healthy habits – A blog by Adam W. Christman

You can become more like Jesus in your daily living.

I don’t mean you can become divine. Rather, I mean you can fulfill God’s empowering call from Romans 12:2, “Do not be conformed to this age, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may discern what is the good, pleasing, and perfect will of God.” But we don’t seek or need a directionless transformation. We need the best direction to head towards. God also said this in Romans 8:29a, “For those he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son…”

To look like Jesus in our actions, priorities, and choices, and to sound like Jesus in our words and tone of voice, is a tall order. He is perfect and we are not! BUT! Christians do experience change from the old self to the new creation (2 Corinthians 5:17). At the same time, Christians do not make good progress merely by accident or via passive accumulation of godly habits. No, our growth in godliness benefits and abounds as we purposefully and actively seek to become more like our Lord Jesus Christ.

Since our growth to become more Christlike requires our active and purposeful efforts, we utilize the spiritual disciplines.

The spiritual disciplines can be defined as “those behaviors that augment our spiritual growth and enable us to grow to spiritual maturity.”¹ I would also phrase them as following Jesus in the overall style of life he chose for himself. In the rest of this post, I will cover an introduction to the spiritual disciplines, arguing for what they are at a broad level and why we need them. The end of this post will feature a suggested bibliography for further reading on the subject. Future posts will cover specific practices in detail.

Humanity’s greatest problem has always been and continues to be a spiritual one. Sin entered the world through the choices of human beings. We perpetuate those choices, ourselves, at an early age. Sin’s infection shows itself through things like depression, addiction, anxiety, personal emptiness, consumerism, sex, violence, cultic obsession, and suicide, among other expressions.

We must take seriously the need for human transformation. We also need to realize and utilize realistic methods of human transformation.

Some think faith should make us different all by itself, as long as we don’t have to do anything to make it happen. It’s called the Fruit of the Spirit, so the Holy Spirit does all the work, right? Well, as with anything having to do with the lives of human beings, God chooses to work with you and through you. You ever watch Power Rangers? They have this little object called a Morpher. They hold it out after doing a little choreography, say a little something, and poof, they’re transformed into their Power Ranger gear and are ready to call down the Zords so they can save the day. God doesn’t work like that. Nor does he wave a magic wand over you like Cinderella’s fairy godmother. His hand is extended out to you. Take His hand, follow Him, and together you will change your life.

I want to take a brief moment to comment on the Kingdom of God. It is relevant to this issue. The Kingdom of God is an ongoing spiritual presence. If your faith is in Christ, you are already in the Kingdom of God. You are already forgiven (Eph. 4:32), redeemed (Eph. 1:7), born again (1 Pet. 1:23), as well as a part of the family of God (Eph. 1:5) and a citizen in the Kingdom of Heaven (Phil. 3:20), among other descriptions. God’s presence is with you! Jesus said in the Great Commission, Mt. 28:20, “I am with you always, to the end of the age.” Where God is, His Kingdom is. If He is with you, then He stands alongside you, ready to empower you and encourage you as you take at least one step every day in your faith journey.

Now that we know He is with us, we can talk about what His presence and power does for us. We must not take this gracious opportunity lightly or flippantly. Through the spiritual disciplines, you will meet with and dwell with the Triune God! That’s an amazing thing! Further, God designed human beings and how we are best to live. Jesus did it perfectly. He mastered it. Just as an apprentice worker benefits from spending time with a master craftsman, we strongly desire to spend time with Jesus to learn from Him. Spending time with Jesus changes things.

G.K. Chesterton was a writer in the 19^th-20^th centuries.² He once wrote, “Christianity has not so much been tried and found wanting, as it has been found difficult and left untried.” Even as difficult as Christianity is, we love Jesus. And because we love Jesus, we set our will to resolve to be like Him whom we love.

Jesus said many beautiful things, but I want to highlight one in particular at this point. In Matthew 11:29-30, He said, “Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, because I am lowly and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light” (emphasis added).

Isn’t it so interesting that Jesus invites us to learn from Him? We all take up a yoke or burden in life. For some of us, the yoke is parental expectations. For others, it is societal expectations. Maybe it is a career goal, or a life goal like living in a certain city, or a certain style of home. Maybe the yoke is to be “free,” but eventually we find our so-called “freedom” is a shackle to meaningless or mindless consumption of Netflix, sex, or drugs. We all take up a yoke or burden. Why not trade the difficult and heavy yokes of this world for the only one that is easy and light? Joyfully, Christians make that trade. We often mess up and try to pick up the old, heavy burden. But when we repent from sin, we let it drop to the ground again, choosing to continue down the path with our loving Lord.

Not only are you taking up a yoke in your life, one way or another, you will also learn from somebody, somewhere. If we have learned anything from the age of social media, we have learned how powerful and how easy it is for one person to influence another. A meme goes viral and suddenly middle school kids quote it ad infinitum. A young man who is really good at editing silly YouTube videos gets a new haircut and now you can’t walk through a store or mall without seeing it dozens of times. Or we see a middle-aged adult share a “life hack” or whatever that is supposed to be some health secret. (Remember the “raw water” trend that popped up for a few years around 2015-2019?) More serious examples include isolated individuals who watch social media for an incredibly unhealthy number of hours, weeks, months, or years, and decide to hurt themselves or others with some action (surgical, sociological, political, or violent) they have convinced themselves to take. My point is, you are going to learn from somebody anyway. And what you put your mind on, you become. Preachers often use the phrase, “You become what you behold,” and that is true.

Since you are going to learn from somebody anyway, why not learn from Jesus? Why not learn from the best human being in the history of humanity? The call to learn is right there in Matthew 11:29. He wants to teach you. Will you not learn from Him?

We can learn from Jesus by following Jesus in the overall style of life he chose for himself. He told us this in John 10:10, “I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.”

Let’s learn from Jesus. Let’s see what HE did so we can see what to emulate.

In the coming weeks, we will talk about individual spiritual disciplines as practices we can utilize to realistically participate in God’s plan for our transformation. The spiritual disciplines include reading the Bible and prayer, as you might expect, but they also include times of (healthy) solitude, living simply, living sacrificially, service to others, confession of sin, celebrating what God has done in your life and the lives of those around you, and worship.

“Ours is an undisciplined age. The old disciplines are breaking down . . . Above all the discipline of divine grace is derided as legalism or is entirely unknown to a generation that is largely illiterate in the Scriptures. We need the rugged strength of Christian character that can only come from discipline.”-V. Raymond Edman

This series of posts about the spiritual disciplines has concluded. Here are direct links to the rest of the posts:

For further reading:³

Richard Foster, Celebration of Discipline
Donald S. Whitney, Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian Life
Mason King, Spiritual Disciplines: How to Become a Healthy Christian
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship
Dallas Willard, The Spirit of the Disciplines: Understanding How God Changes Lives⁴

“What are the spiritual disciplines?” GotQuestions.org, https://www.gotquestions.org/spiritual-disciplines.html, accessed August 19, 2025. That website is a great resource. ↩︎
Best known for his book Orthodoxy, which is easily available online, Amazon Kindle, in paperback, etc. ↩︎
Notice I am not posting links. These are simple recommendations. I won’t be making money off of affiliate marketing with this post. Although if you’re reading this and are interested in asking me to review your book…….. 🙂 ↩︎
If you only have the budget or time to read one of these, pick Foster or Willard. ↩︎

Tag: healthy habits

An Introduction to Spiritual Disciplines