How Can You Throttle Fast Habits?

I’m here today, continuing to remind myself what it means to slow down, to be slow and steady. To throttle fast habits.

My kid’s bible study Sunday morning at church was talking about The Tortoise and The Hare (aka how slow and steady wins the race).

Do You Need To Throttle Fast Habits?

The Tortoise and the Hare story got me thinking about how many fast habits we have in our lives. Oh how often we are like the hare.

We are sprinting and looking behind thinking how glad we are to not be as slow as we used to be and glad that we are hustling now.

Or maybe we have all this pressure to be number one, all this pressure that we put on ourselves, perhaps, to achieve a certain level of whatever, for whatever.

Or maybe it honestly is God trying to increase our capacity with balancing new things and dealing with this crazy world, and it all just feels fast.

Take a deep breath with me.

I am going to remind you of a story in the Bible of a guy who had a giant mission ahead of him, but he paused and was able to throttle fast habits.

I’m talking about a guy named Joshua. He was Moses’ right hand man, and after Moses passed away, God pushed the baton on to Joshua. God had been preparing Joshua for years.

He mentored under Moses and followed in his footsteps walking through the wilderness. And he and this other guy, Caleb, were the only two people who made it from Egypt to the promised land, no one else did.

Everyone else had passed away and there was this new generation.

Joshua lead the Israelites through the Jordan River on dry ground (hello miracle!), he landed in this place called Gilgal. There were like 600,000 men, Joshua and these men had been wandering a long time and they were ready to get to their Promised Land.

They had been hearing about the land flowing with milk and honey for years, for an entire generation, and they were hungry. They were eager. They were willing.

And God said wait. To throttle fast habits can mean waiting.

Biblical Characters Who Throttle Fast Habits

At the beginning of the book of Joshua, God basically tells Joshua, “Look, I’m going to ask you to do big things. You have already got victory and achievement. You have already won the battles and you haven’t even lifted a finger yet.

But you have to stop and recommit to me.

You have to throttle your pedal, pump the brakes, and make sure that you build a monument to remember what I have done and make a recommitment to your identity in me. Set up a place of worship so you can always come back to that slow place to recharge.’”

They did these things to establish the precedent before they conquered 31 kings in 7 years. That’s a lot of accomplishment, that’s a lot of battle, that’s a lot of victory.

But it took a lot of work, a lot of faith and a lot of trial and error, because not all the time did they get it right. For example, have you heard of Achan?

Achan’s sin where he went into the town of Jericho and instead of leaving all of the plunder, he took some with him and hid it under his tent. It cost him his life, as well as their next battle in Ai.

Throttle Fast Habits at Gilgal

It caused them to lose. I’m on a tangent because I love the Old Testament. I love what we learned about in Joshua. I love the city of Gilgal and what they did there.

What I am imagining is for us to be able to throttle our fast habits, we need to have a home base. We need to have this place where we can go out and work hard, face our challenges, and overcome our obstacles, then come back to our home base, to our own Gilgal.

Final Thoughts: Throttle Fast Habits

Go out and face our giants, then come back again to our home base to recharge and refresh and recommit our lives to make sure that we are never outside of God’s plan. To make sure that we are never walking ahead of what Jesus’ pace is. Because what victory is in that?

How will you feel satisfied and content if when you make it to the top of that mountain and realize that God is not even in it?

You feel empty.

It’s ok to slow down, it’s ok to take one day at a time. The world will keep on spinning. And God wants you to honor your priorities. I spoke about this in my last blog, I have 5 priorities this year:

My family, my kids
Making sure that my home is a life-giving space
Dating my spouse, making sure that Nick and I are on the same page.
My work.

Now the hard thing is, I told you this before, I enjoy working. But I can’t even fit in number four until I have honored the priority of the first three.

And then number five is like mindless entertainment, numbing my mind, watching some Netflix. Any type of purposelessness.

That’s all awesome and it’s super fun, but I have to make sure that I have cared for the first four priorities to be a good steward of the time that God has given me. You know what I mean?

I intentionally made this one shorter so that you guys can get a compact message to understand what I think it means to throttle fast habits. When we want to run.

When we feel behind. When we feel like we should have already accomplished our goals four days ago or we should have already lost those five pounds. When we haven’t even started our New Year’s resolutions.

When we’re glued to the television and social media and all of the drama going on right now. God is saying throttle down. Close your thoughts, and relax your mind. God is in control. He sees you. He sees the world. And he wants you to slow down.

Honor Him today guys.

xoxo

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