“The Habit of Having No Habits” is the title of today’s devotional.  I remember the first time I read this a couple of years back, how taken aback I was by it.  I had not realized how much I had made my habits, especially my spiritual ones, “little gods.”

Your god may be your little Christian habit–the habit of prayer or Bible reading at certain times of your day.  Watch how your Father will upset your schedule if you begin to worship your habit instead of what the habit symbolizes.  We say, “I can’t do that right now; this is my time alone with God.”  No, this is your time alone with your habit. . . Love means that there are no visible habits–that your habits are so immersed in the Lord that you practice them without realizing it. . . . If you are consciously aware of your own holiness, you place limitations on yourself from doing certain things that God is not restricting you from at all.  This means there is a missing quality that needs to be added to your life.  —Oswald Chambers

Make a habit of being flexible.

To summarize this–if my habit makes me feel pretty good about myself, (it doesn’t matter what the habit is, it can be not eating certain foods, exercising daily, spending X amount of time with God every day . . .) than that habit is about ME, not about God.  We become introverted and closed even to God and set limitations on our lives that would add sparkle if only we allowed ourselves flexibility.

The first time I read this I was in a Bible Study group with friends and we were covering a similar topic so you might say, it was driven home into my heart.  As hard as it was, I decided I needed to stop my “time alone with God” for a while and allow Him to come in at different times of the day in different ways.  I began than to “see” him more.  It could be in a song, in a word from someone I’d run into, an opportunity to serve someone else.  The possibilities for how He came in opened up my eyes and life to the idea that God wanted to add sparkle to my life all day, every day and sometimes in ways and experiences I once considered wrong, because I was doing it to “please god”–my habit.