to pray more. I'm going to
read the Bible more, and we set a goal. And it doesn't feel outlandish to us, but we do it for like two weeks, three weeks, and we burn out. And then what happens after that? We feel like failures. If you know, the motivation to like, start again is then colored with shame. Because I should have been doing this more. What's wrong with my heart spiritually that I don't want to pray? So we said, all right, we don't want people to just always be doing the bare minimum.
But here's the deal. If you start small, you can do that consistently. Whether you're talking about working out or drinking more water or praying. And the more you do this thing consistently, the more it will feel like you're winning and you're doing it right, and that will build momentum to continue doing it. So those small steps and making it like so absurdly easy, it's so easy that like, you're almost embarrassed to say that this is my new goal.
That's actually just right to build momentum, to make this a habit, which is what we want. The goal isn't to really do some impressive spiritual stuff for a week, but to make this stuff ingrained in our lives. So we are people of prayer and people of the Bible.
Yeah, yeah. And it has to be. It has to be something that is consistent with what Jesus says as well. Now Jesus says we have to take up our cross and follow him. But he also says that the yoke is easy. The the burden is light, right? So we want to take him at his word there. But his correction there is is against the the Pharisees and them
adding additional things to do. So it's not that we we think that that our spiritual lives, there are hard parts to it, but particularly if we think about our families, we don't want to be doing a spiritual habit, that it looks too hard or not appealing to our kids
because we actually want to bring them along in it. So. So making the starting point Easy is a way to invite a new believer, of which our children hopefully are all going to take that step at some point, and it provides an easy way for us to invite them in as well. So it's not just about us, it's about involving our families as well.
Yeah.
That's great. I think a lot of parents are saying, hmm, I like that. Let's start easy. So what about tangible, you say another one is to make it tangible.
We came around to this, like, very pragmatically. We made a thing I mentioned called Advent Blocks, which is this advent resource. That's not just stories, but there are blocks on the mantel where you turn each block as the days go along, and each reading builds on that. And we were stunned that it was having the physical thing in the room that made our kids want to do these stories every day leading up to Christmas. Um, and so when when we backed up to say, like, was
that an accident? We realized, no, that the tangible element was what made them care. And that's when we turn to Scripture to say, well, was there anything in the Bible about our faith being tangible? And it's wild to me that we hadn't asked that question before, because the moment we asked it, everything started to come alive. And you start to see, well, God, all throughout the Old Testament says, hey, build an altar here for me. Build
this temple here. And telling people to build all sorts of tangible things, and often saying when your sons and their their sons and generations to come look at this and say, what is this for? You're to tell them, this is where God met me and did such and such. So the the tangibility was meant to act as a reminder for God's people in the from the altars of the Old Testament through the Passover meal, which Jesus then
picked up. And at the Lord's Supper he didn't say, all right, guys, we've graduated now, and you don't need tangible reminders because this is the this is the varsity version. And they were JV. No, he said, this is still tangible. Like, I want you to keep eating this. Keep drinking this. Because the more you do this tangible thing, the more you'll be reminded of this spiritual reality.
So give us another example. You mentioned the advent blocks as a tangible thing. Give us another example of of something tangible in a habit that you suggest.
Well, I mean, the easiest one to throw out there would be your Bible. I mean, that's a very tangible thing, right? So we say that the tangible things you have, um, they should they should draw you in and they should help you do the, the habit itself. It's not that we're just saying that you that you put a piece of tape on the wall that says, remember, remember to pray though that could be something that could could help.
But putting your Bible beside the chair that you sit in in the evening after your kids go to sleep, or that you that you sit down in, um, after dinner putting your Bible there, that can be a reminder that you're ready to read. That's a that's a tangible reminder. Um, another one that we've that our families do is it's something called the cube. It's a 12 sided die that we put on our our dinner tables. There's one on mine, there's one on Chris's. Uh, and what happens is our
our kids pick it up and they roll it. And what they think they're doing is playing a little game with the dice, you know, a 12 sided die. But actually what they're doing is they're initiating a meaningful conversation where we're pointing them to God's presence in their life
and how to be grateful about that. And so those those tangible reminders, they're kind of like little spiritual speed bumps where they're like making us kind of pause, bringing our attention to what we were we're wanting to do in that moment.
Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Okay. Number three, in the small steps that we can take, you say is picking a place and how important that is.
Yeah, absolutely. Um, James, clear that atomic Habits book. He says that you we are often victims of our environment, but you can also be the architect of your environment. So that's what he says. But when we look in the Bible, we see that in the in the Old Testament where God was was very, very clear. Right? We could we could measure our distance from him. He was on a mountain. And that that told us something about him.
He was in the fire. He was in the temple, which there's fire that comes down and there's the Holy of Holies. All of these different things were instructional. They were telling God's people about where he was, who he was, and how to relate to him. Right. So the place that we're doing our spiritual habits, the places that we're living, our lives are doing. James Clear says we're a victim of those things. It's doing something to us. And so, Gary, we like to kind of joke like, what does what
does your environment, like, teach you about God? You know, what does it teach you about life? I would say my environment, I don't know about yours teaches me that I need to stop by target and pick up something, you know, because it's just it's right there. And so we think that we can be a little bit more intentional, probably more so in our homes than on the highway of actually pointing us towards God and being and thinking
about where we're doing our spiritual habits. So if you have kids that are doing homework or homeschool, I think it's probably a good idea to have them reading their Bible in a different location just because we want them to think of it, of it differently. Or if you're wanting to have a meaningful conversation with your family or people who come over, you probably don't want to be sitting in a room that has everybody's phones and TV around.
So the place ends up being important because it's it's the place is actually directing how we how we're experiencing the moment. I think we would all understand that reading your Bible in a library or reading your Bible on the side of a mountain is going to make you experience something different. And that's something beautiful, you know? And but we think we should pay attention to that in order to take advantage of it.
Yeah. So in the spring and summer, taking the children outside at the same place every time, every day for a while. Uh, would that be an example of that? It's a different place from what they would normally do.
Oh, absolutely. I mean, here's the deal. The last thing you would want to do is to find a place that your kids naturally tighten up and don't enjoy, and then attach something spiritually significant to that because they will have an association of, I don't like this. Even though they can't articulate it. Yeah. If you're if the weather is is nice and you'd be like, hey, let's go outside and have this conversation or let's go outside and
we'll do a brief lesson about whatever this is. I mean, how many times did Jesus offer his teaching in a church setting? A few times, right? He was in synagogue, but most of the time he was like, okay, guys, see these birds? See these flowers? You see that building over there? So, I mean, there's there's a lot of value to taking it outside if you can have if you're nimble enough to be able to recognize what God might be doing in that situation and how to make
it relevant for your kids. And if you're okay with them finding worms and saying, okay, I guess that's what we're doing now instead, because that's also fine. They're children, you know?
Yeah, absolutely. A lot depends on the age too, right?
Yes.
All right. Number four is, uh, simple steps we're talking about, uh, is choosing your timing is important.
Yeah, absolutely. It's important. Gary, I don't know about you, but every afternoon, around 2 or 3, I kind of want to take a take a nap or have another coffee. Um, you know, we we have these circadian rhythms. Daniel Pink in his his book, When The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing, he says, everybody has this peak of energy in the morning, a trough in the afternoon and a peak in the evening.
What I learned from Chris. Chris, I don't know if you want to speak to this as well, but I remember when Chris was writing the book and he wrote down, we didn't create the hours in the seconds, right? God only created the evening. He created evening and morning, evening and morning. We see that in in Genesis, in the creation story. So what we're saying here is the timing really,
really matters. And if you're, um, if you're having a tough time, uh, reading your Bible, one of the things you could consider is read your Bible at a different time of day. Chris, you have a story that goes along with that, right?
Yeah. I was meeting with a guy here in our church, this younger guy who was he was like, legitimately doing some soul searching because he felt like he was a bad Christian because he was struggling to read the Bible consistently. And we talked about the spiritual elements. It didn't seem like he was deconstructing or he had decided that, you know,
he didn't. He was having significant doubts. But then he mentioned that, like I asked when he was doing this and he said, well, you know, I just like I always did in college, I'll do this just before I go to bed. And the trouble he was having was that he would fall asleep while he was reading. And so I was like, hey, this may not be a spiritual problem at all. It might be that when you were 20, reading the Bible at 11:00 at night was fine because you were alert and wide awake, and now
you're 30, and that's harder. So don't do it just before bed and you won't fall asleep. And it was. I mean, we both laughed about it because it seemed so obvious after the fact. But sometimes we we tie ourselves up and not giving ourselves permission to recognize like, oh wait, the timing here just might be a little wonky. That's keeping me from doing a thing I really want to do.
Yeah, yeah. And then there are people who think you always have to have your time reading the Bible with God in the morning, but they're not morning people.
Right.
And pink even mentions that in in his book, he says that we each have this kind of U shape of energy to our day, where it starts high in the morning, it drops in the afternoon and bounces back up in the evening, but some people have a huge rally at the end of the day and other people have a huge rally in the morning, and it's nice to recognize that, to say like, well, if this is a significant habit for you, pick the time. You've got the energy. My wife, she's very disciplined, but she just
cannot do the, like, crack of dawn, anything. She'll get up. She's got to go to work. She's got to do her things. But you know, and she recognizes, like, look, I'm not a lazy person. I just don't like the first hour of the day, and that's okay.
And I think.
Some people need to hear that.
Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. Because they feel guilty if they get the idea that you have to start the day early in the morning with God, you know, consciously sitting down with God. And they're just they're not they're not alert enough to, to do that in the morning.
They could force.
Themselves to do it. And then by 10:00 they would have no idea what happened.
Yeah.
They had no idea what they read.
Yeah.
You're right. Well, Clayton, one of the chapters in the book on the steps that we take in building these spiritual habits with ourselves and our family, there's you've got a whole chapter on play, uh, you know, in your book. So describe what that means and how a family can make it happen in their home.
Yeah. Well, Chris is, uh, writing in the Advent blocks guide is just incredibly playful. And because we're including our kids played, it almost seems has to to be a part of what we're we're doing. Um, and it's actually not bad. We did some reading on this because it was so embedded in everything that we were we were doing. And what we discovered is that there's a lot of feeling for adults in North America. That probably comes from a very good thing, the Protestant Protestant work ethic, right?
Where it's like, I'm working, I'm doing good things. I'm even I'm doing good things for God. But Sometimes that can slip into the fact that work and seriousness is a direct reflection of our maturity. But Jesus says, let the little children come to me. Right. And the reason that he is giving that, that that analogy there is because he's talking about their humility and how they come into the kingdom. And he's he's putting that as an
example in front of us. What we think happens with play is there's a certain amount of humility that is necessary in order to play with someone. There's a certain amount of vulnerability and connection to someone before you start doing something really silly singing a song, dancing around the living room, playing a game, whatever it might be. And so when you do that, interestingly, after you've played that game or you sang that song, you actually increase your
connection to that person in vulnerability. You weren't thinking about yourself as much as you were thinking about them. And so there's actually these very beautiful spiritual things that are happening in that moment. Now, that doesn't mean that if you are playing a game that that is somehow inherently spiritual, but we actually think that it increases memory with our kids. It increases the appetite for them to engage with us. And so we think you should, at minimum, be playful
with your kids. And in some ways, we think play is has the spiritual component to it.
Kids ministries tend to intuitively get this, but I'm I was stunned that this isn't really a key feature in anything of what people generally write about spiritual disciplines, or much of what is written in the habit formation books. But we found that it's really pivotal. If kids think stuff is boring, you can force them to do it a number of times just by making it happen. But that's not the sort of thing they're going to latch
on to and want to come back to. And so we've just leaned into it to say, hey, you know, what would this look like if I were to try to translate this spiritual habit into the language and practice of a seven year old? What would make prayer possible for someone that age. What would make Bible reading possible for a seven year old? And then just starting that and inviting us as grown ups into that. This is true of so many kids resources. We found this with
Advent Blocks. We wrote it for the kids, but we were kind of like writing it over the shoulders of the parents. So many of the parents reached out to us to say, I never realized this about God, about his presence and his work in the world. And I think it's not an accident that that happened to them because they were reading something that was written for an elementary school kid that was light and like, silly at times.
And it was just the sort of like approach to something very important that opened their eyes for the first time.
This is the Building Relationships with Doctor Gary Chapman podcast. He's the author of the New York Times bestseller The Five Love Languages. You can take an easy assessment of your love language and see our featured resource today at five Love Languages comm. It's the book by our guests building spiritual habits in the home. Small steps you can take today. Just go to five Love languages. Com.
Okay, so let's say that a family is working through some of these things, trying to build these habits with their children as they are younger. But then the children get to be teenagers. And we all know that a lot of things begin to happen. The teenagers, the brain is changing and a lot of other things are going on. What if in a family you get pushback from your teenagers when you're trying to, you know, continue to build
these habits into their lives? Or maybe they feel like you're kind of forcing them into habits that they don't want now because they are tending to develop logical thought. And they may question some things that you have been teaching them. How does a parent deal with all of that?
Well, that's a that's a great question. We, um, neither one of us have teenagers yet. So this is, um, this is what we are actively beginning to think and prepare for. You know, when we think about habits, we like to think back to the verse, train up a child in the way he should go. And when he is old, he will not depart from it. Eugene Peterson points out the fact that that is saying training, not teaching. And I think that's when we talk about habits. We're
actually talking about training, not teaching. We're like showing the way. The example that we like to give, thinking about training is how many, you know, 5 to 7 year olds in the United States, do you think could go into a gas station and find a pack of Sour Patch Kids and pay for it if they had a credit card in their hand? I would say almost all of them could. Now, how many parents actually taught them how to do that? They actually taught. Here's what a credit
card is. Here's where you go. Here's where you swipe. This is where they keep the Sour Patch Kids. None of them. I've never I've never met anyone that has actually done that. But their kids know how to do it. So I think if that if you're experiencing that pushback, which even with our kids, we've experienced pushback on some
things that we tried to do with them. I think what we're doing most is we're we're modeling for them and embedding in the operating system of their life something that they are going to to take with them because they've seen us do it over and over. My mom had a recipe for pot roast from her grandma, who she got the recipe from, from her mom. And so all these generations had passed down this recipe, and my mom always would cut off a certain amount of the
pot roast before she would actually put it in. And at some point somebody asked her, why do you do that? And she said, well, that's because you have to. That's what you do. That's what the recipe says. Anyway, she ended up going to ask her grandma. She said, why do I cut off the end of this? And she said, oh, you don't have to cut off the end. My mother just had a pot that was so small, we always had to write.
That's training. That's training.
And I think that I think when we think about it, training over a long period of time, we're going to experience pushback. But I think that training is going to go with them.
Yeah.
Yeah. And I think that's really true with teenagers. Uh, a lot of lot of parents struggle in those teenage years because they do get pushback for the spiritual habits they've been trying to build in the lives of those children. Not always, but but sometimes that happens. Well, the sixth step that you deal with in the book, uh, is the step is to find your friends. Unpack that for us.
Yeah. I've always found anecdotally that the success or failure of any spiritual habit in my life really hinges on whether or not I do that with somebody else at the same time. Not everybody is going to have that as the linchpin for their spiritual disciplines. But it's night and day difference between deciding to read through the Bible in a year by myself, and then doing it as
I'm doing right now with my small group. There's just something about the way God wired us that we are relational beings and we know this, and yet we very quickly forget this when it comes to doing significant spiritual stuff. But God wants us to do this in community. And when we find our friends, or as we often like to say, like companions on a spiritual journey because they don't always have to be your best friend that you
click with. But when you find somebody else you can link arms with, it will make that experience of, say, reading the Bible. It'll make it more meaningful. It'll make it more likely to happen because they'll offer you accountability. It'll actually make it more fun because they're bringing elements to it that, uh, that you enjoy. And, and they'll show you things that you don't know. It's hard to overstate just how big a deal it is to do
all of this with other people. This is, um, a saying that if you if you want to go fast, go alone. But if you want to go far, go together. And that's like God is going to shape us over the course of God willing, decades. And if that's the case, then we have to do this in conjunction with other people rather than blitzing ahead at any one point, all by herself on one thing.
Yeah.
So where might a parent or two parents, where might they find friends that would walk with them on some of this?
Clayton and I have found each other for this, and I think the key is to not look for somebody else who's got it all together, but maybe look for somebody else who you can be honest with about where you're not all together. Because this is how it started with me and Clayton is us saying, man, I really want this to be the case. I'm having a hard time doing these devotions regularly with my kids. And then he said, me too. And then suddenly we were on
our way. And it's surprising how much that that candor of the struggle will put you in a spot where you can find somebody else who's willing to kind of walk along that with you.
Yeah. If there's a leader in a church who leads a small group listening to us today, uh, I think this book might be a good starting place for that leader to introduce to that small group. Does that make sense?
Oh, absolutely. Yeah, that'd be awesome.
For a group.
To go through.
So I'm assuming that parents really have to have a vision for this, uh, this this habit, spiritual habit building, if they're going to introduce it to their children. So are there advantages in the parent developing these, uh, habits? At least some of these habits, uh, apart from their children, just individually, in their own lives, or the husband and wife together. Uh, how might that work?
Yeah, I think that doing it at all as a family is is one way, I think. Doing it separately as an adult to then lead your kids would be really important as well. I mean, like I was saying before, there's a modeling aspect to this. This is not a do as I say, not as I do situation. It that's when you really will get the pushback is if you're creating expectations for habits that you're not also doing
in some some way yourself. But I also just the encouragement there for someone who might be listening that's that maybe doesn't have a robust kind of list of spiritual habits. Is that starting small and engaging with God over a long period of time? We know that God is going to do something in us, and so that's where we put our faith, not in our ability to be consistent or to do these things. But it's actually we put our faith in the God who is is going to
change us. And so also what we're trying to do is to get our kids to engage with that same God. And so we want to be leading them in it by by engaging ourselves.
I want to ask each of you this question, Chris. We'll start with you, but I want Clayton to answer it also. Uh, how has this book changed your own spiritual habits?
Yeah, that's a really good question. Um, I mean, at a certain level, you've got to feel this as well, Gary. Writing a book puts you in a spot where you really, really have to ask yourself, am I living this out? I'm about to tell a bunch of people that this is the way, and I've got the code cracked, and they need to go and change all these things in their lives. Um, I don't want to be the sort
of person who's dishing out advice that I'm not taking. Fortunately, there was very little as we were writing where we found that incongruence. But one of the biggest in terms of my spiritual habits is just recognizing how important a tangible item is to kickstarting a spiritual habit. And so we've been trying to pray more with our kids. And it's an uphill battle right now. Not because they're resistant
to it, they actually are quite open to it. But it's hard to find the time where it seems natural and it's not awkwardly jammed in there. So we're trying to come up with some sort of physical thing that sparks the question, so that even if just for 30s, we can sit with them and say, let's, let's thank God for something today, or where do you need God's help? We're fussing around with things and may not have found the perfect physical object. We've got kind of a fidget
right now with some blocks that spin. It may not be the winner, but I think for the rest of my life I'm going to carry that with me to say, all right, I want to start a new spiritual habit, or I want to invite someone else into this spiritual habit. First thing I'm going to do is say we need something that you can hold. If this is going to take.
Yeah.
Um, Gary, I would say for me, it is that I probably set the expectations for starting a new spiritual habit lower. So I'm more okay with saying, you know, I'm going to pray for three minutes this morning rather than setting the expectation of 15 minutes. Not because I don't want to pray for 15 minutes, but because I want to be consistent. Because the more consistent I am, the the more engaged, uh, overall, spiritually I am. And I also think that I'm probably more gracious with myself.
You know, Chris mentioned earlier, kind of feeling guilty for not doing things the way that you intended to do, not reading the Bible as much as you thought that you would read. It's actually by removing some of that pressure, that guilt that actually keeps me engaged. I'm way more likely to come back because I know, hey, this is hard. I'm I'm I'm trying to get better at these things.
If I if I get off of my rhythm, I can pretty easily get back into my rhythm without any guilt, because I know that God is gracious and invites us back in, into reengaging with him and and even more so, you know, I'm applying that as the seasons of my life change. Like, I recognize that when my my kids are, you know, three and five, there's a certain amount of time of day, there's a certain amount of thing that I can do because they're engaged in my life in
a certain way. When they're 12 and ten, things have changed. You know, at five and three, I wasn't thinking of coaching their soccer and how my car ride with them was, was pertaining to their spiritual habits and, and the conversations that we would have. But now I do. And that applies to a lot of things in our life. Gracious to ourselves and lowering the bar for for the barrier for entry so that we can actually remain engaged more often.
Is there a time for either of you in which you made a real course correction in your own spiritual life? Uh, that would be helpful for our listeners to hear.
The advent block story is a huge course correction for for me, right where where my daughter Cara said it. You say that Christmas is all about Jesus and it feels like Christmas is all about presents. I mean, that's probably the biggest course correction that I can, I can think about. I also think about something that Chris and I have done together, like in terms of, in terms of fasting. Um, we both wanted to we picked the
day of the week. We were not doing it currently, but but last year there was a couple of months in a row where one day a week we would both fast and, um, we had these tangible reminders like Chris talked about, like these chips that we would carry around with us, um, that we would write our prayer for the day on. And for the first couple of weeks, I would forget that reminder. And sometimes, you know, I would be unsuccessful in kind of going through the through
the whole day. So it's actually the location of those chips that would remind me, hey, by the way, it's Thursday. This is what you're doing with Chris. I was blaming myself for not being consistent when actually I just needed to move my reminder so that I actually continued to remember and put a calendar invite over my lunch, you know? So those types of things, um, I've kind of course corrected on as well. What were you going to say, Chris?
I was going to say, I'm not sure I could limit this to one.
But, um. Yeah.
Here's a recurring one in my life. I labor under the the view that if something is good spiritually now, then it should be good spiritually every day for the rest of my life. So I've had to learn a lot that spiritual habits can shift as your season of
life shifts. And that doesn't mean that you've abandoned the faith. Now, I'm not saying you stop praying or stop reading the Bible, but the way you do that, the time of day, like the method of engaging, you know, there's a time when I was in seminary where part of my quiet time every day was reading a few verses in Greek and translating them because I thought, this is I want to flex this muscle. I want to really get to know the original language. And I'm not doing that now.
And there's there's a piece of me that says, well, if you're real Christian, you would keep doing that, that very fruitful thing.
Yeah.
And I think it just needed to see the freedom that there are a dozen beautiful things I could do to get to know God better and be in his presence. And I'm not going to be doing all 12 of those things every day for the rest of my life. And that's okay. I that's a that's a big course correction I find myself having to make over and over and over again.
Yeah. Yeah.
As we come to the end of our time together, uh, Clayton, let me ask you first, and then Chris, I'd like your answer as well. How do you how do you visualize in your mind? How do you hope this book is going to change? A family who begins to try to put some of these habits into practice? What is your vision of what how this book could be used and will be used to help families.
Yeah, I would love for this to be a book that becomes a strategy for starting new spiritual habits throughout the rest of a family's kind of time together. And if a family's life lifetime. Um, I hope that it. The six small steps are things that are regularly being tweaked in order to increase the consistency of a spiritual habit. Uh, and that when new season comes and a new spiritual habit is needed, that this can be a tool that someone could use to start onto a new journey of
a new spiritual habit. I hope it's a tool that can be used over and over and over again.
My hope, in addition to this being very practical, like Clayton was saying, my hope is that people will will really take to heart what we mentioned in the book about the disposition of God towards us, and that that will change how they approach their spiritual habits. Because I think a lot of us, If we imagine Jesus showing up in our living room and us handing him a report of how we've done with our spiritual habits, we expect him to kind of shake his head and say, man,
I expected better. When, as I read the Gospels, what I see is Jesus who invites us in and says, are you weary? Are you tired? I've got a better life for you. Come to me. I want to spend time with you. And if we could, if people really do take to heart that God, even in our failures, wants to draw near to us and wants us to draw near to him, I think that would be revolutionary
for the way that we approach our spiritual habits. It's it's I know that's been the case for me in Clayton, and I really am praying that that will be the case for all of our readers, too.
Yeah, well, that would certainly be my prayer. I want to thank each of you, Chris and Clayton, for the time you invested in practicing this and then putting it in book form. And I want to also thank you for being with us today on building relationships, because I think our listeners will find this book to be extremely helpful as well. So thanks again for being with us today.
Thank you Gary. It was a pleasure to be here.
Thanks for having us.
Once again, the title of our featured resource is Building Spiritual Habits in the Home small steps you can take today. Just go to Building Relationships to find out more. Again building relationships.
And next week, simple ways to make your marriage better.
Here quick practical insights for every marriage in one week. Our thanks to Janice backing and Steve Wick for their production work on today's program. Building relationships with Doctor Gary Chapman is a production of Moody Radio in association with Moody Publishers, a ministry of Moody Bible Institute. Thanks for listening.