The Inveterate Habit of Unbelief

One of my regular disciplines is to read the biography of exemplary people. I do not have the time to read entire biographies, so I prefer books that offer a good summary. The one I am reading through now is called Deeper Experiences of Famous Christians. I actually hate the title, but I love what is contained within. While reading the short biography of William Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army, I was struck by his wife's account of trial in giving herself wholly to God. After getting up from prayer one day, she describes a yearning she began to feel for God.

I felt sure He had long been knocking, and oh, how I yearned to receive him as a perfect Saviour! But oh, the inveterate habit of unbelief! How wonderful that God should have borne so long with me!"

I was struck by the phrase, "The inveterate habit of unbelief." The first reason was because I did not know what inveterate meant. It is an old word that is synonymous with ingrained, entrenched, and deep-rooted. Unbelief, according to Catherine Booth, is something that we have learned for a long time. It has been with us for so long that we do it without thinking; it's our second nature; it's inveterate. Hence the difficulty for many earnest Christians to make progress in their life with God. I think the main problem is that unbelief is not taught as something that has been made old in us through habitual use, to the point that we are unconsciously unbelieving creatures. Therefore, people do not know how to overcome unbelief. They don't know how to believe. They have been formed to be unbelieving. This is a problem!This is also an opportunity. For whatever is learned, can also be unlearned and replaced. People can experience a transformation. We, as pastors and teachers, can train people in the way of belief. So much so that belief in God becomes inveterate, like it was in Jesus! This, I think, is what discipleship to Jesus Christ is all about. This is what the church is for. We gather, not merely to hear a good word, or to be encouraged, but to learn how to be Christian. That way unbelief can be identified where it used to pass by like a smell one no longer notices, and it can subsequently be rooted out by a practice of belief. 

As Oswald Chambers says, "If we refuse to practice, it is not God's grace that fails when a crisis comes, but our own nature. When a crisis comes, we ask God to help us, but He cannot if we have not made our nature our ally. The practicing is ours, not God's."

But God will help us. He will give us his grace which will enable us to do what we cannot do by direct effort. (That's another Willard quote, by the way.) To change the habit of unbelief will take an intentional determination to believe God. It won't be easy at first, but as time passes, and habits change, we will find ourselves naturally believing God in places where unbelief was our custom.We train for marathons, exams, sports, school. Let's also train for godliness, until godliness is our habit.