You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit

If you worship money and things—if they are where you tap real meaning in life—then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you.

And you might not love what you think. Which raises an important question. Let’s dare to ask it.

Apocalyptic literature invites us to lean over and get a new perspective that lets us see through the blinders to the monsters behind the screen.

Granted, I think many renditions of Christian worship—reflecting what we might call “refueling” models—are subject to the same disappointments and frustrations.

Christian worship is the feast where we acquire new hungers—for God and for what God desires—and are then sent into his creation to act accordingly.

Apocalyptic literature invites us to lean over and get a new perspective that lets us see through the blinders to the monsters behind the screen.

Our desires are caught more than they are taught.

the Reformers saw the liturgy as God’s action and our faithful reception of that action. The governing idea of the Reformed liturgy is thus twofold: the conviction that to participate in the liturgy is to enter the sphere of God’s acting, not just of God’s presence, plus the conviction that we are to appropriate God’s action in faith and gratitude

Has all of your new knowledge and information and thinking liberated you from those habits? As anyone who has ever attended a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous well knows, “Your best thinking got you here.”2

since our hearts are made to find their end in God, we will experience a besetting anxiety and restlessness when we try to love substitutes.