Every morning I search for great motivational quotes. It is a way for me to give a jump start to my day. I have read several things by Aristotle.  One quote that stood out for me is this one, “Men acquire a particular quality by constantly acting in a particular way”. In other words, practice determines performance, what you do, is who you become.

We have all heard the quote, “Practice makes perfect”. If we lived long enough we realize this  is not true. I heard a quote at a horse clinic and it really stuck with me, “Perfect practice makes perfect”. If we have the wrong technique, the wrong thinking, the wrong perspective it will never give us the right results that we are searching for in our lives.

The word that we seem to overlook in the quote by Aristotle is the word CONSTANTLY. In some area of our life we all want the end result to be perfection but we only want to practice occasionally. I personally would love to eat my Nutty Buddies every day and twice on Sundays and be a size 6. I still have not figured out a way to make that happen. Seriously, excellence is not an act but a habit. A daily habit.

What habits are we making? Are we striving daily to grow closer in our walk with the Lord? Are we creating healthy habits for our physical bodies? Do our actions and words build bridges or burn bridges? May we all keep our thoughts positive because our thought become our words. Let’s keep our words positive because our words become our behavior. Let’s keep our behavior positive because our behavior becomes our habits.

Show up for your prayer time with the Lord. Show up for your exercise time for your physical strength. Show up for your relationships/friendships and encourage one another. Relationships are about giving and taking. Encouraging and being encouraged. If we take more withdrawals in our relationships than deposits, we will wake up one day and we will be overdrawn. Most great things in life require a positive action on our part .

We all have habits, whether good or bad. However, for the followers of Christ, our lives become transformed by the renewing of our minds . Romans 12:1-2 tells us, So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you.

We must constantly change old (bad) habits for new (good) ones, in order to please the Lord. For instance, “Do all things without grumbling and complaining” (Philippians 2:14) may demand a new habit on our part. We may need to cultivate a whole new pattern of thinking, from negative to positive as “we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.” (2 Corinthians 10:5).

It all comes down to this…IF you really want to get better at something there is really one way….Ask the SOVEREIGN  Lord for his help and  consistently show up for practice.