Part IV

The Practice: Living the Renewed Life

Chapter 13

Habits of the Renewed Mind

What the renewed life actually looks like on a Tuesday

So far in this book, we have spent a great deal of time on what the renewed mind is, and why it matters, and how the process of renewal actually works. We have walked the path. We have looked at the science. We have sat with the Scriptures. We have, I hope, begun to feel something opening up inside us that wasn’t there before.

But there is a question that has been quietly waiting in the corner of every chapter, and we owe it a proper answer before we go any further.

What does this look like on an ordinary Tuesday morning?

What, in other words, are the actual habits of a person whose mind is being renewed? Not the dramatic moments. Not the breakthroughs. Not the testimonies you tell at conferences. The small, daily, unspectacular practices that quietly shape a life in the direction of what God is doing.

Because here is what I have come to believe, after years of watching Christians try and try again to be different people. The renewed life is not built in the dramatic moments. It is built in the daily ones. It is built in what you do on a Tuesday morning when no-one is watching, when nothing exciting is happening, when the kitchen is messy and your inbox is full and you have to choose, one more time, to do the small thing that quietly shapes the rest of you.

This chapter is about those small things.

I am not going to give you a programme. This is not a checklist of eleven things you must do every morning before five-thirty or you have failed at the Christian life. I have spent enough time in church culture to know that there is a great deal of disappointment that sort of language leaves behind — people feel they have fallen short, that they can never quite keep up, that everyone else has cracked it while they keep failing — and I am not about to add to it. What I want to offer you instead are four habits that, in my experience, both biblically and practically, cluster around a renewed mind. Not as conditions. As companions.

You will not do all four perfectly every day. Neither do I. But the direction of your life, over months and years, will be quietly shaped by which of these you keep returning to.

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Habit one: Meditation on the Word

We have already spent an entire chapter on this, so I will not repeat what we said. But I will name it here, plainly, because it is the foundation. Of the four habits in this chapter, meditation on Scripture is the one that everything else rests on.

The renewed mind needs feeding.

It is as simple as that. You cannot think God’s thoughts if you are never listening to God. You cannot maintain a renewed inner life on a diet of news headlines, social media, and other people’s opinions. The Bible is not a religious obligation to be performed grimly before breakfast. It is food. Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God (Matthew 4:4). Jesus said this when He was hungry, after forty days in the wilderness, with the smell of bread practically conjured in front of His face. And He still ranked the Word higher.

The habit, in practice, is simple. A small amount, every day, taken slowly. One psalm, slowly. Three verses, repeated. A passage you keep coming back to all week. Hagah. You already know how to do this. You just have to do it.

The mistake most of us make is to confuse more with deeper. We think the goal is to get through more chapters, finish more reading plans, tick more boxes. The renewed mind does not, in my experience, come out of more. It comes out of deeper. One verse turned over for a week will do more to renew you than ten chapters read in a hurry.

Pick something small. Sit with it. Speak it out. Let it begin to live in you.

That is the first habit.

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Habit two: Journaling

The second habit I want to commend to you is one that took me an embarrassingly long time to embrace, because I had absorbed, somewhere along the way, the idea that journaling was a slightly precious activity carried out mostly by teenage girls and middle-aged women on yoga retreats. I was wrong about this, and I am happy to say so publicly.

Journaling is one of the most powerful tools the renewed mind has at its disposal.

Here is why. Most of us live in our heads at the speed of thought, which is to say, at a speed too fast to actually examine anything. The thoughts arrive, the moods follow, the day is shaped, and we never quite stop long enough to ask what just happened in there? The thoughts run the life. The life never gets to interview the thoughts.

Writing slows the mind down to a speed at which it can be observed.

When you put pen to paper — and I do mean pen and paper, although a screen will do if it has to — something quite different from thinking happens. You begin to see your own thoughts. You begin to notice the patterns. You begin to catch the lies as they go past, because writing forces them to slow down enough to be examined. Why does this same fear keep showing up? Why does that one comment from years ago still have so much power? What am I actually feeling underneath what I’m doing?

David, the most prolific journaller in the Bible — the Psalms are essentially his journal — did exactly this. He wrote his fear down. He wrote his anger down. He wrote his confusion down. And he wrote, on the same pages, the truth that he was speaking back to his soul. Why are you downcast, O my soul? He did not pretend to be more spiritual than he was. He wrote his way through it. And he ended up, three thousand years later, with the most-quoted prayer book in human history.

You do not have to write beautifully. Nobody is reading this. Five minutes a day. What is going on in me today? What am I feeling? What is God saying? What truth do I need to hold onto? The page is a quiet, patient counsellor. It will not interrupt you. It will not tell you to feel something other than what you feel. But it will, slowly, help you to see yourself with a clarity that the unexamined inner life can never quite manage.

Five minutes. A small notebook. Most days. That is the habit.

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Habit three: Daily Scripture in the bloodstream

The third habit is closely related to the first, but it deserves to be named on its own.

Scripture as part of the bloodstream of your day.

It is one thing to read the Bible for ten minutes in the morning. It is something quite different to have Scripture in you all day long — drawn on in the queue at the supermarket, whispered to yourself while you drive, returned to in the middle of a difficult meeting, recalled in the moments when your mind is under siege at three in the morning.

This is, in part, why memorising matters. We touched on it in Chapter 9. But it is worth saying again here, because most of us have given up on memorising Scripture, and we have given up much too easily. We tell ourselves we are no good at memorising. We tell ourselves it is something children do. We tell ourselves we will remember the gist of it. And then, in the moment we actually need a verse to fight with, we find that the gist is not enough. The voices speak in complete sentences. We need complete sentences to speak back.

You do not need to memorise a chapter. You probably won’t. But you can memorise a verse a week. Twelve in a quarter. Fifty in a year. By the end of a couple of years, you have a library inside you that will be there at three in the morning when you need it.

The other dimension of this is listening. We live in an age in which the Bible is more available, in more forms, than at any moment in human history. You can listen to it on the way to work. You can have it playing quietly in the kitchen. You can put a psalm on while you walk the dog. Most of us spend hours a day filling our minds with something. The renewed mind learns to take some of that time and fill it, deliberately, with what God has said.

I do not believe in a legalism about this. I am not telling you that you must listen to Scripture for ninety minutes a day or you have failed. I am saying that the renewed mind, almost by definition, keeps God’s voice close. You will work out what that looks like in your own life. But the habit is to keep returning. To keep the conversation going. To keep the Word in the bloodstream.

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Habit four: Gratitude

The last habit is the one I want to spend the most time on, because it is, in my experience, the most underrated of the four — and possibly the most powerful.

Gratitude.

The Bible commands it. Give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you (1 Thessalonians 5:18). Notice the language. In all circumstances. The will of God. It is one of the most direct statements in the New Testament about what God actually wants from us, day to day, and yet it is one of the least practised habits in modern Christian life.

I think there is a good reason for this. Gratitude does not feel powerful when you are in the middle of something difficult. It feels weak. It feels like denial. It feels like papering over reality. When you are anxious, or grieving, or worried about money, or angry at someone, sitting down to write three things you are grateful for can feel almost insulting to your own pain.

But here is what the modern psychological research has been quietly confirming for years now, and what believers have known for millennia.

Gratitude rewires the brain.

Studies in positive psychology — there have been many, and they are easy to find — have shown that the simple, regular practice of naming things you are thankful for produces measurable changes in mood, in sleep quality, in cardiovascular health, in resilience under stress, and in long-term life satisfaction. The brain, it turns out, has been designed in such a way that the act of gratitude activates one set of neural pathways while quieting another. The lie that says everything is going wrong cannot survive long in a mind that is regularly naming what is going right.

The Bible got there first. In every thing give thanks. Paul, writing those words, was not sitting in a comfortable office. He was, on various occasions, writing letters like these from prison. The man who wrote rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, rejoice (Philippians 4:4) was writing it from a Roman cell. He was not a man with nothing to complain about. He was a man who had learned to redirect his attention — and that redirection had become a habit so deeply embedded in him that even prison could not dislodge it.

The practice, in real life, is simple. Three things, every day, before you go to sleep, or first thing in the morning, or both. I am grateful for this. I am grateful for that. I am grateful for the third thing. Sometimes the things will be small. The coffee was good this morning. My daughter laughed at something I said. The traffic was lighter than yesterday. Sometimes the things will be large. My marriage is intact. I still have work. I am still here. It does not matter. The act is the work.

Gratitude is not denial. Gratitude is the deliberate decision to notice what the lie does not want you to see. The lie wants you to focus on the one thing that is not working. Gratitude widens the lens. The lie wants you to feel poor. Gratitude reminds you that you are, by almost any honest measure, richer than you have any reason to be.

Cultivate this habit. Cultivate it especially when you feel least like cultivating it.

That is the fourth habit.

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How these habits fit together

Notice what these four habits have in common.

They are small. None of them require a transformed Tuesday morning. None of them require a retreat to a monastery. None of them require you to be a different person than the one you are right now.

They are slow. They will not produce instant results. The fruit of these habits is the kind of fruit that grows underground for a long time before anyone can see it. You will not feel different on day four. You may feel different around month four.

They are cumulative. Each one quietly reinforces the others. The Word feeds the journaling. The journaling clarifies what to be grateful for. The gratitude makes the Word easier to receive. The Scripture in your bloodstream gives the journaling something to push back with. None of these habits stands alone, and none of them needs to. They are designed to work together, like instruments in a small ensemble.

And they are sustainable. They are not the sort of regime you will burn out of by Easter. They will, if you let them, become quietly woven into the texture of your life — the way brushing your teeth is woven into your morning. You will not feel virtuous for doing them. You will just do them. And over time, you will notice that you are not quite the same person you were five years ago.

That is what we are reaching for.

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A small word about failing at this

Before I close, one important thing.

You will fail at these habits.

You will start strong and tail off. You will skip three days and feel guilty. You will skip ten and feel like you’ve lost it altogether. You will compare your practice with someone else’s perfectly curated Instagram morning routine and feel like you are doing it all wrong. You will have a Tuesday morning, somewhere around February, when you stare at your unopened Bible and feel nothing whatsoever.

This is fine.

The renewed life is not built by the people who never fall off the path. It is built by the people who keep getting back on it. The Christian life is not a perfect attendance record. It is a direction. And the four habits I have named here are not laws — they are companions. If you miss them for a week, they will be there when you come back. If you miss them for a month, they will still be there. They are not Pharisaical demands. They are quiet invitations, day after day, into a way of living that quietly shapes who you become.

So start small. Pick one. Build it slowly. Add another when the first one is steady. Don’t try to install the whole thing at once. The renewed mind is built one ordinary Tuesday at a time.

And in time, the Tuesdays will add up to a life.

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Personal reflection

•       Of the four habits — meditation, journaling, Scripture in the bloodstream, gratitude — which is the most developed in your life right now? Which is the most neglected?

•       What is one small practice you could begin this week — not next month, not in the new year, but this week — that would start to anchor you?

•       When you fall off these habits, do you treat yourself with grace and get back on, or with shame and stay off?

•       Is there someone in your life you could invite to walk one of these habits with you? Habits sustained in community last longer than habits sustained alone.

Declaration

The renewed life is built in small daily acts. I will feed my mind on the Word. I will write my way through what I cannot yet think through. I will keep Scripture close all day. I will name what I am grateful for, even when I do not feel like it. And when I fall off, I will get back on — without shame, and without delay. Slowly, faithfully, I am being made new.