Do It Again (Holiness Part 4 of 5)
This is a 5-part series on what it takes to grow in holiness.
Virtue is a habit. It’s not a matter of being humble or patient or courageous one time. It’s being it over and over again.
You practiced patience yesterday morning when your kid spilled juice everywhere. Great. But that doesn’t mean you’re now a patient person. It means you were patient once. Tomorrow morning when they spill juice again, you need to practice patience again. And the next day. And the day after that.
This should be encouraging to us because it means there’s always another chance to grow. If we miss one, we just keep trying.
That’s how virtue is built—repetition. Doing the right thing, falling short, doing it again, falling short again, doing it again. Sometimes we’ll be successful, sometimes we’ll fail, but to build the habit, we just need to keep trying.
The problem is we get discouraged when we fail. We think, “I already worked on being patient. Why am I still impatient?” But that’s not how this works. You don’t master a virtue and check it off the list. You grow in virtue by repeatedly choosing it, over and over, until it becomes more natural.
It’s like working out. You don’t lift weights once and become strong. You lift them again and again, and slowly, gradually, you build strength. Some days you lift more, some days less. Some workouts feel great, others are a struggle. But if you keep showing up, you get stronger.
Holiness works the same way.
So when you fail—and you will fail—don’t quit. Get back up and try again tomorrow. That’s not failure. That’s growth.