Episode #233 How to Stack Simple Habits to Connect with God Daily – Small Steps, Big Faith

Hey friends, it's Jen and welcome to Good God Talks. Today we're talking about developing simple spiritual habits and using something called habit stacking to help us connect with God daily.

The whole reason I'm here is to help you develop your habit of having uncommon conversations with God in everyday life moments. And so I've been thinking and talking with God a lot about this concept of habits. And how we can often discount our small choices or small habits as being too small to actually be significant.

But I invite you to consider how often in scripture we see God doing huge things from small means.

One of the first stories that comes to mind is the feeding of the 5, 000. When there were five loaves And two fish that fed a multitude. And actually that food fed more than 5,000 because it was 5,000 men not counting the women and the children who were also in attendance.

And that story is recorded for us in the gospels including in John 6. And I want to read for us verse 9 from the story. So the whole crowd has been gathered with Jesus and he's noticing that they are hungry, but they are too far away to actually get food. And so he turns to his disciples and he's like, Hey, how are we going to feed the people?
Then Andrew spoke up. And in verse nine, it says, he tells Jesus, “there is a young boy here with five barley loaves and two fish. But what good is that with this huge crowd?” (John 6:9 NLT)

Well, Jesus tells everyone to sit down. He takes the loaves and breaks them, and he gives thanks to God and he has his disciples distribute the food to the people. And if you're familiar with the story, you know, everyone had their fill as much as they wanted to eat and there were 12 baskets of leftovers available afterward.

But for us today, I'm really looking at that part of verse nine. “There's a boy here with five barley loaves and two fish, but what good is that with this huge crowd?”

What good is this small supply? What good is a small step? Or a small habit here? With all that is to be done? With all the ministry that's needed in the world? With all of the formation that I know you want to do in my life, God. What good is this small step?

It also makes me think of how Jesus called the twelve disciples. Twelve unschooled men to help make sure that his message reached the ends of the earth and the way that he prepared them for this life of ministry was he said, come and follow me and I will make you into fishers of men come and live daily life with me, watch me, talk with me, spend time with me, learn from me, I will show you and I will teach you.

And to Jesus, 12 men was not too small a number to be sent out to make disciples of all nations.

We often discount small choices or habits as being too small to be significant, but that's not the case at all.

And so our focus for today's episode is a little unique, because I wanted to share a few practical tips with you about building spiritual habits.

And one of the common problems I see in building habits like this is we can go too small with our goal, and we can go too large with our action steps.

By going too small with our goal, we can set a spiritual goal as being what we want to accomplish instead of the why. The activity itself often is not motivating enough for us to stick with it. What motivates us is the reason behind the activity. So we want to expand our goal to the why, the heart motivator behind it. And then we want to take our action steps and make them smaller.

A too big action step is actually many action steps that are rolled into one, but it's okay to take small steps. It's okay to take things one step at a time, because when we roll all of these action steps into one, often that leads to burnout and discouragement.

Here on Good God Talks, we're all about building life giving habits with God. And that's actually what you're doing right now by tuning in for this episode. We're talking about God together. We're looking at his word. And then we're bringing that into conversation with him.

We're taking an opportunity to engage with him in this moment in our everyday life, because a moment is not too small for God to do something big in your life.

One of the things I love to apply here is a practice called habit stacking. And I think I first learned this from the book Atomic Habits. I know it's something that's talked about by a lot of productivity experts, but the concept of habit stacking is taking an existing habit that you have in your day-to-day life and adding a new habit before, during, or after that.

It can be something as simple as I'm going to greet God in the morning before I scroll social media on my phone. Or I want to pray while I'm brushing my teeth.

If this idea of building simple spiritual habits is appealing to you and you want more help with that, I have a free resource that's available to help you with this. It's called 3 Minute Habit Hacks. I'll also put a link for that here in the show notes if you want to check it out.

But even in our episodes here, you're actually habit stacking already. You're going from a habit of listening to a podcast and adding to that a habit of talking with God about what you heard, that's habit stacking. And that can happen in any routine habit of your day-to-day life. As we build life with God, we get to engage with him along the way. Learning from him, watching him, talking with him, having him teach us and reveal things to us, just as he did with the disciples.

Your small, consistent acts of faith can make a big difference. And so here's a question I encourage you to take to God today.

God, what's one small way you want me to invite you into my daily routine?

I'm excited for what he wants to show you.

Have a good talk.

And if you've been encouraged by this content, please share it with a friend and help them grow in their conversational relationship with God too!

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