October 5, 2025
The Sixteenth Sunday after Trinity
Did you brush your teeth this morning? Did you make the bed? Get dressed? Eat breakfast? Wash the breakfast dishes? Put them away?
Did you come to church?
Did you think much about these things first, or just do them? We are, in the main, creatures of habit. We’re formed and shaped by our habits, from care for our bodies to study and prayer. Our character is shaped by them over time.
Some decades ago I ran across, on a motivational poster, a fragment from historian Will Durant’s paraphrase of one of the key points in Aristotle’s Ethics: “Excellence is not an act but a habit.” The fuller quote is from his best-selling 1926 book The Story of Philosophy:
“Excellence is an act won by training and habituation: we do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have these because we have acted rightly; ‘these virtues [justice and temperance] are formed in man by his doing the actions;’ [that is] we are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.” He continues, quoting Aristotle, “The good of man is a working of the soul in the way of excellence in a complete life … for as it is not one swallow or one fine day that makes a spring, so it is not one day or a short time that makes a man blessed and happy.”
“But,” Aristotle notes, “most people do not do these, but take refuge in theory and think they are being philosophers and will become good in this way, behaving somewhat like patients who listen attentively to their doctors, but do none of the things they are ordered to do. As the latter will not be made well in body by such a course of treatment, the former will not be made well in soul by such a course of philosophy.”
Practice doesn’t so much “make perfect” as make whatever is done easier. Try to touch your toes each day, and it will become easier until eventually you can touch your toes. We become over time whatever we practice each day.
The disciples were students. They followed Jesus to learn. We see Mary of Bethany attentive in Luke 10:38–39 (ESV): “And a woman named Martha welcomed him into her house. And she had a sister called Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet and listened to his teaching.” And after the descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost what did the newly baptized do? In Acts 2:42: “And they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.”
It’s from disciple that we get the word discipline, “to train or develop by instruction and exercise, especially in self-control.”
And so we have such things as Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises. You have heard Matthew 6:33-34 (KJV): “But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you. Take therefore no thought for the morrow; for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.” Yet for some reason it’s the Aristotelians, the Stoics, the Buddhists, and the modern self-help industry, who talk of practice and the present moment. All of them, for the most part, offering no reason, no end, for any practice other than one’s self.
Paul prays for the church in today’s reading:
“[God] grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith—that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.” (Ephesians 3:16–19)
Several commentators, among them Thomas Aquinas and John Calvin, see this as a call to the contemplative life. That we, grounded in love, may grasp the full extent of the love of Christ. Calvin wrote,
“The love of Christ is held out to us as the subject which ought to occupy our daily and nightly meditations, and in which we ought to be wholly plunged. He who is in possession of this alone has enough. … He who has Christ has everything necessary for being made perfect in God; for this is the meaning of the phrase, the fullness of God.” Aquinas quotes Gregory the Great who wrote, “the contemplative life is to cling with our whole mind to the love of God and our neighbor, and to desire nothing beside our Creator.” I’m reminded of the first question of the Westminster Shorter Catechism: “What is the chief end of man? Man’ s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him for ever.”
But neither Calvin, nor Aquinas, nor Gregory, nor Aristotle see contemplation as a navel-gazing “refuge in theory.”
Nor does the Preacher of Ecclesiastes: “The words of the wise are like goads, and like nails firmly fixed are the collected sayings; they are given by one Shepherd. My son, beware of anything beyond these. Of making many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh. The end of the matter; all has been heard. Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man.” (Ecclesiastes 12:11–13)
Nor does Paul. He follows his prayer with an exhortation to practice: “Walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called, … until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, so that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes. Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, cwhen each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love. (Ephesians 4:1,13–16)
We are to practice, so that we become rightly ordered to the head of the church — that is, to the Word of God, to seek first the kingdom of god and his righteousness. There’s a fancy word for what happens, this becoming: sanctification.
WSC Q35: What is sanctification?
Sanctification is the work of God’ s free grace, (2 Thess. 2:13) whereby we are renewed in the whole man after the image of God, (Eph. 4:23–24) and are enabled more and more to die unto sin, and live unto righteousness. (Rom. 6:4,6, Rom. 8:1)
The grace of God makes this possible through the working of the Holy Spirit. We’ve been born again in Christ. The fancy word for that is regenerate. There’s been a new creation, and Christ the new Adam. So we are “to put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.” (Ephesians 4:24)
As Paul puts it elsewhere, for freedom Christ set us free.
Recall the story of Naomi and Ruth, how death took first Naomi’s husband, and then her two sons, leaving Naomi and her daughters-in-law Ruth and Orpah, with nothing, impoverished. Now on the way into the city of Nain, Jesus and crowd of disciples come across a large party of mourners, carrying a young man, his widowed mother’s only son. One can assume, now that her only son is dead, she, like Naomi, is impoverished. “And Jesus had compassion on her,” and raised the young man to new life, and restored him to his mother. The ancient church fathers, and later authors, Augustine, Gregory, Aquinas, and Calvin among others, read the raising of the widow’s son together with the raising of Jairus’s daughter and the raising of Lazarus as a trilogy, describing our redemption from three kinds of sin, that is, from death, and our spiritual rebirth.
Augustine writes, “These three kinds of dead persons, are three kinds of sinners whom even at this day Christ does raise. For that dead daughter of the ruler of the synagogue was within in the house, she had not yet been carried out from the secrecy of its walls into public view. There within was she raised, and restored alive to her parents. But the second was not now indeed in the house, but still not yet in the tomb, he had been carried out of the walls, but not committed to the ground. He who raised the dead maiden who was not yet carried out, raised this dead man who was now carried out, but not yet buried. There remained a third case, that He should raise one who was also buried; and this He did in Lazarus.”
What three kinds of sin? The thought, the act, and the habit.
The thought is only in your heart and mind, a private, little thing of no consequence. What does it hurt if I salivate over chocolate cake? Who, after all, knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? God. Jesus, in the Sermon on the Mount, the same sermon from which everyone likes to quote the Beatitudes, said, “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart. If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body be thrown into hell.” (Matthew 5:27–29)
The act takes that thought and brings it into the open, carries it out in public. I want that cake; and so I take it and eat it.
The habit repeats the action, over and over again, so that there is no longer thought, but gluttony. And so a simple thought is transformed.
This is not to say that chocolate cake is, in itself, sinful. Nor that habits are. Such a small thing, that first thought; and such a difficult thing to cure, that habit.
“But all these in mercy He restores to life.”
Our salvation is no small thing.
You came to church this morning. That’s a good habit.
One of the means by which God’s grace acts in and on our lives is the regular reading and hearing of his Word.
Another means is the perfection(?) of our baptism with the Lord’s Supper, whereby we are fed by Christ in our hearts by faith with thanksgiving:
“The Supper of the Lord is not only a sign of the love that Christians ought to have among themselves one to another; but rather is a Sacrament of our Redemption by Christ’s death: insomuch that to such as rightly, worthily, and with faith, receive the same, the Bread which we break is a partaking of the Body of Christ; and likewise the Cup of Blessing is a partaking of the Blood of Christ. The Body of Christ is given, taken, and eaten, in the Supper, only after an heavenly and spiritual manner. And the mean whereby the Body of Christ is received and eaten in the Supper is Faith.”
We gather together today to give thanks to God. To “walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.” (Ephesians 5:2) We too devote ourselves “to the apostles’ teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.” (Acts 2:42)