Habit gets a bad rap these days. It’s an insult to call a person a “creature of habit,” suggesting that the one who lives life by rote, by a set of habitual activities, is almost beast-like, somehow sub-human.
Instead we prize novelty and spontaneity. The person who is truly living is the one who finds herself free to do as she pleases on a moment’s notice. She is not bound by convention nor even by her own customary way of acting. One Hollywood film after another suggests that the best way to live is to overturn the habits and patterns of years and head off freely into the great spontaneous unknown.
The problem with this low view of regular and habitual behavior is that it absolutely ruins any basis for the development of character, of what used to be called “virtue.” A good character is nothing more than regularly, habitually doing what is good and right.
When we place our trust in another person we do so because we’ve found that they habitually do the right thing or treat us well. If we find that what we thought was a pattern of kindness, generosity and patience might any moment be overturned and a person fly off in other directions, trust evaporates.
The Christian faith has traditionally placed three virtues or habits above all the rest, the triad of faith, hope and love which appears at the end of I Corinthians 13. We also find Paul commending the church at Thessalonica for exemplifying these virtues in verse 3 of our text for this Sunday, I Thessalonians 1:1-10.
For the next few weeks I plan to look at these three Christian virtues plus the four virtues Christians inherited from classical Greece, typically called the “cardinal” virtues: justice, prudence, temperance and courage. This coming Sunday we will focus on faith, which is the root of all the others and for which Paul most commends the Thessalonians.
For now it’s enough to say that faith is way of living, a habit of trusting God. It’s the regular practice of living in such a way that our actions are directed toward God. That’s very different from our usual understanding of faith as primarily belief. Faith certainly involves what you believe, but it only becomes the virtue of faith as you develop of habit of action which trusts in God.
May God give us grace to grow in all the virtues.