"Death Match": Grace, Vigorous and Violent (Col 3:5-10)

“To The Death”: Grace, Vigorous and Violent

(Col 3:5) [1]

MP3

I Made a video montage of Classic Death Matches (MTV – celebrity death match, PBS – robot death match– that bad ping pong movie – Princess bride “to the death…I accept” – Golumn and Bilbo riddle contest - “Are You not entertained?”  Hunger Games – BLR?  “yay, a goat” – thunder dome)

We love a good death match. There is something about the ultimate stakes contest that captures our imagination.  There is something about the desperation and sanctioned ruthlessness.  We allow a noble protagonist to exert ruthless violence without moral compromise because his or her life is on the line.  The stakes capture our imaginations.

Actual death matches were part of Paul’s cultural world….

But ruthlessness is not in the Christian vocabulary.[2]  We have a command of cheek turning and a tradition of martyrdom.  For us, ruthlessness, a win at all cost battle to eviscerate an opponent…giving them not the slightest opening and pressing every advantage until they are beaten and lifeless and pose no threat…it is a non-sequitur…with one exception.  The Scriptures use the metaphor of ruthless hand to hand, mortal combat to talk about dealing with one enemy…our sin. 

When it comes to people…we are to “love mercy”

But when it comes to our self destructive and self centered tendencies…stuff the Scriptures calls sin, Paul calls for violent tenacity.[3]  The scriptures call us to have mercy on all…except for the pernicious aspects of our selves that rebel against God…to those he says, give them no quarter…take no prisoners…press every advantage and land every blow will lethal force until it is lying lifeless, and then keep at it, just to make sure.  He says:

5 Put to death therefore what is earthly in you: sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry. 6 On account of these the wrath of God is coming. 7 In these you too once walked, when you were living in them. 8 But now you must put them all away: anger, wrath, malice, slander, and obscene talk from your mouth. 9 Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have put off the old self with its practices 10 and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator.

Paul says that in this great project, that he describes in this very passage with the metaphor we have used throughout this passage…renewing the image of God in you…just as your greatest ally, the Holy Spirit, resides in the bounds of your borrowed molecules, so does your greatest enemy…your dark nature.

In this part of the passage and series, we move the front of the battle from motivation to method…and ‘battle’ is exactly the right metaphor…because Paul’s metaphor gets violent and ruthless.  He says, now that those things that seek to destroy you have been disarmed…”put them to death.”

THE classic Christian extra biblical text on change was written about 300 years ago by a man named John Owne…and he based his book on this verse and a few others like it a work I’m going to lean on him from time to time in this talk. He gave it an old timy title “Mortification of the Flesh” but essential argues the same thing.  You are in a death match…he says:

“Be killing sin or it will be killing you.” 9 –

And while your spiritual destiny and how much God loves you is NOT at stake…it is a battle with extremely high stakes…your joy and spiritual vitality is on the line.

“The vigor, and power, and comfort of our spiritual life depends on the mortification of the deeds of the flesh.” 7

And you know why…because sin will pass on no opportunity to steal your joy and sideline you in the process of image recovery…the enemy is disarmed but relentless…Paul says, don’t be naieve….you are in a death match.  Or Owen says:

“the contest is vigorous and hazardous.” 45

That idea has captured my imagination recently.  The process of ‘putting off’ which is a critical portion of image restoration…it is a sort of vigorous and violent grace.  There is an aspect of image recovery that generations of Christians, including Paul and Owen, have described as a sort of ‘sanctification street fight.’  And we should not be fooled into thinking that it is anything less.

But after starting with this evocative metaphor, of a death match with our sin, Paul settles into two lists.  He lays out a taxonomy of sin that we could roughly characterize as departures from the image of God that revolve around purity and relationship.  The first list is sins of self harm…and the second sins of relational harm.

But then Paul kind of gets down to it…

put off the old self with its practices 10 and have put on the new self,

Your character is the sum total of your habits…”putting off” the old self…is a process of putting off concrete “practices”. 

He is using the language of habit.  Putting on and putting off happen in the realm of habit formation and destabilization.  And Owen, in the greatest extra-biblical work of all time on this passage…on how to ‘put to death” also puts our first duty in the language of habit.

“Now the first thing in mortification is the weakling of this habit of sin or lust.”

Lust is strengthened by temptation.  It gives it a new life, vigor, power, violence or rage…the first thing in moritifacaion is the weakening of the habit”

And this comes into line with what social scientists have demonstrated again and again in the last two decades is that much of our life happens on autopilot…it emerges from habitual practices. Many of the “practices” which compose our life, start as explicit decisions…but if they happen often enough, our brains push them off to a different processor where they can happen semi-automatically and require less of our cognitive resources:

Source: Duhigg, "The Power of Habit"

In fact, researchers estimate that up to 40% of our behavior is un-conscious…and much of the rest of it is unreflective.  But just because many of our behaviors and thought patterns are semi-conscious doesn’t mean that we are not responsible for them or that they cannot be changed.

But here is the question this all poses…and in a sense the question that we have been building up to for 4 weeks.  It is the question that has come up again and again, in the lunch bunch.  We are finally to the direct mechanism (put up meta outline).  We’ve had to do the theological work and deal with indirect methods because we are not moralists…we believe in the power of the cross and the Spirit and spiritual practices as the context of change…and so does Paul…but he doesn’t leave it at that, and neither should we.  We have to round out Paul’s argument and deal with the direct methods…we have to talk about exchanging practices…we need to talk about going to WORK on our habits.

The question, is HOW?  How do I generate new behaviors?  And especially, how do I put off engrained habits?

If we are in a death match how do you win?  How do you kill that which is earthly in you?  How do you put to death habits bent on your destruction?  Well, I’ve got 6 ideas, from the scriptures, classical theology and those who have been doing careful empirical observation of human change….So let’s do it.

1.    Start Somewhere

First, you have to start somewhere…which means…START…but also, don’t start everywhere.  Focus your

Roy Baumeister, a professor at Florida state and one of the first psychologists to take up studies of self control in the lab summarizes the literature like this:

“When people have to make a big change in their lives, their efforts are undermined if they are trying to make other changes…For most of us the problem is not a lack of goals but rather too many of them” – Baumeister

As you will see, I take on approximately one big project of image recovery every 8-10 months.  Right now, I am trying to make better use of my work day, which I will talk about later.  I already have the next one picked out.  I want to dissect our budget and spending habit to find more margin for generosity.  I actually have software tracking our spending as we speak for when I am ready to start.   But that is still 3-6 months off.  I am not taking it on, until the practices I have introduced to make my work day honoring God, my family and my employer become habits.

And here is one of the great resources that Christian theology brings to the table…because we are a people of grace…because we do not bear the guilt of our failings.  It doesn’t all have to happen right now.  We can take on one death match at a time…and transform it into a new habit…

The other interesting thing that has shown up in the social science literature is that by giving concerted attention to changing one habit, others benefit.  The simple process of consciously perusing a single change will spill over.  For example, a study by two Australian psychologists demonstrated that who made concerted progress on money management…also exercise more often and make better use of their study time. And visa versa…those who gave specific attention to making the best use of their study time, had cleaner rooms and

So choose your opponent…I mean, seriously…do it, right now. Here are some options (Paul’s lists).  Got it…I’ll wait.  Write it down.  Abbreviate it if it’s embarrassing.   Ok, second, it is helpful to:

2.    Understand the Architecture of a Habit

That behavior or thought pattern that you wrote down…it is probably entrenched.  It has been part of your life long enough that they it has achieved the status of habit.  It is a semi-conscious behavior that occurs in the context of reduced brain activity. 

Well, the psychological literature seems to argue that habits are extremely difficult to quit.  But they can be weakened and ultimately replaced. 

“You can never truly extinguish bad habits.  Rather, to change a habit, you must keep the old cue, and deliver the old reward, but insert a new routine.” – Charles Duhigg “The Power of Habit” 

And a basic model that has emerged that allows us to talk about this is what has become known as the MIT model:

(Figure modified from Duhigg, "The Power of Habit")

The MIT model suggests that the behavior that we want to change is actually embedded in a system…and to ‘put off’ the behavior, we need to understand “what is the trigger” for this behavior…or in their language “the cue” and what is the fundamental motivation…or the “reward.”  By understanding how semi-automatic behaviors are motivated and triggered, we have a better chance of putting them off.

3.    Identify a Cue and Swap Out the Routine

And so, people who talk about habit change suggest that you need to find the trigger…the “cue” in the language of the MIT model.  What unconsciously or semi-consciously initiates the dehumanizing routine. 

The cue can be:

A Location

A Time

An Emotional State

A Person

The immediately preceding action

If you can remove the cue…you are on your way.  For example, if the routine is making out with your gf…the cue might be being alone in your room.  But you can’t always control an emotional state, and 3:30 pm (the time I like to go buy a coke) comes every day whether I want to or not.

So one of the ways people have made progress is to swap out the routine. 

Duhigg (who wrote the definitive, popular, meta-analysis on the habit change literature) shared a kind of minor example of this, but it illustrates the idea.  So let’s look at it, and then upscale to something a little more meaningful.  He’d get board at work mid-afternoon and go to the cafeteria and get a cookie…8 lbs later, he investigated this routine and found that the cue for the cookie wasn’t hunger, it was boredom and even loneliness.  What he really wanted was companionship, which he was finding in the cafeteria.  So he replaced the cookie habit with a mid-afternoon visit to a friend’s desk.

But let me share how this has worked on something bigger in my life, and then show you how it aligns very nicely with Paul’s categories of direct methods of change.

One of the things I have found, by talking to dudes about their struggles for a couple decades now, is that “lust” is a word with semantic range.  And you kind of get that from Paul’s list.  He doesn’t just say put lust to death…he has a whole taxonomy of lust.  And that is what I have found.  Lust is not a thing, it is a bunch of habits that are aligned to different cues and provide different perceived benefits.  For example, I have never understood the porn thing.  I mean, I don’t mess around with it, I’m sure it could eventually have power over me if I let it in, but I have never understood what guys get out of 2D images of women they have never met.  For me, the cue and content of this brokenness wasn’t visual, it was the stories that I let my imagination generate.  And a few years ago, I was finally tired of it.  It was time for a death match with my illicit imaginations.

This happened throughout the day but was most egregious when I lay down to bed at night.  Almost as soon as I lay down to bed my imagination would dive into some, usually illicit, alternate reality.  And so the first thing I tried, was to pray in that time instead.  But it just wasn’t working.  The classic evangelical traditions of spontaneous, self generated, prayer required more creativity than I had at hand in what was essentially my most depleted psychological state.  Prayer required too much effort, and couldn’t compete with a semi-conscious fully automatic, engrained habit.  Do you see what was going on.  The cue was the quieting of my mind when I laid down…not something I could avoid…unless I actually became a cyborg (pic).  I needed a new routine.  Something that could more easily become automatic.

So I decided to start off really simple.  Instead of spontaneous, self generated prayer.  I would just work my way through the Lord’s prayer, slowly and methodically, really lingering over each word, until I fell asleep.  Now it took a while.  The old habit was at least 25 years old, but over time, the new habit began to take root and push out the old one.  Now, when I lay down to bed at night, my natural impulse, the routine that that cue invokes is to start into “Oh gracious and merciful father, who resides in a truer parallel reality that is breaking through…your name is Holy…Holy…Holy.”  (you say that prayer 20,000 times and see if you don't take some creative liberties with it) The habit had been replaced. 

But you know what, I got more than that, it transformed the imaginative content of the rest of my day, because it turns out that I was seeding my imaginations in that time.   That was where I was generating the content I my imagination would revisit the next day.

But do you see, in this passage, Paul and his divine co-author were way ahead of the psychological community on this…

put off the old self with its practices 10 and have put on the new self,

Part of putting habitual sin to death, is replacing it.  You have to pair “putting away” with “putting on”.  Paul’s direct methods go together.

4.    Want a Better Reward

The other thing that social scientists that study habit tell us to do, is to examine the “reward,” ask ourselves, what are we really getting from the routine and swap out a routine that gives us the same reward.  But this is where I partially depart from the MIT model...because I think this idea falls short of the recovery of the image of God that Paul offers in this passage. [*]

But they are right about assessing the actual motivation of the habit.  We need to ask, what are we really getting out of it.  And I feel like that is what Paul is getting at with his taxonomy of sexual brokenness.  The list progresses from easily observable behaviors to subtle motivations.  And do you notice where it lands…what is actually at the base of all of these flavors of sexual brokenness…disordered wanting….which is fundamentally idolatry.

You see, prayer didn’t deliver the same reward as illicit imaginations.  It delivered a better one.  But I had to want it.  Early in the process that was a struggle.  And that is why I find Paul’s metaphor of hand to hand combat so apt.  Or listen to how Owen puts it:

!!! “Mortification is the soul’s vigorous opposition to self.” -Owen

On multiple nights, I had to ask myself, do I want Jesus more…do I believe that Jesus is better…I mean, is this story of Christ’s victory in the cross, and his indwelling friendship…is that my story or not.  The Spirit helped, and the mechanisms helped, but there was an aspect of brut force to this as well.  It was a fight.  Paul’s metaphor is prefect.  I had to look at my darker self, call him out, and punch it in the face.

Paul and Owen describe an experience that is much darker than the simple swapping of habits…it is a call to battle….it is something vigorous and violent.

They call us to be people whose live by patterns of generous mercy towards people and but who live by patterns vigorous violence towards our degrading habits. 

____

Let me digress for a second and get back anyone I have lost by talking about…romance

You have heard: “Don’t marry someone planning to change them.”  -True

But let me nuance that for you:

Don’t marry someone who doesn’t have a track record of self-motivated change.

Women, you want to marry a man who isn’t just going to keep his hands off other women, but for the most part, his heart and thoughts as well…who isn’t going to live an alternate imaginative life with 2 dimensional women on his computer screen or fostering crushes…do you want to marry a man who not only doesn’t watch the hot waitress walk away when he is out to dinner with you but doesn’t want to…then you need to marry a man who is willing to stand toe to toe with his dark nature…and punch it in the face.  Not once, in a dramatic spiritual display…but again and again. Acutally, all of you want to marry a someone who wakes up every morning, stares down his or her dark self, not just dark sexual tendencies, but as Dan laid out last week, envy, anger, and X and (to which I would add, bitterness and pride…I’m less sanctified than dan) stuff on both of Paul’s lists.  You want to be and marry someone who looks deep into the hidden recesses of the heart where those things live and says, “today, you die.” You want to marry someone who is into vigorous and violent grace.  Which leads me to…

5.    Go Ahead and Kick that Dead Horse…it’s Never Totally Dead

“Never think a lust dead because it is quit, but labor still to give it new wounds, new blows every day….Col 3:5” 47 –  Owen

One of the problems that the habit management literature runs into is that the victories it has observed can be devastatingly temporary.  And this is one of the places I think Christian theology provides an advantage that takes us beyond the social sciences.  By understanding what sin is…but recognizing it as a fallen networks of wanting that manifest as dehumanizing habits…we expect it to be a relentless enemy.  Keep taking the battle to it.

Now I had, frankly, an amazing extended zombie metaphore her. ..which I don’t have time for.  But I think you can put the pieces together yourself.  The first rule of battling a zombie is to never assume it’s done seeking your destruction.  Just because you have shot it full of lead and it is temporarily immobile, doesn’t mean its done coming after you.  Even if you knock one of these habits down, even if it seems at an end, you keep on the offensive. 

You can never be satisfied with your victory over a dehumanizing habit.  You have to come at it again and again.  It becomes easier when you have replaced it with a new habit, but times of emotional stress can destabilize the new habit and set you into new patterns. 

6.    Don’t do it alone

But back to points of agreement between the social sciences, there is not so overwhelming as the role of community in change.  Study after study demonstrates that there are two things that increase the success rate and persistence of change:

1.    Monitoring

There have been a number of famous studies on this, but the most fun one was a famous experiment published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology [4.5] where the researchers put out a range of excellent unsupervised candy (I mean, we’re not talking about the cheap house that gives out dum dums or those hard candies from the 70’s…this was premiere candy) with the classic instructions to “take 1” on Halloween and then secretly monitored the behavior of 379 children.  The only variable was that there was a small mirror behind the candy.  And sometimes the mirror was facing the children and the candy and sometimes it was turned around to face away.  When the mirror was facing the children, there was a significant increase in the number of children who took only one piece of candy.

And this is part of the repertoire of our brokenness...one of the things that makes sin so insidious….part of what makes what paul calls ‘our old self’ such a formidable enemy…it is a master of stealth.  If so much of our life happens semi-consciously, then sin can hide undetected.  And so sometimes, to really get at the dynamics of a behavior, as well as the cues and motivations, we need to do a little monitoring.  We need to move it from an semi-conscious activity in which sin can hide,

So as I said, I take on a new major project of image restoration every 8-12 months or so.  And right now, I am trying to order my work day so that it honors God, it honors my family (by getting more done at work and needing to put in fewer hours outside of the office), and brings complete integrity to my interaction with my employer and clients.  And the first thing I did, was try to figure out where my work day went.  So I loaded a tracking software which kept track of how much time I was wasting, which tasks were taking too long, and which projects were getting more attention than they had paid for. 

Change sometimes requires this level of self awareness.  So whether it is changing your eating habits, or exercising, or money management, internet use…success rates sky rocket if you monitor, record and review your behavior.

But for a Christian, there is an additional effect to explicitly monitoring behavior.  It is an act of confession to God. Self awareness demands repentance.  In that plot, pink is wasted time (this was a pretty effective day).  And at the end of each day, the amount of pink on the plot pushes me to call out for grace and go to work on the habits that  

2.    Community

But maybe the most unequivocal finding in the habit change literature will surprise no one that has even a passing familiarity with Christian theology.  Success rates increase dramatically when habit change is undertaken in the context of community.

We throw around the word ‘accountability’ so often that it has lost some of its meaning.  But the benefits of perusing your projects of recovering the image of God with friends who are doing the same, is not only well established in the ancient Christian scriptures, it has been empirically vindicated again and again in double blind studies.  So in my case, the next step is to find someone willing to track their time and meet with me.  But this is why software like covenant eyes can be really helpful …

And in your case, talk about the thing you are taking on in growth group this week.  I want you to actually break out this loop, and not only identify the behavior, but also the cue and fundamental motivation.  And then work with your allies to figure out the better motivation and an ennobling habit to swap in.  And if you aren’t in a growth group, come on, you are in a freaking death match, you don’t want to do that thing alone…you need a team.  And if you are skeptical about the Christian story, but still look at your life and see habits you’d like to be free of.  The overwhelming conclusion of science is that you have very little chance of significant change unless you comitt to a community that is actively trying to change.  The psychological literature argues that going to a growth group may be the best thing you could do.  All of the evidence of the scriptures and the social science literature declares that with one voice – community is the currency of change.  You will find a list of ggs on the back of your hand out.  Make gg part of your rule of life. 

Conclusion:

(I often preach in an old Boston red sox cap.  I wore it this night.)

You see, when it comes to Paul’s direct methods (put outline up)…after we center our quest on Christ’s work on the Cross and the Sprit’s power…after we set up a rule of life that increases practices that are hospitable to the spirit and diminishes those that make him awkward in your skin (like the guy at the party nursing a drink in the corner because it is clear to him and everyone else that he is out of place and mostly not welcome).  Paul says we have to put off and put on habits.

We have to take off the losers rags (take off the hat) that bears the emblem of disapointment, shame and sadness and put on the cloths of the champion (Tyler handed me his Giants cap and I put it off).[5]

It is the Mr Rogers metaphor of sanctification – take the make believe s*^$ off and put on your going out and getting crap done cloths.

 

But it starts with taking off.  It starts with vigorous and violent grace against our disordered wanting.  And replacing them with better habits.

There are things that will derail your attempts to ‘put on’ new habits and behaviors.  Putting on kindness is tied to putting off bitterness.  Taking on healthy sexual intimacy is linked to putting off disordered sexual wanting.  Living a life of just action and generosity begins with putting away self serving affections.

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Footnotes

[1] Alternate titles:

The Hunger Games, the Thunder Dome, and John Owen

Going to war against your darker self

Death match, Vigorous Grace, Sanctification Street Fight

Becoming God’s Best Version of You (Part 5): A Call to Violence

[2] Ken Burns – Civil War letter: “I think I would like to kill a Yankee, but I am afraid that this is not in line with the principles of Christian charity.

[3]We are like that guy in “a history of violence” – kind, attentive, unassuming, but capable of swift, decisive, targeted violence

[4] For anyone in a work environment…the person who just drops by your office to chat – without respect to your “flow” or productivity, is not always welcome…whereas someone who is in the cafeteria is, by definition, at a convenient stopping point.

[*] I don’t disagree in the sense that I think the work is not empirically attested, but that it does not share the goals of Christian image recovery.  At the heart of Christian ethics is the idea that the behavior is not the real problem.  If you swap out a new behavior that satisfies the same degrading motivation, you have, (as Tim Keller would say) “hot wired your heart” to be more socially presentable, but you have not really dealt with spiritual decay.  Or as Owen says:

[4.5] http://psycnet.apa.org/index.cfm?fa=buy.optionToBuy&id=1981-01088-001

[5] I preach in 9ers country.  And I wrote this before the game.  If they lose, I’ll have to do it with my red sox hat (which works because they were not just terrible, but unlikable this year) and a giants hat.