April 5, 2025 • 44 mins
You want your home to be a place of refuge from the world. You want it to be a vibrant space to fully live out your faith. So how do you accomplish that? On this Building Relationships with Dr. Gary Chapman, two entrepreneurs and dads talk about the small steps you and your family can take to build spiritual habits in your home. What are the six simple shifts you can make? Find out on Building Relationships with Gary Chapman.
Featured resource: BUILDING SPIRITUAL HABITS IN THE HOME: SMALL STEPS YOU CAN TAKE TODAY
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Episode Transcript
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S1 (00:00):
Atomic Habits meets Jesus today on building relationships with Doctor
Gary Chapman.
S2 (00:06):
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.
S3 (00:14):
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.
S1 (00:27):
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.
S4 (00:45):
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.
S5 (01:06):
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.
(01:27):
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.
S4 (01:36):
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
(01:57):
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.
(02:21):
Just go to Building relationships.
S5 (02:24):
Well, Chris and Clayton, welcome to Building Relationships.
S2 (02:28):
Thank you for having us. So excited to be here.
S5 (02:31):
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
(02:53):
two of you became friends. Uh, which one of you
wants to start, Chris? You or Clayton?
S3 (02:58):
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
(03:19):
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
(03:40):
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.
S5 (03:53):
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?
S2 (04:09):
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
(04:30):
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
(04:51):
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.
(05:11):
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.
S5 (05:31):
Yeah. So, Clayton, who's this book for?
S2 (05:35):
Yeah, it's for me and Chris. Right. Most people, I guess.
S6 (05:38):
Right? Yes, 100%.
S2 (05:40):
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
(06:01):
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
(06:24):
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.
S5 (06:35):
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?
S3 (06:47):
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
(07:08):
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
(07:33):
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.
S5 (07:42):
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.
S4 (07:51):
Our guests are Doctor Chris Pappalardo and Clayton Green. You
can find out more about them and our resource at
the website. Building relationships.
S5 (08:01):
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.
S2 (08:14):
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
(08:35):
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
(08:56):
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?
(09:20):
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.
S5 (09:42):
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.
S3 (09:50):
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.
S5 (10:09):
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?
S3 (10:24):
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
(10:45):
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
(11:08):
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
(11:29):
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
(11:50):
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.
S2 (12:01):
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
(12:23):
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
(12:46):
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.
S6 (12:54):
Yeah.
S5 (12:54):
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.
S3 (13:06):
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
(13:27):
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
(13:48):
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
(14:09):
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,
(14:30):
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.
S5 (14:49):
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.
S2 (14:59):
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.
(15:21):
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
(15:42):
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
(16:04):
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.
S5 (16:14):
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.
S2 (16:25):
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
(16:46):
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,
(17:09):
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
(17:31):
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
(17:53):
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
(18:14):
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.
S5 (18:24):
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.
S3 (18:42):
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
(19:05):
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
(19:27):
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?
S5 (19:46):
Yeah, absolutely. A lot depends on the age too, right?
S6 (19:50):
Yes.
S5 (19:51):
All right. Number four is, uh, simple steps we're talking about, uh,
is choosing your timing is important.
S2 (19:58):
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,
(20:19):
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
(20:40):
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?
S3 (20:56):
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,
(21:17):
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
(21:39):
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,
(22:00):
oh wait, the timing here just might be a little wonky.
That's keeping me from doing a thing I really want
to do.
S5 (22:05):
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.
S6 (22:15):
Right.
S3 (22:16):
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
(22:37):
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.
S6 (23:00):
And I think.
S3 (23:00):
Some people need to hear that.
S5 (23:02):
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.
S6 (23:17):
They could force.
S3 (23:18):
Themselves to do it. And then by 10:00 they would
have no idea what happened.
S6 (23:22):
Yeah.
S3 (23:23):
They had no idea what they read.
S6 (23:24):
Yeah.
S5 (23:25):
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.
S2 (23:47):
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.
(24:07):
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
(24:29):
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
(24:51):
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
(25:12):
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
(25:36):
with your kids. And in some ways, we think play
is has the spiritual component to it.
S3 (25:41):
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
(26:03):
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
(26:25):
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
(26:47):
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.
S1 (27:10):
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.
S5 (27:37):
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
(27:59):
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?
S2 (28:21):
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
(28:43):
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
(29:06):
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,
(29:28):
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
(29:52):
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
(30:14):
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.
S6 (30:22):
That's training. That's training.
S2 (30:25):
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.
S6 (30:34):
Yeah.
S5 (30:35):
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.
S3 (31:00):
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
(31:21):
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
(31:43):
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.
(32:04):
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.
(32:29):
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.
S6 (32:44):
Yeah.
S5 (32:45):
So where might a parent or two parents, where might
they find friends that would walk with them on some
of this?
S3 (32:53):
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
(33:14):
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.
S5 (33:32):
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?
S6 (33:48):
Oh, absolutely. Yeah, that'd be awesome.
S3 (33:49):
For a group.
S6 (33:50):
To go through.
S5 (33:51):
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
(34:13):
wife together. Uh, how might that work?
S2 (34:18):
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
(34:41):
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
(35:03):
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.
S5 (35:19):
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?
S3 (35:30):
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
(35:52):
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
(36:14):
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,
(36:36):
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,
(36:57):
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.
S6 (37:06):
Yeah.
S2 (37:07):
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
(37:28):
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
(37:48):
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
(38:09):
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.
(38:31):
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.
S5 (38:53):
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.
S2 (39:05):
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
(39:27):
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
(39:48):
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
(40:11):
corrected on as well. What were you going to say, Chris?
S3 (40:13):
I was going to say, I'm not sure I could
limit this to one.
S6 (40:17):
But, um. Yeah.
S3 (40:19):
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,
(40:45):
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.
(41:08):
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.
S6 (41:14):
Yeah.
S3 (41:15):
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.
S6 (41:36):
Yeah. Yeah.
S5 (41:37):
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
(41:58):
and will be used to help families.
S2 (42:01):
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,
(42:23):
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.
S3 (42:39):
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
(42:59):
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
(43:20):
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
(43:42):
case for all of our readers, too.
S5 (43:44):
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.
S3 (44:05):
Thank you Gary. It was a pleasure to be here.
S2 (44:07):
Thanks for having us.
S4 (44:08):
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.
S5 (44:22):
And next week, simple ways to make your marriage better.
S1 (44:26):
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.
Atomic Habits meets Jesus today on building relationships with Doctor
Gary Chapman.
S2 (00:06):
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.
S3 (00:14):
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.
S1 (00:27):
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.
S4 (00:45):
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.
S5 (01:06):
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.
(01:27):
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.
S4 (01:36):
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
(01:57):
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.
(02:21):
Just go to Building relationships.
S5 (02:24):
Well, Chris and Clayton, welcome to Building Relationships.
S2 (02:28):
Thank you for having us. So excited to be here.
S5 (02:31):
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
(02:53):
two of you became friends. Uh, which one of you
wants to start, Chris? You or Clayton?
S3 (02:58):
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
(03:19):
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
(03:40):
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.
S5 (03:53):
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?
S2 (04:09):
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
(04:30):
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
(04:51):
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.
(05:11):
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.
S5 (05:31):
Yeah. So, Clayton, who's this book for?
S2 (05:35):
Yeah, it's for me and Chris. Right. Most people, I guess.
S6 (05:38):
Right? Yes, 100%.
S2 (05:40):
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
(06:01):
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
(06:24):
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.
S5 (06:35):
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?
S3 (06:47):
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
(07:08):
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
(07:33):
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.
S5 (07:42):
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.
S4 (07:51):
Our guests are Doctor Chris Pappalardo and Clayton Green. You
can find out more about them and our resource at
the website. Building relationships.
S5 (08:01):
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.
S2 (08:14):
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
(08:35):
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
(08:56):
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?
(09:20):
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.
S5 (09:42):
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.
S3 (09:50):
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.
S5 (10:09):
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?
S3 (10:24):
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
(10:45):
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
(11:08):
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
(11:29):
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
(11:50):
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.
S2 (12:01):
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
(12:23):
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
(12:46):
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.
S6 (12:54):
Yeah.
S5 (12:54):
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.
S3 (13:06):
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
(13:27):
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
(13:48):
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
(14:09):
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,
(14:30):
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.
S5 (14:49):
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.
S2 (14:59):
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.
(15:21):
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
(15:42):
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
(16:04):
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.
S5 (16:14):
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.
S2 (16:25):
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
(16:46):
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,
(17:09):
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
(17:31):
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
(17:53):
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
(18:14):
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.
S5 (18:24):
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.
S3 (18:42):
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
(19:05):
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
(19:27):
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?
S5 (19:46):
Yeah, absolutely. A lot depends on the age too, right?
S6 (19:50):
Yes.
S5 (19:51):
All right. Number four is, uh, simple steps we're talking about, uh,
is choosing your timing is important.
S2 (19:58):
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,
(20:19):
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
(20:40):
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?
S3 (20:56):
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,
(21:17):
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
(21:39):
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,
(22:00):
oh wait, the timing here just might be a little wonky.
That's keeping me from doing a thing I really want
to do.
S5 (22:05):
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.
S6 (22:15):
Right.
S3 (22:16):
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
(22:37):
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.
S6 (23:00):
And I think.
S3 (23:00):
Some people need to hear that.
S5 (23:02):
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.
S6 (23:17):
They could force.
S3 (23:18):
Themselves to do it. And then by 10:00 they would
have no idea what happened.
S6 (23:22):
Yeah.
S3 (23:23):
They had no idea what they read.
S6 (23:24):
Yeah.
S5 (23:25):
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.
S2 (23:47):
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.
(24:07):
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
(24:29):
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
(24:51):
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
(25:12):
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
(25:36):
with your kids. And in some ways, we think play
is has the spiritual component to it.
S3 (25:41):
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
(26:03):
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
(26:25):
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
(26:47):
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.
S1 (27:10):
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.
S5 (27:37):
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
(27:59):
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?
S2 (28:21):
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
(28:43):
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
(29:06):
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,
(29:28):
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
(29:52):
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
(30:14):
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.
S6 (30:22):
That's training. That's training.
S2 (30:25):
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.
S6 (30:34):
Yeah.
S5 (30:35):
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.
S3 (31:00):
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
(31:21):
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
(31:43):
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.
(32:04):
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.
(32:29):
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.
S6 (32:44):
Yeah.
S5 (32:45):
So where might a parent or two parents, where might
they find friends that would walk with them on some
of this?
S3 (32:53):
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
(33:14):
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.
S5 (33:32):
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?
S6 (33:48):
Oh, absolutely. Yeah, that'd be awesome.
S3 (33:49):
For a group.
S6 (33:50):
To go through.
S5 (33:51):
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
(34:13):
wife together. Uh, how might that work?
S2 (34:18):
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
(34:41):
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
(35:03):
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.
S5 (35:19):
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?
S3 (35:30):
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
(35:52):
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
(36:14):
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,
(36:36):
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,
(36:57):
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.
S6 (37:06):
Yeah.
S2 (37:07):
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
(37:28):
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
(37:48):
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
(38:09):
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.
(38:31):
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.
S5 (38:53):
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.
S2 (39:05):
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
(39:27):
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
(39:48):
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
(40:11):
corrected on as well. What were you going to say, Chris?
S3 (40:13):
I was going to say, I'm not sure I could
limit this to one.
S6 (40:17):
But, um. Yeah.
S3 (40:19):
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,
(40:45):
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.
(41:08):
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.
S6 (41:14):
Yeah.
S3 (41:15):
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.
S6 (41:36):
Yeah. Yeah.
S5 (41:37):
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
(41:58):
and will be used to help families.
S2 (42:01):
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,
(42:23):
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.
S3 (42:39):
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
(42:59):
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
(43:20):
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
(43:42):
case for all of our readers, too.
S5 (43:44):
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.
S3 (44:05):
Thank you Gary. It was a pleasure to be here.
S2 (44:07):
Thanks for having us.
S4 (44:08):
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.
S5 (44:22):
And next week, simple ways to make your marriage better.
S1 (44:26):
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.
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