Dial In with Jonny Ardavanis - Growing in Christ Through Godly Habits with Greg Gifford and Jonny Ardavanis

Episode Date: November 19, 2024

Join us as we explore biblical counseling, spiritual disciplines, and Christ-centered habit formation. From overcoming anxiety to building godly habits, we provide practical wisdom rooted in Scripture to help you grow in your faith journey.What You'll Find:Biblical counseling insights and techniquesSpiritual discipline practicesChristian habit formation strategiesBiblical perspectives on mental healthPractical applications of ScriptureExpert interviews with pastors and counselorsFaith-based personal developmentWhether you're a pastor, counselor, or someone seeking biblical guidance for personal growth, our content helps you apply God's Word to daily life challenges.Subscribe for practical biblical wisdom that transforms lives through the power of God's Word. "Watch over your heart with all diligence, for from it flow the springs of life." - Proverbs 4:23 Watch VideosVisit the Website Buy Consider the LiliesFollow on Instagram

Hey folks, my name is Johnny Artavanis and this is Dial-In. I want to thank you all for continuing to support Dial-In Ministries and sharing this content available here with your friends and family and church community. I've been so grateful to see how the Lord has continued to use these various episodes and even what we've started lately, if you haven't already signed up, are daily devotionals which are being sent out via email on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. These are three to five minute reads that prayerfully ground your day in the timeless truths of scripture. You can sign up for the daily devotional on our website, which is dialinministries.org. As always, it is

really helpful for us as a ministry if you would leave us a rating and review on either Spotify or Amazon, this just helps more people find out about what we're doing. And hopefully it just is content that they can consume that is biblical and yet digestible and applicable for their lives. Now in this episode, I sit down with Dr. Greg Gifford from the Masters University. I really appreciate Greg's ministry. He's written a book on the subject of habits. And that's what I asked him in this episode is about how do we form godly habits and how do we even break bad habits? I remember Pastor John MacArthur one time sharing with us that his life is governed by habits, meaning that what you see is just the overflow of the different

rhythms or habits that he's implemented into his life. And this is so true from a biblical perspective. We often call them maybe spiritual disciplines or whatever it may be, but what you do consistently becomes a habit and whatever your habits are often determine and dictate your life. And so the question is for us as a Christian is how do we break bad habits and form godly habits so that we can become more like Jesus Christ? Well, without further ado, let's dial in. Dr. Gifford, thanks so much for sitting down. Can you first maybe just introduce who you are, what you do for a living,

both here at the university from a biblical counseling perspective and so forth? Sure. Yeah. Thanks for having me. So first of all, I get to be here at the university as a professor, and that means that I teach in the School of Biblical Studies. So primarily I teach biblical counseling. And we're at the Masters University for people that- Of course we are. The one and only. Yes. So we're at Masters and I teach here. And then I also help serve at a local church called Faith Community Church, where I'm an associate pastor. Outside of that, like, it's all counseling stuff. You know, like, there's an organization we partner with called ACBC. I'll teach with them kind of a traveling faculty style. Okay.

And then do whatever I'm writing and other podcasts I can. If you've heard of Wretched Radio or Gospel Partners out in Atlanta, try to partner with them to write and produce content. Specifically around the realm of biblical counseling? Yep. It's like my life. I think it's a good thing. I like it. Fitness, apparently.

I enjoy working out. Come on. I enjoy working out the inner man most of all, Johnny. Okay, okay. It's of some value. Yeah, that's right. Okay, well, I want to talk to you about habits from like a biblical perspective. Our life is shaped in many ways by habits.

We're to watch over our heart with all diligence for from it flow the springs of life is Proverbs 4.23. And so much of watching our heart is having some sort of oversight into the habits that govern our life. I think a lot of people have habits that maybe they're even unaware of. I'm sure that people have things they do every single day that they would say, well, I don't know if it's a habit, but you maybe be able to qualify that. Maybe just talk to us, biblically speaking, about why habits are so important to even understand what they are. What are some dangerous habits that we should be aware of? And then I think just finally, how do we implement godly habits into our lives so that we can become more like Christ? Yeah. Okay. There's a lot there. Maybe just try to take one at a time. Yeah. Thanks, Greg. I think the importance is what often stirs the conversation.

And usually the importance starts whenever a person is like, something's blowing up in my life. I need to figure out my habits. And that is true. I mean, that's kind of counseling to a certain degree. You have had bad habits in certain areas, and that can produce counseling problems. So the habit of not going to church, it may seem benign to go camping every weekend, and then all of a sudden you're disconnected from your local church. But that habit actually has a very long-term consequence. There's great spiritual devastation that comes from not being at a local church. Same thing for Bible reading. I mean, I know we talk about engaging in the scripture, your quiet time.

Remove the Bible from your life habitually and just watch things begin to blow up in your life. So I think the importance is what starts the conversation most of the time, because we think something like, this can't continue to happen. Something's got to change, which leads to kind of the nature of what a habit actually is. So one of the things I try to say in my book, Heart and Habits, is that there are a couple of ways to define it. The first is usually what we mean, which is your

regular frequent practices. Think of the things that you can regularly do. Without thinking much. Yeah. Like with much, very little intentionality. Yeah. So like when you wake up in the morning, what's the first thing that you go do? You know, coffee, Bible, that you actually learn to do those things as a frequent practice. Or you learn to not do certain things as a frequent practice. But that regular frequent practice is usually what we're calling a habit. And so you often learn those things and you can learn those things. You mentioned this a second ago, unbeknownst to yourself. So you do that out of ignorance. I don't mean like you're unintellectual or something like that, but you just don't know you're doing that thing. You're cultivating a bad habit in the way.

Communication. Easy one. You talk over people. If I talk over people as a habit of my communication, I may not know I'm doing that, but that is a habit that has long-term consequences. Yeah. So habits are something that we do without much level of intentionality. It just kind of like, I don't have to like discipline myself to brush my teeth in the morning because it's a habit of my life. Right. Hopefully it is for you as well. It looks like it is. You talked about some of the dangers of maybe poor habits, a lack of commitment to the local church, a lack of commitment to scripture. Let's just say it's in the realm of just a spiritual life in general, spiritual disciplines. What would be the distinction in your mind between the semantical language that you're employing for a habit and maybe implementing godly habits and that of spiritual disciplines? Are those one and the same or distinct? No, I mean, I do think that you can use those interchangeably about the spiritual disciplines.

So if you want to say spiritual habits, I think semantically that's okay, because you can develop a way of thinking, renewing your mind as a spiritual discipline, but you do it out of a learned behavior in that way. So maybe just if I'm sitting here, I'm talking to you, what are your you're just counseling someone in general or you're walking with someone that wants to grow in their walk with the Lord? Just generally speaking, here are X amount of godly habits that you should start implementing them. Everyone knows, well, I want to read the Bible. You know, I want to be better at that. But maybe how do they even set up a habit because it's easier said than done. Like, oh, I need a habit of exercising. Knowing how we're

wired, how does one go about setting up godly, necessary, even physical habits? Sure. I mean, you have to, first of all, kind of see that a habit is a thing. You have to start to think about the habits that you're developing or not developing. You're going to see like science that starts to say 90 days and it's a habit 120 days, but it's all different to a certain degree. I don't think you worry too much about how long. One of the things I say in the book is focus on faithfulness to a task. And I find in counseling, if I say do this seven days a week, every day for a month, you won't do it. But if I say do it five days a week and you have two days to kind of have a mulligan, oh, yeah, that's much more attainable. By setting smaller goals, it often makes that habit more attainable.

So think the majority of your week when we're talking about Bible reading. So if you go for like this Bible reading plan on steroids, you know, like I'm reading the Bible in a month, it usually will fail. In all honesty, it will fail. But if you begin to say, you know what, I want to be faithful five days a week to my Bible reading. So I may miss a day here and there, but by and large, I'm in the scripture. Faithfulness over frequency. Faithfulness over frequency. A couple of other thoughts about structuring your life or habits. Environment really does shape some of the habits that you develop. Easy example, subscribe to a TV network package and have all of this and all this access to technological input that you really don't need.

But then you start to see yourself going the downward spiral of watching more TV than you would want to watch. You're streaming movies, you're streaming TV shows, whatever that looks like. How do you help restructure some of your life if you feel like you're wasting too much time? Yeah, I think you have to see. I have to pare down the package that I'm paying for, my streaming package, that's the word I'm looking for. I have to get rid of that so that I now free up time. So I go to bed on time and I wake up on time to be in the word the next morning. So think of structuring your environment so that it's conducive to godly habits in that way. Removing certain things, adding certain things, all as a

means of helping you engage in that spiritual discipline, spiritual habit. So let's say you're sitting down with someone that is really struggling with anxiety. Are you going to ask them questions to get to maybe some of the root causes about their habits or whether it's pornography or despair and melancholy? Are you trying to necessarily like, let's look at the underlying habits of your life to see what might be contributing to that? What type of questions are you asking me if I say, Hey, Greg, I'm really struggling with pornography. And obviously there's the issue itself, but are you going to ask what, how do you spend your evenings? How do you spend your mornings? What do you do when you have free time? Are you going to ask those types of questions?

So counseling uses the idea. We don't use the term as much, but we use the idea. It's called preconditioning. So a preconditioning problem. And what that means is the habits that you've developed that are contributing to the problem itself. So easy example, guys struggling with pornography. And then I'll say, do you have a smartphone? Yeah.

Yep. Do you use it as your alarm clock? Also, yes. So what you're telling me is you have a smartphone right next to your nightstand. And that habit you don't think is hurtful to you at all and trying to be pure right now. And so when you just start to unpack, you know, you could take pornography, you could take anxiety, you could take despair. And you say, well, hey, what's going through your mind when you struggle with anxiety? Is that what normally goes through your mind?

Is that what you normally think about? What are you getting at? Some of the habits of thought and the things that you allow to go on the replay reel. So you could take any of the presenting problems and counseling and say, yes, there are frequent practices you do that can contribute to this. And sometimes you do that unbeknownst to yourself. You're doing those things without awareness that that's hurting you. Yeah. Now, maybe just, Greg, finally, I think that there's sometimes this idea that if I'm going to do something that serving in the church, I think maybe this could be a fair example.

It should be something that I really want to do. You know, like if and if my heart's not there, then it's not something the Lord has put in front of me. Because maybe talk about how the habit of something facilitates the proper heart posture and how sometimes people inverse that and think, well, if God hasn't given me the desire to do it, it's not worth setting up the discipline to do it. Yes. And how the habit facilitates the desire. Yeah. I mean. One of the things I found interesting is when I was doing the research for the book, the English Puritans, excuse me, they used Philippians 2, 12, and 13

as a work out your salvation and God works in you. So you work out and God works in you through your spirit filled obedience to actually change what you want. We believe that about progressive sanctification, that God actually changes your desires. But how does he do that? He doesn't do that by you sitting on the couch. Proverbially speaking, he doesn't do that by you laying in a comatose state. God actually uses your obedience to begin to change what you want to do. So that stuckness, people often feel disingenuine to say, well, I'm kind of force feeding myself the Bible, but I need to read the Bible. That feels disingenuous.

But the reality is you're never going to change how you feel and what you want if you're not being faithful to do what God's calling you to do. Why? Because of the progressive nature of sanctification. God changes what you want by what you do. So that is one of the effects of habits. Your habits shape what you want. So what you do shapes what you want to do. And that isn't a sanctifying way, but that's also in a hardening way. You can be hardened from the Lord by having frequent practices that are just entrenched in sin, really. I think that's important, even what you said about the Bible, because I was talking to someone the other day, I'm in church, and they said they were

at a church where the pastor said, don't read the Bible just to read the Bible. Like, if you feel like you're disciplining yourself, you should want to love, it's a relationship. So no wife wants to go to the dinner with her husband that feels like he has to be there. And so they end up only reading the Bible when they feel like it. But you said, just again, to clarify, God shapes us, you said, by what we do. Sure. Say that again, how you do. Yeah. So think what you want to do is shaped by what you do. Yeah. So if you're saying, I'm only going to read the Bible when I want to, well, the reality is, what if you don't want to? Yeah. What if you never want to? How is God going to actually change you? He uses your word, uses his word, excuse me, to bring about those change in your desires.

That's so helpful. Great. Just finally, you've mentioned the book that you wrote, but just maybe talk about the book, mention the title again, and then where they can find it. Sure. So for those that are watching this, it's called Hardened Habits and the subtitle is How We Change for Good. Amazon is usually the easiest place to just go on Amazon, check it out, and you can have it prime next day. It's awesome. Well, yeah, thank you for all the work that you put into this needed subject and it has such a great ripple effect to so many different categories of our spiritual life. So thank you for your input on that and even for your time in this conversation. Yeah, thank you.