Many pastors can name people who have been part of the church for years, who love God and serve faithfully, and whose struggles look much the same as when they first arrived. The same quick temper in a meeting. The same worry that takes over whenever money is tight. The same way of pulling back when someone hurts them. They have heard sermons on each of these, agreed with them and sometimes asked for prayer. The patterns remain.
Patterns like these were usually formed over years, through countless repetitions, and they tend to continue until a different response is practiced in the same places where the old one lives. Scripture describes lasting change in very similar terms, and it places that change within God’s own work in His people.
Where Patterns Live
Most of what people do in a hard moment, they do without deciding to. The response was learned, often long ago, and it grew stronger each time it was repeated. By the time someone hears a sermon on patience, their impatience may have had decades of practice.
A church mostly meets its people at the level of belief: in teaching, worship and prayer. That is right and necessary. But the patterns themselves live somewhere else, in the kitchen, the car, the office and the text message sent too quickly. They are formed there, and it is in those everyday circumstances that God continues His transforming work.
What Paul Says About Direction
Paul had just told the believers in Rome that, because of Christ, they should “consider yourselves to be dead to the power of sin and alive to God through Christ Jesus” (Romans 6:11, NLT). Then he described the life they had left behind and the life they were now called to:
“…Previously, you let yourselves be slaves to impurity and lawlessness, which led ever deeper into sin. Now you must give yourselves to be slaves to righteous living so that you will become holy.”
Romans 6:19, NLT
Paul is writing about the life these believers knew before they came to Christ. But the principle in his words reaches the patterns that remain. The old life had a direction, and each time they gave themselves to it, it took them further. He calls them to give themselves just as deliberately in a new direction, toward righteous living, so that they would become holy.
That change rests on what God has already done in Christ, and it is God who makes His people holy. But Paul expects believers to take part, giving themselves to righteousness in the same ordinary places where they once gave themselves to something else. It is part of what he later calls being transformed by the renewing of the mind (Romans 12:2).
What This Means for a Church
If patterns are changed where they are practiced, people need more than the truth about them, important as that truth is. They need help bringing that truth into the specific places where an old pattern shows up in their own lives, and keeping at it long after a single good response.
Many find that hard to sustain alone. A pattern that took years to form often does not give way after a week of effort, and it is easy to conclude that nothing is changing. Believers who are working at the same thing alongside one another can encourage each other to keep going, notice progress the other might miss and pray with understanding.
Long-standing patterns do not have the final word on anyone. God is the one making His people holy, and He calls them to give themselves to that work, again and again, in the places where life actually happens.
The Next Question
Why do these patterns hold on so firmly, even after someone knows the truth and sincerely wants to change? Why Behavior Doesn’t Change Through Knowledge Alone answers that question, including Paul’s own honest description of the struggle.
Scripture quotations are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996, 2004, 2015 by Tyndale House Foundation. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved.
